Beyond Resveratrol: The Anti-Aging NAD Fad
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Far be it from me to preach to anyone else about their health maintenance strategies, but I can't help noticing that you can enjoy all the apparent benefits of caloric restriction by simple expedient of limiting your food intake and engaging in periodic fasting. People seem obsessed with the ability to have their cake and eat it, rather than put up with feeling hungry some of the time.
The first Google result on the term is pretty good: http://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fa...
At its simplest, for men it means eating all your food for the day in a roughly eight-hour window, often noon to 8pm. (There is apparently some scientific thought that women may have significantly different needs; I really can't speak to that.) In practical terms, this translates to "skipping breakfast" and avoiding midnight snacks. This turns out not to be that difficult, but has definitely had an positive impact on me, so far. Discomfort-wise for me, I tend to get a bit of a rumbly tummy around 10am, but generally it subsides pretty quickly and even by 11am I can easily go for another couple of hours without even thinking about lunch if I get busy. It is far from constant hunger. (But I won't lie and say it's zero... just, negligible. Literally. It can easily be neglected and it will in fact go away.) I can also say that I'm hardly watching the clock in the evening and trying to judge whether it's the crack of 8pm yet or not... I often eat at noon-thirty or 1pm and then dinner at 6pm and am done thinking about food for the day, without any willpower expended. It just happens.
I say this mostly to point out to people that there is something to investigate that they may have misconceptions about, as I did. I will fully and up-front admit once again I am not in a position to extol its benefits particularly. (I like to do something like this for at least a couple of years before I do that.)
(But I will go slightly out on a limb and say that I would not be all that surprised to discover that "intermittent fasting" has somewhere between 80-120% of the benefit of the scientifically-studied high caloric-restriction diets, with much lower willpower and discomfort costs. It turns out that if you dig into those, we've really only studied "normal (modern) diet", "heavily calorically restricted", and sometimes a particularly unrealistic fasting schedule (see link), so if you're interested in a point in the middle of the two we've studied, you're sort of scientifically on your own. Hence the possibility I cite of 120%; currently it would fit the two data points we have just fine for it to turn out that "caloric restriction" isn't the optimum and is in fact overshooting.)
With regards to this form of diet, I've found it to be successful for keeping me from overeating, and I rarely run into days when I think, "Man, I should've had more to eat." (NB: These days do happen, but they're usually days when I'm unusually physically active, like going for a run and two 1+ hour martial arts classes in the same day. That is, things that most people won't encounter and that an extra serving of protein at lunch probably would've resolved.)
(There's a blog post bubbling in my head about how Everything I Was Told About Health As A Child Was Entirely Wrong. Not just sort of wrong, but "everyone needs to eat three meals a day"-is-also-wrong levels of absolutely, positively everything I was told is wrong. The only thing I can think of that was true is that exercise is important, but even then, there was a radical overemphasis on aerobic exercise when I now believe the correct focus for most people is strength training.)
Are you seriously suggesting that it builds character? Honest question, because if you are, it would seem that fasting for that purpose alone would be a good idea.
I find it taught the idea just because you're hungry didn't mean you have to eat.
A lot of people seem to think their hunger has the right to control actions. It doesn't. Being hungry is ok and normal.
Like air conditioning making people less tolerant to the heat.
Character building benefit / Cost, I'm not so sure, lots believe it does though.
With health benefits, definitely worth it IMO. But it takes willpower.
My character is strong enough, thanks.
I'd say it helped build character. Regarding going hungry, when you're out on the trail and have 10 miles left to hike and no time to stop for lunch because you know a storm is coming in and you need to set up camp, you learn that you really don't need to eat every time your stomach growls. You also learn how to be dependable for those in your group, and how to depend on others without becoming dependent on them.
I miss this feeling... and wish to echo your sentiment. Hiking with 'just enough' is a great way to discover just how little we truly need to be alright.
That's nice. I lived that way throughout large chunks of my childhood.
Camping is fun. Living it as a lifestyle sucks.
1. It's broken my 'boredom' eating habit.
2. I wanted to comfort myself with food when stressed. It's broken that habit too.
Feeling hungry usually kills my concentration especially in early stages (I remember first day being the worst and later you sort of get used to it). And in general I feel weaker and drained.
Although sometimes when I "get in the zone" I actually forget about food for the entire day - usually when I need to do work and I'm not particularly motivated being hungry would make me irritable - I would probably do 1/3 of the work I would normally do.
This is the point, isn't it? For me, not only fasting does not make me weak or unconcentrated - quite the opposite. My fasting days are the days I'm feeling the best. And the added benefit is that I have so much more time because I don't need to worry about cooking and eating. Oh and the opposite too ... :)
Why is it though? I think it is just because I came over the initial obstacle, became used to fasting and now it is just as natural to me as normal eating pattern.
Was it worth it, though? After all, there is little chance I will actually experience real shortage of food so my "skill" is useless in practice. Well, one thing is that there is a growing number of studies that show health benefits. The other is that I am sure it carries over to other aspects of life - i.e. being trained to voluntary restrain from food, it's easier to restrain from impulse purchases or apply any other restrictions. Plus, I believe (with no studies that I know of to support that) that having a body that is more "robust" - that can operate equally well both during feast and famine - is a positive thing.
After the 7th day I did start to suffer weakness, and I had a busy schedule at work, which put a limit on how long I could fast. The night of the 10th night I slept for 16 hours. The 11th day (a Saturday) I walked 10 kilometers, but it was much more difficult than walking 12 kilometers 4 days earlier.
