Dr. Mark Mattson on Intermitent Fasting and his new book: A Causes or Cures Podcast

Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I invite you to check out my latest Causes or Cures Podcast with Neuroscientist Dr. Mark Mattson. He is a repeat guest on Causes or Cures, having come on in 2019, when the podcast was just getting started, to discuss the potential health benefits of intermittent fasting.  I’ve been interested in intermittent fasting  for a while, particularly how you weed out the benefits due to intermittent fasting versus calorie reduction, but as you’ll learn in the podcast, we still have a ways to go in the research world to understand that more fully. At any rate, my audio editing skills have evolved since 2019 (hooray!) so hopefully this podcast sounds a little better. It’s tough recording in a NYC apartment– you are always competing with street noise, hallway noise, my dog barking, and my favorite, fights in the communal laundry room. But, I do the best I can.

Specifically, what is new in this episode vs the 2019 episode?

In this episode of Causes or Cures,  I’ll chat with Dr. Mark Mattson about his new book titled, The Intermittent Fasting Revolution: The Science of Optimizing Health and Enhancing Performance. I ordered a copy on Amazon and read it and encourage you guys to do the same. You don’t have to be “into” intermittent fasting or even a fan of it, but you will learn something if you read the book.

As a reminder, Dr. Mark Mattson is a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, the former chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute of Aging and someone who has done a lot of research on intermittent fasting. The National Institute of Health (NIH) considers him one of the world’s top experts on the potential health benefits of intermittent fasting. And guys…there are a lot of people giving advice on intermittent fasting online, particularly on Instagram and Tiktok. I’m not saying what they are saying is wrong, but many of them don’t actually do the research, have scientific backgrounds or have had their sleeves rolled up in the science for decades, so please, ALSO take time to listen to the people doing the research and writing the studies.

In the podcast, he will discuss how food scarcity sculpted the brain, including creativity and imagination; why 3 meals a day (plus a snack) isn’t the best nutritional advice; the mechanisms of how intermittent fasting slows aging and prevents specific diseases; why stuffing our bodies with antioxidants may not be the best idea and why some “free radicals” are necessary; what hormesis means and why exercise and intermittent fasting are “good” kinds of stress; how intermittent fasting increases cortisol, but neurons respond differently to cortisol produced by intermittent fasting vs, say, chronic lifestyle stress. He will talk about how intermittent fasting relates to “old cells”, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and autism. He will discuss a ketone ester that is on the market and finally, why we have an “ass backwards” health system.

To order Dr. Mark Mattson’s book, go here.

To listen to the Causes or Cures Podcast with Dr. Mark Mattson, please go here.

I realize I hadn’t posted a podcast in a month, but dayjob work takes priority and I do the podcast when I can. It’s not a paid gig. That said and for those who have asked, if you want to support the podcast so I can continue to keep it ad and subscription free, you can hit the “support the show” link on the podcast or, even better, you can purchase one of my books and read those: Manic Kingdom or ( and this one is very quirky)- Yours in Wellness, Krystal Heeling.

If you are interested in the work I do, you can learn more here.  

And definitely check out some of the other podcast episodes, such as:

A Nasal Spray for COVID in the Works