You may recall that, back at the end of 2019, my wife and I were visiting family in Hawaii. For New Years, there was a celebration at my wife's sister's home, where we had a discussion with one of my wife's Millennial nephews. When he approached us, I noticed that he looked remarkably more fit than the last time I had seen him, although he hadn't looked that bad before. He immediately began talking about intermittent fasting, something I'd never heard of before. He was on the 5-2 plan, meaning he ate normally five days per week, but had less than 600 calories two days per week. He mentioned that, in addition to losing weight, he thought he could think more clearly.
We returned home a few days later. About that time, I received a kind of cryptic email from my sister asking if I'd seen the recent research on fasting. The answer was no, but I figured I'd better investigate. The day after we got home, I went to the gym and got on the treadmill. I immediately began searching YouTube about fasting, encountering a couple of videos referencing an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). I resolved to look for the article on the Internet when I got home.
Well, I was home for about an hour, when the doorbell rang. It was my next door neighbor, a retired physician who had taken a strong interest in my experience. He had in his hands the pages he'd torn from his recent copy of the NEJM; the article on intermittent fasting. "Here. You might be interested in this," he said.
And I was. And it launched me on my own journey with intermittent fasting. Regular readers of the blog know that we have posted on it a number of times, and I have been fasting about 20 or so hours a day since then. I wrote about it in the second edition of Beating the Dementia Monster.
When I began fasting, the first thing I noticed -- after about two weeks -- was that the chronic arthritis pain in my neck just stopped. I had deeper pain in my lower back which persisted. But that, too, disappeared after about six months. This was not expected, but it reflected the influence of fasting on inflammation.
Has five years of fasting helped my memory and cognition? I'm applying it alongside all elements of the Dementia Toolkit, and I have no real way of knowing which elements have more or less power than the others. Nevertheless, I am really, really happy with the state of my memory and cognition at this time. (I just wished my balance issues would respond as positively.) I'm sure it's doing something, and I don't want to rock the boat by changing anything.
I recently finished a book by the man who seems to be one of the most highly regarded researchers on the topic of intermittent fasting, Dr. Mark P. Mattson. The book is The Intermittent Fasting Revolution, and I got it on Amazon. When I began reading it, I learned that he was actually the author of the NEJM article that started me going back in January, 2020. For some, the book may be a little hard to follow, since it goes fairly deeply into the science. But I had a few takeaways worth sharing.
First, it notes that the Western habit of eating three meals per day (topped off with a carbohydrate-rich late-night snack) is not a natural eating regime. Our ancestors may have feasted on a fresh kill, but likely went hungry until the next hunt. In order to out-smart their game, their brains would have been at peak cognitive performance when they set out. So the brain functions best when it's in the fasted state.
When fasting, the body exhausts its supply of glucose from carbohydrate metabolism. It undergoes "metabolic switching" to rely on keto bodies instead as an energy source in the brain. The keto diet does something similar, although I'm not an advocate for it.
Mattson describes a variety of metabolic processes that occur in the fasted state that improve brain health. One of these is the production of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) that is also produced during sustained aerobic exercise. BDNF from aerobic exercise is likely the single biggest reason that I am not in memory care right now.
He says that exercise in the fasted state gives brain diseases a double-whammy. Exercise and fasting are powerful, but together, the level of power seems to be greater than the sum of the parts.
For himself, Mattson applies a 6 to 8 hour daily eating window (compared to my 4 or 5 hours). He started out with a 5-2 plan, but found (as I did) that it was simply easier to adjust to a daily routine.
In addition to getting the body into ketosis through fasting, he emphasized the importance of inducing autophagy. This is a complex topic, but it's about the removal of dead cell debris from the brain. The ability to remove debris from the brain is important to its resistance to Alzheimer's disease.
While we won't go into detail here, he also explained my experience where intermittent fasting promotes the same functions in the circulatory system as the drug sildenafil.
Why do I apply an eating window of 4-5 hours when Mattson "only" applies 6-8 hours? I have seen apparently credible experts on YouTube saying that this is what's required to achieve the level of ketosis and autophagy necessary to address Alzheimer's disease. Are they right? Do they know what they're talking about? Mattson doesn't discuss a 4-5 hour window. When interviewed on YouTube, he says he's not sure how long it takes to get fully into autophagy. But he doesn't discuss how to approach Alzheimer's disease with intermittent fasting once (as in my case) the disease has begun to truly assert itself. He discusses Alzheimer's disease a lot throughout the book, but mostly from the standpoint of prevention.
He does warn that fasting should not be done with children, people with anorexia, or the frail elderly. (Perhaps I can be described as elderly, but I don't seem to be frail...)
For me, the book was a great read, although he assumed a fair amount of sophistication in the reader. And it increased my confidence in my fasting routine.
No comments:
Post a Comment