Inflammatory damage from high levels of blood sugar is also


an issue. Sugar is a sharp, pointy molecule that is flowing your blood and bouncing off your delicate endothelial lining of the arteries and veins. If there is a ton of sugar, that means lots of collisions with the blood vessel walls and physical damage, which causes inflammation and also opens up a crack, an inconsistency in the integrity of the vessel wall so that atherosclerotic plaques have a place to accumulate. Over time, this can cause an aneu- rysm or a piece of the plaque can rupture and cause thromboses, emboli, or a stroke. For context, consider the sugary dessert you leave out overnight. What happens to it? It gets hard and brittle. That is because the sugar oxidizes. What happens to the sugar in your blood and stuck in the walls of the vessels? It gets hard and brittle.


So What Does Fasting Do? Fasting gives our heart, gut, liver, and kidneys a bit of a break


from effects of excess blood sugar. After 10 hours, your body has more or less used up all of its blood sugar and liver glycogen storage supply of would-be blood sugar. The body starts burning lipids that scavenge for spares in a process called autophagy (auto=self phagy=eating). The metabolic state during which au- tophagy takes place is known as “dietary ketosis.” In ketosis, which is a safe and potentially therapeutic meta-


bolic state, the liver cells use ketone bodies as fuel that come from fatty acid oxidation. The fatty acids come from adipose tissue but also from other available lipids such as atherosclerotic plaque. This is the plaque that can accumulate in the blood vessels that accumulate and can cause cardiovascular disease and injuries. Intermittent fasting is great because if you count the hours that you are sleeping, you can get into ketosis and stay in ketosis


longer. Your brain is metabolically expensive to run and operate, so if you’re fasting, you need to use your brain as little as possible. Stopping food intake at say, 7 p.m. and having nothing but water and maybe certain herbals teas until no sooner than 7 a.m the next morning will give you two hours, roughly, in ketosis. The longer you fast into the morning, the more autophagy takes place. Alternatively, research shows that people can alternatively


fast for 24 hours all at once for one day a week and enjoy similar effects of nightly 12 – 14-hour fasts. The 18-hour daily fast is the best, in my opinion, because it does a daily clean-up, and makes daily functioning better quicker. In addition to losing weight and feeling better, fasting can


reduce or eliminate “foggy brain” that can often come with con- suming too many carbs. Try it for a few days and experience it for yourself. If you go back to your old eating schedule, you will see the difference. But fasting is only part of the equation. When you do eat,


you have to be aware of everything you put into your body. If you eat a diet that is high in processed, pre-packaged foods with a list of ingredients a mile long, you are still harming your body even if you fast regularly. My advice to my patients is just eat naturally. Plants, some fruits (not a ton because of the sugar), fresh meats (preferably grass-fed beef, organic poultry, and wild caught sea- food), eggs, and some whole grains. If eating all-natural seems cost prohibitive, consider this, when you fast regularly and eliminate the between-meal snacks, that cost of eating better may be negligible.


Dr. Blake Kovner is a Naturopathic Physician practicing at the Naturopathic Health Clinic of NC in Winston-Salem. Call 336- 724-4452 for an appointment or visit www.nhcnc for more info.


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