Dr. Mark Mattson: Intermittent Fasting - Fad or Factual?

Intermittent fasting has become popularized in recent years, but the evidence often gets lost in the headline-chasing videos, blogs and posts. If you're a health coach, wellness coach or performance coach, you're likely getting a lot of questions about this topic. To cut through all the baloney, we sought out one of the world's most respected neuroscientists on the subject, Dr. Mark Mattson.

Dr. Mattson is a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins and the Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. His work has looked into how the brain and body respond and adapt to fasting and exercise. If there is an expert on the subject of Intermittent Fasting, Dr. Mattson is that expert. In fact, he is among the most highly cited neuroscientists in the world. To say we felt fortunate he agreed to join us for this episode would be a clear understatement. 

Looking for weekly tips, tricks and turbo boosts to enhance your life? Sign up for the CATALYST COMPASS here, a brief weekly compilation of ideas, evidence-based concepts and encouragement to improve your personal and professional life!

Info re earning your health & wellness coaching certification, annual Rocky Mountain Coaching Retreat & Symposium & more via https://www.catalystcoachinginstitute.com/

Best-in-class coaching for Employers, EAPs & wellness providers https://catalystcoaching360.com/

YouTube Coaching Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/CoachingChannel

Contact us: Results@CatalystCoaching360.com
Twitter: @Catalyst2Thrive
Website: CatalystCoaching360.com

If you are a current or future health & wellness coach, please check out our Health & Wellness Coaching Community on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/278207545599218. This is a wonderful group if you are looking for encouragement, ideas, resources and more.

Transcript

Dr. Cooper:   0:06
Welcome to the latest episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness and Performance podcast. I'm your host, Dr Bradford Cooper, and today we're gonna dig into the topic of intermittent fasting. Now, most likely you've heard the term, but do you really understand it? A Google search will provide over 58 million results, but the actual evidence based research that pops up compared to the headline chasing blogs, videos and articles? Well, that's humorously one sided. So what we did, we decide to reach out to one of the world's foremost experts on the subject, Dr Mark Mattson of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, to see if there is any chance he could spend just a few minutes with us to cut through all the bologna and get to the facts. And he said yes. Dr. Mattson is a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins and the chief of laboratory Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. His work has looked into how the brain and body respond and adapt to fasting and exercise. If there is an expert on the subject of intermittent fasting, Dr Mattson is that expert. In fact, he is among the most highly cited neuroscientists in the world. To say we felt fortunate he agreed to join us for this episode would be a clear understatement. By the way, he mentions at the end of the interview. He's happy to receive emails from people who may have questions about his research. His email address is MMattso2@jhmi.edu.

Dr. Cooper:   1:52
A brief note about educational options. You likely know about our health and wellness coach certification that is now available 100% at home, in terms of your training and that it is NBHWC accredited. But you may not realize we have a full spectrum of accredited continuing education programs available at CatalystCoachingInstitute.com. So even if you're a certified wellness coach already, even if you're board certified, it might be worth a look if you'd like to fill your toolbox right now. We also have some free coaching resources available on the new health, wellness and performance coaching YouTube channel that you you might want to check out. As always, email us, any time with questions. Results@CatalystCoachingInstitute.com. Now on to our discussion with world renowned researcher Dr Mark Mattson on the latest episode of The Catalyst Health, Wellness and Performance podcast. Dr Matteson, thank you so much for joining us today, this is an intriguing concept. Lots of information come out of the gate. Just thank you. Appreciate you being here.

Dr. Mattson:   2:58
I'm glad to talk to you today. I look forward to the conversation..

Dr. Cooper:   3:01
Let's just start with the basics. Can you describe intermittent fasting in practical terms for our listeners and then some of the general ways in which it benefits individuals outside of simply calorie reduction?

Dr. Mattson:   3:13
Intermittent fasting, first and foremost is not a diet. It's an eating pattern in which there's sufficiently long periods of time of no energy intake to deplete energy stores in the liver, which is glucose, and to mobilize fats, which are then converted to ketones. Which during long periods of fasting can keep cells energy levels up when glucose levels are being maintained low.

