Library / English Dictionary

FASTING

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (noun) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Abstaining from food

Synonyms:

fast; fasting

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Hypernyms ("fasting" is a kind of...):

abstinence (act or practice of refraining from indulging an appetite)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "fasting"):

diet; dieting (the act of restricting your food intake (or your intake of particular foods))

hunger strike (a voluntary fast undertaken as a means of protest)

Ramadan ((Islam) a fast (held from sunrise to sunset) that is carried out during the Islamic month of Ramadan)

Derivation:

fast (abstain from eating)

fast (abstain from certain foods, as for religious or medical reasons)

 II. (verb) 

Sense 1

-ing form of the verb fast

Credits

 Context examples: 

Longo and his team also examined pancreatic cell cultures from human donors and found that, in cells from type 1 diabetes patients, fasting also increased expression of the Ngn3 protein and accelerated insulin production.

(Fasting-Mimicking Diet May Reverse Diabetes, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

Signs and symptoms may appear early or later in life and may be triggered by periods of fasting or illnesses.

(Mitochondrial Trifunctional Protein Deficiency, NCI Thesaurus)

This, the student was to swallow upon a fasting stomach, and for three days following, eat nothing but bread and water.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Normal fasting plasma glucose intervals (in the morning after an overnight fast) in children are 3.3 - 5.6 mmol/L (60-100 mg/dL); adult range - 4.1- 5.9 mmol/L (74-106 mg/dL).

(Plasma Glucose Measurement, NCI Thesaurus)

Typically a baseline (fasting plasma or serum glucose) is drawn prior to the administration of the glucose bolus.

(Glucose Tolerance Test, NCI Thesaurus)

MCPG is known to cause hypoglycaemic encephalopathy, a metabolic illness that affects the brain when body sugar levels are low due to fasting or undernourishment.

(Lychee deaths linked to pesticides, not the fruit, SciDev.Net)

An assessment of beta-cell function and insulin resistance based on fasting blood glucose and insulin concentrations.

(Homeostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance, NCI Thesaurus)

Halofenate also decreases fasting plasma glucose in type 2 diabetic patients, but not normoglycemic subjects.

(Halofenate, NCI Thesaurus)

Increasing sleep duration or bedtime variability was strongly associated with multiple metabolic and simultaneous problems such as lower HDL cholesterol and higher waist circumference, blood pressure, total triglycerides, and fasting glucose.

(Study links irregular sleep patterns to metabolic disorders, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

Signs and symptoms may be exacerbated during fasting and include hypoketotic hypoglycemia, increased levels of carnitine in the blood, hepatomegaly, seizures, and coma.

(Carnitine Palmitoyltransferase I Deficiency, NCI Thesaurus)