Alzheimer's is sometimes called "type 3 diabetes." If the body stops responding to insulin signals to pull glucose out of the serum to use for energy (insulin resistance), then the brain might chronically get less energy. By weight, the brain is the organ that uses the most glucose of any other organ. The brain is responsible for about 20% of your body's total glucose use, despite being only 2% of your body's weight.<p>Intermittent fasting usually kicks you into ketosis. Ketosis is when your body runs out of glucose and it metabolizes fat in the liver to use for energy, including the brain, which starts getting 66% of its energy from fat. You're on HN so you probably already know that. It also changes the krebs cycle, and eventually it changes how your body processes ketones themselves, but the important switch is in your brain.<p>Nutritional ketosis is a form of "fed" ketosis, where you mainly don't eat glucose, and eat more fat, and your body enters a similar state as fasting, except you don't have to be hungry. Nutritional ketosis is also distinguished from "starvation ketosis" (like from fasting) by the quantity of ketone bodies in the serum.<p>Alzheimer's patients on a ketotic diet show improvement (<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33622392/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33622392/</a>)<p>Could a nutritional ketosis diet be preventative against Alzheimers?<p>I sometimes hear stories of friends who eat generally "healthy," and aren't overweight, shocked to learn they are pre-diabetic.<p>This is the limit of my knowledge, and I know this is an incomplete picture. From my limited view, this is why I strive to be in nutritional ketosis.
The wealthy owners of senior homes for mice keep on winning.<p>But more seriously the idea biological beings have adapted to going hungry for a set period each day (say only eating between 9am to 5pm), without starving themselves, fits well into an intuitive model of life (hunting, scarcity, etc).<p>It’s a cliche that weight loss and health requires being irrationally hungry all the time, or some unique physical ability, but like strength training where you can eventually squat 250+lbs with some practice I can see intermittent fasting as something you eventually build as a habit.<p>I say this from experience after trying a couple of times with both gym/fasting. Don't expect going hungry each night for a week is the quick Tiktok-esque solution to being fit. The initial habit building is easy... the hard (but rewarding) part is building a lifestyle that maintains it long term. I personally enjoy the gym more than changing food intake, but the latter (or keto) seems more valuable.
So basically just another confirmation that insulin resistance is a huge problem and that combating it with (in this case) intermittent fasting propagates into things like reducing incidence of Alzheimer's disease.
Most fascinating is that the addition of sarcosine to the diet was able to mimic intermittent fasting responses. Sarcosine has previously shown psychoactive effects at ameliorating schizophrenia and depression in humans.<p><a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2022.884155/full" rel="nofollow">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2022.8841...</a>
I've stopped eating breakfast years ago. After a month or so the body adapts and you just stop being hungry in the morning. Most of the stuff people eat for breakfast is unhealthy anyway.
Keeping my bias aside. It’s amazing that some religions prescribed fasting for variety of reasons. Here is a mysterious quote from Quran:<p><i>"...But to fast is best for you, if you only knew." -- Surat Al-Baqarah 2:184</i><p>Did we have any ideas about the benefits of fasting back then?