How Intermittent Fasting Changes Your Brain

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How Intermittent Fasting Changes Your Brain
And how it could help you avoid a stroke, brain disease and prevent neurodegeneration.
Photo by Morgan Housel on Unsplash
There is very little chance you haven’t heard about intermittent fasting. Maybe not quite zero, but I’m pretty sure you would have heard about it in some way, shape or form.
Intermittent fasting is best known for its potential weight-loss benefits and often attracts a cult-like following. While numerous studies have shown the weight-loss benefits that intermittent fasting fanatics espouse to be plausible, I’m not particularly interested in investigating its effects on weight loss.
That is because weight loss is an arbitrary metric to me. Just because you’re losing weight by scoffing down ten doughnuts a day after not eating for 16 hours doesn’t mean you’re living a healthy life.
Instead, I dug into a few studies conducted on the benefits of intermittent fasting on brain health. In particular, whether intermittent fasting can help your brain stay healthy and prevent neurodegenerative diseases down the line. Here’s what I found:
Studies have shown intermittent fasting to promote longevity and counteract the development of neurodegenerative diseases in animal models. In particular, the chances of developing Alzheimer’s or an ischemic stroke are significantly reduced.
To benefit from this, you might not even have to reduce your calorie intake. There is evidence that simply extending the time between meals has the same or greater effect on brain health than reducing calorie intake.
In combination, the studies I looked at show merit in the claim that intermittent fasting is good for your brain. However, our current understanding of intermittent fasting is limited , and we should investigate its long-term effects before we draw any hard conclusions.
How intermittent fasting works
The two leading hypotheses for the anti-ageing effects of intermittent fasting on the brain are the oxidative stress hypothesis and the stress resistance hypothesis .
Oxidative stress hypothesis
Free radicals are molecules produced during metabolism that contain oxygen and which have an uneven number of electrons. The uneven number of electrons makes these molecules highly reactive, allowing them to easily react with other molecules in your body. This can be a good thing but left unchecked, too many free radicals can cause damage to your body.
Antioxidants neutralise the damaging effects of free radicals by donating an electron without becoming unstable, making the free radicals less reactive.
Oxidative stress , then, is just an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants in your body.
Intermittent fasting often goes hand-in-hand with a reduction in the amount of energy you take in. Therefore, according to this theory , when you take in fewer calories, there are fewer free radicals produced in the mitochondria of the cells, and, therefore, less oxidative damage to the cells occurs.
Stress resistance hypothesis
According to this hypothesis, intermittent fasting imposes a mild stress on brain cells, which allows them to resist more severe stress in the future.
Think about it like working out — you strain your muscles, which causes them to grow, allowing them to take more strain in the future.
This hypothesis seems preferred and forms the point of departure for a series of studies , which I examine below.
How intermittent fasting prevents neurodegeneration
A study on rats showed that intermittent fasting boosts the production of a vital stress resistance protein (BDNF) in the brain, which increases the resistance of neurons in the hippocampus (the region of the brain critical for learning and memory) to degeneration. Thus, intermittent fasting switches the brain to a neuroprotective state which helps protect it against injury and diseases.
Collectively , the data suggests that intermittent fasting encourages the survival of neurons, enhances neuroplasticity and increases the number of neurons produced from adult stem cells (a process called neurogenesis).
Not only does intermittent fasting appear to prevent neurodegeneration, but studies on mice and rats have shown it to reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and ischemic stroke.
On top of this, intermittent fasting can improve the outcome following something like a stroke. So, not only is a stroke less likely to happen in the first place, but if it does, the consequence could be less severe. An experimental study put this down to intermittent fasting increasing neurogenesis in the brain following a brain injury like a stroke.
You might not even have to reduce your calorie intake
A study on two groups of mice reduced one group’s calorie intake by 40%, while the other group could eat as much as they wanted but were subjected to every-other-day fasting.
The group subjected to every-other-day fasting showed beneficial changes to their bodies that were as good or better than the mice on the 40% calorie-restricted diet. In addition, the intermittent fasting diet was even more effective than the calorie-restricted diet in protecting neurons in the brain from a neurotoxin administered to the mice.
These findings are of great interest because they suggest we can improve our brain health by reducing the time between meals without reducing calorie intake.
The studies I examined are very promising, and they seem to suggest that we can improve our brain health by practising intermittent fasting. However, we must remember that we have a long way to go before we understand the long-term effects of intermittent fasting on the mind and body.
If we can avoid the trap of treating intermittent fasting as the solution to all our dietary problems, we can seriously leverage its benefits. Intermittent fasting can help us out, but never more than a poor diet can harm us.
This article was originally published on infive Blog .