I doubt I'll ever again do 11 days when I'm working. Maybe on vacation, but not when I have work to do. However, doing 7 days is something I plan to do this month. Because 7 days without food imposed no limits on me, at all.
It has health benefits, it imposes no burden, and it's easy to do. I don't think we need to wait for a drug to be invented, when the solution is so easy and available.
Well, it's kinda obvious - the drug would let you avoid feeling hungry - the main reason most people never try fasting.
That it could be patented and sold, as could be the drugs that combat the side effects of the drugs invented to combat side effects.
I did 36 hour fasts, then I did 48 hour fasts, then I went for 3 days, then for 4, finally for 5 - over a course of several years actually. May try a longer fast in the future, but my current schedule is to have a weekly 36 hour fast - at least, most weeks.
My longest fast was 5 days. My personal experience was that starting from day 3 I was a little "lethargic" or basically slow in the morning, but that feeling went away fairly soon, and by 10 AM I was operating as normal.
But things like climbing up the stairs got noticeably more difficult, even though I'm a physically active person. I would not dare walking 12 kilometers while fasting, except maybe shortly before breaking of the fast.
Anyway - no noticeable hunger, no nausea or vomiting and the bowel movements also stopped on day 1 or 2, so quite a fun experience overall.
It's great that you're seeing benefits, but I wanted to bring this to your attention (and anyone else doing long-term fasting) in case you hadn't already heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome. In particular, "any individual who has had negligible nutrient intake for more than 5 consecutive days is at risk of refeeding syndrome".
I don't know in practice _how_ big the risks are - I've been meaning to get an official medical opinion for some time - but I've started trying to take it into account for my fasts (usually two or three days) and plan accordingly (drinking rehydration salts while fasting, and breaking the fast slowly, with plenty of milk for phosphates).
Apologies if you already knew about this.
Although I agree that "the ability to have the cake and eat it" (i.e. the gluttony motive) can be prevalent, I'd say that the most important factor is the conception of eating, not only as a physiological need, but as a social ritual.
My personal experience is that while I can (very) easily restrict calorie intake, I'm less inclined to do so with friends and colleagues when invited to share meals. Take a "protocol" such as the "Internet-popular" intermittent fasting; if I'm invited to lunch with colleagues and if my girlfriend wants to have dinner somewhere, my fasting period for the day will be seriously harder to achieve. I could juggle with the scheduled hours for the meals, but then I'd be "imposing". It's doable, but not something I actually want. I don't share that many meals, so I can be compliant with my diet; but this is just not true for many people.
Kurzweil wrote on this topic in 2013 [1].
Nobody seems to mention that the NAD precursor NR is a Vitamin B3 variant, that would make it seem less special. It does seem to have unique properties, Examine.com states [2]:
Nicotinamide riboside is a relatively new form of
Vitamin B3 supplementation that appears to be
active following oral ingestion in animals
The chief scientist at Elysium states his daily supplements are Elysium's product, Vitamin D and Aspirin [3]. The latter two are well supported by research.
[1]: http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-new-and-reversible-cause-of-agin...
[2]: http://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-b3/#summary1-2
[3]: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/blog/qa-with-elysium-co-founder...
EDIT: brain switched Aspirin, it's late here.
"I take BASIS, as well as vitamin D (2500 IU daily) and aspirin (82 mg daily)."
For the same amount of money, actual, serious rejuvenation of the double the remaining healthy life span following treatments type could be built in mice by following the SENS vision of repairing the cell and tissue damage that causes aging [1]. People should be chasing that dream.
Inside the scientific community, it is completely rational from a short term career still have a job a few years from now perspective to be investigating metabolism and the end state of a disease/old metabolism and proposing drug candidates that might slightly alter the situation for the better. That is the proven path to getting grants awarded, to moving with the grain of the system that wants drug candidates based on metabolic alteration that do a little bit of good, and no-one really cares that you're tinkering with proximate causes, not root causes, trying to get a little bit more mileage out of a damaged engine rather than fixing the damage.
It's a mess of perverse incentives. The only way to break out of the hole of misallocated funded (or at least misallocated if your goal is to effectively treat aging as a medical condition rather than, say, gain more data on the fine details of metabolism, or further your career within the system) is to bootstrap SENS therapies to the point of showing that you get far better results for far less funding, and with far less work.
Fortunately this is starting to happen. See, for example:
1) amyloid clearance: http://www.uclb.com/news-and-events/news-post/potential-new-...
2) senescent cell clearance: http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2015/20150309agingcell.htm...
3) mitochondrial DNA damage bypass: http://www.gensight-biologics.com/index.php?page=mts
There are others moving into startups for development; more senescent cell clearance at Oisin Biotech, clearance of metabolic waste products that contribute to atherosclerosis at Human Rejuvenation Technologies. And so on.
Billions have been spent on the investigation of sirtuins and other excessively hyped alleged paths to ways to slightly, slightly slow down the aging process. They have gone nowhere, produced nothing beyond more knowledge of metabolism. It is well past time to accept that that game is broken, it's a path to nowhere other that the comprehensive mapping of cellular metabolism: very useful for the next generation of science, but not a road to extending healthy life and eliminating age-related frailty and disease. The only way to achieve that end is to repair the root causes of aging. For so long as the majority of the research community insists on metabolic tinkering that can in principle only achieve marginal results, progress to meaningful therapies will be slow.
For some silly reason HN doesn't let you change or retract your vote.
Best first sentence introducing a scientific text, as far as I can remember ...
But I challenge you - got something more intriguing?