Abd And Immune-boosting vitamins your paper in the New England Journal, you mentioned that there have been some studies Alternate-day fasting and mental clarity Alternnate-day cognitive Alternate-ady of people who are doing intermittent fasting and that their performance on some memory tests like verbal memory actually improved during the intermittent fast. So there's been now dozens of studies in overweight or obese humans. Klotho is very important in improving memory.

Alternate-day fasting and mental clarity -

Could you speak to some of those mechanisms of how intermittent fasting could actually help the brain? Mattson: Yes, and this is based on animal studies and animal models of A.

and Parkinson's so there's multiple mechanisms. One is that intermittent fasting can enhance neurotrophic factor signaling particularly brain derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, which is known to be important for cognition and - actually it's important also because it has kind of an antidepressant effect.

The most commonly used antidepressant drugs are mediated by BDNF so that's one mechanism. BDNF is known to enhance the resistance of neurons to stress and to promote the formation and maintenance of synapses.

Okay, so then another mechanism is that the intermittent fasting what it does - during the fasting period nerve cells in the brain, they reduce their overall uptake of proteins and production of new proteins.

And then at the same time they're increasing a process called autophagy, which is a mechanism whereby the nerve cells recycle molecules in the cells or even mitochondria, the energy producing compartment of the cells. Then during the feeding period, the cell goes into a growth mode.

We think from the animal studies that that's when actually new synapses are formed and the nerve cells grow and enhance connections so forth. A third mechanism is to enhance DNA repair. There's some evidence that - well there's a lot of evidence - during aging, there's increased accumulation of damaged DNA in our genome.

This is why cancer risk increases during aging, at least part of the reason why that there's increased mutations in cells that aren't repaired and therefore there's increased chances of a cell becoming cancerous.

We found intermittent fasting and exercise enhanced DNA repair in the brain as well. Chin: So it seems that intermittent fasting not only helps the whole body by improving insulin sensitivity, helping with weight loss, reducing blood pressure and risk for diabetes, but then there are some very specific effects that can happen within the brain.

Mattson: One thing we found is really interesting. Very recently, we had a paper in a journal called Nature Communications where we found that intermittent fasting - well this is very important for the people listening - it takes people several weeks to a month to adapt to an intermittent fasting eating pattern so that they are no longer hungry and irritable during the time period with their previous eating pattern that they would have been eating.

For example, if someone wants to adopt an intermittent fasting eating pattern where they skip breakfast and eat all their food between noon and six or seven PM each day so that they're fasting for hours a day, then when they first start that skipping breakfast they're going to be very hungry in the morning and irritable, maybe not even - having maybe having trouble concentrating.

But by two weeks to a month, those initial side effects if you will, or adaptations, will disappear. We found by looking at the brains of mice that, with the same time course, there's an enhancement of activity of an inhibitory neurotransmitter called GABA, which has an anti-anxiety effect.

And that's because we think there's impairment in GABA, the inhibitory neurotransmitter, signaling or even death of the neurons - they use GABAs and neurotransmitters.

So intermittent fasting will constrain excitability within normal limits and protect neurons against what we call excitotoxicity, which gets a little more complicated. But in the brain and Alzheimer's, of course, a lot of focus is on the Amyloid-Beta peptide, which forms the plaques and intracellular TAU tangles.

My own opinion is that A-Beta and certainly TAU are downstream. That is, occur after other important changes that contribute to the increased accumulation of the amyloid. But once the amyloid starts to accumulate then it makes neurons even more vulnerable to hyperexcitability and what we call excitotoxicity.

In fact one of the one of the drugs that's used to treat Alzheimer's patients is a drug that blocks a certain type of excitatory glutamate receptor. That's a drug called memantine. Chin: And you know, you mentioned that this first month of an intermittent fast is difficult for people.

I notice that you put that in your paper as well as far as practical considerations. But you also speak to the research referencing brain evolution and how this practice of intermittent fasting is meant to optimize our brain function.

However the modern lifestyle kind of gets in the way of that, and so what is it about our modern lifestyles that make it difficult to do intermittent fasting or actually negatively impact our brain?

Mattson: What makes it hard to do is that most of us, including me, we were raised in family where the normal eating pattern was three meals a day and oftentimes ice cream after dinner. As everyone knows what you learn when you're a kid you tend to stick with, whether it's you know anything, religion, or just habits, you know.

Exercise, in general kids who are brought up in families where the parents exercise, they're more likely to exercise. So yeah this is a long-standing eating pattern that arose way back probably nine, ten thousand years ago when the agricultural revolution took hold and people settled down and farmed domesticated plants and animals and were able to store food so that they could wake up in the morning and they'd have food to eat.

