Can Fasting Truly Reboot Your Brain and Silence Depression? The Science May Surprise You.
This enhancement of mood, alertness, and calm makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense. Our body wants us to feel poorly initially so we continue to eat, day to day, when food is available, but if we go a couple of days without food, our body realizes we can’t just mope in our cave; we need to get motivated to go out and find some calories.
So, can fasting be used for mood disorders, like depression? It’s great that people can feel better after a few days of fasting, but the critical question revolves around the “persistence of mood improvement over time” once fasting ends and eating resumes. The little published evidence we have comes out of Japan and the former Soviet Union, and some of it is just ridiculous, like this study that included women with a variety of symptoms, which the researchers blame mostly on marital conflict, as you can see below and at 2:08 in my video. Husband not treating you right? How about some “electroshock therapy”? That didn’t seem to help much, so what about “hunger therapy”? Of course, starving the women made them hungry, but that’s what Thorazine is for. If they keep getting injected with an antipsychotic to calm them down, they can sail right through. So, what happened in the study? What would we even do with those results?
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