Dr. Courtney Peterson runs one of the world's largest labs studying intermittent fasting in humans at Harvard, and her research shows most people are fasting at the wrong time of day. Here's what the clinical data actually says.
Chris Wharton sits down with Dr. Peterson — Harvard researcher and member of the international scientific committee that formally defined intermittent fasting — to break down what rigorous clinical trial data actually says about fasting, meal timing, blood sugar, and weight loss. Not what the headlines say, but what the science says.
In this episode, you'll discover:
→ Why fasting doesn't work by burning more calories — and what it's actually doing inside your body instead
→ The single most important variable in your fasting protocol — and why most people are getting it completely wrong
→ Why the timing of your eating window matters more than the window itself — and how shifting it can dramatically improve blood sugar and blood pressure
→ What 27 out of 28 clinical diabetes studies showed about intermittent fasting — and why this finding changes everything
→ The weight loss results you can realistically expect — what the data shows for both short-term and long-term outcomes
→ How fasting affects hunger hormones — and why people who do it right stop feeling deprived → The specific populations who benefit most from time-restricted eating — and the ones who should not fast at all
→ How to make fasting sustainable long-term — practical strategies backed by clinical research, not wellness trends
→ Why intermittent fasting may support women’s metabolic health and healthy aging — and why extreme fasting is not one-size-fits-all.
Dr. Peterson has spent years running controlled clinical trials on intermittent fasting. This episode isn't wellness hype, it’s the science.
Courtney Peterson, PhD | Harvard University
Dr. Courtney Peterson is Associate Professor of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with appointments in the Department of Nutrition and the Department of Molecular Metabolism. Her research examines how meal timing, intermittent fasting, and circadian rhythms shape metabolic health, with the goal of developing dietary strategies to prevent and reverse type 2 diabetes and obesity. She led the first human clinical trial of early time-restricted eating, an approach that aligns the daily eating window with the body's internal clock, and her work has helped establish meal timing as a distinct variable in metabolic health, alongside diet composition and total caloric intake. Dr. Peterson holds a PhD in physics from Harvard, where she studied the early universe before turning to nutrition science, along with master's degrees from Tulane in clinical research, Imperial College London in science communication, and the University of Cambridge in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. She previously served on the faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
59 mins