Free The 8-Hour Diet by David Zinczenko

your cognitive powers, not recognizing your own spouse, your children, or your fellow aging ex-band members from the once-popular group Kiss.
    Dr. Mattson shares that fear (except for the leather pants part). In fact, it’s why he got into anti-aging research in the first place. As a neuroscientist, he’s spent his entire career tracking the brain insults that lead to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which impair memory and movement in older people.
    “One study had shown that that [intermittent fasting] will increase the life span of animals by about 30 percent,” he says. The lightbulb lit up: Fasting obviously had a salutary effect on the body, but what good was a healthy body without a healthy mind? Perhaps our brains are adapted the same way our bodies are—to last longer when we take in fewer calories.
    So the NIA tested a group of laboratory mice, allowing half to eat all they wanted whenever they wanted, while the other half was fed only every other day. After 3 months, the researchers administered a neurotoxin to their mousey brains. The results were definitive: The fasting mice fended off the toxins and maintained brain function; the big feeders lost their minds.
    What does this mean to you, exactly?
    Well, in place of the neurotoxins Dr. Mattson administered to these mice, swap in the toxic amyloids now known to cause Alzheimer’s. When you fast, you increase production of proteins called
neurotropic factors
that are critical to learning and memory. They fend off brain attackers and clear the wreckage of dying cell structures, and they encourage the formation of new neurons and synapses.
    To explain just how your brain grows stronger on the 8-Hour Diet, Dr. Mattson likens it to what happens to muscles when you work them regularly.
    “Vigorous exercise is a stress on your muscle cells,” he points out. “There’s increased energy demand and increased free radicals, but it turns out to be good for your muscle cells as long as you’re allowed some recovery. That mild stress stimulates muscle cells to increase production of proteins that help the cells resist stress: antioxidant enzymes, protein chaperones, growth factors, increased mitochondrial production. The number of mitochondria increase. So there’s an increased ability to provide energy to the muscles.”
    Then he winds up to deliver the kicker: “Many of the same exact changes that are happening in the muscle cells—increased antioxidant enzymes, increased protein chaperones, increased growth factors, increased number of mitochondria—are occurring in nerve cells with fasting.”
    In other words, skipping meals is like exercise for your brain.
The Full-Body Fasting Effect
    Dr. Mattson is talking about mental vigor here, but a study published in
Medical Hypotheses
, in 2006, extends the blanket endorsement of fasting to a whole range of debilitating conditions that can sap the life, and the joy of living, out of older people.
    The study authors, Stanford-trained surgeons, write: “Since May2003 we have experimented with alternate-day calorie restriction, one day consuming 20 to 50 percent of estimated daily caloric requirement and the next day ad lib eating, and have observed health benefits starting in as little as 2 weeks, in insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial, and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette’s, Meniere’s), cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause-related hot flashes. We hypothesize that many other conditions would be delayed, prevented, or improved, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, brain injury due to thrombotic stroke atherosclerosis, NIDDM [noninsulin-dependent diabetes mellitus], congestive heart failure.”
    The method they mention is alternate-day fasting,