DEMENTIA AND INTERMITTENT FASTING
In an earlier article, we explored intermittent fasting, with a few brief paragraphs on the benefits it has to offer. Let's take a deeper look at one of these benefits involving your brain function as you age, so you understand why you should be doing intermittent fasting.
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WHAT IS
INTERMITTENT FASTING?
Intermittent fasting refers to fasting for regular periods in the week or every day. There's a few different ways to do it - you can have very low caloric days on 2 days in the week (this is called the 5/2 fasting plan), or you can fast daily for set durations of time (the more typical 'intermittent fasting' regime, with the fasting periods ranging from 12 to 20 hours).
Give our earlier article on INTERMITTENT FASTING a read to learn a bit more.
DEMENTIA
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Intermittent fasting has been shown to improve your cognitive function (essentially meaning your brain function), and reduce your risk of developing dementia. It is also postulated that it actually helps improve your cognitive function - definitely beneficial for all of us!
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Let's take a look at a few scientific papers on the subject of cognitive function (how well your brain works) and intermittent fasting.
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In this review article from Korea, the authors focus on several pathways by which intermittent fasting helps reduce the risk of developing dementia.
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They focus on a particular type of dementia - vascular dementia, and this makes the link a lot easier to establish for them because vascular dementia is a type of dementia that occurs because of cardiovascular risk factors causing strokes and cognitive impairment.
It is well known that intermittent fasting helps you control your cardiovascular risk factors like Diabetes, Hyperlipidemia (high cholesterol) and Hypertension (high blood pressure), thereby reducing your risk of stroke, and therefore vascular dementia.
However, the authors do explore several other interesting mechanisms by which intermittent fasting helps reduce your risk of developing dementia.
They discuss how intermittent fasting controls inflamamtory pathways, reducing oxidative stress on the neurons (nerve cells) in your brain, and therefore improves cognitive function.
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Something very interesting that they discussed also is that intermittent fasting may actually improve synaptic plasticity in neurons, thereby actually helping IMPROVE dementia.
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They also postulated that intermittent fasting also helps enhance neurogenesis (the growth of new nerve cells), thereby helping your brain tissue recover from oxidative stress.
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In this next scientific article, the authors discuss some mechanisms by which brain ageing (and cognitive decline) occurs and how a healthy metabolic state helps counter some of these effects of brain ageing.
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They postulated that brain ageing occurs via several different mechanisms - such as dysfunction of the cell components (like mitochondria - the energy-generating 'power plant' of the cell), compromise of DNA repair mechanisms, and accumulation of damaged molecules (damaged by oxidative stress on the brain cells).
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The main gist of a lot of the points the authors make in their article is that a chronically bad metabolic state is bad for your brain health, while a healthy metabolic state helps reduce these effects of brain ageing.
In their article, they make their opinion very clear by stating: 'Thus, both
correlational data from human studies and controlled trials in animals demonstrate that a chronic positive energy balance adversely affects brain structure and function. Data suggest that metabolic morbidity accelerates most, if not all, of the
hallmarks of brain aging.'
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For our final scientific article, we'll look at an animal model study involving rats. This study is aimed at helping understand Alzheimer's Dementia in post-menopausal women.
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Rats were given a diet resembling a time-restricted form of intermittent fasting, ans their cognitive function assessed by trying to determine their short- and long-term memory function by having them go through a maze and face a passive avoidance device (using an electric foot shock to make the rat move from a light to dark chamber - poor rats!).
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The authors found that intermittent fasting helped improve cognitive function in terms of the short- and long-term memory functions they tried to assess in their study.
WRAP IT UP!
Intermittent fasting has a lot of benefits to offer, and it's really exciting to elarn that it may actually help keep us mentally sharp as we age. Definitely another good reason to seriously consider making intermittent fasting a way of life!