Intermittent fasting from dawn to sunset induces anticancer response
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Would really like to see this compared to another group with a similar level of calorie restriction but without the intermittent fasting. The question with intermittent fasting is really just "is it better than plain old calorie restriction". Seems like there's some evidence that points to "yes" and some evidence that points to "not really".
EDIT: To be clear, by "is it better" I meant aside from just adherence. I've used IF quite a bit myself and I find it much easier than eating frequent, small meals throughout the day if I want to be hypocaloric. There are a lot of claims around autophagy, a more favorable metabolic adaptation, better body composition, and in this case actual cancer treatment. That is what I would like to see evidence for.
If you increased the amount of fasting, I'd bet good money that people would lose more weight than on a calorie-equivalent diet. Intermittent fasting, in my experience, is helpful in sticking to a diet that is lower in calories because it allows you to eat satisfying meals.
https://www.edx.org/course/autophagy-research-behind-the-201...
The 18 hour claim may be supported by evidence, but there isn't any in this subthread so far.
All I can say is that we are a SaaS supported product, not an ad supported one. We are highly incentivized to protect your data.
The only thing I regret since the pandemic is drinking coffee. I try to limit the amount of sugar and almond milk I add, but I feel like it's impacting my diet some how.
EDIT: parent edited for the typo, but it originally read one mead a day... one very large mead. But where do you get your protein? Is there protein mead? How does this all mead diet work.
Your coffee should taste great without any milk much less sugar.
Are you using freshly roasted beans, with a burr grinder, and grinding just before brewing?
Use a $15 gram scale from Amazon and a $5 melita pour over paper filter holder and paper filter.
1 part of coffee to 15 to 18 parts water. So for a cup: 23 grams of coffee to 380 grams of water
For a brew method, immersion brewing (like an aeropress) is uncomplicated, fast and can make larger batches at once. Brew at ~205F for 2 minutes, extract gently, and add water if it tastes too strong. You can use that method to make a large batch at once and keep it in a thermos, or make coldbrew and then warm it up to ~160F. No need for a scale or constantly grinding the coffee, and you don't end up with a single lukewarm cup of pour-over.
For "fancy" coffee you can do the same, except instead of adding water you can add frothed hot 2% milk. And if you really just want a "coffee ritual": clean everything of old coffee residue, filter the water, bloom the coffee before brewing, wet the filter before extraction, and get your coffee:water ratio, temperature, and extraction time to match the roast. All of that and no hardware besides an aeropress.
There are volatile organic compounds in coffee that begin to dissipate and react with oxygen as soon as they are exposed to the air by being ground.
I’m no coffee snob, I’m not advocating a high end burr grinder, the cheapest one on Amazon will do (~$60).
Same with the brewing method. Aeropress is great too, but anyone can find Meltia pour over filter holders and filters for $5 at their grocery store.
If bitterness is a concern, people should also look for beans that are medium roast (which tend to be more balanced) or lighter (more acidic/sour).
I mean, what exactly is the mechanical difference of putting hot water through coffee grounds and a filter that differs when you do it in an aeropress vs. a dripper? And you think you're tasting enough of a difference to say one is horrible and one is amazing? Because the hot water and the ground coffee interacted slightly differently(?) between contraptions?
I do this test for all of my friends and they all fail. Unless it's the moka pot or french press because the lack of filter has you picking soot from your teeth. Those cups always rank last.
Not to derail the thread. But I seriously think you should do a blind test with someone who knows what they're doing. Just for fun.
My theory is that it's 75% placebo of having a coffee gimmick that everyone else is missing out on, and 25% the fact that an aeropress or whatever finally got someone to measure coffee grounds and time it for once instead of dumping a random amount of grounds into a drip filter and then drinking it when it's been sitting on the burner for 3 hours.
Oddly enough, I've actually done a blind taste test on multiple coffee systems systems: drip, aeropress, chemex (pour over), italian percolator, french press, keurig, manual espresso machine, and real espresso machine. We controlled for water temperature and mass, steep time, coffee type, coffee grind (with exceptions for specialized filters), coffee mass, packing pressure (similar pressures for similar types of brew methods).
