17 to 18 hours fast

Six years and counting with Intermittent Fasting! I am so used to IF now that I forgot sometimes that I am doing it regularly. Do I see improvement in my body? I sure do! For one thing, I don’t worry about gaining weight again. I’ve maintained a normal weight for 6 years now. It gives me good sleep, as long as I don’t mess up with my body clock by sleeping the same time at night, and waking up at the same time in the morning. The only time I will mess it up if I allowed myself to extend my waking hours to accommodate some personal chats with friends and relatives especially this time of pandemic. People need people, but sometimes, we overdo it and for all you know, it is past our bedtime. It’s hard to go back to scheduled sleeping especially when you are wired up from prolonged conversations and you seemed like you cannot relax. Thank goodness it does not resort to raiding the refrigerator for something to eat just so my mind can relax. It’s totally something that I don’t want to practice– the wee hours of chatting to help the other person with their personal, emotional and mental issues and vice-verse.

The pandemic surely changed many things you have not done before for just having so much time on your hand being on a never ending lockdowns; unable to have regular travel plans, going to restaurants on special occasions or every weekend; or just going to the mall to just enjoy a day away from home. We cannot do that for fear of getting infected with Covid.

Thankfully, the pandemic did not change my intermittent fasting habits. It helps with taking care of the immune system which is very important in so many ways in these unprecedented times of pandemic crisis.

The technique, called “intermittent fasting” (IF) involves eating during a six-hour period of the day and then abstaining for the remaining 18 hours as a way to change the way the body burns food and stores energy.

Researchers are touting a diet that involves fasting for 18 hours each day as a way to stop getting overweight and reducing the chances of contracting everything from cancer to diabetes and heart disease.

A study of past animal and human studies in The New England Journal of Medicine, called Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease, says the diet effectively hacks the human metabolism.

“Evidence is accumulating that eating in a six-hour period and fasting for 18 hours can trigger a metabolic switch from glucose-based to ketone-based energy, with increased stress resistance, increased longevity, and a decreased incidence of diseases,” says the study.

In the report, authors Mark Mattson and Rafael de Cabo analyze two types of intermittent fasting to help physicians prescribe dieting as a way patients can tackle obesity and prevent a range of killer diseases.

One format, daily time-restricted feeding, involves eating 6-8 hours daily and fasting for the remaining 16-18 hours. The other, intermittent fasting, involves eating normally for five days of the week and consuming no more than 500 calories on the remaining two days.

It is not the first time that researchers have touted intermittent fasting as a panacea, including by Kate Harrison in her 2013 book called The 5:2 Diet: Feast for 5 Days, Fast for 2 Days to Lose Weight and Revitalize Your Health.

In a Harvard Medical School blog post last year, contributing editor Monique Tello noted intermittent fasting is “safe and incredibly effective” but added that it is “really no more effective than any other diet”.

“But a growing body of research suggests that the timing of the fast is key, and can make IF a more realistic, sustainable, and effective approach for weight loss, as well as for diabetes prevention,” wrote Tello.

What Are The Minimum Number Of Hours You Can Intermittent Fast & Still Get Benefits?

By Stephanie EckelkampMedical review by Bindiya Gandhi, M.D.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is one of the trendiest eating styles of the moment—and for good reason. This eating approach can yield a number of impressive results: weight loss, increased fat burn, improved cognitive functioning, reduced inflammation, and potentially even increased longevity.

But all that said, one big question still remains: How long do you have to fast to reap these potentially life-changing rewards? Is there a minimum number of hours you need to restrict food to get the perks?

We asked some leading intermittent fasting experts to weigh in on the topic so you can better tailor your intermittent fasting plan according to your specific goals.

The benefits of fasting don’t kick in at the same time for every person.

Experts agree that your personal habits will play a role in when exactly certain health benefits will kick in. “There are very few definites here,” says Vincent Pedre, M.D., an integrative physician and gut health expert who frequently recommends intermittent fasting diets to his patients. “Where you start seeing those benefits depends on what you eat, how healthy your gut health is, what kind of physical activity you’re doing, etc.”

For example, letting calories slip into your fasting window, overeating calorie-dense foods like pizza during your eating window, not prioritizing sleep or physical activity, or making one of these intermittent-fasting mistakes could all delay or counteract the benefits of intermittent fasting.

Even if you’re formulating the rest of your diet and lifestyle perfectly, it’s important to understand that the different health benefits associated with intermittent fasting will likely kick in at different durations of fasting. For example, weight loss may be triggered by a relatively short fasting window, while entering ketosis or triggering autophagy—that “self-cleaning” cellular process that boosts brain functioning and maybe even longevity—may take significantly longer.

