Living longer is good, living longer in good health is better! For the past few years, researchers have been exploring anything that could shorten that time interval in poor health before we die. Admit it: living to a certain age, in full health, and suddenly disappearing, that would be the dream.
Unfortunately, in real life, we are confronted with the diseases of old age, one of the most common being the decline of our cognitive functions, which is often summarized, wrongly, with “Alzheimer’s disease” which is in fact a particular case of cognitive decline.
This decline is linked to the fact that at some point, new connections between brain neurons are no longer created in the brain. This is the very basis of the proper functioning of the brain. These connections are made, as we know, thanks to a protein called Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, abbreviated as BDNF. But hasWith age, there is a decline in this protein in the brain, hence cognitive decline.
6-minute sessions of cycling reduce the risk of cognitive decline
Animal model studies, i.e. laboratory mice, show that the production of BDNF in the body can be promoted without resorting to medication. The first way, I was talking about it a few weeks ago, is intermittent fasting. For what ? During a fast of several hours, we draw our energy from our fat reserves and also from the lactate produced by the activity of our muscles. To fuel, the brain therefore passes from glucose to ketone bodies and lactate, and that stimulates the production of this famous protein BDNF.
But that’s not all. A team from the University of Otago in New Zealand has discovered, this time thanks to human volunteers, the means to further increase this production of BDNF. The researchers studied the concentration in the blood plasma of two groups: one with a normal diet and the other subjected to a 20-hour fast, on which they tested: no physical activity, moderate physical activity and intense physical activity for short periods of time, called interval training. Concretely: 6-minute sessions of high-intensity cycling.
Thus, in fasters, we observe a little more BDNF. But in the group of intensive athletes, the rate of BDNF jumped. Remember we are fasting, the brain no longer has glucose to feed itself, but it has lactate produced by the muscles in full effort. And this shift from glucose to lactate would stimulate our brain.