There were ten of us in the test. We each did three tastings of each brew, with a 10 minute break between each round of tasting. Each round we wrote down guesses at brew methods, how much we enjoyed the taste, how much we enjoyed the smell, and the coffee's were shuffled between each round.
Analyzing the results was interesting, and gave some insights into similarity categories between them. For example, everyone identified the espresso brews correctly, but some people misidentified the percolator brew as being an espresso brew during the first tasting, then correctly identified the espresso during their second or third. The aeropress was also misidentified as both the manual espresso and the percolator.
There were a few more interesting conclusions, but the total average accuracy was something like 70%.
I think humanity could benefit a lot from more citizen sience, especially in non-fundable Arras (such as coffie brewing/tasting ;)
If you start out with mediocre beans, they'll tend to taste more or less the same as other mediocre beans, no matter how they're ground and brewed.
If you take good beans, grind them within a few days of roasting, and brew them within a few hours of grinding, you will start to notice a very significant difference in taste, regardless of brewing method.
I admit that my test was not blind or scientific by any means, but I didn't know much about the brewing methods back then, so at least I wasn't swayed by any preconceived ideas of how they should taste. Also, it's entirely possible that most people would fail this test, but IME most people also don't particularly care how their coffee tastes. This is evidenced by the popularity of Starbucks, which trades flavor for consistency by over-roasting their coffee.
The moka pot is miles ahead of all the rest in terms of flavor and texture. It isn't quite as creamy and rich as a good shot of espresso, but it's pretty darn close for what it is. It's certainly better than a mediocre espresso, like you might get at a drive-through coffee shack (could be my beans more than anything, hard to know for sure). There is a pressure buildup and a rapid extraction time with the moka pot that certainly changes the interaction between hot water and ground coffee. If you are picking grounds from your teeth with a moka pot you are 100% doing it wrong and probably ruining the coffee in the process.
I don't bother with the chemex (isn't this just a retro style of pour over?) and aeropress because I'm not really into gimmicks :)
The best coffee maker I had was 20€ no-brand from grocery store corner shelf. One of the worst offenders IMHO is the popular design icon Moccamaster.
You're not fasting.
and I've learnt that it's very hard to know when you're satisfied in terms of hunger, and full in terms of desire.
The level of food required to satiate my hunger seems to be quite different from when I am "full".
However, once the taste buds are firing, it’s pretty hard to stop eating mid meal. One way is to take a little bit of food away from all the other food, eat it, and then force yourself to sit there while your blood sugar catches up to tell you if you still need more.
This is why I suppose I don't enjoy eating when I am "starving" as we like to say when we haven't eaten in a while. I am so hungry that I can't even enjoy the meal because the hunger pangs I am feeling don't subdue until I am practically done with the meal, and sometimes, even afterwards.
Near impossible these days, I just had toast and coffee while scrolling through HN.
Eating while watching TV doesn't impact my eating choices.
Not that the remainder was easy, but it was a different kind of struggle - and noticeably easier than the first week.
This is only true up to a point. A colleague put me onto a fasting method called “Buchinger’s Fasting”. I fasted for around a week and a half, muscle maintenance was not a concern. After 3 days, your body burns through the glucose reserves and you get brain fog. After that, indeed, your body tried to break down muscle mass for fuel. The trick is to do some moderate exercise to keep your muscles in good condition. After a few days, your body finally turns to your fat reserves, and rapidly starts burning away fat. After the first 3 or so days, you actually become numb to the hunger and go into a slightly “high”, hunter gatherer alert mode that enabled our ancestors to search for food when hungry. It really brings home that being hungry and not being fed constantly is a normal part of human existence, and the industrial era, shoving food down our gullets constantly is making us sick and prevents natural healing within our bodies.
https://youtu.be/_ZG6lCgpPcA?t=480
wake up, do exercise, drink warm beverage, work, wait for hunger, eat breakfast/midday, take a powernap, work, last meal at 5-6pm.