Unfortunately, not enough research has been conducted on all the different forms of intermittent fasting to provide any hard-and-fast rules. Based on personal and patient experiences, however, the doctors and researchers we spoke with were able to offer a general idea of how long you may need to fast to reap certain benefits, which we’ll dive into below.

So, how long do you need to fast for the different benefits?

The benefits of a 12-hour fast.

Most of the experts we spoke with agreed, less than a 12-hour fast doesn’t really do anything. “Twelve hours [per day] is the minimum in my experience,” says integrative physician Amy Shah, M.D. “There’s research showing a 34% reduction in breast cancer recurrence with approximately 13 hours of fasting per day.” This may be thanks in part to the improved blood sugar regulation that occurs with this level of fasting.

Shorter fasts like this will also reduce your exposure to gut-associated toxins, like endotoxin, says Pedre, which is a harmful byproduct of bacterial death that contributes to metabolic syndrome, obesity, and inflammatory diseases. A daily 12-hour fast can also be beneficial for weight loss, adds Shah, but it would likely take a longer fasting period to enter ketosis or trigger autophagy.

The benefits of a 14- to 18-hour fast.

For many people, somewhere between 14 and 18 hours of fasting per day is the ideal range, providing more significant weight loss benefits than a 12-hour fast, while still being attainable, says functional practitioner B.J. Hardick, D.C. “For most people, this seems to be the sweet spot; others will need slightly longer to get those weight loss and other benefits,” he says.

Shifting into the fat-burning state known as ketosis can also occur during this range. While the specific point at which you enter ketosis will depend on a number of factors, including what you ate during your last meal, this typically happens within 12 to 22 hours of a meal—once you’ve burned through your glycogen stores (i.e., the carbs stored in your muscles and liver).

The benefits of an extended fast.

Pedre agrees that around 16 hours is a good daily fasting window for many (i.e., confining your eating to an eight-hour time frame and known as 16:8 fasting), but, he says, “You might not start seeing bigger benefits like autophagy until you reach 24 hours.” Autophagy is the natural process by which cells disassemble and clean out or recycle unnecessary or dysfunctional components so you can create new healthy cells. Autophagy reduces oxidative stress and inflammation, and taking steps to enhance autophagy may help reduce the risk of getting a number of chronic illnesses. 

Obviously, you can’t fast for 24 hours every day because, you know, food is essential for life. So if you do want to experiment with these longer autophagy-inducing fasts, you’ll have to strategically space them out. “My opinion is that a longer [24-hour] episode without any caloric intake done a few times per month over decades is likely the best approach for preventing chronic diseases because it is feasible to do consistently over a lifetime—the period of time that chronic diseases like coronary artery disease and diabetes develop,” says Benjamin Horne, Ph.D., a genetic epidemiologist who is currently conducting a trial evaluating the effectiveness of a once-per-week 24-hour water-only fast.

Fasts up to 36 hours have also shown promise for people with type 2 diabetes, says Pedre, but these would absolutely need to be done under the supervision of a medical professional.

So, how long should you fast for?

Whew, that’s a lot to take in! Bottom line, though, is that the ideal fasting window will vary depending on the individual. “What matters more, I think, is the duration of fasting that works for you,” says Pedre. “If you can’t stick with it or it isn’t working for whatever reason—say, you can’t concentrate—that’s a sign benefits are starting to drop off and you may need to scale back.”

Switching up your fasting plan may be beneficial as well.

Some experts find that people’s fasting results eventually stall, in which case it helps to switch things up. “Increase your fasting time to a few days a week or do a longer fast one day a week,” suggests Pedre. “In the end, what works best is mixing it up for your body and keeping it guessing when food is coming.”

To learn more about what IF approach may be right for you, check out other expert-powered articles about the different types of intermittent fasting plans, the ultra-popular 16:8 intermittent fasting schedule, and the fasting-mimicking diet. Also, be sure you know exactly what breaks a fast to ensure you’re getting the maximum possible benefit. 

Time will tell which is worse

Covid 19 News Update

By Jennifer Margulis

The answer may be in the antibodies, a new study suggests.

Are the antibodies we produce to fight COVID-19 infection causing severe disease?

A new paper—so new in fact that it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed—from scientists in Hangzhou, China, appears to indicate just that.

The researchers’ data suggests that at least two antibodies that target the spike protein that enables the COVID-19 virus to enter human cells are “pathogenic”—meaning these antibodies create illness all by themselves.

It’s hard to think of antibodies—one of the body’s best infection fighters—as “pathogenic,” but that’s exactly what happens in autoimmune disease. Antibodies that the body develops in response to foreign invaders attach to body tissues instead, sometimes causing catastrophic damage.

In early 2020, Japanese researchers discovered that many COVID-19 deaths were caused by part of the body’s immune reaction. In a peer-reviewed article published in Inflammation and Regeneration, the scientists argued that it was a “cytokine storm” that overwhelmed the body and was implicated in the high death rates from the virus.