Dr. Cooper:   3:47
And essentially there's three types if I understand. There's the alternate day fasting. There's the five two which is five days of generally normal eating and then two days interspersed with zero or maybe in that 500 to 1,000 calorie. And then there's a time restricted, which seems to be the more popular, probably because it fits with life a little bit more. Where you're fasting for 14 to 18 hours and eating in between those. Is the research showing similar results? First of all, did I get that right? And then is the research showing similar results across all three of those? Or is there a hierarchy of value and benefit and those kind of things?

Dr. Mattson:   4:25
Yes, you got it right. And we don't know, we know from human studies in overweight humans, any of those intermittent fasting eating patterns will enable them to lose weight and specifically abdominal fat, and to improve their glucose regulation and risk factors for a number of chronic diseases. You know, whether it's daily, time restricted eating or two days a week eating only 500 calories, 5/2 approach or even more harsh, I guess, alternate day eating only 500 calories. You know, they haven't been compared head to head in the same study, so we can't really comment. But we can say that compared to eating three meals a day plus snacks, any of these intermittent fasting eating patterns seem to be better than that.

Dr. Cooper:   5:28
Interesting. Let's talk about the trends. Why do you think intermittent fasting is getting so much attention recently? It seems like in the last year or two, even though it's been around for decades, it's really come to the forefront. Was there some specific tipping point that you saw being engrossed in this?

Dr. Mattson:   5:45
Yes, so work in my lab and beginning in the 1990s, we performed many studies in rats and mice where we found that intermittent fasting had an anti aging effect and protected the brain against dysfunction and degeneration and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And we investigated the mechanisms and came to the working conclusion that intermittent fasting imposes a mild but beneficial stress on cells, and they respond by being more robust and resilient. And then we started collaborating with various scientists and and clinicians that were working with humans who saw our animal work, and one of those was Dr Michelle Harvey in England, so we did two studies with her. Mainly her, we just analyzed a lot of blood samples for her and both studies had approximately 100 women. They were overweight, and they were randomly assigned to either two days a week, eating only 500 to 600 calories. The other five days, they were advised to just eat normally. Don't purposely change their eating habits. And then the other group of women we had them eat three meals a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner spaced out about each meal had 20 to 25% fewer calories than they had been taking in. And so we followed them for six months. Both groups of women lost weight, but the women on what's now called 5/2 intermittent fasting, so that approach is based on these two studies I'm talking about, those women on that intermittent fasting regimen, lost more belly fat. They had greater improvement in insulin sensitivity and some other markers in blood health indicators. 

Dr. Mattson:   7:50
And then what happened that led to the popularization or the recognition by the general public is that a producer for the BBC named Michael Mosley, who's an MD, he picked it up. So he's, BBC is in England right? So he picked up on, there's a little bit of publicity on her studies with Dr Harvey and he picked up on that. And then he came over, came to my lab, also went to Baltar Longo's lab at USC and Krista Verity up at the University of Chicago. And he tried Walter Longo's approach of going 3 to 5 days in a row with no food. And then he tried to 5/2 and he took his own blood and so on, so forth. So then that program aired in England and then PBS bought it. And it aired in the states and in the meantime, Mosley, Doctor Harvey and several other actually copycat people who didn't really do the research published books. And then what happened? Of course the Internet is here. And if you would have went on Google, even, let's say, five years ago, 5 to 7 years ago and you put in intermittent fasting, pretty much all of the first couple pages would be some of the science. Now, if they put intermittent fasting on and Google it, it's hard to find the science. You know, all the first number of pages are these random people who picked up on it and many of them are good and well intentioned, And I think most of them are just spreading the word. But there's some people who are trying to make money, which I can't understand, right? I mean, intermittent fasting people should save money.

