Insight into intermittent fasting?
Cutting back on calories is related to other dietary strategies, including intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating, Dr. Belsky says. “Intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating are nutritional interventions that have been developed, in part, because in experiments with animals, they have some of the same biological effects as calorie restriction.”
There remain many unanswered questions.
“There are people who would argue that the reason calorie restriction does what it does is because when people are calorie-restricted, they also tend to restrict the times when they eat,” Dr. Belsky says. “They tend to have these longer fasts during the day.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.