How Fasting Can Save Your Brain (and Why Big Pharma Won't Study It)

What if medical science were hiding a method that could make Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease largely a thing of the past? That not only did not require buying expensive medications, but also reduced your normal, budgeted household expenses? You could never expect Big Pharma or Big Food to support such a plan that saves you money and costs them sales.

However, there is a method for enhancing brain health that almost certainly mitigates Alzheimer's and Parkinson's that doesn't involve drugs and that even saves you money. It's intermittent fasting.

What Is Intermittent Fasting?

Most serious athletes know about intermittent fasting, taking a break from food for one or maybe two days a week. Once or twice a week, followers of intermittent fasting don't eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and they don't eat snacks, either. That's to give their muscles a chance to grow.

How can intermittent fasting help muscles grow? It turns out that when you aren't consuming protein, specifically when you aren't consuming branched-chain amino acids such as leucine (which is abundant in dairy protein), your brain releases growth hormone to make sure that your muscles don't lose protein. That's right. When you avoid eating for at least 17 hours, up to about 24 hours, your muscles not only don't shrink, they grow.

That doesn't mean that fasting for 24 hours is good so fasting for 48 hours is better. There is a point, after about two days, that failure to consume protein foods can result in the body's breaking down muscle tissue so it can harvest amino acids to make enzymes and hormones. Short-term fasting builds you up. Long-term fasting breaks you down. But it isn't just muscles that respond to fasting.

Your Brain Benefits from a Break from Food, Too

One of the more recent discoveries about fasting is that it's also good for your brain. The brain is the most energy-intensive organ in the human body. Even though your brain comprises just about 2 percent of your body mass, it uses 20 percent of your body's energy supplies.

Most of the time the brain operates on glucose. You have probably noticed that when you are hungry (if you go without eating often enough that you actually get hungry, not everybody does), your thinking gets fuzzy and your emotions tend to swing high and low. That's because your brain isn't getting enough glucose.

READ How Intermittent Fasting Can Fight Cancer

However, if you don't reach for a candy bar or a snack, your body finds another way to feed your brain its fuel. The liver stores glucose in the form of glycogen. Chemically, glycogen is a molecule of glucose combined with four molecules of water. When you don't eat carbohydrate foods and you don't eat excess protein foods (your liver can turn the amino acids in protein into glucose), it starts sending your brain ketone bodies to use as fuel.

The liver makes ketones from fat. One of the byproducts of the process of making ketones is acetone, which is the same chemical used in nail polish remover. The presence of acetone is the reason your breath is bad when you are dieting. The principle product of this process is beta-hydroxybutyrate, also known as BHB, which is also an excellent energy source for the brain.

How to Keep Your Brain Happy on Ketones

The previously mentioned ketone BHB is an excellent alternative fuel for the brain because it replaces glucose, and stops free radical reactions that require glucose and destroy brain tissue. In some conditions, stopping the production of free radicals has a profound influence on health. For instance, in ancient times people thought seizures were caused by demons. If you kept the epileptic in a room and gave them relatively little food, the demons would go away. Nowadays we know that what's really going on is that calorie reduction depletes the liver's store of glycogen, so it stops releasing glucose, and starts releasing ketones. The ketones in turn provide the brain with an alternative form of energy that attenuates seizures.

Similarly, experiments with lab rats but also with people have found that eating less generally slows down the formation of tangled proteins known as plaques that are characteristic of Alzheimer's disease, and preserves the dopamine production capacity of neurons in the substantia nigra of the brain critical in Parkinson's disease. Giving your brain a break from food helps it stay healthier longer. There are people who are more susceptible to brain damage from glucose and there are people whose brains are less susceptible to the free radicals of oxygen released by burning glucose, but generally every brain stays more functional for more years when people eat less.

The problem is, how can you eat less? As most of us have found out, dieting just doesn't work. 

Fortunately, you don't necessarily have to lose weight to protect your brain. You don't necessarily have to eat less food, if you occasionally give your brain a break from food. Here are some ways to do it.

• The 5-2 diet. Trainers often persuade athletes to go without food for two 24-hour days a week to promote muscle gain and fat loss. For athletes, that means no food at all for an entire day, usually from 2 p.m. one day to 2 p.m. the next. In a modification of this diet, people limited calorie consumption for brain health consume no more than 500 calories during each of two non-consecutive 24-hour periods each week, and eat healthy meals the other five days a week. The objective is not to lose weight, although weight loss may occur. The objective is to give the brain a chance to recover from constant exposure to free radicals of oxygen that form when blood glucose levels are constantly high.

READ Everything You Need To Know About Intermittent Fasting

• The eight-hour diet. Another way to give your brain a break is to abstain from food just long enough for your liver to start generating ketones instead of releasing glucose. Usually this takes about 15 to 17 hours. If you just don't eat for about 2/3 of a day, your liver's supply of "stored sugar" is depleted and your body starts running on ketones. Just a brief period of ketolysis each day is beneficial. What you would do is to eat between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. each day, and not eat anything, at all, the other 16 hours a day. This method isn't helpful for weight loss, but it seems to be, according to Dr. Mattson at the National Institute on Aging, protective of the aging brain.
• Reducing food consumption every day. It can also help just to eat less at every meal. If you are capable of restraining you appetite each and every day, that's a great approach. But if you find yourself sneaking snacks and loading up at some meals when you have reduced at others, try one of the other methods mentioned above.