Study Shows Intermittent Fasting’s Effect on Long Term Memory
With cognitive decline on the rise, a search for solutions has never been more pressing. A groundbreaking recent study on intermittent fasting suggests that the way we time our eating may play a significant role in our brain health.
For thousands of years, people have been fasting for religious and spiritual reasons while reaping a host of physical benefits. Today, however, the standard western diet has left many overfed and undernourished. While fasting practices are not new, there is a host of new research showing they may be an important key to preserving health in a time of disease.
Dr. Edward Group is a naturopathic physician who has been incorporating fasting in his practice for years with great success.
“Fasting is something that has been used for thousands of years actually, and it’s nothing more than really giving your body the time it needs to heal itself,” Dr. Group said. “The human race, right now, probably eats ten times, or more, the amount of food that we need to repair and regenerate.”
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Across the world, nearly every culture has a tradition of fasting, but in our modern lives we’ve created a world of surplus and with it a constant and easily satiated hunger. With this excess food, our society has become plagued by diseases of excess.
Dr. Alan Goldhamer is the founder of True North Health Foundation, a therapeutic clinic for water-only fasting that helps patients suffering from a range of illnesses including hypertension, inflammation, autoimmune disorders, and cancer.
“We’ve gone from being criminal quacks to cutting-edge researchers because this idea of fasting has definitely gained some popular support,” Goldhamer said. “Our approach is very different, we believe that there is a cause of real health and the cause of health is healthful living. So, we focus on diet, sleep, (and) exercise, and we use fasting to undo the consequences of dietary excess, essentially. That’s why the conditions that respond the best to fasting are the conditions caused by dietary excess – so, obesity, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, Type II diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and certain forms of cancer, including Lymphoma.Â
Studies have shown that fasting acts to help the body’s natural ability to destroy dead or diseased cells — a process called autophagy. Now, doctors have begun to study how fasting protocols in conjunction with drugs, such as chemotherapy, can improve the efficacy of cancer treatment.
“It turns out autophagy is the process the body uses to get rid of cellular debris — aging cells and cancer cells — and it turns out that fasting is one of those things that may profoundly enhance autophagy in, not just humans, but also in other animals. In fact in rats, if you do periodic fasting with rats you can double their lifespan (everything else being equal). So, this is something that’s very interesting and promising. I don’t know that we have what I would consider definitive research on the issue, but it certainly raises one of the mechanisms by which fasting may also be effective,” Goldhamer said.
