Intermittent Fasting: How Does it Work?

In 2016, the Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize for describing the mechanism of cell autophagy. Autophagy is the body’s way of self-liquidating cell structures that are either harmful or unnecessary.

After fasting became widely known, doctors and healthy lifestyle advocates started to apply it to the human body. They advised therapeutic fasting as a method to prolong life, treat cancer, lose weight, prevent Alzheimer's disease, and even use it as a cure-all remedy. Let’s look at intermittent fasting in more detail.

How does it work?

In any living organism, there are many processes continuously occurring on the cellular level. The human body has about 37 trillion cells. Among those, in grown adults, approximately 220–240 billion cells die and are replaced eve...