Fasting may help keep age-related diseases at bay: Study

Fasting can boost the body's metabolism and help protect against age-related diseases, a study has found.

The circadian clock operates within the body and its organs as intrinsic time-keeping machinery to preserve homeostasis in response to the changing environment.

While food is known to influence clocks in peripheral tissues, it was unclear, until now, how the lack of food influences clock function and ultimately affects the body.

"We discovered fasting influences the circadian clock and fasting-driven cellular responses, which together work to achieve fasting-specific temporal gene regulation," said Paolo Sassone-Corsi, a professor at University of California, Irvine in the US.

"Skeletal muscle, for example, appears to be twice as responsive to fasting as the liver," said Sassone-Corsi.

The research, published in the journal Cell Reports, was conducted using mice, which were subjected to 24-hour periods of fasting.

While fasting, researchers noted the mice exhibited a reduction in .