n class="dropcap">Eitan Okun only eats between the hours of 8 and 10 p.m., or, on days when he rides his bike, from 6 to 8 p.m. This practice is one form of intermittent fasting, and the subject of Okun’s research as head of the Paul Feder Laboratory for learning, memory and neurodegenerative diseases at Israel’s Bar Ilan University. His study, “Food and Age: It Takes Two to Degenerate,” recently published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, found that eating only for a few hours a day or on certain days of the week benefits the body’s cells. “It induces autophagy, a process in which the cell recycles chunks of itself in order to get rid of proteins and organelles”—tiny cellular structures—“it doesn’t need,” Okun explains. Eating throughout the day leads to a constant presence of sugars and proteins in the body, which, according to this theory, can lead to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.Read Full Article »
