United States: Scientists have found that taking breaks from eating a lot of food, called intermittent calorie restriction, can help change things in both our stomach and brain. This discovery could help people keep a healthy weight and fight obesity.
Chinese researchers looked at 25 adults with obesity and invited them to adhere to the IER plan for 62 days to monitor their compliance and the effects of a regime that is characterized by determined calorie intake and occasional fasting.
As reported by the sciencealert.com, not only did the participants and people in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 per cent of their body weight on average – there was also documented changes in the activity of obesity-related areas of the brain, as well as the density of gut microbiota.
“Here we demonstrate that an IER diet shifts the human brain-gut-microbiome,” said health researchers Qiang Zeng from the Second Medical Center and National Clinical Research Center for Geriatric Diseases in China at the time of The results were published in December 2023.
“The observed alterations which is in the gut microbiota and activity within the addiction-related limbic circuits during and after weight loss are highly synchronized in time.”
While the changes occur, there is no understanding of what sparks these changes or whether it is the gut that is communicating with the brain. We do know that gut and the brain are linked and therefore treating certain regions of the brain could be a way of managing food intake.
Befitting the characteristic of the subjects and the scans which were to reveal alterations in the brain, specific on the inferior frontal orbital gyrus and other brain areas that are involved in the regulation of appetite as well as that which addresses addiction, the alterations that were detected were observed using fMRI scans.
Notably, the alterations in the gut microbiome, profiles of which were determined from stool samples and blood biomarkers, were associated with specific brain areas.
For instance, a relationship between Coprococcus comes and Eubacterium hallii was inversely correlated with activity in the left inferior frontal orbital gyrus that is a fast-functioning center of our will power over food intake in relation to the executive functions.