The Fast Diet: The secret of intermittent fasting � lose weight, stay healthy, live longer Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrong. I am aware that as I get older my memory has become more fallible. I’ve compensated by using a range of memory tricks I’ve picked up over the years, but even so I find myself occasionally struggling to remember names and dates. Far worse than this, however, is the fear that one day I may lose my mind entirely, perhaps developing some form of dementia. Obviously I want to preserve my brain in as good a shape as possible and for as long as possible. Fortunately fasting seems to offer significant protection.
    The man I went to discuss my brain with was Professor Mark Mattson.
    Mark Mattson, a professor of neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging, is one of the most revered scientists in his field: the study of the ageing brain. I find his work genuinely inspiring – suggesting, as it does, that fasting can help combat diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia and memory loss.
    Although I could have taken a taxi to his office, I chose to walk. I’m a fan of walking. It not only burns calories, it also improves the mood, and it may also help retain your memory. Normally as we get older our brainshrinks, but one study found that in regular walkers the hippocampus, an area of the brain essential for memory, actually expanded. 8 Regular walkers have brains that in MRI scans look, on average, two years younger than the brains of those who are sedentary.
    Mark, who studies Alzheimer’s, lost his own father to dementia. He told me that although it didn’t directly motivate him to go into this particular line of research – when he started work on Alzheimer’s disease his father had not yet been diagnosed – but it did give him insight.
    Alzheimer’s affects around 26 million people worldwide and the problem will grow as the population ages. New approaches are desperately needed because the tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia is that once you’re diagnosed it may be possible to delay, but not prevent, the inevitable deterioration. You are likely to get progressively worse to the point where you need constant care for many years. By the end you may not even recognise the faces of those you once loved.
Can fasting make you clever?
     
    Just as Valter Longo had, Mark took me off to see some mice. Like Valter’s mice, Mark’s mice are genetically engineered, But they have been modified to make them more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s. The mice I saw were in a maze, which they had to navigate in order to findfood. Some of the mice perform this task with relative ease; others get disorientated and confused. This task, and others like it, are designed to reveal signs that the mice are developing memory problems; a mouse that is struggling will quickly forget which arm of the maze it has already travelled down.
    The genetically engineered Alzheimer’s mice will, if put on a normal diet, quickly develop dementia. By the time they are a year old, the equivalent of middle age in humans, they normally have obvious learning and memory problems. The animals put on an intermittent fast, something Mark prefers to call ‘intermittent energy restriction’, often go up to 20 months without any detectable signs of dementia. 9 They only really start deteriorating towards the end of their lives. In humans that would be the equivalent of developing signs of Alzheimer’s at the age of 80 rather than at 50. I know which I would prefer.
    Disturbingly, when these mice are put on a typical junk-food diet, they go downhill much earlier than even normally fed mice. ‘We put mice on a high-fat and high-fructose diet,’ Mark said, ‘and that has a dramatic effect; the animals have an earlier onset of the learning and memory problems, more accumulation of amyloid and more problems with finding their way in a maze test.’
    In other words, junk food makes these mice fat and stupid.
    One of the key changes that occur in the brains ofMark’s fasting mice is increased production of a protein called brain-derived