Brain with Alzheimer’s (left) vs. normal brain (right)

Fasting can help protect against brain diseases, scientists say

Researchers at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore said they had found evidence which shows that periods of stopping virtually all food intake for one or two days a week could protect the brain against some of the worst effects of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other ailments.

“Reducing your calorie intake could help your brain, but doing so by cutting your intake of food is not likely to be the best method of triggering this protection. It is likely to be better to go on intermittent bouts of fasting, in which you eat hardly anything at all, and then have periods when you eat as much as you want,” said Professor Mark Mattson, head of the institute’s laboratory of neurosciences.

“In other words, timing appears to be a crucial element to this process,” Mattson told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

Cutting daily food intake to around 500 calories – which amounts to little more than a few vegetables and some tea – for two days out of seven had clear beneficial effects in their studies, claimed Mattson, who is also professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

If you’re really serious about getting started with life extension, don’t miss Christine Peterson’s Personalized Life Extension Conference. Here’s our recent interview with Christine for those who missed it.

Cross-posted from Better All the Time.

Healthy life extension is not something that we’re going to “discover” in the future. It is something we have been working towards for a long time and to which we are getting closer every day. Writing at PJ Media, Patrick Cox explains a major shift in thinking which has occurred in the past few years concerning the importance of Vitamin D, driven primarily by the work of Dr. Michael Holick, a professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at the Boston University School of Medicine:

Optimal vitamin D serum blood levels, attained through sunlight or supplementation, dramatically reduce the risk of many diseases other than bone maladies. Many of the most serious are ameliorated by an astonishing 50 to 85 percent. These diseases include cancers, from breast and colon to deadly melanoma skin cancers.

The big killers and most expensive diseases respond similarly to adequate D. I’m talking about hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. So do type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes (to a lesser extent), rheumatoid arthritis, peripheral vascular disease, multiple sclerosis, dementia, autoimmune diseases, and apparently even viral diseases such as H1N1 and AIDS.

Want to live longer? Cut your chances of suffering from the afflictions listed above (and many others.) Make sure you’re getting enough Vitmain D.

Simple.

And if you’re really serious about getting started with life extensions, don’t miss Christine Peterson’s Personalized Life Extension Conference. Here’s our recent interview with Christine for those who missed it.