If eating is part of your social or work life as it is for most people then not really. Or you're going to sit there sipping water while your family or your colleagues eat or have drinks which is miserable
You can also adjust your fasting windows to include one meal with family (as the person your responded to suggested, but you didn't actually reply to). Or only fast every other day. If you're fasting for a reason like to lose weight, then you'll have to decide if the goal is worth it to you.
If your social and/or work life heavily depends on eating together it might be part of the "problem" of why you need to lose weight in the first place.
This! My last boss used to be a "bon-vivant" guy, meaning he would particularly enjoy a nice meal with the occasional wine to go with it (please note this is pretty common in France) [0].
Two years after joining his team, I had gained quite some weight. I figured I had to eat less somehow, but I never had the impression that I was overeating. I also didn't want to skip to those meals with him. So I tried a few things:
* Pace myself with the wine. We would usually split a bottle among us. I actually enjoy wine, but don't particularly enjoy being tipsy, especially when I have to work. So win-win-win (see below)
* If there was some fruit available have that instead of cake, or skip desert altogether. Drinking the wine slowly leaves me with "something to do" while the others have desert, so they don't feel any pressure to hurry up.
* Go for more "filling" meals, meaning I looked for dishes with a bunch of vegetables. This would keep me full longer and I'd be less hungry in the evening, so also eating less. Another bonus is that I'd feel /really/ full and actually not want desert.
What I've found is that even though in the beginning the others would comment on my not having desert, they actually stopped having it themselves after a little while. The wine never actually went away, but we would occasionally only have a glass instead of a whole bottle.
The point is that I think people may feel there's a certain expectation to have a lunch a certain way. And it may be true in the sense that "it's common, so people expect it". But if you don't fully conform to it there doesn't seem to be any issue, pretty much no one seems to care [1] (except maybe if you think that you have to adhere to the expectation).
All this being said, I do appreciate that for people who enjoy nice meals it can be difficult to choose those "restrictions", especially when they're right in front of you.
[0] There never was any pressure to go along, especially since he was the kind to actively avoid talking shop at lunch. But, as the team would go out with him, I would have missed out on getting to know them. I should note that I'm not particularly outgoing and rather focused on my job, so random chats during the day wasn't exactly something I'd spontaneously do.
If people can endure that, then people can still be social at mealtimes and just get used to drinking some water or tea or whatever while they fast. Or coffee, mmmmm. They might feel a bit put out at first during lunch, but then again might enjoy the looks they get during dinner when they get to chow down with abandon. The big thing would be waiting until you're comfortable with the fasting so you're not making everyone around you uncomfortable with your body language (or worse, complaining or otherwise drawing attention to it).
it says no drinking as well, so not sure about the water, but I was surprised to read it, maybe they just meant drinks other than water.
I IF from post-dinner to lunch every day, and only drink water and plain coffee.
Fasting is ”easier” because you can get away with caring less about that stuff though.
On the flip side, I know multiple people who have tried the same and have your exact experience. Oddly enough, three of them had tried keto and had great results where I personally didn't. I know there's no real correlation there, just thought it was interesting. Try keto maybe?
Did you ever try, waiting 10 minutes?
You eat a little, food gets in your stomach, after 10 minutes the message "I'm full" is sent.
The point is, you won't feel full until those 10 minutes pass. But you don't need continue eating during those 10 minutes.
I'm just asking because if you always do, you might be under the impression that it requires 10 minutes of sustained eating, to stop feeling full.
My own anecdata suggests that I have better adherence to IF than regular caloric restriction. YMMV. The diet that helps you lose the most weight will be the one you follow closest.
The problem I see is if this question is the only one, the immediate second question becomes - does Intermittent Fasting produce the same results? requiring an additional study.
From a practical implementation, this research is better suited to everyday life. Intermittent Fasting as a system is way easier to implement at scale than calorie counting.
I think the answer to your question is total time inflamed (for lack of a better term).
Eating and digesting appear to be an interrupt for many other processes, for obvious reasons. You divert a lot of resources and produce a lot of inflammation and depress a lot of immunity.
