Normally, we are told to maintain a low calorie diet for the sake of losing weight or avoiding weight gain. Many modern diets are beginning to preach against maintaining a low calorie diet because there are more effective and less annoying ways to lose weight. Quite frankly, it can be a true pain to count calories regularly just for the sake of losing weight. This is especially the case when you can lose weight just as effectively while eating all that you want while doing a diet like Keto.
But recent research has given us another reason to expend the energy maintaining a low calorie diet. Adhering to a low-calorie diet can actually have a protective effect against certain diseases because the number of calories a person consumes has a direct effect on the performance of various cells.
The research ran trials on mice. It demonstrated that a low calorie diet protects the brain from suffering from neuronal cell death. This is associated with cognitive and neural diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral vascular accident, and epilepsy. The study divided mice into two groups. Researchers calculated the average amount of calories the group without caloric restrictions would eat, then fed the other group 40 percent fewer calories.
The mice were injected with a substance used to cause seizures, neuronal cell death, and damage after sticking to their perspective diet for 14 weeks. The researchers discovered that the mice in the group lacking dietary restrictions had more seizures than the mice who had restricted calories.
This study isn’t entirely conclusive. Significantly more research needs to be done to confirm that low calorie diets are actually the reason for less seizures in the mice, and how they work exactly.