Essentials: Effects of Fasting & Time Restricted Eating on Fat Loss & Health

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. What we're going to talk about today is how intermittent fasting aka time restricted feeding impacts weight loss, fat loss in particular, muscle maintenance and loss and gain, organ health such as gut health and liver health, the genome, the epigenome, inflammation, sickness, recovery and healing from sickness, exercise, cognition, mood, and lifespan. So let's talk about eating and what happens when you eat.

And let's talk about fasting or not eating and what happens when you fast. If ever there was a topic that is controversial, especially on the internet, it is that of diet and nutrition. So I'm wading into this with a smile and in eager anticipation of all the but-but-but this and but but that and wait, but this showed that. Here's the deal. We need to precisely define what it is that we're talking about when we talk about nutrition.

I'm going to give you an example of a study that was published a few years ago, 2018, by a colleague of mine at Stanford, Chris Gardiner, who is a terrific professor of nutrition and has done a lot of important studies on how nutrition impacts different aspects of health. This paper where Chris is the first author, it's Gardner et al., 2018, JAMA, looked at weight loss in people following one particular diet versus another particular diet. This was a 12-month weight loss study, so it was focused specifically on weight loss, although they looked at some other parameters as well. And the basic conclusion of the study was that there was no significant difference in weight change between people following a healthy low-fat diet

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