Intermittent Fasting vs Cognitive Decline!

Cognitive decline is generally thought of as one of the most relevant-to-daily-life aspects of aging, and for that reason, combatting age-related cognitive decline is more important to a lot of people than, say, reducing wrinkles.

Before we get into the main part of it today, let’s drop a quick recap for anyone not up-to-speed with intermittent fasting as a concept in general:

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

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!

Fasting diet, slowing cognitive decline

Researchers (Dr. Yvette Schlussel et al.) investigated whether intermittent fasting (or as the paper words it, time-restricted eating, which is the same thing) can help maintain/improve cognitive function in women over 50 (age range was 50–79).

What they did: the participants were randomized into two groups; one group ate all meals within 9 hours or under each day, while the other continued eating over a more typical 12-hour period. Aside from the time restriction considerations, all participants were advised to reduce their daily calorie intake by 500 calories per day.

And as for what they found, metric by metric:

• Weight loss: both groups lost about 15 lbs (6.8kg) on average, with no significant difference between them.
• Planning and problem-solving: despite similar weight loss, the time-restricted eating group showed significantly greater improvements in tests of spatial planning and problem-solving.
• Memory and learning: participants in the shorter eating-window group tended to make fewer memory and learning errors, but this improvement was not statistically significant.
• Reaction time and multitasking: researchers found no significant differences in reaction time or multitasking performance.

Further, there was a dose-response relationship, insofar as participants who shortened their eating window the most tended to experience the greatest cognitive improvements.

As to how this happens, Dr. Schlussel and her team suggest that meal timing can influence brain health through an abundance of different ways, including effects on circadian rhythms, inflammation, metabolic health, and nutrient-sensing pathways.

For more on that, see for example: The Circadian Rhythm: Far More Than Most People Know and The Other Circadian Rhythms

If you’d like to read the paper in full, it’s so new that it hasn’t actually been officially published yet; it was presented at NUTRITION 2026, the annual flagship meeting of the American Society for Nutrition, this week (at time of writing; the conference finishes tomorrow; let it never be said we don’t bring you cutting-edge news), but you can read the abstract which contains all the details including the method and results, with pertinent data: Time-Restricted Eating and Caloric Restriction influences Cognition in Older Women: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Want to learn more?

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

Complete Guide To Fasting – By Dr. Jason Fung

You might also consider our main feature on more general dietary considerations against brain aging:

A New Contender For “Best Diet For Heart & Brain” In Aging

Enjoy!