On the other hand, from an evolutionary perspective, breakfast is the least likely meal. That is to say, animals in the wild don't wake up and breakfast is waiting for them. They have to work for it. Chin: You also mentioned, too, that one of the potential barriers to intermittent fasting is that most healthcare providers are not really trained to provide specific interventions, intermittent fasting interventions.

You do mention some of the options and you mentioned them here today in the podcast of this, having two days a week where you restrict how many calories. But there are other options, too, where you do not eat for 16 to 18 hours. Is there any evidence that one is better than the other?

Mattson: No. In humans, there's been no studies yet within the same study that directly compared, you know in other words, have three arms to the study control five-two intermittent fasting or daily time-restricted eating approach and, you know, so same group of people and look at same endpoints.

But we do know that definitely sedentary overindulgent lifestyles are not good for the brain just like they're not good for other organ systems. It makes sense that the converse is true; that is exercise and moderation and energy intake and intermittent fasting compared to normal eating pattern will be beneficial.

We don't - it'll be interesting to do studies in normal healthy subjects, normal weight, say people who exercise to see if there's any additional benefits of intermittent fasting for endpoints of that interest, whether it's cognition or endurance.

There's a lot of interest in the exercise community in intermittent fasting now. Because it's emerging that at least with endurance events, marathon certainly, Tour de France type things, that if you start the event in a fasted state where you've already switched to using the fats coming from your fat cells then you're able to maintain performance throughout the event.

Whereas if you're taking essentially glucose, carbohydrates, you know if you, before the event and then different times during the event, it causes these well - first of all the ketones don't go up but then if you do deplete the glucose then you go into a period of poor performance until the metabolic switch takes hold.

So I've had some interest in that. And we did studies in animals running on treadmills daily for two months with them on either intermittent fasting or ad libitum feeding eating patterns. At the end of the two months, the animals that were on the intermittent fasting eating pattern had better endurance when we tested their maximum, how far and how long can they run on the treadmill.

Chin: That's a pretty important finding. Fasting, it turns out, is like exercise for your brain. First we have to talk about how stress can be both bad and good. So under good stress, your brain increases the production of certain molecules, such as glucocorticoids, catecholamines, and glucose levels, which prepare your tissues for responsiveness to challenges or danger.

One of the effects of this stress response is sharpened senses and heightened awareness. It makes sense that humans would have adapted this physiological function as a means of survival. From an evolutionary perspective, intermittent running and food deprivation involuntary fasting have been the most common energetic challenges our brains and bodies experience.

In addition to mental clarity, fasting appears to boost the mood. Fasting mice have been shown to produce as much as five times the amount of endogenous opiates in just 24 to 48 hours of fasting.

We do so by summarizing the effects of IF which through metabolic, cellular, and circadian mechanisms lead to anatomical and functional changes in the brain.

Our review shows that there is no clear evidence of a positive short-term effect of IF on cognition in healthy subjects. Clinical studies show benefits of IF for epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease, and multiple sclerosis on disease symptoms and progress.

Findings from animal studies show mechanisms by which Parkinson's disease, ischemic stroke, autism spectrum disorder, and mood and anxiety disorders could benefit from IF.

Patients are fastlng breakfast for Alternate-day fasting and mental clarity clarity and longer lives. Although intermittent fasting is ahd popularity among those mejtal for clrity loss, some evidence suggests that abstaining from food for certain periods of Alternat-eday could also have profound effects Pomegranate in Cooking brain health. Jental has long been reported to help with mental acuity. According to Philip Horner, Ph. Scientists believe that new neural pathways and gene cells important for DNA repair are upregulated—their response to stimulus is increased—somewhere between 12 and 18 hours in a fasted state. Kristen Kizer, RD, LD, a registered clinical dietitian at Houston Methodist Hospital, says that most studies of intermittent fasting have focused on a schedule, meaning subjects eat normally for five days a week, but restrict intake to calories for two days. Fasting may provide several Atlernate-day benefits, including weight loss, blood sugar emntal, and protection against medical mentao like cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. Alternate-day fasting and mental clarity its Altsrnate-day surge in popularity, fasting is a practice that Alternate-day fasting and mental clarity back Alternnate-day and plays Sports drinks for athletes central role in many cultures and religions. Defined as abstinence from all or some foods or drinks for a set period, there are many different ways of fasting. Intermittent fasting, on the other hand, involves cycling between periods of eating and fasting, ranging from a few hours to a few days at a time. Several studies have found that fasting may improve blood sugar control, which may be helpful for those at risk of developing diabetes.

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Effects of Fasting \u0026 Time Restricted Eating on Fat Loss \u0026 Health - Huberman Lab Podcast #41