Grow new brain cells

Mice and memory and intermittent fasting—but that's not even the good part. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

I read an interesting neurological study recently, about mice and intermittent fasting.

But to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have shared it if I hadn’t dug deeper into what the main author had previously researched—and how she believes there’s some really good news about our brains that we were probably raised to believe was not possible.

Let’s tell the whole story the way I found it. It comes to us from King's College London, where researchers wanted to figure out if intermittent fasting would spur the development of new hippocampal neurons, and thus improve memory performance in lab mice.

Their experiment ran three months and focused on brain genes known as Klotho. Researchers divided the mice into three groups: 

1. A control group of mice who were fed as they normally had been, 

2. A calorie-restricted group (CR), that had its daily food intake reduced by 10%, and

3. An intermittent fasting group (IF), that had its food similarly reduced but was fed only every other day during the study.

In the …