Fasting-Mimicking Diet for Easing IBD Symptoms

Diet plays an important role in easing IBD symptoms. Therefore, new research has explored a lot about the types of food that can help you in making your life easier if you’re experiencing IBD symptoms. The studies suggest that fasting-mimicking diets have been proven very effective in easing IBD symptoms. However the research is not enough to consider the hypothesis valid. The recent researches have shown mixed results where fasting-mimicking diets are yielding ambiguous results among the people with IBD. 

Ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease  are two distinct types of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). It’s the time to learn how fasting can benefit these two conditions.

Although, there’s a lot of buzz around several beneficial effects of fasting on overall human health. But the most crucial conditions which are benefited by following a fasting-mimicking diet include:

• Obesity.
• Asthma.
• Inflammatory conditions.
• Blood sugar levels.
• Rheumatoid arthritis.
• Psoriasis.

As fasting and fasting-mimicking duets have been explored with mixed results fir IBD symptoms. But researchers are hopeful about the most promising impacts of fasting on IBD. However, sometimes fasting-mimicking duets like time-restricted fasting and alternate-day fasting can make your symptoms worse. 

Here’s complete information about what you should know about the effects of fasting-mimicking diet on IBD symptoms.

How Fasting-Mimicking Diets Can Improve IBD Symptoms?

Studies from the last decade have found that eating a diet with low calorie count can help reduce inflammation in intestines and reverse the pathology of IBD in animals. But the information the researchers showed was not enough to verify the authenticity of the results. The results should be more significant while you use them in treating IBD.

The recent research also proposes that fasting-mimicking diets have useful impacts on multiple sclerosis symptoms in animals and humans. Therefore, researchers also expect that it may be proven beneficial for other autoimmune diseases, particularly those involving the gut. 

Other studies support the idea that fasting works as an effective strategy that not only keeps the symptoms under control but also prevents the spreading of illnesses i.e. ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.

Scientists perform experiments on mice to find out the results of fating-mimicking duets. The program has been expanded to four consecutive days where the animals were purchased with 50% of their normal calorie intake on day 1 and 10% calorie intake on 2nd, 3rd, and 4th day. 

The second group of mice had been operated only with water for two consecutive days and kept fasting.

The results show some IBD related symptoms reversed in animals who had followed the fasting-mimicking diet. But the mice who were kept on water-fasting had not benefited from this type of fasting. This is the conclusion made by the researchers that a fasting-mimicking diet may have some nutrients that help reduce inflammation in the gut and promote a healthy microbiome there that helps improve the IBD symptoms. The researchers also claimed that a fasting-mimicking diet also encouraged an increase in intestinal stem cells that are supported by the healthy gut microbiota. Water-only fasting is not as useful as fasting-mimicking diet but it is obviously helpful in promoting intestinal regeneration. While the fasting diet is effective in reversing pathology of disease by regulating inflammation, microbiota and regeneration in the gut. Therefore, modern researchers have approved the idea that the fasting-mimicking duets help easing IBD symptoms by reducing inflammation and promoting regeneration of intestinal walls.

What is a Fasting-Mimicking Diet?

A very low calorie diet that is usually followed just for a few days, is called a fasting-mimicking diet. But it is different from other fasting-like diets because it is not time-restricted as some typical types of fasting like intermittent fasting.

According to expert’s opinion, eating a nutrient-dense food during a fasting-mimicking diet is essential to fulfill the requirements of essential nutrients even if you’re restricting your calorie intake. Many companies are offering prepackaged versions of fasting-mimicking diets that are especially designed to last for just five days while the meal container typically serves you with 40 to 50% of the calories you normally consume in a day. This means, you just need to go on this 5-day eating plan that may be for once a month or twice a year. You can choose according to your health needs.

However, the important thing is all the scientists and researchers are trying to find out the fasting-mimicking effects on humans. So, it is good to be skeptical of the research results. There are chances that foods eaten during fasting-mimicking may be more effective than actual fasting. But still there’s a gap between research and reliable results. If you’re experiencing IBD symptoms and want to follow a fasting-mimicking diet, you should ask your doctor for a personalized recommendation. 

Distinctive Features of Fasting and Fasting-Mimicking

Fasting is a totally different term from fasting-mimicking. Fasting means not eating during certain periods of the day or month. But fasting-mimicking is not the same. 

This can be explained with example, when you follow a 16/8 intermittent fasting diet plan, you eat within 8-hour interval for every day but the food is always of your own choice. Fasting-mimicking diets are not like this. 

How IBD Attacks?

Two popular conditions characterized by chronic inflammation of your gastrointestinal tract i.e. ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease are collectively called inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

It common symptoms include:

• Fatigue.
• Abrupt weight loss.
• Abdominal pain.
• Persistent diarrhea.
• Rectal bleeding.

In the last decade around 2.5 million people had been  reported as patients of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis in the country. The cause remained unknown at that time. However, studies have shown that the condition usually occurs when your immune system accidentally starts attacking the gut. Although, the immune system typically attacks the foreign bodies or invaders like bacteria or viruses to defend your body. But in IBD your immune system works opposite and causes the beneficial gut bacteria as foreign invaders and attacks them. As a result the inflammation occurs throughout the gastrointestinal tract. 

