Читать книгу Intermittent Fasting For Dummies - Janet Bond Brill - Страница 16

To understand how intermittent fasting works, you need a quick adaptive physiology refresher. Because food wasn’t always abundant, and sometimes wasn’t available at all, the human body was forced to adapt to fasting involuntarily — and then, when Stone Age humans found food, they would feast. Because of those evolutionary conditions, human bodies evolved to permit their bodies to thrive by adapting to those cycles of feasting and fasting. In order to survive in such environments where food was scarce, humans had to possess the ability to quickly shift their metabolism from fat storage to fat breakdown for energy. This metabolic flexibility became built into human’s genetic code, producing a system where energy was stored in the form of body fat when food was available and then easily accessed for energy to enable humans to perform at a high level, physically, during extended periods when food wasn’t available. This pattern enabled human brains and bodies to function optimally in a food deprived/fasted state, giving the human race a survival advantage.

Scientists have hypothesized that the human body’s adaptive benefits of intermittent fasting led to the superior cognitive capabilities (brain power) of humans compared to other mammals. These brain adaptations facilitated human’s ability to invent tools, novel hunting methods, animal domestication, agriculture and food storage, and processing.

Because intermittent fasting patterns can replicate the feast-or-famine diet of human ancestors, many researchers have now recognized the advantages of periodically fasting (such as increased brain power, physical enhancements, and disease prevention) for the multitude of health benefits this lifestyle gives rise to.