Here’s some motivation to put away that midnight snack. Going longer without food overnight may help reduce your risk of breast cancer, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say. The study, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention says that women who fasted for longer periods of time overnight had significantly better control over blood glucose concentrations and each three hour increase in nighttime fasting was associated with a 4 percent lower postprandial glucose level, regardless of how much women ate throughout the day.
Women in the study reported eating five times per day with a mean nighttime fasting of 12 hours. Those who reported longer fast durations also indicated they consumed fewer calories per day, ate fewer calories after 10 p.m. and had fewer eating episodes.
A separate recent study found that breast cancer survivors who fasted for 13 hours or more overnight had a decreased risk of cancer recurrence.
“Increasing the duration of overnight fasting could be a novel strategy to reduce the risk of developing breast cancer,” said Catherine Marinac, UC San Diego doctoral candidate and first author on the paper. “This is a simple dietary change that we believe most women can understand and adopt. It may have a big impact on public health without requiring complicated counting of calories or nutrients.”
“The dietary advice for cancer prevention usually focuses on limiting consumption of red meat, alcohol and refined grains while increasing plant-based foods,” said co-author Ruth Patterson, PhD, UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center associate director for population sciences and program leader of the cancer prevention program. “New evidence suggests that when and how often people eat can also play a role in cancer risk.”
Researchers recommend large-scale clinical trials to confirm that nighttime fasting results in favorable changes to biomarkers of glycemic control and breast cancer risk.
It would be interesting to see this study done again with an additional group of women that eat local, farm fresh organic food, in addition to a group that eats non-organic food… how do they know the decreased risk is from the fasting of food and not the fasting from pesticides and other adulterants in our food?
Yes, that would be a great study.