What Causes No Appetite When You’re Sick?
Sometimes, when you are sick, you have no appetite at all and don’t want to eat. In fact, there are some illnesses that require food, and there are some illnesses that are better served by not eating or fasting.
The saying “Feed A Cold, Starve A Fever” may have some scientific truth. Many people don’t know why starving yourself will help you recover. This includes an important dietary concept – “Light Fasting”.
Why Fasting Will Help You Recover?
When many people hear about fasting, they immediately turn around and look at it differently: will you get malnourished if you fast? Will you get sick if you fast? Why do you abuse yourself at such a young age and eat well?”
In fact, there is no need to be so nervous, the fasting process, the body is in self-repair, we previous cell autophagy article inside said, that fasting can be anti-aging.
Some studies have found that fasting for 3 days can repair many damaged immune cells and restart your immune system. Simply understand, control a period of time without eating, stop eating when you are full, starve yourself, and let your body organs function better to recover. This process will switch the body’s energy supply from sugar to fat, allowing the body’s organs to get the rest they need for it to work more safely and properly.
What’s more, fasting will make you naturally thinner and reduce the risk of many chronic diseases.
→ Fasting, which can help you recover
One study found that during a period of fasting ranging from 4 to 21 days, subjects felt a great sense of security, happiness, and an improvement in their health.
This was a long-term study in which 341 out of 404 participants with health problems reported great improvements in their health after fasting from vegetable juices and soups for 4-21 days. Overall, these participants consumed road calories in the range of 200-250 calories per day.
Some scientists believe that intermittent fasting, or eating only for a set period, is embedded in our physiology and constitutes an evolutionary adaptation that can improve cellular function to improve your overall health.
→ Fasting works for some colds
A study of mice with fevers due to bacterial infections found that mice that underwent fasting, lived longer compared to mice that were forced to eat. However, all the studies so far seem to agree that fasting is only for the acute stage of the infection, right up to the first few days.
Another study in mice and humans found that fasting for 48-72 hours promoted the repair of damaged immune cells and allowed healthy immune cells to regenerate. With increased immune function, a person is less likely to get sick, and when they do get sick, they get better quickly.
Fasting is Not Recommended for These Diseases
Regarding disease infections, there are two different ways, viral and bacterial infections.
- Bacterial infections
Diseases including bronchitis and pneumonia are caused by single-celled organisms that can invade the body and multiply and grow on their own. Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics to stop colonies from getting bigger.
- Viral Infections
Viral infections like influenza (flu) and the common cold (rhinovirus) don’t replicate on their own as bacteria do. Instead, the virus hijacks the cell and turns out more copies of the virus.
Studies with rats have found that when fighting off a flu virus infection, eating can help it recover faster, but if you have a bacterial infection, eating may worsen your condition.
→ Fasting and fasting, the effect on two different infections
Medzhitov’s team decided to study the effects of two different infections, on disease recovery. The team performed a series of experiments on mice, injecting them with bacterial and viral molecules specifically designed to trigger the same inflammatory response as the infection. The mice were then given glucose or fasted, simulating a fed group and a fasted group.
They found that both infections initially caused the mice to have no appetite, but the virally infected mice recovered more quickly than the bacterially infected mice. This suggests that glucose helps protect the mice and other systems of the brain from inflammation.
On the other hand, all of the mice that ate the bacterial infection died because the elevated glucose levels caused brain damage that led to seizures and eventually death.
Why is there such a big difference? The team says it may be because the no appetite prompts the liver to produce ketone bodies, molecules produced when the body starts burning fat instead of sugar for energy.
This is important because bacterial infections cause free radicals (a highly reactive atom that can cause oxidative damage to other cells) to surge in the brain, preventing neurons from taking up glucose, which in turn triggers seizures. Eating glucose during this time appears to increase the levels of these free radicals, which increases the risk of seizures.
In other words, the rats were reluctant to eat while battling a bacterial infection because of the damage it could cause. Instead, their bodies wanted to utilize fat reserves for fuel, thus allowing the neurons to do their thing without causing further damage.
The researchers say that our bodies may tell us what to do after an infection. That is, if you’re not hungry and have no appetite, you don’t have to eat, and if you’re hungry and want to eat, eat. If there is no appetite, the need to maintain a good fluid and electrolyte balance is very important for restoring health.