Intermittent Fasting with ΔH Ketone Health Lower Inflammation

In the last few decades, continuous calorie restriction was the standard recommendation for people who wanted to lose weight.  However, as many of us know, portion control is difficult, and people have trouble sticking to a diet where every meal is smaller and less satiating than they would desire.  Therefore, people started to look for different weight-loss strategies with the attention of nutrition researchers turning to intermittent fasting in the last 10 years.

Rather than continuously restricting calories, intermittent fasting means dividing your day into a fasting window and an eating window.  Many people successfully lose weight and fat with intermittent fasting as they find it much easier to stay in a caloric deficit by skipping entire meals rather than constantly eating smaller portions, which requires more willpower.

There are many different intermittent fasting regimes, such as 5:2 fasting (fasting for 2 days a week) or alternate day fasting (fasting for 24 hours every other day), but probably the most commonly used protocol is the 16/8 intermittent fast (termed time-restricted feeding in scientific literature) where a 16 hour fast is followed by an 8-hour eating window.

A recent 2020 meta-analysis of 19 independent studies [1] reported that the 16/8 fast is effective for weight and fat loss, while preserving fat-free mass.  Apart from the positive effect on body composition, the 16/8 fast also positively affects cardiometabolic health as it reduced blood pressure, fasting glucose and cholesterol levels.  Such a good results coming from multiple studies might help you to make 16/8 intermittent fasting a part of your lifestyle.  Moreover, combining a 16/8 fast with ΔH Ketone Health can further improve your results by augmenting the benefits of fasting.  In this blog post, we will show you how to do just that.

Due to convenience, we recommend doing late intermittent fasting with your eating window starting at lunch and ending with dinner.  For most people, breakfast is the easiest meal to skip because they are busy in the morning and skipping dinner might feel antisocial, as it is usually the meal we share with family and friends.  Therefore, have your lunch at around noon and your dinner at around 7 pm. This way, you will fast from 8 pm to 12 pm the next day.  Importantly, avoid snacking between lunch and dinner.

The key element of every weight-loss strategy is its sustainability. If you want to make the 16/8 fast a long-term part of your lifestyle, you do not need to worry about caloric intake too much if you stick to a couple of rules.  Firstly, limit consumption of ultra-processed foods and let whole foods be the foundation of your diet.  Secondly, avoid high carb “fillers” that have a high glycaemic index (pasta, rice or bread).  Thirdly, make sure that a variety of non-starchy vegetables and leafy greens create a substantial part of your diet.  The diets of people living in several places with a prevalence of centenarians are always rich in non-starchy vegetables. 

Also, avoid conventional sweets and have fruits or high-quality dark chocolate as a dessert.

If your dinner and lunch will be 800-900 kcal each, which is a big portion of food, you are still likely to end up in a 300-400 kcal deficit every day.  Such a deficit should enable a steady weight loss sustainable over several weeks or months.  Nevertheless, you are still likely to feel hungry in the mornings after an overnight fast and you still have 4-5 hours until lunch.  This is where our ΔH Ketone Health can decrease your hunger during the morning until lunch (hunger is a major reason to give up fasting!).

Our body controls satiety via an intricate set of hormones released from tissues like fat, the gut or the stomach.  One such hormone is ghrelin, also called the "hunger hormone", the role of which is to travel to the brain to make us hungry.  The Oxford lab responsible for the development of deltaG® drinks found that ketones lower ghrelin levels and suppress appetite[2]. This makes ΔH Ketone Health a great tool to keep hunger at bay in the morning during your 16/8 fast.

Suppressed hunger is not the end of the benefits of ΔH Ketone Health during a 16/8 fast.  You may have heard that fasting makes you more focused and enhances your cognitive capacity.  We now know that the beneficial effect of fasting on cognition is probably mediated by ketones.  Using functional MRI scanning, a study[3] has shown that ketones increase the stability of brain networks.  Measuring brain network stability determines how different brain regions communicate with each other with ageing progressively reducing brain network stability.  It is beyond the scope of this blog to describe why ketones have such a beneficial effect, but one of the main reasons may be increased energy production in neurons during the oxidation of ketones. However, an overnight fast during 16/8 fast will not be able to raise your ketone levels high enough to enhance cognition.  Fortunately, the ΔH Ketone Health drink will get your blood ketone levels to around 1.5 mM, enough to supply your brain with ketones, enhance your cognition and make your mornings much more productive.

Lastly, ΔH Ketone Health should work in synergy with intermittent fasting to lower inflammation.  Italian researchers reported that two months of 16/8 fasting decreased inflammatory markers, one of which was IL-1β[4]. This suggests that ΔH Ketone Health can work in synergy with the 16/8 fast because ketones block an important pro-inflammatory regulator called NLRP3[5].  One of the crucial actions of NLRP3 is a conversion of inactive pro-IL-1β into the active IL-1β form. Therefore, blockage of NLRP3 decreases levels of IL-1β - combining a 16/8 fast with ΔH Ketone Health should have a potent anti-inflammatory effect. This is an important benefit for your overall health because inflammation is recognized as a hallmark of many age-related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's disease or cardiovascular diseases and is also one of the root causes of aging.

As you can see, there are many science-backed ways demonstrating that 16/8 fasts can improve your health. Combining 16/8 fasts with the benefits of an exogenous ketone ester, deltaG®, is a powerful strategy to improve your cardiometabolic health, enhance productivity and cognition with reduced inflammation.  We are delighted that you want to control your health and hope that this blog will make it easier to start your intermittent fasting journey. 

David Bezpalec

References:

1. Moon, S., Kang, J., Kim, S., Chung, H., Kim, Y., Yu, J., Cho, S., Oh, C. and Kim, T., 2020. Beneficial Effects of Time-Restricted Eating on Metabolic Diseases: A Systemic Review and Meta-Analysis. Nutrients, 12(5), p.1267.
2. Stubbs BJ, Cox PJ, Evans RD, Cyranka M, Clarke K and de Wet H.  A ketone ester drink lowers human ghrelin and appetite.  Obesity 2018 Feb;26(2):269-273. doi: 10.1002 
3. Mujica-Parodi LR, Amgalan A, Sultan SF, et al. Diet modulates brain network stability, a biomarker for brain aging, in young adults. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 2020;117(11):6170-6177. doi:10.1073/pnas.1913042117
4. Moro, T., Tinsley, G., Bianco, A., Marcolin, G., Pacelli, Q., Battaglia, G., Palma, A., Gentil, P., Neri, M. and Paoli, A., 2016. Effects of eight weeks of time-restricted feeding (16/8) on basal metabolism, maximal strength, body composition, inflammation, and cardiovascular risk factors in resistance-trained males. Journal of Translational Medicine, 14(1).
5. Youm, Y., Nguyen, K., Grant, R., Goldberg, E., Bodogai, M., Kim, D., D'Agostino, D., Planavsky, N., Lupfer, C., Kanneganti, T., Kang, S., Horvath, T., Fahmy, T., Crawford, P., Biragyn, A., Alnemri, E. and Dixit, V., 2015. The ketone metabolite β-hydroxybutyrate blocks NLRP3 inflammasome–mediated inflammatory disease. Nature Medicine, 21(3), pp.263-269.