Dr. Cooper:   9:52
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Mattson:   9:55
So that's kind of the history and then, you know, it took off just because of the BBC program, number of books and then the Internet. There's also another angle on this, and you mentioned that intermittent fasting has been known and discussed for, even before I started doing research on it in the nineties. And it turns out that bodybuilders and my understanding of the history of this is that they figured out on their own that if they don't eat breakfast and then do their resistance training at noontime and then eat, you know after that probably until they go to bed, that because they're lifting in a fasted state, it accentuates the fat loss, they don't want much fat so that you can see the big muscles and it did not adversely affect their ability to build muscle. And this now has been actually shown in formal studies published recently. We think we know what's going on. And it's not really complicated. In fact, a lot of overlap in the way that fasting and exercise benefits cells. So what happens is that during exercise and during fasting, cells go into a kind of conserve resources and stress resistance mode. And their overall protein synthesis and growth is pretty much shut down. So they reduce their uptake of amino acids and they shift energy resources into conserving what they have and kind of surviving this stressful period. And then during the recovery period, that is eating after fasting, resting and sleeping after exercise, there's a big increase in protein synthesis, and that's when cells grow. Your muscle cells don't get bigger while you're exercising, they grow in size during recovery. And we think it's also, for example, in the brain, we have evidence that, this is really interesting, and this is known for muscle too actually intermittent fasting will stimulate an increase in the number of mitochondria in muscle cells, just similar to what exercise does, although quantitatively, not nearly as much as exercise. And we found that intermittent fasting will increase the number of mitochondria in neurons in the brain and that intermittent fasting will promote the ability of the nervous cells to grow and form new synapses in addition to increasing their resistance to stress.

Dr. Cooper:   12:43
And is that an additive effect? So if you're exercising, you're still getting additional benefits on top of that, if you're doing the IF. Or is it a replacement if you're not really exercising much, the If can help make up for that in these different ways?

Dr. Mattson:   12:57
Yeah, from the standpoint of the brain, the answer is yes. There seemed to be additive effects of intermittent fasting and exercise. We did a study where we found that, so we had mice in four conditions. The control is their fat ad libitum, they always have food, sedentary. Then we had running wheels but ad libitum feeding and we had intermittent fasting alone and intermittent fasting plus voluntary running wheel exercise. And we've found over a period of a couple months. Both the intermittent fasting and the running wheel exercise increase the number of synapses on particularly, a type of neuron that we study that's important in learning and memory. And then the combination, there was an additive effect. We did the same thing in diabetic mice and found that we're able to stimulate an increase in number of synapses in the diabetic animal. But as far as exercise, which we'll get into talking about soon, there really needs to be some well designed studies to address that. I mentioned what the bodybuilders do, but as far as other athletes, of which there's many endurance athletes, people who are sprinters. I think a lot about track and field and running because I used to coach high school cross country. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. I've tried to get the distance coaches at Johns Hopkins to do a study of intermittent fasting. Where we would have them, the idea would be to have, during the summer before cross country season, get half of the runners adapted to intermittent fasting. The other half, they eat normally and then people continue those eating patterns during the season. And there's a lot of ways you could look at their performance, but mainly it would be based on running on the same courses they ran on in previous years and comparing times. Or, you know, where were they among the runners on the team the previous year? And do they move up or back? But it's hard to get everyone to buy into it. They don't want to take, like a chance that maybe that's gonna make it worse.

Dr. Cooper:   15:19
Right, well and for the individual athlete, I mean, they've got a small window of one or two years to really be at their best. They're probably thinking, I don't know, Doc.

