Intermittent Fasting vs Stress!

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, and, which will be relevant today, has a lot of impact on mood*, albeit by a different mechanism of action than the one we’ll be exploring all so soon. Which is great, because we love synergistic benefits!

^{*And to learn much more about this, check out: Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman ← this is about insulin resistance, and, importantly, the invisible insulin resistance that precedes blood sugar imbalances by many years (it goes unnoticed because the pancreas will dutifully keep cranking out more and more insulin to keep the blood sugars stable, until one day it just can’t keep up anymore, and then and only then does prediabetes get diagnosed).}

Back to intermittent fasting itself, we’ve written before about this quite specifically, too:

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

…and you might have seen our guest article, 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.

We covered one such study a few weeks ago, talking about how 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 (per: The Brain-Gut Highway: A Two-Way Street), and today we’ll talk about another, and this time, it’s…

De-stressing from the gut up!

Researchers (Dr. Jian-Jun Yang et al.) did a mouse study that found that in cases of lab-induced chronic stress, chronic stress damaged myelin (the fatty insulating layer around nerve fibers—see: How To Rebuild Your Neurons’ Myelin Sheaths) in the corpus callosum, medial prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus, but intermittent fasting substantially reversed these changes.

The reason this matters as much as it does for mood is because myelin helps electrical signals travel efficiently between nerve cells, which is why disruption of myelin has been linked to depression, anxiety, and other adverse brain conditions.

As for how it works, analyses suggested that intermittent fasting partially reversed stress-related changes in microbial metabolic pathways, indicating that changes in bacterial activity, not just bacterial species, might be contributing to the benefits.

That said, there were some special superstars, namely that higher levels of Prevotellamassilia timonensis and Muricoprocola aceti were associated with better myelin integrity and improved behavior, while Anaeroplasma abactoclasticum was associated with poorer outcomes.

You can read the paper in full, here: Intermittent fasting protects against stress-induced depression and demyelination via the gut microbiota–brain axis

Want to learn more?

As well as the intermittent fasting articles we linked above (which are a great starting point if you want to try out intermittent fasting), you might like this book that we reviewed; we recommend it:

Complete Guide To Fasting – By Dr. Jason Fung

Enjoy!