6/7/2019 Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript) – The Singju Post

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Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting

Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript)
Transcript – Mark Mattson: Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power – a TED
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Mark Mattson – Professor of Neuroscience, The Johns Hopkins

University

Thanks, Brian. I’m at the National Institute on Aging. And as many of

you know, as people are getting older and there have been advances in
cancer research, cardiovascular disease research. Many people who

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6/7/2019 Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript) – The Singju Post

would have died in their 50s and 60s from those diseases are living into
the danger zone for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

It’s projected that by 2050, the number of people with Alzheimer’s

disease will triple from what it is today – 5 million today would be 15
million by 2050.

In my lab, we use a number of di erent animal models that are relevant

to age-related neurodegenerative disorders. We have mice that
accumulate amyloid in their brain as they get older and they have
learning and memory problems. We have mice that have damage to
dopamine producing neurons that control body movements, that’s
miles of Parkinson’s disease and we also have miles of stroke which is
again another major problem and cause of death.

Well it’s been known for a long time that one way to extend the life
span of laboratory animals is simply to reduce their energy intake. And
in rats and mice one can increase their life span by 30% or 40%.

We started looking at the e ects of energy restriction on the brain in

the context of age-related neurodegenerative disorders and found that
we could slow down the, for example, abnormal accumulation about
amyloid or the degeneration of dopamine neurons in the Alzheimer’s
and Parkinson’s mile by reducing energy intake.

Now there’s a number of ways you can reduce energy intake. You can
simply eat less at each meal or you can do what we call intermittent
fasting. So reduce the frequency of the meals.

E ects of fasting on Brain

And what I’m going to tell you today is that fasting does good things for
the brain. In the animals we have insight into a lot of the
neurochemical changes that are occurring in the brain that we think
explain why fasting is good for the brain.

But I’m going to start out and talk a little bit about anecdotal evidence
that fasting is good for the brain and also an evolutionary perspective
on why fasting might be good for the brain.

Okay. So everybody knows that in certain religions, people will fast

periodically down through history. Many famous brain people —
famous people with good brain have fasted regularly.
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6/7/2019 Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript) – The Singju Post

Historical Perspective

Up in the top here is a quote from Plato. He fasts for greater physical
and mental e ciency.

“I fast for greater physical and mental e ciency.” – Plato

There’s some quotes there, including one from about 6,000 years ago
from an Egyptian pyramid inscription that says;

“Humans live on one-quarter of what they eat; on the other three

quarters lived their doctor”. – Egyptian pyramid encryption, 3800 BC

“Fasting is the greatest remedy – the physician within.” – Philippus

Paracelsus (one of the three fathers of Western medicine)

“A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than
can the best medicines and the best doctors.” – Mark Twain

And in this country as you know, being overweight is a big problem. It’s
not only a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and diabetes, certain
cancers but emerging evidence suggests that it’s also a risk factor for
age-related cognitive impairment and possibly Alzheimer’s disease.

In the lower right there is a reference to a book

written over a hundred years ago by Upton Sinclair. Many of you may
know Upton Sinclair is the author of The Jungle, a book on the meat-
packing industry.

But he also wrote and published a book that you can nd the full text
online, it’s the Fasting Cure and in that book he interviews 250 people
who had some ailment and went on a fast for various lengths of time
and except in a handful of cases their health condition improved.

Okay. Before I focus on the brain, which will be the main part of my
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talk, I just want to point out that there’s evidence not just from animals
6/7/2019 Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript) – The Singju Post

but from humans that fasting is good for the body. It will reduce
in ammation. It will reduce oxidative stress in organ systems
throughout the body. And one thing that happens when you fast that
does not happen when you eat three meals a day is that your energy
metabolism shifts so that you start burning fats.

Every time you eat a meal, the energy goes into your liver and is stored
in the form of glycogen. And that’s always tapped into rst. And it takes
about 10 to 12 hours before you deplete the glycogen stores in your
liver.

Okay. So if you eat three meals a day, you never deplete the glycogen
stores in your liver, although if you exercise you can. But once you
deplete the glycogen stores in your liver, then you start burning fats
and you produce what are called ketone bodies.

