It sounds like a form of torture. Consuming nothing but at least a litre of water a day for 25 to 30 days.
But behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s, psychiatrist Dr Yuri Nikolayev was treating patients at a Moscow sanatorium with a radical form of fasting that was hailed by American orthomolecular psychiatrist Dr Allan Cott as an “unparalleled achievement” in restoring schizophrenics to full function.1
What first surprised Nikolayev was that his mentally ill patients suffering depression, phobias and obsessive syndromes also showed improvements in physical conditions such as hypertension, arthritis, asthma and eczema. Smokers quit their addiction, and even alcoholics became near-teetotalers.
“Fasting not only has an impact on mental illness, but also the entire personality,” said Dr Valeri Gurvich, a psychiatrist at the Moscow Psychiatric Institute who worked under Nikolayev for 18 years.2
The finding suggested that improvements in systemic health naturally flow through to the alleviation of mood disorders, whether or not mental illness is the primary target of treatment.
Seven decades later, what we now know about the neurochemistry of the brain is shedding light on why Nikolayev's work was so successful, and how less radical forms of this therapy—such as intermittent fasting—can improve depression through metabolic detoxification.
Intermittent fasting includes hours or days of no or minimal food consumption without deprivation of essential nutrients. The most common versions are alternate-day fasting, 5:2 fasting (fasting two days each week) and daily time-restricted fasting, such as only eating during six- or eight-hour windows (see page 37).
A review of research into intermittent fasting published in in 2020, coauthored by professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University Dr Mark Mattson, noted that weight loss was not the main driver of the health benefits shown by clinical studies. Instead, it is metabolic switching, when fasting triggers