Dr. Mattson:   15:29
So before I retired from the National Institute on Aging, we have positions that we can fill with either post doctoral fellows or post bach fellows that after they get their bachelor's degree, they take a year or two and do research before they go to graduate or medical school. And so, since I knew I was going to retire, and the post bach fellows, it's only short term compared to post Doc, so I recruited post bach fellows who were undergraduate neuroscience majors, had high GPA's, but were also runners. So I had a couple of D1 distance runners and so on, but I got a couple of them to try intermittent fasting, and they're still doing it. And myself, I found when I was trail running that my routine, when I was at NIH was go to lab early in the morning, not eating breakfast. Then I'd usually eat, like, 11 or so and then go on a trail run mid to late afternoon and sometimes, I forgot to bring my lunch. And so I was going on a trail run, having not eaten anything all day. And this is my own perception. But I felt like I was actually running better when I hadn't eaten any lunch. And people can maintain their weight on intermittent fasting eating pattern. It's just a matter of simple calorie intake. But if someone does, like I do, daily time restricted eating, restricting my food intake to a six hour time window and then not eating like a couple of huge meals during that time. But eating you know something every hour over that six hour time window, it's easy to get the same calories you were getting before when you're eating three meals so that I think is something that's a big issue for a lot of people, is that they don't realize that it takes several weeks to a month to adapt to the new eating pattern so that they're no longer, hungry and irritable during the time period, we normally would have eaten. And once they get through that adaptation period, they're no longer hungry or irritable. And it's easy for a lot of, we think, from our human studies for most people to adapt to once you get through the 30 days.

Dr. Cooper:   17:55
Okay, all right. So the benefits for weight loss, obesity, diabetes related, cardiovascular disease, that's completely logical. How about the person who's listening who says I'm pretty healthy. Weight is not a big deal right now. Maybe they're not an elite athlete, but they've heard about this and they're wondering, you know, I'm already exercising. Are there worries for these folks, that they can monitor positive changes outside of having access to lab work. 

Dr. Mattson:   18:23
Well, kind of 

Dr. Cooper:   18:26
Does it effect sleep that they'll pick up on?. Does it effect, I know there's some on mental clarity, but are there any pseudo objective personal things that Joe sitting over here can start journaling in his running journal or his daily tracker or whatever to say? You know what? I think it is making a difference. Not for weight, but just for life.

Dr. Mattson:   18:44
Yeah. Oh, well, okay, so one would be resting heart rate. In animals and humans intermittent fasting alone will reduce resting heart rate significantly. And

Dr. Cooper:   18:59
Well and HRV also right?

Dr. Mattson:   19:01
It increases HRV, yes.

Dr. Cooper:   19:03
Which is good for the listeners.

Dr. Mattson:   19:05
Yes, and we're the first show that in rats were, we implanted transmitters where we could continuously monitor blood pressure and heart rate. And then we switched them to an every other day fasting, eating pattern, and not immediately. But within 2 to 4 weeks, there was clear, highly significant reductions in resting heart rate and blood pressure. And then we just did spectral analysis, and we did for a heart rate variability that the variability and the time interval between individual beats. And then we did,  pharmacological manipulations with drugs that affected the parasympathetic or sympathetic nervous systems. If you remember, that parasympathetic system slows down the heart rate, increases heart rate variability. The sympathetic increases heart rate. And the bottom line is we found that similar to endurance training, intermittent fasting enhanced parasympathetic tone.

Dr. Cooper:   20:04
So those are clear, that's a great pairing, that resting heart rate and HRV. A lot of folks are probably either, we just had Dr Emma Mosley on a few weeks ago, talking about HRV. So a lot of folks are getting insights into this and those are valuable measurements that most people can do. Okay, I like that. So what about the person who only partially follows this? So they're not doing the 5/2. They're not doing the intermittent, you know, 6 to 8 hour eating period consistently. They do it 5 or 6 days a week, and then they don't for a couple days. Are there benefits to that, or do you pretty much need to say I'm either in or I'm out?

Dr. Mattson:   20:42
I can't say for sure because there haven't been studies that address that, but my educated guess is that they will still benefit. But there's such a profound effect on their circadian timing of eating and adjusting the eating pattern that if they're switching back and forth that may be harder. And in fact it's turning out that the 5/2 approach may not be ideal as far as adapting from the standpoint of hunger, because you're only doing it two days a week and then another five days not. Whereas daily time restricted eating, once you get adapted then everything's in sync. So I that's all I can say about that.

Dr. Cooper:   21:29
Okay, fair enough. Well, here's a very specific question. We had a question from one of our listeners about coffee creamer. So my understanding is the intermittent fasting, you can drink water you can drink black coffee outside of the fasting zone. So if you wake up at 7 in the morning, you're not gonna eat until 11. Black coffee's fine. This person's question was, well, what if I really like that creamer? Does it really matter to have a little dash? Or does that, my understanding is that triggers the removal of the fasting process. But can you talk that through? Because that's probably a common question.

