Essentials: Healthy Eating & Eating Disorders - Anorexia, Bulimia, Binging

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are going to talk all about healthy and disordered eating. And indeed, we are going to talk about clinical eating disorders, such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, as well as some other related eating disorders. However, before we get into this material, I want to emphasize that today's discussion will include what it is to have a healthy relationship with food. We're going to talk about metabolism. We're going to talk about how eating frequency and what one eats influences things like appetite and satiety, as well as whether or not we have a healthy psychological relationship to food and our body weight and so called body composition. The ratio of muscle to fat to bone, etcetera. So, as we march into this conversation, I'd like to share with you some interesting interesting and what I believe are important findings in the realm of nutrition and human behavior. I know these days, many people are excited about or curious about so called intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is as the name implies, intermittent fasting is as the name implies, simply restricting one's feeding behavior, eating to a particular phase of the twenty four hour or so called circadian cycle. Other forms of intermittent fasting involve not eating for extended periods of time, for entire days, or some people will extend to two days or three days. Typically and hopefully, they will drink water during those times, sometimes referred to as water fasting, which means that they are ingesting fluids. And hopefully, they are ingesting electrolytes such as salt, potassium, and magnesium as well. Because while one can survive for some period of time without ingesting calories, it is extremely important to continue to ingest plenty of fluids and electrolytes. And the reason for that is that the neurons of your brain and body that control your movements, your thoughts, clarity of thinking in general, etcetera, is critically dependent on the presence of adequate levels of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the electrolytes. And that's because neurons can only be electrically active by way of movement of particular ions, which include things like sodium, potassium, and magnesium. So without those, you can't think, you can't function, and it actually can be quite dangerous. So why all the excitement about intermittent fasting? Well, a lot of the excitement relates to work that was done by a former colleague of mine down at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego named Sachin Panda. Sachin's lab identified some very important and impactful health benefits of restricting one's feeding window to particular times within the twenty four hour cycle, or even to having extended fasts that go for a day or two days or maybe even three days. What …