Now it turns out ketone bodies are very good for your brain and I’ll talk
about that in a minute.

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Now we’ve done a lot of work on animals in the ‘90s and between 15
and 20 years ago showing that intermittent fasting was good for the
brain. Then we started collaborating with some investigators did some
human studies looking at e ects on the body, some that were shown in
the last slide.

And then a producer at the BBC named Michael Mosley made a program
on intermittent fasting that was aired on the BBC. It’s been aired on
PBS. He wrote a book called the Fast Diet. And just in the last two years
there has been a urry of books on intermittent min fasting for health
and it’s becoming what – I think what some people may think it’s a fad
but hopefully it will — people can nd some of these.

So what I mean by intermittent fasting or intermittent energy

restriction, there is a lot of variations that are being and used on this –
one, sort of harsh one is every other day only eat 500 calories. In our
human studies we’re doing what’s called the 5:2 diet where two days a
week you only eat 500 calories, the other ve days you eat normally –
eat healthy if you can.

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6/7/2019 Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript) – The Singju Post

This book called the Eight-Hour Diet. There’s evidence that if you
restrict the time window that you eat each day to eight hours or less, it
will have health bene ts. Again that’s long enough to shift the energy
metabolism.

Why does fasting bolster brainpower?

During development of your brain but also in the adult, neurons are
generated from stem cells. They grow out their axons and dendrites,
they form connections with each other’s synapses and communicate
with each other.

During aging, many people, their brain ages successfully. They stay
cognitively intact whereas unfortunately others develop diseases. We
think the reason — the main take-home message of this talk is that
fasting is a challenge to your brain and your brain responds to that
challenge of not having food by activating adaptive stress response
pathways that help your brain cope with stress and risk resist disease.

Does this make sense in evolutionary terms? When anything we talk

about in biology, we have to always ask the question why is it that way?
Why when we take animals and put them on an intermittent fasting
diet, are their neurons protected in miles of Alzheimer’s and
Parkinson’s disease? Why do they perform better when we test their
learning and memory in maize? Well it if you’re hungry and haven’t
found food you better gure out how to nd food. You don’t want your
brain to shut down if you’re hungry and in fact that’s what we nd in
the animals nerve cell circuits are more active.

Some of the changes in the brain that occur with intermittent fasting
also occur with vigorous exercise. Now most people and Je this
morning gave a nice talk on showing the bene ts of exercise on him. I
think he probably found it bene ted your brain too.

Okay and so we’re nding when we start looking at what are the
neurochemical changes in the brain with intermittent fasting, they’re
very similar to exercise.

Now on this slide, in the upper left picture, the third boy on the right
running that’s my son. He is in the audience. You can tell by the face of
these three kids, they are in a cross country race. That’s a challenge,
right? And they’re probably saying to themselves during the race — I
used to run races, still occasionally do. Why am I doing
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6/7/2019 Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript) – The Singju Post

However when they get done with a race they feel great and they feel
relaxed. During the cross country season my wife and I — it’s very
obvious our son’s mood was better and on the right my daughter’s in
the white, her mood was better during the cross country season. Why is
that? Exercise and intermittent fasting, both increase the production of
proteins in the brain; they are called neurotrophic factors.

We discovered this many years ago back when I was a post-doc in

Colorado in 1980s. We found that these neurotrophic factors such as
FGF and one called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor promote
the growth of neurons, promote the connection of neurons and
strengthening in synapses.

Okay. So here’s the idea. Challenges to your brain whether it’s

intermittent fasting, vigorous exercise or what we’re doing now
hopefully if you haven’t fallen asleep is cognitive challenges. When this
happens neural circuits are activated, levels of neurotrophic factors
such as BDNF increase, that promotes the growth of the neurons, the
formation and strengthening of synapses.

Also shown in the lower left, it turns out both exercise, intermittent
fasting and using your neurons – using your brain can increase the
production of new nerve cells from stem cells at least in one region of
your brain called the hippocampus which is shown here.

