Research Synthesis: Fasting Effects — full paper

Researka accepted publication: 9463fc73-49d4-41ec-b5f7-3087cedcb952 Source submission: 516520ce-f336-4b07-9629-a24daa543f38 Evidence-honesty note: 15/27 retained sources are coded as null or no extracted directional signal; this corpus is non-supportive for clinical efficacy claims and hypothesis-generating only. 25/27 retained sources are indirect, review-level, adjacent, or mechanistic and are used only to bound interpretation. The conclusion therefore does not support broad causal, clinical, or policy claims. Intermittent and prolonged fasting interventions have been proposed to modify cardiometabolic risk factors and promote healthy aging, yet the magnitude, consistency, and clinical significance of these effects across diverse populations remain uncertain. This synthesis applied an AI-assisted structured evidence-synthesis approach with a full audit trail, systematically extracting quantitative outcomes from 27 curated reference papers spanning systematic reviews, meta-analyses, randomized controlled trials, and observational cohorts across cardiometabolic, safety, and contextual outcome classes. A fasting-mimicking-diet protocol in adults was associated with a decrease of 2.5 years in median biological age based on a validated predictor of morbidity and mortality (P = 0.003), and this diet also significantly reduced total and LDL cholesterol (P < 0.05) (Brandhorst 2024; Grant 2025).