Fasting’s effects on our body might be more complicated than we thought. New research in mice suggests that fasting can speed up the healing of intestinal stem cells, but possibly make them more susceptible to becoming cancerous. The findings could help us optimize popular diets like intermittent fasting , the researchers say.
Scientists at MIT led the new research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature . In a previous study, they found that fasting can increase the regenerative ability of intestinal stem cells, but now they’ve zeroed in on how this process seems to work. The researchers studied the gut stem cells of three different groups of mice: a control group that ate as usual, mice that were kept on a fast for 24 hours, and mice that were on a fast and then allowed to eat to their heart’s content for the next 24 hours.
This time, they noticed that the regeneration of these intestinal stem cells was actually suppressed during the act of fasting itself, but would then ramp up once the mice began to eat again. “The major finding of our current study is that refeeding after fasting is a distinct state from fasting itself. Post-fasting refeeding augments the ability of intestinal stem cells to, for example, repair the intestine after injury,” study researchers Omer Yilmaz, Shinya Imada, and Saleh Khawaled told Gizmodo in an email.
While this boost in regeneration might allow our gut cells to heal faster, the researchers also found that it could come with a pric.