Fasting is the process that a person for goes food for a period of time to achieve a physical or spiritual goal. The positives of fasting have always been up contested. Once having fasted people experience new perspectives, renewed mental focus, a stronger constitution and a clearer relationship with their body. Recent science though is starting to reveal incredible evidence backing this age old practice.

Mark Mattson is the current Chief of the Laboratory of Neuroscience at the National Institute of Aging. Mattson is a world class researcher specializing in the cellular and molecular mechanisms  of different neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. What he and researchers like him have found is amazing though scary for the current concepts of health science.

We can’t look at the subject of fasting as a means of treating patients because large corporations have too much at stake to ever let us see the whole picture. I know That sounds like I’m a crazy man with a conspiracy theory but its true. Over the last to decades more and more scientific practices have been called into question. The medical profession has been bought by the Pharmaceutical brands.

Beyond the pharma companies is the food industry and anyone making a buck off health trends. The more we eat the more they make money. If fasting became an accepted practice they could stand to lose millions. While we have experimental results of fasting being healthy,more research is needed. Though everything we’ve seen is very exciting.

“Dietary changes have long been known to have an effect on the brain. Children who suffer from epileptic seizures have fewer of them when placed on caloric restriction or fasts. It is believed that fasting helps kick-start protective measures that help counteract the overexcited signals that epileptic brains often exhibit. (Some children with epilepsy have also benefited from a specific high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet.) Normal brains, when overfed, can experience another kind of uncontrolled excitation, impairing the brain’s function, Mattson and another researcher reported in January in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience,’ says Mattson.

Fasting experiments had amazing results with animals.

“Calorie restriction (CR) extends life span and retards age-related chronic diseases in a variety of species, including rats, mice, fish, flies, worms, and yeast. The mechanism or mechanisms through which this occurs are unclear.”

We can prove that fasting or calorie restrictive diets have positive effects we are just unclear on how. As the you get hungry the body and brain enter into a ‘survival mode’. The prioritization list for bodily functions changes and is done with the highest efficiency possible to save on resources. One clear reaction is protein production increases which promotes the growth of neurons, the connections between neurons and the strength of the synapses.

Separating the science from the politics will be hard here. This subject spans many subjects that people either hold very dear or make their livings off. This fear of moving forward because we may lose what we have is debilitating