How Intermittent Fasting Changes Your Brain

We’ve written before about the benefits of intermittent fasting, such as:

• Intermittent Fasting: What’s The Truth?
• 16/8 Intermittent Fasting For Beginners
• Before You Eat Breakfast: 3 Surprising Facts About Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is mostly enjoyed for its metabolic benefits, such as How To Prevent And Reverse Type 2 Diabetes.

We also covered a very related topic, with intermittent fasting once again being on the suggestions list:

Improve Your Insulin Sensitivity! ← this is actually more important even that blood sugar control itself, important as that latter is!

Next, some additional background. This topic (the relationship between intermittent fasting and brain/cognitive health) has been touched on before by one of our guest articles:

Does intermittent fasting have benefits for our brain?

…which detailed several ways it can help, and/but ultimately concluded with a commentary on the need for more research.

Today we’ll spotlight one of those much-needed studies!

From the gut up

As regular 10almonds readers will know, the gut and brain talk to each other, a lot, largely by means of the vagus nerve running between them.

See also: The Brain-Gut Highway: A Two-Way Street

For this reason, intermittent fasting was one of the habits recommended in a book we reviewed a little while back, 7 Healthy Gut Habits For Women Over 40 – by Lara West.

Researchers (Dr. Xiaoling Wu et al.) conducted an experiment whose participants (who were all there with the goal of losing weight) completed a 2-month intermittent fasting program, while Dr. Wu and her team tracked their body composition, blood markers, gut bacteria, and brain activity using fMRI.

The results, at a glance:

• Weight loss:, as expected participants lost an average of 7.6 kg, equivalent to 7.8% of their starting body weight, while reducing body fat and waist circumference.
• Metabolic improvements: blood pressure, fasting glucose, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and liver enzyme activity all decreased, showcasing broader metabolic benefits beyond weight loss.
• Gut microbiome changes: beneficial or obesity-associated bacteria such as Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, Parabacteroides distasonis, and Bacteroides uniformis increased, while Escherichia coli (usually known to its friends simply as E. coli) decreased.
• Brain (neurological) changes: activity decreased in several regions linked to appetite, reward, cravings, emotion, learning, and cognitive control, including the inferior frontal orbital gyrus, putamen, and anterior cingulate cortex.
• Gut-brain link, specifically: shifts in specific gut bacteria correlated with changes in brain activity, strongly suggesting that the microbiome and brain adapt together during intermittent fasting-induced weight loss.

As for why this happens this way, gut microbes produce neurotransmitters and other compounds that affect the nervous system, while the brain influences eating behavior and food choices, creating the two-way communication system known as the gut-brain axis, as per our article linked up above.

In practical terms, this means a synergistic effect, that you (or at least, most people, probably including you) can leverage to get all manner of health benefits, at once!

You can read the paper in full, here: Dynamical alterations of brain function and gut microbiome in weight loss

Want to learn more?

You might like this book that we reviewed; we recommend it:

Complete Guide To Fasting – By Dr. Jason Fung

Enjoy!