BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 18 (UPI) -- Alternate-day fasting -- fasting or eating half as much as usual every other day -- may shrink fat cells, a University of California, Berkeley study found.
On the fasting day, people consume no-calorie beverages, tea, coffee and sugar-free gum and they drink as much water as they need.
Researcher Krista Varady and colleagues studied the effects of alternate-day fasting on 24 male mice for four weeks. To assess the impact of alternate-day fasting on the health of the mice, the scientists not only tested mice that followed and didn’t follow an alternate-day fasting diet, but they also studied mice that followed the diet only partially: a group of mice consumed 50 percent of their regular diet every other day and another consumed 75 percent of their regular diet every other day.
The study, published in the October issue of the Journal of Lipid Research, found mice that followed the complete alternate-day fasting diet lost weight and that the fat cells of both the 100 percent alternate-day fasting and 50 percent alternate-day fasting groups shrunk by more than half and by 35 percent, respectively.