This new Chinese study shows that yet another component of the immune system may be a danger as well.

The fact that antibodies that target COVID-19’s spike protein are harmful is disturbing enough, but it’s especially disturbing knowing that these same antibodies are likely to be triggered by COVID-19 vaccines as well as the virus.

All three of the vaccines approved for emergency use by the CDC stimulate the production of antibodies against the spike protein—the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, and the recombinant vector vaccine from Johnson and Johnson.

Spike Protein Antibodies Attack Body Tissues

The Chinese researchers suspected that some antibodies triggered by a pathogenic virus could attack body tissues. To test the hypothesis, they identified seven different COVID-19 antibodies. They then analyzed how well each of these antibodies bound to human lung cells, both healthy and damaged ones. Antibodies binding to your own tissue cells can cause autoimmune damage.

As the researchers expected, two of the antibodies bound strongly to damaged lung cells—and one of those bound strongly to healthy cells as well.

The researchers then injected the antibodies, as well as some combinations, into the bodies of healthy pregnant mice at three-day intervals. They wanted to see what, if any, damage the antibodies would do to the mice and their pups.

Again as expected, the same two antibodies that had bound well to the human lung cells did extensive damage to the mouse pups’ tissues.

In fact, the antibody that could bind to healthy human lung cells, REGN10987, killed nearly half the pups.

“This is a very troubling finding,” says Zoey O’Toole, a vaccine safety advocate who has a background in physics and engineering and who reviewed the study carefully. “It should give anyone pause, especially pregnant women.”

How Does SARS-CoV-2 Kill?

One of the big questions about SARS-CoV-2, also known as COVID-19, is exactly how it causes serious illness in those who have died as well as in others who develop long-term symptoms.

Most viruses cause short-term illness that resolves once the body has had time to develop antibodies, which appears to be the case for the majority of people who contract COVID-19.

Why is it, then, that some people die after two to three weeks of illness, when their immune systems have already cleared the virus from their bodies?

And why do some people—known as “long haulers”—have long-term multi-organ damage that seems to have nothing to do with the virus itself?

We know that no two people have identical immune responses. With COVID-19, we’ve also seen that those who get severely ill have higher levels of inflammatory cytokines in their blood. This is the “cytokine storm” that the media latched onto as an explanation for severe infectious disease.

How Antibodies Create Severe Disease

But elevated cytokines are only part of the picture. Researchers have long suspected an autoimmune aspect to severe COVID-19 disease as well.

An article in Nature in January noted that surprisingly high percentages of people with severe disease from COVID-19 had auto-immune antibodies. These antibodies targeted the immune system itself, as well as the blood vessels, heart, and brain.

Since COVID-19 was first identified, we have seen auto-immune responses worsening the effect of the disease, increasing inflammation and immune dysregulation, and sometimes increasing the activity of the virus itself.

The Chinese researchers don’t suggest how the antibodies damage tissues, but autoimmunity researchers have long understood that the particular proteins our antibodies lock on to when they target a virus are sometimes found in our own cells.

This “molecular mimicry” might be only a partial match, but even that can be enough to cause otherwise helpful antibodies to attack our own healthy cells.

COVID-19 Vaccine Design

The findings from this pre-print have profound implications for vaccine design. In order for a vaccine to be as safe and effective as possible, it would have to be one that stimulates antibodies that neutralize the pathogen but don’t bind to any body tissues, so that people who got it would be safe from autoimmune effects.

Unfortunately, it seems that industry scientists didn’t take molecular mimicry into consideration when designing the COVID-19 vaccines.

The spike protein that makes SARS-CoV-2 so infectious to humans was the target the vaccine makers focused on when designing their vaccines. They believed that the spike protein itself, apart from the rest of the virus, was harmless. If the isolated protein wasn’t the disease agent, getting the body to make the protein for a short time would be safe.

But, as the new research from China underscores, there may be at least three problems with this approach.

Potential Problems with COVID-19 Spike Protein Vaccines

Firstly, the spike protein itself isn’t harmless, as has since been found. In fact, according to science published by an international team of researchers in March in the journal Circulation Research, the spike protein can damage lung endothelial cells, just like the ones that bound to the antibodies in the Chinese study, as well as the endothelial cells that line blood vessels throughout the body.

“If you remove the replicating capabilities of the virus, it still has a major damaging effect on the vascular cells,” Dr. Uri Manor, co-author of the study and a researcher at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, said in an interview for Salk.edu.

In the first paragraph of the press release, Salk.edu asserts in parentheses that spike proteins “behave very differently from those safely encoded in the vaccines.” However, neither the study itself or the press release offer any evidence to justify this claim. At the same time, we have seen that many adverse effects reported after vaccination, including blood clots and strokes, are vascular events similar to those associated with the disease itself.

