#299 Why Fasting Slows Brain Aging - Mark Mattson

Mark Mattson (0:00)

This is the whole simple explanation for why regular exercise and intermittent fasting are good for health.

These repeated cycles of mild stress and recovery and growth allow for optimum growth and function of your muscles, your nerve cells. The growth in the nerve cells is increased.

Siim Land (0:20)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and today our guest is Mark Mattson. Mark used to be a professor of neuroscience at John Hopkins University and known for his early research on intermittent fasting. The National Institute of Health considers him one of the world's top experts on the potential cognitive and physical health benefits of intermittent fasting. This episode is brought to you by BluBlox, my favorite light and sleep optimization companies. Artificial light at night exposure is associated with diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's.

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Siim Land (1:41)

Mark, welcome back to the show.

Mark Mattson (1:43)

That's nice to talk to you again, Sim.

Siim Land (1:45)

Yeah, it was like two years ago I checked the last time talked and yeah, I mean, two years is not a lot in terms of scientific research. But I do think that there have been like some pretty interesting studies recently coming out and you also released your book on the topic. So we're talking about that today. And today we also have a co-host, my girlfriend, Inga, who has also a master's in neuropsychology.

And she'll be also basically helping us to ask questions about brain function and fasting and those kind of things. So I think it's going to be a pretty interesting show. But yeah, maybe let's just start with your book.

Mark Mattson (2:27)

Yeah, so what happened was a little over two years ago, I retired from my laboratory chief position at the NIH.

And that gave me some time while I was a lab chief. I had a big lab, a lot of postdocs, graduate students, junior scientists under me. I didn't have time to write a book on intermittent fast on the science of intermittent fasting, even though we started research on intermittent fasting in the 1990s. And in the meantime, as you know, intermittent fasting has become popularized actually based on some human studies we did with Michelle Harvey in England. And we published a paper in 2011 and then a producer for the BBC, Michael Mosley, saw the article and he did a documentary for the BBC on intermittent fasting. And then that kind of ignited the internet chatter. And then since then, there have been now more than 100 human trials of intermittent fasting, a lot of them in people with obesity, type 2 diabetes, but also some in healthy younger people like yourself who, in my looking at your arms, it looks like you do some resistance training. And we can talk about all of this.

And yeah, and I think that the thing I'm optimistic about now is that a lot of physicians have become aware of intermittent fasting. And they're able to at least talk to patients a little bit about it. And there's a lot of interest and clinical trials going on now in patients with various diseases, cancers, inflammatory disorders, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, even some brain disorders.

Yeah. So anyway, I got around to writing a book on the science of intermittent fasting. There are really no books that go into any detail at all on the science of intermittent fasting. I tried to write my book, Intermittent Fasting Revolution, at a level that at most educated people can understand a lot of it. And my goal was to educate people.

From a practical standpoint, intermittent fasting is simple. It's just an eating pattern that involves extended time periods, at least, say, 14, 16 hours with no energy intake. And that repeated regularly, daily time restricted eating, a couple of days a week, and you'd only one moderate size of meal. So that part is trivial. But I think a lot of people are interested in what's going on in their brain and body when they're doing intermittent fasting.