Restoration of metabolic tempo through time-restricted eating (TRE) as the preventive measure for metabolic diseases

Abstract

The characteristics of healthy bioenergetics are the overall balance of energy intake and expenditure, the alternate switching for different metabolic fuels, and the temporal rhythm of eating and fasting. These three bioenergetic attributes, herein, are termed as the metabolic tempo. Cumulative studies revealed the beneficial health effects of fasting. Most of the fasting regimens harness their innate mechanisms of enhancing metabolic fuel switching, thus improving metabolic flexibility. The emerging time-restricted eating (TRE) regimen includes the restoration of diurnal eating and fasting rhythms, improve the metabolic flexibility, while spontaneously reduces the food intake despite the ad-libitum eating. TRE thus simultaneously improves all three bioenergetic-tempo attributes when compared to the energy balance control in general obesity control. We reviewed fifteen human studies of TRE and TRE-liked interventions from 2007 to 2019. These studies reported promising beneficial metabolic effects on body weight, glycemic, and lipid controls while demonstrating most of the fasting-related metabolic and epigenetic responses in overweight and obese individuals. TRE is practically possible for long-termed implementation. Despite its potentials to restore the underlying dysregulated bioenergetics., there is no study confirming that TRE could prevent the development of common metabolic diseases in healthy subjects after long-term implementation. This gap of knowledge warrants future investigation.

Keywords:

• Fasting
• intermittent fasting
• metabolic syndrome
• metabolic tempo
• time-restricted eating

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Mr. Peter Janssen for his help in reviewing and editing the entire manuscript. We appreciated the continuing support of the team of nurses and supporting staff in the Nutritional and Environment Medicine department, BBH Hospital, on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).