Secondly, as this new research shows, antibodies generated to neutralize the spike protein may be particularly toxic to human cells, especially if the cells have already been damaged.

Finally, the Hangzhou researchers’ data suggested that the one thing that could prevent the ill effects of the pathogenic antibodies is when there are also non-pathogenic antibodies alongside them, doing their job normally. But whether the vaccines as they’ve been formulated can actually trigger production of healthy, non-pathogenic antibodies remains an open question.

“This study suggests that antibodies to other parts of the virus can counteract the potential harm of anti-spike antibodies,” explains O’Toole. “That’s an important finding. But there’s no virus in the mRNA vaccines. So, it’s very unlikely that these vaccines can produce enough beneficial antibodies to help.”

The Upshot

As we learn more about SARS-CoV-2’s ability to harm human beings, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests the vaccines can also cause harm.

In our rush to find a way to prevent severe COVID-19, we may unwittingly be doing more harm than good. It may be years before we know the full extent of the damage.

Which was worse, the disease or its preventive? Only time will tell.

Read More at The Epoch Times

It started with the Battery Charger!

I’m rediscovering the books I set aside for 📚 reading, but never find time to read them. Why is that?!

Due to the many opportunities to do all kinds of things when life was normal, and that at the drop of a 👒 hat, we can go mall shopping, walk around with no fear of crowded places, go eat out in a busy, noisy restaurant, go on vacation and do hotel hopping and enjoy breakfast in a crowded room of hungry strangers 🙃; more than two dozens of books I bought and placed in a cabinet were totally forgotten.

Not until I started searching for a battery charger of my mini video camera I had bought but I have never used either. It led me checking up for two small video cameras 📷 I bought through HSN four years ago, when I was tempted to buy this week a camcorder for Vlogging.

I wanted to find out if I can use one of those video cameras for vlogging. Since I have not used the mini video camera, I did not have any idea how to use it. But of course coming to my senses, I noticed the battery attached to the camera. Since I have not used it, the battery needs to be charged. I started looking for its charger but unfortunately 😕 I did some organizing of my gadgets and placed the ones I have not used in a bag and placed them in a closet. The charger is nowhere to be found.

I checked the cabinets where I kept the books I purchased and since it was impossible to look for a charger and/or the camera box with full of books and music CDs and traveling videos I’ve collected through the years; I had to take all the contents in the cabinet to find my way to what I was looking for. As I went through all the books, I was amazed that I have all forgotten them.

As I went through them and placing the books in two boxes, I separated the ones I am now interested in reading and put them in a big open bag so I can start reading them. These are books I mostly bought in some Christian bookstores and those books don’t age, just like the Holy Bible. I have about seven different versions of the Holy Book and there was only one Bible in the mix of books I placed in the cabinet and forgotten.

I am still in search for the battery charger which now has led me to a mission of cleaning all my closets to organize those items and miscellaneous possessions I need to donate for this year.

Starting this evening though, it’s refreshing to read one of the forgotten books which would help me to get away from social media and the stressful happenings all over the 🌎 world.

Battery Charger Update: I did find the battery charger and was able to bring up to speed my two cameras I can use for Blogging. Unfortunately, I got distracted again and I was not able to continue the video blogging, which I needed to put aside for the meantime. The distraction was brought by getting a new desktop, a 27 inch Apple IMAC which came out last year. I’ve always owned a Microsoft System, the last one was purchased in 2010. In changing to IMAC, I have to start all over again in familiarizing a different system totally different from Microsoft Windows. There are many pros and cons, but it’s a challenge in the mind that I mostly welcome.

Then some freak accident that involved a visit to the emergency room, threw me off the radar and I had to nurse and heal myself for more than a month. Not really the best time to be in that situation especially with the Covid crisis that is still lurking out there.

I am fortunate though, that I have close ties with few friends and relations to get me through the hurdle. I was able to overcome and healed with the Grace of God. He came through for me again. With God, He makes trials easier to manage. He comforted, guided and best of all, healed me with His miraculous touch.

Jesus is still in the Healing Business!

Those books I have are waiting to be read, the videos I have in my video files, are waiting to be uploaded and edited, the Mac system features and software updates are eagerly waiting on the sidelines, and the printer and scanner hooked up to Mac are waiting to be tested! My Microsoft Desktop is still my main informational updater, as well as my Tablet, my portable laptop, and cell phones are as important gadgets to keep with the times, as well as friends who need to bend my ear so to listen to their anxious and sometimes happy hearts. And not forgetting the daily house chores and treadmill walks and upper and lower back exercises. Come to think of it, I got busier now than before the pandemic!

And time with God/Jesus must be Priority!

Peace is found in Jesus

Peace is found in Jesus