This Is The Diet To Fix Your Gut, Study Says

For those suffering from chronic inflammation or diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, figuring out what foods work—and don't work!—for you can make your head spin. Interestingly, however, new research1 suggests that getting your gut health in check might have less to do with food you eat and more to do with a lack of food entirely, highlighting the potential role of fasting in healing and managing chronic digestive diseases.

Researchers out of the University of Southern California point to what they call the fasting-mimicking diet (FMD), a program developed by Valter Longo, Ph.D.—director of the Longevity Institute at USC in Los Angeles, author of The Longevity Diet—as a new approach to consider. In this study, published in Cell Reports, this eating pattern not only reduced inflammation in humans but also completely reversed some IBD symptoms.

So what exactly does it mean to fast but not quite fast? In this diet plan, you're never completely without food. Instead, researchers had mice reduce their caloric intake by half for a day, then down to 10 percent of what they'd normally eat for three more days. This stretch of four days was the "fasting" period, and when repeated every once in a while, the mice reaped the digestive benefits.

By "mimicking" fasting but still providing the body with some form of nutrients, the body can still rebuild its healthy cells and tissues. The mice that were put through comparison water-only fasting periods saw no change in gut-healthy improvements, demonstrating that even little amounts of food can go a long way.

This isn't the first time fasting has been in the spotlight. Intermittent fasting took over the wellness world with a laundry list of benefits like improved cognitive function2, balanced blood sugar, and stable energy levels3, just to name a few (seriously, IF has been hailed as a fix for just about everything, it seems). And while this fasting-mimicking diet is distinct from intermittent fasting plans, like the 16:8 plan, they do have some overlapping benefits.

For the 1.6 million Americans who suffer from some form of IBD, this is a big deal. Inflammatory bowel diseases are—simply put—exactly what they sound like. They include common conditions like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.