Read Online The 8-Hour Diet by David Zinczenko - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: David Zinczenko
Ads: Link
ways to extend your lease—and his own—on this planet. And his solution is shockingly simple, inexpensive, and effective.
When he’s not logging hours as a researcher at the National Institute on Aging, Dr. Mattson is a professor in the department of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. At a particularly brainy institution, he’s in the brain department. Lately, he’s been investigatingthe fascinating effects of caloric restriction and intermittent fasting on animals of all kinds. So, while rats and worms and rhesus monkeys command a lot of his attention, he’s studying those animals for what their experiences can tell him about you and me.
“My interest in fasting began when I got interested in aging, back in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” says Dr. Mattson, seated in his office on a high floor of the skyscraper. “It was known that in animals, if you reduce their energy intake, they live longer.”
Thus began a career quest to investigate the science behind this equation: Less energy intake equals more life output. Dr. Mattson is striving to find comfortable ways to subtract food with the goal of adding productive years to human lives, including his own.
He’s now in his early fifties, but he cuts the figure of a skinny teenager who just might have some difficulty keeping those blue jeans hitched above his waist. A profile in
US News and World Report
pegged Dr. Mattson’s weight at “less than 130 pounds”—the result of a diet in which he skips breakfast every day, lunch most days, and relies on his evening meal for most of his sustenance.
Don’t panic: Nobody’s telling you to arrange your life around a single meal. But it’s at least instructive that Dr. Mattson, given all he knows about this subject, has embraced this approach to eating with such fervor. Much like the researchers at the Salk Institute, the more scientists learn about the effects of an 8-hour diet, the more they begin to change their lives to gather up all its benefits.
OK, perhaps Dr. Mattson takes it to an extreme you’d rather not share. For instance, even on days he’s fasting, he’s known to run 6 to 9 miles with a high school cross-country team he coaches. (He says he likes to swap out snacking in favor of exercise, which isn’t a bad strategy, actually.) The fact is, we could all stand to be a lot leaner and have the stamina to keep up with the teenagers in our lives. And as Dr. Mattson quickly points out, there are mental benefits as well. This distinguished doc makes his living by finding longevity secrets at a time of life when most of us would be satisfied just to locate the car keys.
So it’s instructive that he calls the modern meal plan of three squares “abnormal from a genetic standpoint. We clearly haven’t adapted to ityet.” And by “adapted,” he means that we’ve instead become sedentary, obese, prone to health risks, and at the mercy of fast-food advertising. Sounds like a recipe for extinction.
Dr. Mattson pulls out a fascinating set of maps that show the distances our species (or its ancestors) have traveled to find dinner over the course of our histories on the planet. The first map, from 5 million years ago, shows a dog-eat-dinosaur world where the species are constantly on the run, but cover only a limited distance. To survive long enough to reproduce, they’ve got to both outsmart and outrun all of the other critters that would like to eat them (or us) for dinner. Physical capacities and mental ones interlock; the species that have the best brains and endurance live the longest, have more offspring, spread their genes far and wide, and come to dominate the herd.
OK, fast forward to 10,000 years ago. A plucky mammal called homo sapiens is up on two legs and can sprint across the landscape for long distances—far outrunning even the most dogged competitor or pursuer. And for our species, this form of travel is broadening. The brains of these running animals
When he’s not logging hours as a researcher at the National Institute on Aging, Dr. Mattson is a professor in the department of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. At a particularly brainy institution, he’s in the brain department. Lately, he’s been investigatingthe fascinating effects of caloric restriction and intermittent fasting on animals of all kinds. So, while rats and worms and rhesus monkeys command a lot of his attention, he’s studying those animals for what their experiences can tell him about you and me.
“My interest in fasting began when I got interested in aging, back in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” says Dr. Mattson, seated in his office on a high floor of the skyscraper. “It was known that in animals, if you reduce their energy intake, they live longer.”
Thus began a career quest to investigate the science behind this equation: Less energy intake equals more life output. Dr. Mattson is striving to find comfortable ways to subtract food with the goal of adding productive years to human lives, including his own.
He’s now in his early fifties, but he cuts the figure of a skinny teenager who just might have some difficulty keeping those blue jeans hitched above his waist. A profile in
US News and World Report
pegged Dr. Mattson’s weight at “less than 130 pounds”—the result of a diet in which he skips breakfast every day, lunch most days, and relies on his evening meal for most of his sustenance.
Don’t panic: Nobody’s telling you to arrange your life around a single meal. But it’s at least instructive that Dr. Mattson, given all he knows about this subject, has embraced this approach to eating with such fervor. Much like the researchers at the Salk Institute, the more scientists learn about the effects of an 8-hour diet, the more they begin to change their lives to gather up all its benefits.
OK, perhaps Dr. Mattson takes it to an extreme you’d rather not share. For instance, even on days he’s fasting, he’s known to run 6 to 9 miles with a high school cross-country team he coaches. (He says he likes to swap out snacking in favor of exercise, which isn’t a bad strategy, actually.) The fact is, we could all stand to be a lot leaner and have the stamina to keep up with the teenagers in our lives. And as Dr. Mattson quickly points out, there are mental benefits as well. This distinguished doc makes his living by finding longevity secrets at a time of life when most of us would be satisfied just to locate the car keys.
So it’s instructive that he calls the modern meal plan of three squares “abnormal from a genetic standpoint. We clearly haven’t adapted to ityet.” And by “adapted,” he means that we’ve instead become sedentary, obese, prone to health risks, and at the mercy of fast-food advertising. Sounds like a recipe for extinction.
Dr. Mattson pulls out a fascinating set of maps that show the distances our species (or its ancestors) have traveled to find dinner over the course of our histories on the planet. The first map, from 5 million years ago, shows a dog-eat-dinosaur world where the species are constantly on the run, but cover only a limited distance. To survive long enough to reproduce, they’ve got to both outsmart and outrun all of the other critters that would like to eat them (or us) for dinner. Physical capacities and mental ones interlock; the species that have the best brains and endurance live the longest, have more offspring, spread their genes far and wide, and come to dominate the herd.
OK, fast forward to 10,000 years ago. A plucky mammal called homo sapiens is up on two legs and can sprint across the landscape for long distances—far outrunning even the most dogged competitor or pursuer. And for our species, this form of travel is broadening. The brains of these running animals
Similar Books