Dr. Mattson:   22:03
It is a common question. Any carbohydrates will rapidly cause ketones to go down. So some people are, you know, if you want to have something besides coffee or straight coffee or tea, water. Some people are putting what are called medium chain triglycerides, MCTs, which are small fats that are immediate precursors of the ketones. So if you, and they taste fairly good.

Dr. Cooper:   22:36
You hesitated there.

Dr. Mattson:   22:37
Yeah. And, so that's one. But kind of the key thing is, don't ingest any carbs during the fasting period.

Dr. Cooper:   22:48
And so then proteins and fats are completely, all in? Seems like they would be sensed by the body differently.

Dr. Mattson:   22:58
Yeah, they are, proteins no, fat yes.

Dr. Cooper:   23:00
Okay, so fat is okay. But make sure, folks, when you're reading those labels, it's only the fats. Okay, very good. Just wanted to clarify that. All right, it seems like there's a big overlap between the keto approach and intermittent fasting in terms of where the benefits and where the research is. Can you talk to that a little bit about maybe the differences or how they might relate to each other? Things for people to be aware of that one offers that the other doesn't?.

Dr. Mattson:   23:27
One way to think about this is from an evolutionary perspective and that our human ancestors before the agricultural revolution and animals in the wild. They were in environments where food is relatively scarce, and so they'd go, their kind of on intermittent fasting involuntarily, and we're omnivores. And so during evolution, individuals whose brains and bodies function really well, perhaps optimally, when they were in a food deprived state had a survival advantage. That is to say, if they could figure out how to find food and also could expend a lot of energy to get that food than they pass their genes on. And so there's more than just ketones involved. Ketones play an important role, but there's a lot of activity dependent, both brain neural network activity and neuromuscular activity that drive changes that are beneficial not only for those organ systems, but we think also for other tissues that are independent of ketones. So again, with exercise, strengthening of the muscles is dependent on activity of the muscles. There's a lot of evidence that strengthening of the brain, if you will, is dependent upon activity and nerve cells in the brains. And in fact, we found that a protein called BDNF brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is well known to be critical for learning and memory and formation of new synapses. We found that it was stimulated by intermittent fasting and apparently in an activity neural network, activity dependent manner. So when you haven't been able to find food, your brain cells are more active, and that activity in itself leads the beneficial effects that are independent of the ketones.

Dr. Cooper:   25:29
Okay, All right. So the keto approach, or diet or strategy or whatever will overlap some of those benefits. But then they won't tap in it all to the things that you're talking about there. 

Dr. Mattson:   25:40
Yeah. 

Dr. Cooper:   25:40
Okay, very good. Let's talk about athletes for a minute. You're an athlete, you're an endurance athlete. You talked about being a coach there in your area. When it comes to athletes, and especially endurance athletes, any research in regards to performance enhancing overtime? I think I've read something about reduced inflammation potentially, maybe some improved recovery. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Or the potential of that?

Dr. Mattson:   26:04
There's in my mind, a lot of potential. However, it's not clear whether an intermittent fasting eating pattern is superior to regular eating pattern in endurance athletes yet. We really need studies with really well defined, groups of athletes that are done in a randomized manner. That is, some of the athletes of similar ability are assigned to, you know, intermittent fasting eating pattern,, the others to regular eating pattern. And then they're followed over time. And cross sectional data are not really, in my mind too useful, and you really need, the more variability there is in the athletes you're studying inter individual variability and in their ability, the harder it will be to know if there's an effect because of, if you will, the standard deviation is gonna be increased a lot.

Dr. Cooper:   27:06
We have a lot of Masters athletes that listen this podcast. So for that person who's not a professional, they're not competing at the Olympic level. They care about their performance, But they also care about their their work performance and their, you know, life, mental clarity, all those kinds of things. For that person, are there benefits or the fact that they're already that high level, let's take the top 5% of Masters athletes in terms of performance and ability. Are they going to garner any benefit from this in, you said athletically we don't know yet. Is there enough outside of that to make that a regular part of their pattern? Or do you say, you know what? With everything else they're doing, they're pretty dialed in, I wouldn't put a focus on that.

