What One High-Fat Meal Does To A Healthy Brain In Just 4 Hours

Study Finds ^ | August 07, 2025 | Chris Marley, Damian Bailey (University of South Wales)

[RideForever]

How do they know that the chocolate syrup and the sugar aren't the problem?

What happens to the gut when sugar is detected? It doesn't digest the food until the sugar is sequestered. What does that do for this experiment? Invalidates any facts about fat. But you make a good demonstration of what sugar does to you.

[rdcbn1]

Fasting was one of the earliest treatments for epilepsy and was effective in the early 1900s before the days effective drug options.

Why this is not generally known is a bit of mystery, but the fact that it required 14-21 days of strict water fasting may have something to do with that. Some of the early reports show that people in trials made improvements but terminated the fasting protocol because they did not build up their fasting tolerance before going on an extended fast.

Fasting converts the body to a ketone metabolism which is fundamentally neuroprotective and improves cognitive function, it reduces inflammation and irritation of nerve and brain tissue ( and may allow recovery from chronic inflammation) , it down regulates the mTOR metabolic pathway that plays a critical role in overstimulating the nervous system which creates the seizures, it re sets the metabolism in ways that may be favorable for the treatment of epilepsy, and it activates the autophagy process that can remodel and rewire the brain and nervous system.

One paper suggests that the benefits of the fasting can be substantially maintained via a single one day (36hr) hr fast per month which is kind of surprising

I learned about this by chance when doing some research on fasting and autophagy for MS and other neurodegrnerative diseases.

Below are some peer reviewed and published results that give a bit more info on the subject. one of the best is the recent 2022 Boston Children's Hospital study

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(22)01098-1.pdf

This is a non human study but for the case of Epilepsy, the animal models results are very close to those of humans Shoot me a message if you are interested and would like to review more - have a lot more archived someplace.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6836141/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6601432/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15652725/

https://www.cureepilepsy.org/news/why-does-fasting-reduce-seizures/

https://practicalneurology.com/diseases-diagnoses/epilepsy-seizures/dietary-treatments-for-patients-with-epilepsy/30181/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9508617/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-025-01254-5

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(22)01098-1.pdf

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35429726/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3740951/

[grey_whiskers]

Thanks for the links to the studies!

[LilFarmer]

Excellent, thank you! I will pass this along to my son.

A lot of folks don’t realize that the ketogenic diet was developed in the 1920s for epilepsy.

https://www.news-medical.net/health/History-of-the-Ketogenic-Diet.aspx

[rdcbn1]

Happy to do so :-)

[rdcbn1]

My pleasure. There is a lot more published on the topic. I just grabbed what I had on my iPhone

[rdcbn1]

Supplementation with 20 or so grams of exogenous β-hydroxybutyrate adds to the ketogenic effect and can help keep the body keto adjusted even in the absence of a full keto diet.

[redinIllinois]

Thanks for posting all the info and links!!

[logi_cal869]

Oh, please.

I’ll just dose up on niacin and green tea while my wife wonders why I’m all red, smell like bacon while sporting an - ahem - like a pubescent boy in a soft wind.

/s