Could Fasting Calm Your Pain?

If you're over 50 and dealing with nagging back pain, aching joints, nerve pain or another chronic condition, you've probably tried plenty of ways to get some relief.

Now researchers have found an intriguing new clue: fasting may influence how the body processes chronic pain.

But there's an important catch. This wasn't a study of men—or even people. It was a study of mice. So don't mistake an interesting laboratory finding for a proven treatment.

Still, the results are worth paying attention to.

The Gut May Have More to Do With Pain Than We Thought

Scientists are increasingly interested in the connection between the gut and the brain.

Your digestive system isn't simply a food-processing machine. The trillions of microorganisms living in your gut can influence inflammation, metabolism, immune activity and signals traveling between the gut and nervous system.

Researchers at the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University wanted to see whether changing the way animals ate could affect chronic pain and some of the mental problems that can accompany it.

They used several groups of male mice with experimentally induced long-term pain.

Some mice ate normally.

Others followed an aggressive form of intermittent fasting: they alternated between days when they could eat and days when they had no food. The experiment lasted 38 days. 

The results caught the researchers' attention.

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The Fasting Mice Showed Less Pain

Compared with the control animals, the fasting mice displayed reduced responses to painful heat across several pain models.

The researchers also observed improvements in some measures of cognitive problems. In one model involving nerve injury, fasting was associated with less anxiety-like behavior as well. 

That doesn't mean skipping dinner will make your bad knee stop hurting tomorrow.

What it does suggest is that the body's response to food—or the lack of it—may influence biological pathways involved in chronic pain.

And that's where the study gets particularly interesting.

The Gut Bacteria Connection

The researchers noticed that fasting changed the animals' gut microbiome.

One species in particular, Alistipes finegoldii, increased substantially in the fasting animals.

Then came an even more interesting experiment.

Researchers introduced the bacteria into non-fasting mice. Many of the effects associated with fasting—including effects on pain and anxiety-like behavior—could be reproduced.

In other words, the food restriction itself may not be the entire story.

The real action may involve what happens to the gut bacteria and the chemicals they produce when eating patterns change.

One Chemical May Be Part of the Puzzle

The researchers identified another possible piece of the chain: a substance called hippuric acid.

The study suggests that changes involving the gut bacterium, hippuric acid and an immune-signaling pathway known as STING may influence inflammation in the nervous system.

That's a mouthful of biology, but the basic idea is fairly simple:

What happens in your gut may influence inflammation and pain signals elsewhere in your body.

Scientists now have a potential pathway to investigate—and perhaps eventually target with new treatments.

Don't Call It a Cure Yet

Here's where some headlines can get ahead of the science.

This study does not prove that intermittent fasting treats chronic pain in humans.

It doesn't establish the best fasting schedule for people. It doesn't prove that fasting will work for arthritis, back pain or neuropathy. And the mice were subjected to a much more extreme fasting regimen than the eating schedules commonly described as intermittent fasting.

Human research will be needed before anyone can say whether these findings translate into meaningful pain relief for men and women.

That's especially important if you're older or take prescription medications. Major changes to eating patterns can have consequences, particularly for people with medical conditions or medications that depend on regular food intake.

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But There's a Bigger Lesson

The interesting part of this research isn't simply "fasting might reduce pain."

It's the possibility that chronic pain is influenced by more than the injured joint, damaged nerve or aching muscle.

The immune system, nervous system, metabolism and gut microbiome may all be connected.

For someone who's spent years trying to manage chronic pain, that's potentially important.

Researchers may eventually find ways to manipulate these pathways without requiring people to endure severe fasting—or without relying exclusively on traditional pain medications.

For now, however, consider this a promising scientific clue, not a prescription.

The researchers have identified a fascinating connection between fasting, gut bacteria and pain in mice. The next question is the one that matters most:

Does the same mechanism work in humans?

We don't know yet.

But it's a question worth answering.