To better understand how diet influences brain aging, we focus here on the presymptomatic period during which prevention may be most effective. Large-scale life span neuroimaging datasets show functional communication between brain regions destabilizes with age, typically starting in the late 40s, and that destabilization correlates with poorer cognition and accelerates with insulin resistance. Targeted experiments show that this biomarker for brain aging is reliably modulated with consumption of different fuel sources: Glucose decreases, and ketones increase the stability of brain networks. This effect replicated across both changes to total diet as well as fuel-specific calorie-matched bolus, producing changes in overall brain activity that suggest that network “switching” may reflect the brain’s adaptive response to conserve energy under resource constraint.

To better understand how diet influences brain aging, we focus here on the presymptomatic period during which prevention may be most effective. Large-scale life span neuroimaging datasets show functional communication between brain regions destabilizes with age, typically starting in the late 40s, and that destabilization correlates with poorer cognition and accelerates with insulin resistance. Targeted experiments show that this biomarker for brain aging is reliably modulated with consumption of different fuel sources: Glucose decreases, and ketones increase the stability of brain networks. This effect replicated across both changes to total diet as well as fuel-specific calorie-matched bolus, producing changes in overall brain activity that suggest that network “switching” may reflect the brain’s adaptive response to conserve energy under resource constraint.