BBC Two, 21:00, Aug 6 – it may sound like a crazy, horrific lose-weight-quick-exclamation-mark fad, but tonight we’ll hear from the mouth of Michael Mosley why Alternate Day Fasting (ADF) may be good for us.

Michael Mosley presents Horizon: Eat, Fast and Live Longer on BBC Two at 21:00 BST on Monday 6 August

ADF involves eating what you want one day – high-fat, low-fat, whatever – and restricting your calorie input to fewer than 600 the next. It reminds me of the fashionable diets that some of my peers frantically insist really do work. True, some people fast for days or weeks or months at time through faith – but these are usually special occasions. Continuous, on/off, half-your-life fasting sounds like body-abuse to me. So with a sceptical mind I read this BBC article to learn the proposed mechanisms of this. The idea revolves around growth hormone IGF-1. The…