I suspect that one thing fasting does is frees up those cells to do other stuff.
Anecdotally, I've seen people comment on HN and Reddit that fasting helped them with some chronic health issue or other. Here's an HN comment that says he was on antibiotics constantly until he tried fasting:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20279338
If you find any such studies, please share. Thanks.
I suspect that one thing fasting does is frees up those cells to do other stuff.