20 Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

Coping with Stress
Fasting, like exercise, helps us cope with stress by being a mild stressor itself. Mark Mattson, senior investigator for the National Institute on Aging, explains, “There are several theories about why fasting provides physiological benefits…The one that we’ve studied a lot, and designed experiments to test, is the hypothesis that during the fasting period, cells are under a mild stress…And they respond to the stress adaptively by enhancing their ability to cope with stress and, maybe, to resist disease.”