Neuroscientist Shows What Fasting Does To Your Brain And Why Big Pharma Won’t Study It

Have you ever thought about the effects of fasting on your body and health? This article provides a TEDx talk by Mark Mattson, who is the current Chief of the Laboratory of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging.

Also, he works as a professor of Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University and is undoubtedly one of the best researchers of cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying multiple neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

During the last few decades, ‘Big Pharma’ has been found to manipulate published research. Due to this, the Harvard Professor of Medicine Arnold Seymour Relman said that the pharmaceutical industry has bought the medical profession.

The same reason made John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, publish an article under the title “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” that became the most widely accessed article in the history of the Public Library of Science (PLoS).

In the same manner, Dr. Richard Horton, Editor in Chief of The Lancet, told that there is a great part of the published scientific literature these days that is simply false. Furthermore, Dr. Marcia Angell, an ex-editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, maintained that the “pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

At the end of the video, Dr. Mattson also comments on this topic:

“Why is it that the normal diet is three meals a day plus snacks? It isn’t that it’s the healthiest eating pattern, now that’s my opinion but I think there is a lot of evidence to support that.

There are a lot of pressures to have that eating pattern, there’s a lot of money involved. The food industry — are they going to make money from skipping breakfast like I did today?

No, they’re going to lose money. If people fast, the food industry loses money. What about the pharmaceutical industries?

What if people do some intermittent fasting, exercise periodically and are very healthy, is the pharmaceutical industry going to make any money on healthy people?”

Mark’s team has published many papers whose subject examines the effects of fasting on reducing the risk of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

“Dietary changes have long been known to have an effect on the brain. Children who suffer from epileptic seizures have fewer of them when placed on caloric restriction or fasts.

It is believed that fasting helps kick-start protective measures that help counteract the overexcited signals that epileptic brains often exhibit. (Some children with epilepsy have also benefited from a specific high-fat, low carbohydrate diet.)

Normal brains, when overfed, can experience another kind of uncontrolled excitation, impairing the brain’s function, Mattson and another researcher reported in January in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience.”

Multiple caloric restriction studies have found that it leads to boosted ability of the body to fight chronic diseases, as well as a prolonged lifespan.

“Calorie restriction (CR) extends lifespan and retards age-related chronic diseases in a variety of species, including rats, mice, fish, flies, worms, and yeast. The mechanism or mechanisms through which this occurs are unclear.”

While fasting, the brain experiences multiple neurochemical changes, which are beneficial for the body, and inflammation is reduced, stress is managed, and the cognitive function and the neurotrophic factors are boosted.

Namely, the brain is challenged by fasting, and its response is actually an adaptation of stress response pathways which help the brain to lower stress and fight diseases.