Time-restricted feeding prevents memory impairments induced by obesogenic diet consumption in mice, in part through hippocampal thyroid hormone signaling.
The consumption of calorie-rich diet has adverse effects on short and long-term memory, especially when introduced early in life when the brain is still under maturation. Time-restricted feeding (TRF) without calorie restriction has proven to be an efficient strategy to reduce the deleterious effects of diet-induced obesity on metabolism. TRF was also found beneficial to restore long-term memory in Alzheimer rodent models. Here, we show that 4 weeks of TRF restores the rhythmicity of some metabolic parameters together with short and long-term memory in mice fed a high fat-high sucrose (HFS) diet since weaning. Hippocampal translatome analyses indicated that impaired memory of mice under HFS ad libitum diet is accompanied by changes in genes associated to thyroid hormone signaling and astrocytic genes involved in the regulation of glutamate neurotransmission. TRF restored the diurnal variation of expression of part of these genes and intra-hippocampal infusion of T3, the active form of thyroid hormone rescued the memory performances of ad libitum HFS diet-fed mice. Thus, TRF has positive actions on metabolism as well as memory to fight obesity and its comorbidity in mice. The analogous time-restricted eating in humans is an easy to implement lifestyle intervention that should now be tested in obese adolescent with memory alterations.