Intermittent fasting continues to generate a lot of controversy, there are those who defend it tooth and nail and those who believe that it is not a healthy practice. A new study, published in the journal BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health, has found that people who follow this restriction on daily meals may be less likely to suffer complications from COVID-19.
The research, which has been carried out by members of the Intermountain Healthcare (USA), discovered that reducing the number of meals a day on a regular basis, maintained only by drinking water, had a lower risk of needing to be hospitalized or dying as a consequence. of coronavirus infection.
“Intermittent fasting has already been shown to reduce inflammation and improve cardiovascular health. In this study, we found additional benefits when it comes to fighting a COVID-19 infection in patients who have been fasting for decades,” said Benjamin Horne, principal investigator of the study.
Intermittent fasting could be a good complement to vaccines
The tests to reach these conclusions were done on a group of 205 patients with a positive diagnosis of COVID-19. Of the total, 73 of them declared that they had been practicing intermittent fasting for about 40 years on average at least once a month, a diet that consists of going more than 12 hours a day without eating and grouping the intakes in the remaining time.
Autophagy generated by fasting, which helps destroy and recycle damaged cells, could be one of the reasons why the severity of COVID is reduced
This study was conducted between March 2020 and February 2021, before the vaccines were widely available. The researchers cautioned that intermittent fasting was not associated with a lower or higher risk of getting SARS-CoV-2, but rather was associated with less severity once people tested positive.
Among the authors’ hypotheses that could explain the effects of intermittent fasting on the severity of COVID-19 are the reduction of inflammation and that after 12 to 14 hours of fasting the body switches from using blood glucose to ketones, including linoleic acid.
“There is a pocket on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 that linoleic acid fits into, and it can make the virus less able to stick to other cells,” Horne says. “Another potential benefit is that intermittent fasting promotes autophagy, which is the body’s recycling system that helps it destroy and recycle damaged and infected cells.”
However, these results are limited by the fact that the participants had been practicing this type of diet for decades, so it is not known whether the effects are the same in those who have been doing it for a short time. In the Intermountain study, participants who said they fasted regularly did so for an average of more than 40 years, because a large portion of those patients fast regularly for religious reasons, belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Utah Days, whose members typically fast on the first Sunday of the month without eating or drinking for two consecutive meals.
For this reason, they believe that studies should continue to be carried out to see if intermittent fasting can be a complementary tool to vaccines and antiviral therapies in the fight against the serious effects of COVID-19.
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