People often use certain medications to treat the IBD. However, in severe cases surgery is also recommended. Because there’s still no authentic research about the right treatment for IBD. Treatment of IBD is challenging and risky as it is a complicated condition that is generated by some exceptional factors including overactive immune response that occurred due to some underlying genetic re-deposition or any environmental or microbial trigger. Reversing pathology or treatment of IBD is difficult. Even the most effective medicines recommended for IBD treatment canopy induce long-term remission in the majority of people with the disease. Therefore, the main focus for funding the best treatment plan is the ongoing research. 

Diets Specialized for Easing IBD symptoms

If you’re looking for a specialized diet plan that can ease your IBD symptoms, you’re going in the wrong direction because there’s still no diet plan that can help treat inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract caused by IBD or reverse the symptoms. However, some research results found that certain diets like the FODMAP  diet can help you improve the symptoms but just to some extent. And they should be combined with other treatments so that they may possibly manage the disease and prevent the complications.

If researchers and scientists become successful in finding a percent diet that can treat inflammation, the mortality can also be decreased. So the dispute of funding the solution for IBD symptoms with duet is becoming stronger day by day in both communities i.e patients and doctors.

The task is difficult because the bacteria living in the bowels of people having IBD symptoms are very different. Therefore, many scientists are focusing just to correct the imbalance of gut bacteria that is the leading feature of disease, unfortunately, it is very difficult to cure this imbalance.

Ulcerative Colitis, Crohn’s Disease and Fasting

Most people ask their healthcare providers if they fast white they write experiencing symptoms of Ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. Because they listen from several sources about the beneficial impact affecting or fasting-mimicking diet on IBD symptoms. If you’re one of these people, this information is for you.

According to the latest research, the effects of fasting on IBD are still not fully known but researchers are trying to find out the authentic results that can explain the exact effects of fasting on UC or Crohn’s disease. The recent research on this topic has shown mixed results, suggesting that there may be several factors that can prove the results true or false. Therefore, you cannot get a straightforward answer.

Though, old students had promoted the idea that dating had a beneficial impact on many health conditions including IBD. For example, intermittent-fasting was considered effective for promoting gut-microbiota composition and reducing inflammation in the gut and throughout the gastrointestinal tract and whole body. 

Other studies have also found that fasting plays a positive role in improving other inflammatory conditions like psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis. 

However, when  it comes to IBD symptoms, studies suggest that the results are not clear. This means the story is not the same for Crohn’s disease and UC. 

Certain observational studies in last last decade involved intermittent fasting and observed its impacts on people during Ramadan especially on the people who were affected by IBD. The results were based on the analysis the researcher measured for the levels of certain inflammatory markers  and disease activity for those people who were involved in IBD and also fasting for Ramadan. 

Ramadan is a popular Islamic month during which the followers of Islam (Muslims) all over the world fast including abstaining from water during daylight hours. They eat before dawn and after sunset. Studies show people who fast for the whole month, start experiencing IBD symptoms  by the end of fasting month. Even people with IBD have to stop fasting because their condition got worse. This means fasting impacts the health negatively.

Similarly, some science based experiments revealed that fasting affects people with IBD opposingly as compared to those with either autoimmune disorders because changes in food and nutrients directly affects your gut rather than different parts of the body. 

Moreover, research also supports the hypothesis that different types of fasting impacts your gut health in different watts. 

What about More Research?

As the results of research about effects of fasting-mimicking due to the IBD symptoms are not clear, experts are striving to find out the truth. Students are being made to untangle the complex factors that affect the disease activity and inflammation in IBD. Researchers say that the effectiveness of fasting-mimicking diets is yet to be determined. Furthermore, the randomized clinical trials are carried out to determine the efficacy and safety of such diets in humans. In other words, the results of many studies are optimizing but require more experimentation of more nutrients to verify the effectiveness of this diet for humans. 

However, stooges also show that fasting-mocking diets are also associated with some health benefits especially for humans. 

Moreover, people with IBD often experience malnutrition because a restricted diet exacerbates this.

Conclusion

A fasting-mimicking diet plan is not similar to fasting because the former doesn’t abstain you from food and water completely. In the early days, excerpts used animals, especially mice to do experiments to check the validity of the hypothesis that a fasting-mimicking diet helps ease IBD symptoms. But more research is needed before we apply the results and findings of those experiments in humans. You should have known about the effectiveness of fasting on Crohn’s disease or UC  more certainly if you have IBD symptoms. This knowledge can save you and reduce the risk of complications. 

According to students, difficulties of fasting like intermittent fasting, time-restricted fasting or Ramadan fasting have different effects on human health especially on gut microbiota. Differentiation of nutrients play different roles in the increase or decrease of inflammation in gastrointestinal tract cats by UC or Crohn’s disease in IBD. 

However, it is finally concluded that fasting-mimicking diets or dating don’t have a clear positive effect on people with IBD. Furthermore, some studies even suggested that intermittent fasting can cause the worsening of condition. 

The jury has still not succeeded in ordering the correct answer of the question of whether a fasting-mimicking diet can help people with IBD. More research is needed.