Dr. Mattson:   27:45
I think the good news is it's easy in people who are very health conscience and the group of people you're talking about, pretty easy for them to try it and then determine over a period of at least months or maybe one year compared to other years. And they could go to the doctor and just do general blood work, is enough to know fasting glucose, triglycerides, cholesterol and H1C, which is kind of a marker of glucose levels under the curve over time.

Dr. Cooper:   28:27
So an N of one makes sense in that case with somebody that cares enough to dive in. Any modifications due to the number of calories they are burning? So the Ironman triathlete or the you know, marathon or ultra runner, do they need to be extra focused on, okay, I'm only eating in a six or eight hour period instead of 17 hour period. Any suggestions along those lines for those folks?

Dr. Mattson:   28:50
That's important at level, one can assume that their body mass index is, you know, in the low healthy range, and so they wanna maintain their body weight as much as they can, and they also need, endurance athletes need some fat because that's what they're using if they're not taking, assuming they're not taking in sugar's during the event, which some some people do. But, yeah, so I think they could adjust the time window eight hours, 16 hours fasting is plenty of time to have the metabolic switch occur, and ketones go up and are being used. So I think they can play with that and see how it goes.

Dr. Cooper:   29:35
Okay, good. You've done a lot of research on Alzheimer's, so if we could cross two areas a little bit. Any additional findings of note that might be important on that front, or are developing on that front for somebody who may have a friend or a family member that's in the early stages? Are we seeing any benefits from this strategy?

Dr. Mattson:   29:53
Well, the trials in humans with Alzheimer's disease or what's called mild cognitive impairment, which at least in some people, people with clearly detectable problems with short term memory. They're definitely at increased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. What we do know is that intermittent fasting can shift some risk factors for Alzheimer's in the right direction and specifically, type two diabetes is a risk factor now. It's pretty well recognized. Maybe long term obesity or overweight, you know throughout life. Then, inflammation is reduced and inflammation, as in a lot of chronic diseases. Cardiovascular disease, there's inflammation of the blood vessels, and actually cancers often involve inflammation. And in Alzheimer's disease there's local inflammation in the brain. And so animal studies show that intermittent fasting can reduce inflammation in the brain. We also know that there's good evidence that exercise, regular exercise, during adult life reduces risk for Alzheimer's and also keeping intellectually engaged and socially engaged. And that gets back to what I was talking about by activity in nerve cell networks in the brain It's good for those nerve cell networks. Exercising your brain cells is good for them just as exercising your muscles. So those three things, regular exercise, keeping your brain active and perhaps intermittent fasting eating pattern, could make it less likely that you'll develop cognitive impairment when you get old.

Dr. Cooper:   31:40
So those are in terms of reducing future risk or current risk factors that would affect the future. How about the person whose mom's seeing this or Dad is seeing this or whatever. Could they, do we have any encouraging data saying, if you then start, we're already there were already starting to see the decline. If we then start a pattern of intermittent fasting, it seems to push it back a little bit. It seems to keep that curve from dropping off as fast..

Dr. Mattson:   32:08
Such studies remain to be done, but there are studies suggesting that ketones through ketone or medium chain triglycerides may be beneficial. That's based in part on the work of Dr Steve Cunan up at Vancouver who used what's called positron emission tomography, PET scanning methods to show that nerve cells in the brains of people with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer's disease, they're not able to use glucose very well.. Certainly not normally, and however they're still able to use ketones. So there's some excitement now about the potential for elevating ketones. In theory, intermittent fasting should be beneficial not only for the ketones but what we talked about before. Changes in activity in neural circuits in the brain in response to the fasting.

Dr. Cooper:   33:07
So if it were you, we don't have research on this yet. But if it were you, you would give it a shot because you see certain indications that potential is more than 50/50 it's gonna help. 

