Intermittent fasting may help prevent liver disease

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In a new study from the University of Sydney, researchers found how intermittent fasting works on the liver to help prevent disease.

The findings will help medical scientists working in cancer, heart disease and diabetes research develop new interventions to lower disease risk and discover the optimum intervals for fasting.

In experiments with mice, the team found how every other-day fasting affected proteins in the liver.

This showed an unexpected impact on fatty acid metabolism and the surprising role played by a master regulator protein that controls many biological pathways in the liver and other organs.

In particular, the researchers found that the HNF4-(alpha) protein, which regulates a large number of liver genes, plays a previously unknown role during intermittent fasting.

They showed that HNF4-(alpha) is inhibited during intermittent fasting.

This has downstream consequences, such as lowering the abundance of blood proteins in inflammation or affecting bile synthesis. This helps explain some of the previously known facts about intermittent fasting.

The researchers also found that every-other-day-fasting — where no food was consumed on alternate days — changed the metabolism of fatty acids in the liver, which may improve glucose tolerance and the regulation of diabetes.

The team says that the findings may help determine optimum fasting periods to regulate protein response in the liver.

If you care about liver health, please read studies about the key to stopping the silent killer of liver disease and findings of this diet may reduce non-alcoholic fatty liver disease by 50%.

For more information about liver disease prevention and treatment, please see recent studies about this diet may help prevent drug induced liver damage and results showing that this diet can make normal liver tissue behave like tumor.

The study is published in Cell Reports. One author of the study is Dr Mark Larance.

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