I mentioned ketones which come from burning fat and that happens
during fasting. The Romans discovered ketones even though they had
no – they hadn’t taken any chemistry courses, or didn’t know what it
was.

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People with epileptic seizures back then, they thought they were
possessed by demons and they found if they take these people and shut
them in a room and don’t feed them, the demons will go away. What’s
happening is ketones go up and it’s well known that ketones suppress
seizures and in fact ketogenic diets are used to treat even today patients
with severe epilepsy. We’re doing in my work and my lab trying to
understand why ketones are good for neurons. One reason is they
provide an alternative fuel for the neurons that boost the energy levels
in the neurons.
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6/7/2019 Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript) – The Singju Post

Recently we discovered that fasting by increasing BDNF levels in the

brain, this neurotrophic factor, can increase the number of
mitochondria in your nerve cells. And I’m not going to go into the
details of this slide but the mechanism is very similar to the
mechanism whereby exercising your muscles increases the number of
mitochondria in your muscles.

The fasting is a mild energetic stress and the neurons respond

adaptively by increasing mitochondria which helps them produce more
energy and in this paper cited down here in Nature Communications,
we recently showed that by increasing the number of mitochondria and
neurons it can increase the ability of the neurons to form and maintain
synapses and thereby increase learning and memory ability.

In addition to the increasing neurotrophic factors and increasing the

energy neuronal bioenergetics if you will, we have found that
intermittent fasting will enhance the ability of your nerve cells to repair
DNA. So right now — and also probably exercise and also intellectual
challenges.

And again what’s happening — in this case when you’re using your
neurons, exercising your neurons causes a mild oxidative stress and at
the same time that there’s increased oxidative stress the cells are
enhancing their ability to repair oxidative damage to DNA.

Why is it that the normal diet is three meals a day plus snacks?

It isn’t that it’s the healthiest diet — way of eating pattern, and that’s
my opinion but I think there’s a lot of evidence to support that.

There are a lot of pressures to have that eating

pattern. There’s a lot of money involved.

The food industry — are they going to make money from skipping
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breakfast like I did today? No, they’re going to lose money. If people
6/7/2019 Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript) – The Singju Post

fast, the food industry loses money.

What about the pharmaceutical industries? What if people do

intermittent fasting and exercise periodically and they are very healthy,
is the pharmaceutical industry going to make any money on healthy
people?

So one challenge for society and this — one of the other purposes of
this TED Talks hopefully is that communication is the way to improve
health. People understanding what they can do to improve their health
and then taking action like Je talked about in his own talk this
morning.

So I would urge you to communicate and spread the word that there are
ways for people to be healthy. And maybe we can do this even with – of
course I’m working for the NIH and one thing about the NIH’s we’re
using your taxpayers money to try to help your health. We don’t have a
pro t motive. And so that really one of the main reasons I’ve got
interested in things like intermittent fasting, exercise, trying to
understand at the cellular molecular level, what’s happening in the
brain is — this is a research that is uncommonly done and it’s not done
at all by pharmaceutical industries and it’s done so much.

So I’m going to end with this slide and thank you very much for your
attention and try it out. You can just play around with these kinds of
kind of diets and you may nd — what we found in our human studies
though is it’s kind of like exercise. If you’ve never exercised before and
you go and run three miles you’re not going to feel good.

If you eat three meals a day and all of a sudden you go whole day don’t
eat anything, that they are going to feel irritable and ornery and so on.
But it turns out if you can kind of force yourself to do that, maybe one
day a week for a month and then two days a week, you get used to it and
after a month or two many people can adapt to that kind of diet with no
problem. And you’ll nd on the days that you don’t eat so much, you
are more productive.

Thank you.

About the Speaker:

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6/7/2019 Mark Mattson Discusses Why Fasting Bolsters Brain Power (Transcript) – The Singju Post

Mark Mattson is the current Chief of the Laboratory of

Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. He is also a professor
of Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University. Mattson is one of the
foremost researchers in the area of cellular and molecular mechanisms
underlying neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease,
Parkinson’s Disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

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