Dr. Mattson:   33:19
Yes. 

Dr. Cooper:   33:20
Okay, good. Just a couple more. Any contraindications, our listeners need to be aware of this. As they're talking to folks and people say, I'm gonna do this thing. Any contraindications that they need to bring to the forefront of those conversations?

Dr. Mattson:   33:31
Little children, women who are pregnant and who have not previously been adapted to intermittent fasting. Although research still needs to be done there because we don't know for sure. We know now, for example, in medicine, there's a lot of myths that have been overturned. Starting with if you have a heart attack, you should not over exert yourself. You should rest. You don't want to stress your heart Well, we know that's the worst thing you can do. Pregnant women now are encouraged to get some exercise, and as you know, there are some women who were running marathons while they're pregnant. And then little children who are growing rapidly. There is some interest, though, from the standpoint of obesity. Childhood obesity is at a dramatic increase recently, and I've talked to parents who you know, they were doing intermittent fasting. Their child was way overweight. These are like middle school aged kids and what they did, is that essentially, they got their kid to shift to their own, to the parents intermittent fasting meeting pattern, and then they claim the kid was able to lose weight. So you know that I would submit that three meals a day, plus snacks is an abnormal eating pattern from an evolutionary perspective. And that most people can adapt to it. One contraindication would be elderly, frail people, and people who already have a very low body mass index.

Dr. Cooper:   35:08
Last question. Any final words of wisdom for folks that are trying to help others improve their health and wellness, or just trying to improve their own, either health and wellness or their performance when it comes to intermittent fasting?

Dr. Mattson:   35:18
The first is what I mentioned is that it takes up to a month to adapt to an intermittent fasting eating pattern. And, a vast majority of people will adapt so that it's no problem adapting to their new lifestyle eating pattern. So people may want to do it with friends or spouse or so on. So it's always nice when you're doing something like that, whether it's an exercise program or something like changing your eating patterns, have someone to talk to and kind of cheerlead each other, encourage each other From the workplace standpoint, it's interesting. There are a number of companies in Silicon Valley, the big companies that many of their employees are switched to intermittent fasting eating pattern as kind of a group thing. They're doing it mainly because they think, and I think they're probably right, it can enhance their cognition and productive creativity and productivity. In their case, they don't have to be more creative about finding food in a food sparse environment. But they can be, maybe translates to more creativity and whatever the software they're developing,

Dr. Cooper:   36:35
Yeah, that's gotta be attractive to everybody. Very good. Well, thank you so much. You're so busy. You've got so much going on. You're one of the foremost experts in this, and I just really appreciate you taking the time. So thanks for diving in with us. And what's the best way for folks to keep track of you? Is there a website you'd like them to go to?Are you on Twitter? What's the best way if people want to tap into more of this?

Dr. Mattson:   36:57
No, I'm not on Twitter. If people want to know some my scientific publications and I've written a number of review articles that at least they're partially understandable by most people. They're welcome to shoot me an email that if they go on Google and my Hopkins Web page now has my contact information. I prefer email rather than phone.

Dr. Cooper:   37:21
Okay, very good. Well, we will mention that in the intro. And again really appreciate the time.

Dr. Mattson:   37:26
Okay, Brad, have a good rest of the day.

Dr. Cooper:   37:28
You too, take care. What an honor to have Dr Mattson join us. We really appreciate him taking the time to provide his insights. For the coaches out there, just reminder it's not our job to tell people what to do or to recommend an eating plan. But we must be aware of the evidence and be aware of the research that our clients may find helpful as they consider the best path for their lives. You clearly won't find anyone better than Dr Mattson when it comes to evidence based insights on the topic of intermittent fasting. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoy the podcast, please share it with others. A special big time thank you to those who have provided encouraging reviews on iTunes, as my understanding is, that really helps people find us when they're looking for various podcasts. Now let's go get better. One step, one decision, one day at a time. Today, folks, today is our opportunity. Let's make the most of it. This is Dr Bradford Cooper signing off. Make it a great rest your week and I'll speak with you soon on the next episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness and Performance Podcast.