20 POWERFUL Health and Performance Advantages of Intermittent Fasting (IF) for Your Brain: Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now, you’ve heard of intermittent fasting (IF). It’s the act of alternating between eating and not eating within certain intervals each day. It’s basically meal timing or what’s referred to as time-restricted eating (TRE).
Most of you reading this have some familiarity with IF. You may have even tried it yourself. A few of you have made it a daily practice.
Of course, some people have never tried it (at least not deliberately) and have no intention of ever doing so. For these folks, just the idea of going more than four or five hours without food sounds horrific.
The funny thing is, unless you’re one of these muscleheads who are obsessed with getting your mandatory serving of brotein by waking yourself up in the middle of the night to have your 10th meal of the day, you already are doing intermittent fasting on some level.
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BEYOND FAT-LOSS BENEFITS
For the fear-mongering anti-fasting crowd, IF is not some kind of extreme diet reserved for those with mental disorders or religious fanaticism. It’s not even a diet. And it’s certainly not just about losing weight. In fact, I wouldn’t regard IF as the ideal way for most people to burn fat.
Whether you know it or not, fasting is a necessary and vital part of a healthy lifestyle. It has also been demonstrated to be a powerful anti-aging weapon in every animal model tested thus far (still awaiting results for humans, who live too long to know just yet).
Again, intermittent fasting is nothing more than meal timing. And the reason meal timing is important has to do with how our bodies respond and adapt to the timing of our meals.
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A FOCUSED INVESTIGATION INTO FASTING AND THE BRAIN
There are plenty of books and articles that explain the general health benefits of fasting, along with all the countless ways you can practice IF, such as 16/8, 20/4, and one meal a day (OMAD), just to name a few.
And IF is just one kind of fasting. There are also juice fasting, dry fasting, alternate-day fasting (ADF), and long-term therapeutic fasting (TF), among others.
For those looking to get a crash course in IF, this information is easy to come by. You can quickly get the basics by perusing through some of the health and diet magazines the next time you buy some groceries at the check-out line. Or a simple Google search can get the job done within minutes.
But that’s not what this discussion is about. This particular series of IF articles is very specific, very focused. It dives deep into all the many ways intermittent fasting benefits one single organ: the brain.
Not to worry. I’ve got no intention of producing long-winded, dry content you would read from a peer-reviewed scientific journal article, so I’ll still keep things relatable, down to earth, and to the point. But the data will still be based on the latest research.
So why even go this deep about how fasting impacts one thing? Why be so narrowly focused? Because no one else is doing this. Not on this level.
Most typical articles on fasting and the brain are very brief and merely skim the surface. That may be fine for those who only want the headlines and Cliff Notes from mainstream news sources and women’s diet magazines; but personally, such superficial information feels like a tease to me.
Not to mention the fact that they are often short on facts. I want more. And maybe you do too.
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FASTING & MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT (MCI)
There are plenty of reasons to explore this particular topic in greater depth. You or someone you know may be getting up there in age, have been experiencing some mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and are curious about what can be done about it. Or maybe you want to take action now as a means to prevent Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and other neurological issues.
Well, in just one of the countless brain studies on intermittent fasting, individuals aged 60 and above with MCI were examined after they had practiced IF. These volunteers were divided into three groups: one followed intermittent fasting twice a week from sunrise to sunset due to religious practices, another group did so less frequently, and the third group did not fast at all.
After a 3-year follow-up, the results were unignorable. The group that regularly practiced intermittent fasting had almost 25% of its participants with no cognitive impairment, compared to 14% in the occasional fasting group, and less than 4% in the non-fasting group. Additionally, those who regularly fasted performed significantly better in cognitive tasks.
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FASTING & BRAIN DAMAGE
You or someone you know may have experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and are wondering what strategies can be taken to regenerate damaged portions of the brain. It turns out that fasting provides tremendous value for those who have suffered a TBI.
A notable 2020 research published in the journal Cell Stem Cell titled “Aging and Rejuvenation of Neural Stem Cells and Their Niches” revealed exactly that. The study indicates that IF promotes the proliferation and differentiation of neural stem cells (NSCs), essential for brain repair and regeneration. Additionally, IF can support the maintenance and survival of newborn neurons, further contributing to enhanced neuroplasticity and overall brain health.
As early as 2008, researchers discovered that fasting provides regenerative effects to those who have experienced traumatic brain injury. According to Davis et al. (2008), “Fasting for 24 hr confers neuroprotection, maintains cognitive function, and improves mitochondrial function after moderate (1.5 mm) TBI.”
Fasting has also been shown to reverse damage caused by non-traumatic brain injury (NTBI) as well. One example of an NTBI is ischemic stroke. Not only does IF reduce blood pressure (a contributing cause of stroke), but multiple studies, such as that published by Arumugam et al. (2010), have shown that intermittent fasting can reduce brain damage and improve neurological outcomes after a stroke.
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FASTING & NEUROENHANCEMENT
You could be a dedicated neurohacker (like me) who is always on the lookout for new ways to enhance your brain’s health and performance. Of course, any business professional looking to up his or her mental game can benefit from this information as well.
Ever see the movie Limitless? For those few of you who haven’t, it’s about an average Joe who takes some very unique nootropic pills that unlock his brain potential so that he could function at super-genius capacity. Intermittent fasting may not get you to that level, but it can optimize how your brain operates.
Fasting sparks neurogenesis (the birth of neurons), previously thought impossible beyond the beginning of adulthood. It generates synaptic plasticity (the strengthening of neuroconnections), useful for accelerated learning and brain repair. IF also trains your brain to shift between two fuel sources (glucose and ketones) for optimum cognitive performance (Seidler & Barrow, 2022).
These are just a small number of beneficial neural shifts that occur when one embraces IF. You can pop all the pills, eat all the healthiest foods, get plenty of sleep, and meditate all day (all incredibly powerful practices in their own right), but if you aren’t implementing intermittent fasting, you’ll be hard-pressed to reach your highest brain-performance potential.
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CLOSING THOUGHTS
Whatever your motivation, I thought it was high-time we finally have a series of discussions that give this topic the well-earned attention it deserves. These upcoming articles will be coming out in rapid-fire succession, so you don’t have to wait entire weeks to read each one. Having said that, consider this article the introduction to this IF-brain series.
The next article marks the first of 20 POWERFUL health and performance advantages of intermittent fasting for your brain. I hope you enjoy the information.
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REFERENCES:
Arumugam, T. V., Phillips, T. M., Cheng, A., Morrell, C. H., Mattson, M. P., & Wan, R. (2010). Age and energy intake interact to modify cell stress pathways and stroke outcome. Annals of Neurology, 67(1), 41-52.
Davis, L. M., Pauly, J. R., Readnower, R. D., Rho, J. M., & Sullivan, P. G. (2008). Fasting is neuroprotective following traumatic brain injury. Journal of Neuroscience Research, 86(8):1812-22. doi:10.1002/jnr.21628
Navarro Negredo, P., Yeo, R. W., & Brunet, A. (2020). Aging and Rejuvenation of Neural Stem Cells and Their Niches.?Cell stem cell,?27(2), 202–223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2020.07.002
Seidler,?K., & Barrow, M. (2022). Intermittent fasting and cognitive performance – Targeting BDNF as potential strategy to optimise brain health. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 65, 100971. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yfrne.2021.100971