Mayer says time-restricted eating — a form of intermittent fasting that requires you to squeeze all your daily calories into a compressed feeding window — may be helpful. “The migrating motor complex is rarely mentioned in these articles on intermittent fasting, which is surprising because it’s so well-studied,” he says.To ensure the MMC has enough time to perform its duties, aiming for 14 hours without caloric foods or drinks is a good target, he says. For example, you could avoid all calories between 8 p.m. and 10 a.m. “The 14 hours without food intake would allow the MMC to kick in and not only cleanse your gut of any undigestible, unabsorbable food components, but also to reestablish the normal proximal-to-distal gradient of gut microbial density,” he says.

But, if you take a supplement containing 1,250 milligrams, your body seems to realize that’s too much—and so, clamps down on absorption at the intestinal lining level, and you end up absorbing less than half.