• Fasting may make it harder to fight infections and increase your risk of heart disease.
• The study demonstrates that the immune and nervous systems communicate with one another.
• The connection between the brain and these immune cells during fasting has been established for the first time in this study.

Fasting may make it harder to fight infections and increase your risk of heart disease, according to a recent Medicine study. One of the first studies to show that skipping meals causes the brain to react in a way that harms immune cells is this one that focused on models of mice. The findings, which focus on breakfast, were published in the journal Immunity and may assist researchers in comprehending the effects of prolonged fasting on the body.

“There is indeed a wealth of evidence for the benefits of fasting, and there is a growing awareness that fasting is healthy. “This is a mechanistic study delving into some of the fundamental biology relevant to fasting,” said lead author Filip Swirski, PhD, Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at Icahn Mount Sinai. “Our study provides a word of caution because it suggests that there may also be a cost to fasting that carries a health risk.” The study demonstrates that the immune and nervous systems communicate with one another.

The researchers wanted to learn more about how the immune system is affected by fasting, which ranged from a brief fast of a few hours to a longer fast of 24 hours. They looked at two kinds of mice. As their largest meal of the day, one group ate breakfast immediately upon waking, while the other group skipped breakfast. When the mice first awoke (baseline), four hours later, and eight hours later, the researchers took blood samples from both groups.

The researchers noticed a clear difference in the fasting group’s blood work. The number of monocytes, which are white blood cells that are made in the bone marrow and travel throughout the body to play a variety of important roles, including fighting infections, heart disease, and cancer, was specifically found to be different.

All mice had the same number of monocytes at baseline. However, monocytes in the fasting group of mice showed significant changes after four hours. Ninety percent of these cells disappeared from the bloodstream after eight hours, according to the researchers. Monocytes in the group that did not fast were unaffected.

Researchers discovered that monocytes travel back to the bone marrow to hibernate in fasting mice. In parallel, bone marrow production of new cells decreased. The bone marrow’s monocytes, which typically have a short lifespan, underwent significant change. Because they were in the bone marrow, they lived longer and developed differently than monocytes that were in the blood.

After reintroducing food, the researchers continued to fast the mice for up to 24 hours. Within a few hours, the cells that had been hidden in the bone marrow surged back into the bloodstream. The degree of inflammation increased as a result of this surge. These altered monocytes were more inflammatory than they were anti-infective, making the body less effective at fighting infections.

The connection between the brain and these immune cells during fasting has been established for the first time in this study. During fasting, the monocyte response was found to be controlled by specific brain regions. This study demonstrated that a stress response in the brain is elicited by fasting, which is what causes people to feel “hangry” (hungry, hungry, and angry). This stress response immediately causes a large-scale migration of these white blood cells from the blood to the bone marrow, where they remain until food is reintroduced.

This new study is a useful step forward in our complete comprehension of the body’s mechanisms, despite the fact that there is also evidence of the metabolic benefits of fasting.

“The study demonstrates that, on the one hand, fasting reduces the number of circulating monocytes, which one might consider to be beneficial considering that these cells play a significant role in inflammation. On the other hand, when food is brought back into the body, a lot of monocytes flood back into the blood, which can be bad. “Because these cells are so important to other diseases like heart disease or cancer, understanding how their function is controlled is critical,” stated Dr. Swirski. “Fasting, therefore regulates this pool in ways that are not always beneficial to the body’s capacity to respond to a challenge such as an infection.”

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