Fasting is part of every culture and religion. All people Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jews and Buddhists practice this from the begging of the time. Most of the people look on fasting as on deep meditation and spiritual healing, but it seems to be much more than that.
Scientist took a closer look to this tradition and realized that fasting is really healthy and helps you improve you overall health. Scientist from the University of Sothern California conducted survey and came to conclusion that prolonged fasting can serve as prevention of damage of the immune system. Besides this they also said that it can produce hematopoietic stem cells which generate bloods cells and immune cells.
Another study proved that fasting for 2-4 days in a period of six months can destroy aged and damaged cells. This might help cancer patients that are undergoing chemotherapy, because as we all know chemotherapy kills cancer cells and damages the healthy cells too. In other words fasting can reduce the side-effect caused by chemotherapy.
“We could not predict that prolonged fasting would have such a remarkable effect in promoting stem cell-based regeneration of the hematopoietic system,” announced Edna M. Jones, a professor of Gerontology and Biological Sciences at USC Davis School of Gerontology.
Valter Longo, director of the USC Longevity Institude add the following: “When you starve, the system tries to save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed, especially those that may be damaged,” “What we started noticing in both our human work and animal work is that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged fasting. Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back. So we started thinking, well, where does it come from?”
There are still many doubts and answers waiting to be answered about this research. Dr. Graham Rook emeritus professor of immunology at University College London talked about this theme and said the following “There is some interesting data here,” “It seems that fasting reduces the number and size of cells and then re-feeding at 72 hours saw a rebound. That could be potentially useful because that is not such a long time that it would be terribly harmful to someone with cancer, but I think the most sensible way forward would be to synthesize this effect with drugs. I am not sure fasting is the best idea. People are better eating on a regular basis.”
We hope that in the future will be done more studies about this theme!
