In the 1970s, researchers locked overweight, insulin-resistant patients away from all food
and starved them for 30 days.
What happened?
And is it safe for you?
In the 70s, they didn't flaunt the word fasting yet.
So they allowed these patients to have water, salt, and a multivitamin during this study.
Along the Y-axis, you will see several of these biomarkers.
In this slide, we talk about blood sugar or glucose.
And you'll see that these healthy, lean people without insulin resistance
started their fast with a blood sugar around 88,
a little more and a little less in some people.
And they fasted for that 24, 48, and 72 hours.
They kept their blood sugar in the 60s for the 24, 48, and 72 hour mark.
And this is probably because they didn't have a large storage of glycogen.
That ball off to the side is something we're going to refer to in the not so healthy people.
They did not have a large storage of that when they began their fast.
Let's move on to the second biomarker in these healthy people. We looked at their insulin.
Remember, insulin is that hormone that helps us store blood sugar or store energy.
And as we become insulin resistant, it gets quite high.
These healthy people had a little bit of variability on the first two days of the fast.
By the end of that 48 hours, they tightened up the range a little bit and had a healthy insulin of nine
and even a little bit lower by the end of the 72 hour fast.
Let's move on to biomarker number three.
The ketones that were found in circulation in these healthy people at the beginning ranked at zero.
They were not circulating them at all
But as they denied food for the first 24 hours, they shot
their ketones up to 2.0 and then an average of four and almost five by the end of that 72 hour fast
Essentially, they were able to recruit energy out of their fat storages very efficiently.
Let's move on to norepinephrine.
This biomarker is actually one of my favorite.
It's one of the hormones that affects your brain as well as your body.
It is also very resistant to surging when you're in an unhealthy state.
Norepinephrine is what helps our brain focus.
It gives us energy.
It can also be called adrenaline.
You produce norepinephrine during times of stress. It helps your body respond to the demands that
might not be in your normal life.
As you might expect, healthy people had a pretty normal looking norepinephrine at the beginning of
the study, not much stress.
But the longer they denied food, their body rallied and responded with a higher level of this hormone in circulation.
This will often be associated with times where they felt euphoric while fasting.
Let's move on to the biomarker growth hormone.
Growth hormone is often touted as one of the reasons people fast.
It can dramatically surge over the days that your body is fasting.
However, this hormone is a little tricky to measure.
I'd like you to look at the peak numbers that were found in a 72-hour fast of these healthy people.
You'll notice at the beginning there wasn't much growth hormone.
Even 24 hours into the fast, they got a slight bump in their growth hormone.
By the second day of denying food, and especially the third day, is when you really saw a surge in
that growth hormone. Again, these dividends will last longer than the three-day fast in these healthy people.
Alright, let's move on to our unhealthy patients.
We're going to start by looking at these folks with insulin resistance in just the first 72 hours of a fast.
So this first biomarker is again their glucose.
And this time, they started with not only an elevated blood sugar of around 110, but they had a
liver filled with glycogen, which is a whole bunch of stored sugar.
You can see the effects of that as they denied food for that 24, 48, and 72 hours.
Although their blood sugar dropped, it was not nearly as dramatic as that of the healthy people.
And they rarely hit a blood sugar into the 60s.
The next biomarker of insulin tells even a further story of that same problem.
Not only did they begin the fast with an elevated insulin, but even after denying food for 24 hours,
that insulin hardly dropped at all.
By the time they get to 72 hours of no food, their insulin is very similar to what the healthy
people had at the beginning of their fast.
Why?
Well, that stimulus of insulin was on overdrive.
That's part of being insulin resistant.
They also had plenty of blood sugar circulating around the body, which kept that insulin producing
at a higher level.
Let's move on to ketones.
How well were these unhealthy patients able to recruit the energy stored in fat?
Well, as you can see, by the end of the first day, 24 hours into no food,
they barely had a ketone at .5 to .7
By 48 hours, now two days into fasting, they had an average ketone of 1.0.
And by the third day, they still had only a ketone that was about 2.5.
Again, this reflected how poorly they were recruiting energy from their fat.
And they didn't need to.
They still had so much energy in the form of glucose circulating around their body.
Let's move on to norepinephrine.
Yes, this data gets a little juicier.
These patients, again, were trying their best.
They were going to deny food in hopes to improve their health.
But as you watch what happens to them in the first 24, 48, and even at 72 hours,
they hardly produced any norepinephrine.
Again, this is the response that their body is doing under stress.
And unlike the healthy people who had a dramatic rise in their norepinephrine,
these unhealthy patients were hardly able to recruit any more norepinephrine.
And they felt it.
At the end of 72 hours, the folks that were feeling better had a dramatic rise and said things like,
"I feel euphoric. I feel amazing."
But those unhealthy patients said, "this is rotten."
"I feel terrible."
A similar response happened with growth hormone.
As you look at the production of the 24-hour summary in their growth hormone, there was hardly a
difference between the first day, second day, and the third day.
And when you compare this to what happened in healthy patients, you can see that there was an
obvious answer of why the healthy people bragged about how good that fast felt.
While the insulin-resistant and unhealthy people said, "this is terrible. I feel awful."
The story gets even more interesting when you follow these patients and their growth hormone out for over a month.
That they continued to say, "I'm going to white-knuckle it. I'm going to be very disciplined."
And in fact, in the study, they were locked away from food.
As you look at the end of the month, what the growth hormone had done by the end of that study,
it wasn't as high as the healthy people had on the first day.
These patients tried to fast in a time where their body wasn't ready.
Their ability to support that stress of their body with these fat-based hormones
like cortisol, like norepinephrine, or testosterone, estrogen, or other hormones that are known for supplying our
body with the endocrine side of health.
Their body's endocrine system was unable to produce those hormones because of their broken metabolism.
As I teach patients a much better approach to repairing their health and losing that weight,
it begins with a very important set of steps that are known to recruit those endocrine hormones
onto their side, onto the benefit of health.
When patients crash land into a fast and their metabolism isn't ready, not only does their body not
respond well, they don't feel well, and they don't sustain the behavior change.
Teaching these steps is something I have organized in the ketoCONTINUUM. They get through those
first couple of weeks with a very simple set of beginning rules.
Once they graduate to an improved metabolism, we start to change the behaviors
of a restriction in time, and then a further restriction in time.
We then start to add things like fasting only when I have proof that their endocrine system is helping their metabolism.
Don't get me wrong. These patients who denied food for over a month, they lost weight.
They did have that metric improve.
But what they weren't able to tell was the improvement in their growth hormone.
Part of the weight they lost was their muscle mass, something they couldn't afford to do.
Growth hormone would have protected them from that.
These patients could have found a better outcome had we prepared their metabolism for this big, of a stress.