Neuroscience Shows How Fasting Affects Your Brain & Why Pharma Won’t Study It

Put Down the Fork and Knife: Intermittent Fasting Really Can Improve Your Cognitive Function

Have you ever wondered why the average human being’s daily food intake is three meals each day with a few snacks mixed in here and there? The truth is this amount of food is not necessary to maintain a healthy body and mind. Food companies and pharmaceutical industries push for excessive food consumption in order to make an ever-growing profit. The bottom line is that healthy people who exercise and engage in intermittent fasting are not profitable for corporate America.

The Benefits of Fasting

Mark Mattson is a professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and the Chief of the Laboratory of Neuroscience with the National Institute on Aging. He has published a number of papers that explain how fasting two times per week can reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. We’ve known for quite some time that alterations to one’s diet impacts his brain functionality. Neuroscientists have found that overfed brains are more likely to become impaired. Mattson reports that fasting causes an array of neurochemical alterations in the brain. Abstaining from food boosts cognitive function, decreases inflammation and helps one cope with stress.

In a nutshell, fasting is the equivalent of issuing a challenge to one’s brain. The brain responds by modifying stress pathways and consequently reducing the risk for various diseases. A person who fasts empowers his brain to boost its protein production and catalyze the growth of neurons and bonds between neurons. Memory ability and learning aptitude increase in response to fasting as it stimulates the creation of ketones and mitochondria in neurons/nerve cells. Fasting even bolsters the fortitude of synapses. In some instances, fasting helps create new nerve cells from the hippocampus’s stem cells.

Fasting for DNA Repair

Mattson has also found that those who practice intermittent fasting are more likely to enjoy enhanced nerve cells that repair DNA. Fasting can protect the immune system as refraining from food consumption helps stem cells self-renew from a dormant state. Fasting essentially destroys old, compromised immune cells and catalyzes stem cells to form brand new, perfectly healthy cells. In 2007, a scientific review of studies centered on fasting was printed in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The review determined that fasting is an effective means of reducing cancer as well as cardiovascular disease. The article also provided evidence that fasting has the potential to treat diabetes. It is clear that fasting boosts the brain’s health and functionality as well as the integrity of the cells throughout the body.

Here’s a short 3 minute video of Dr. Joseph Mercola explaining the benefits of intermittent fasting:

Big Pharma Isn’t Interested in the Merits of Fasting. Are You?

You’ll likely never read about any studies performed by the pharmaceutical industries or any food companies regarding the merits of intermittent fasting. Their agenda is clear: Encourage human beings to overeat and sell them pharmaceuticals to alleviate the negative consequences of such a gluttonous diet. However, you do not have to eat three square meals each and every day. You have the power to read about the benefits of fasting and incorporate such knowledge into your everyday life.

Do your brain and your body an enormous favor by testing out intermittent fasting. You just might find that skipping a meal or two here and there really does improve your cognitive function.

Read more here: http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/12/11/neuroscientist-shows-what-fasting-does-to-your-brain-why-big-pharma-wont-study-it/

We Want to Hear From You

What do you think about the reported merits of intermittent fasting? Are you willing to give it a chance? Have you already? Readers are encouraged to leave their thoughts and comments below to help everyone better understand the effects of fasting on the human mind and body.