Fasting-Style Diet Seems to Result in Dynamic Changes to Human Brains

Fasting-Style Diet Seems to Result in Dynamic Changes to Human Brains

David Nield

Researchers from China studied 25 volunteers classed as obese over a period of 62 days, during which they took part in an intermittent energy restriction (IER) program – a regime that involves careful control of calorie intake and relative fasting on some days.

Not only did the participants in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 percent of their body weight on average – there was also evidence of shifts in the activity of obesity-related regions of the brain, and in the make-up of gut bacteria.

"Here we show that an IER diet changes the human brain-gut-microbiome axis," said health researcher Qiang Zeng from the Second Medical Center and National Clinical Research Center for Geriatric Diseases in China when the results were published in December 2023.

"The observed changes in the gut microbiome and in the activity in addiction-related brain regions during and after weight loss are highly dynamic and coupled over time."

Fasting-Style Diet Seems to Result in Dynamic Changes to Human Brains

David Nield

This isn't very interesting, because it is common sense that there would be some sort of changes in the brain caused by any concerted effort to change behavior in any way decided on by a person. For instance there would also be brain changes if he decides to indulge himself and stimulate the pleasure centers by gorging on food for a couple of weeks, or by decided to get drunk every night. There are always many correlations between consciousness and brain neurological function and structure, but as we know but probably the investigators here don't, these correlations are just correlations and don't indicate that consciousness is generated by the brain.

This isn't very interesting, because it is common sense that there would be some sort of changes in the brain caused by any concerted effort to change behavior in any way decided on by a person. For instance there would also be brain changes if he decides to indulge himself and stimulate the pleasure centers by gorging on food for a couple of weeks, or by decided to get drunk every night. There are always many correlations between consciousness and brain neurological function and structure, but as we know but probably the investigators here don't, these correlations are just correlations and don't indicate that consciousness is generated by the brain.

I didn't really think about production vs transmission when I posted it.

I guess if nothing else it shows the close causal continuity between the mind and the exterior world, which suggests a Monism of sorts? And since the Physicalist faith is false it'd be one of the other options?

I didn't really think about production vs transmission when I posted it.

I guess if nothing else it shows the close causal continuity between the mind and the exterior world, which suggests a Monism of sorts? And since the Physicalist faith is false it'd be one of the other options?

This "close causal continuity" is very much limited to one particular mediating interface alone in the world (except for paranormal phenomena) - between the brain/body part of the material world and consciousness, and this functional interface very much appears to exist in order to enable basically immaterial consciousness to manifest itself in the material world. This looks to me to be much closer to interactive Dualism than to some sort of Monism.

This "close causal continuity" is very much limited to one particular mediating interface alone in the world (except for paranormal phenomena) - between the brain/body part of the material world and consciousness, and this functional interface very much appears to exist in order to enable basically immaterial consciousness to manifest itself in the material world. This looks to me to be much closer to interactive Dualism than to some sort of Monism.

Your hunger is sated by the substance of this world (food).

By using your mental will and fasting you alter the substance of the brain as well as the gut bacteria.

So there's a "two-way street" happening here. For the Dualist it'd be like adding extra if-ten statements to the rules of causality, which then implies a third higher substance at the level of the Designer-Programmer.

But to me this is a poor way to think of causality, even though I don't put that much stock in the Interaction Problem. It's less about "how do two substances interact?" and more that Dualism has to insist there are two distinct realities, and every interaction from body-to-mind and/or mind-to-body is yet another special "if-then" from the Designer(s).

The other issue I have with Dualism is it would extend not just to this reality, but also some of the afterlife realities. Even in a hyper-real NDE many people have bodies or witness bodies, which means you still have the observing consciousness and that which is presented as "external" to said consciousness. Even if you have a "subtle body" that has no internal organs let alone a brain, and is more like some kind of "energy form" with consciousness there would still be a "Hard Problem" then.

This issue is compounded by the fact that there are witnesses claiming events happening in this reality that are not connected to the afterlife or the dead. So our current reality also does not seem fundamentally different to the afterlife realities.

All to say it seems, IMO, to place our current reality on a spectrum rather than think of it as fundamentally distinct from the realities people claim to visit (in NDEs), temporarily reside in (Intermission Memories) or live on within as part of their "after life" (the dead communicating through mediums).

Admittedly we're getting quite far from the more mundane study, but as you say the study itself isn't all that interesting. It's the question of what the larger take-away is.