Scientists say: you can eat everything, but by the hour

Scientists say that in order to fight such ailments as type 2 diabetes and obesity, it is not necessary to go on a strict diet and drastically limit the number of calories. It is enough to eat only at strictly defined intervals. Or, as they say, interval fasting.

"Such fasting is suitable for people who can not follow diets or who are simply bored with such a lifestyle," says one of the authors of the study, Professor Krista Varadi. Scientists came to this conclusion in the course of experiments in which 75 patients participated. All of them had previously tried to get rid of excess weight, as well as reduce the concentration of sugar in the blood, following strict diets.

Scientists divided the volunteers into two groups. One of them continued to follow a strict diet, reducing the caloric content of the daily diet by a quarter. The second group did not have such a strict restriction of calories, but here they took food only in a certain time interval - from 12.00 to 20.00. That is, the fasting lasted for sixteen hours.

Six months later, the scientists summarized the results of the experiment. It turned out that interval fasting fights diseases much more effectively than calorie restriction. On average, it allowed the study participants to reduce their weight by 3.6 percent. This is twice as much as those who sat on a low-calorie diet (1.8 percent). In addition, the second group recorded a decrease in the concentration of glycated hemoglobin and other biomarkers associated with blood sugar levels.

By the way, in other experiments, the duration of fasting was both eighteen and twenty hours. But scientists believe that the most gentle variant - sixteen hours - is quite effective. According to the researchers, the experiment showed that the use of food in certain time intervals exceeds traditional diets in the effectiveness of diabetes treatment. The work was published in the journal JAMA Network Open.