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.

There are a few things we know that promote longevity and healthspan. Caloric restriction and intermittent fasting are one of the most effective ways of doing so as shown by research in virtually all species.

Valter Longo, PhD has been studying an aspect of fasting and autophagy that is fascinating enough, I wanted to include it in it’s own section. One area of his research focuses on how fasting induces differential stress resistance to make chemotherapy far more effective. In a food scarce environment, normal cells become more resistant to oxidative stress, but cancer cells don’t. Remember, cancer cells are broken cells. Something went wrong with them and they are replicating out of control. Being broken means they don’t retain all the typical functions and protective mechanisms of normal cells, like antioxidant generation. That’s one of the reasons cancer cells switch their metabolism from oxidative phosphorylation to glycolysis even in the presence of oxygen. It’s known as the Warburg effect. There are many theories on why this happens, but one is because cancer cells are more sensitive to the reactive oxygen species created during normal metabolism. Eating creates an environment where cancer cells thrive and normal cells are stressed. Cancer cells need an environment rich with sugar, growth factors (like IGF-1) and amino acids like glutamine. For normal cells, metabolism creates reactive oxygen species and triggers an immune response to deal with all the pathogens riding along on top of your meals. However, when you fast, normal cells become 1000 times more resistant to reactive oxygen species, but cancer cells do not. This same starvation-protection also makes normal cells far more resistant to chemotherapy drugs.

the likely reason why fasting later became associated with the run-up to Easter is that people started holding baptisms at Easter. The three-week long preparation for becoming a Christian through baptism included fasting, and as baptism became more strongly associated with Easter in the fourth century AD, it is possible that fasting in the lead-up became more generalised to include people who were already Christians

Peter I of Alexandria in the fourth century who connected Christian penitential (still not Lenten) fasting to Jesus’s 40-day fast in the wilderness:

earliest reference to a sustained fast of more than two or three days is in the Didascalia, a Syrian Christian document probably from the the third century AD. Therefore you shall fast in the days of the Pascha from the tenth, which is the second day of the week; and you shall sustain yourselves with bread and salt and water only, at the ninth hour, until the fifth day of the week. But on the Friday and on the Sabbath fast wholly, and taste nothing … For thus did we also fast, when our Lord suffered, for a testimony of the three days … This text connects a six-day fast with Easter and with Jesus’s suffering, but surprisingly still not with Jesus’s 40-day temptation

John Chrysostom (c. 349-407), writing against Christians sharing anything in common with Jews, admonishes Christians who fast on the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur

Circadian rhythms of the peripheral clock genes are profoundly affected by fasting/feeding cycles.

eating in a ‘twelve hour window’

But I think the most sensible way forward would be to synthesize this effect with drugs

People are better eating on a regular basis.