Do you want to be in that state for 14 hours per day or for 6 hours per day ?
My bro-science intuition tells me that, all else being equal, consuming the same number of calories in a tighter window is much less expensive.
I note with interest that we make reference to insulin "spikes".
Do I want to insulin spike more, or fewer, times per day ?
Eating 3 balanced meals throughout the day might be marginally better or worse for the pancreas, but neither of these dietary choices trigger the panic-level insulin responses (which ultimately lead to insulin resistance and diabetes) that snacking on large amounts of refined carbs and refined sugars are notorious for.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2121099/ This study found that although there was higher blood glucose and reduced glucose tolerance in the morning for the group eating 1 meal a day, surprisingly they had less insulin resistance than the group eating 3. Other indicators of dietary/hormonal health were the same between groups. Same caloric intake of glucose between groups, and the 1 meal a day group shared the same evening window just like OMAD. This was a pilot study with small sample size (irritatingly the actual number isn't listed from what I can see) as well as a high withdrawal rate, unsurprisingly.
That seems odd, in a non-city context wouldn't eating and drinking be one of the riskiest things in terms of getting sick?
Edit: After thinking about it maybe it's related to not overreacting to everything we eat and causing allergies?
Either way I don't see how what you say is true. If I stop eating or drinking how does that make me catch the flu or something the immune response helps against?
It seems having it active when I eat would be the most useful, which is why I wondered why it worked how it does.
In that eating and drinking is essential, and for the primitive man, not guaranteed everyday...
>If I stop eating or drinking how does that make me catch the flu or something the immune response helps against?
It just makes you die in a couple months from not eating, and a week or so from not drinking :-)
They only know the right-now and that's good enough for them.
This is something I've seen with my friends and family who have never been in good shape. They don't know that it's possible to go up 3 flights of stairs 2-3 steps at a time at a brisk pace and NOT be panting with exhaustion afterwards. They don't know that it's not normal to fart 24/7 and have constant heartburn, because that's all they've ever known.
The article is about intermittent faSting
However, I did enjoy this limited foray into humor, and appreciate that we can seemingly keep it limited to a couple funny comments, and still have intelligent conversation.
Agree, and it is interesting because offline, humor has a way of aiding conversations.
But when you are young and healthy, you can basically eat everything you want and don't feel bad at the moment. The problem is that all the side effects will come later.
Why not do both? I don‘t see how one can ever be a substitute for the other.
Checkung nevus. Early on means, if you notice them changing size and color - have them checked and maybe removed. No spreading skin cancer as a result
Breast cancer: feeling knots, etc. are warning signs.
Lung cancer: pain
Brain cancer:
certain types of headaches can be ignored with pills, or checked
etc. etc.
I am not aware of any cancer, which has no warning signs. But yes, most if not all signs are not a guaranteed test result. And in fact, it probably does not helping many people freaking out, when they notice warning signs, caused by harmles other causes. But doing so in a rational manner definitely increases your chances of early spotting.
The concrete advice at the end seems pretty supported by science. Drinking and smoking are definitively bad for you.
More recent studies have pointed in the direction of “no safe quantity of alcohol”.
Are studies asking people how many times they eat food X per week and correlating on that information science?
The study in the link has a sample size of 14, is that ” actual” science?
I have an an autoimmune condition. Diet is a massive factor. No doctor has said anything about it however.
I spent a month mostly eating plain sweet potatoes and apples. My inflammation dropped dramatically.
Your diet sounds a lot like AIP diet.
Are you implying that cutting back on alcohol can cause acid reflux? That doesn't seem right.
BTW: what did you eat during the time? It seems like you couldn’t eat a lot of you leave out fruits and most meat
From my personal experience: very high protein with calorie deficit can allow you to build muscle while losing fat but also causes impotence, anxiety, poop so hard you scrape your insides till you fill the toilet with blood. Are the studies right? Yes. Do you want to follow their advice? Not really.
In particular, I cut alcohol in a big way (mostly casual beer) and was fairly stunned to realise how much I'd lived with "booze blues" every day. It's now very, very obvious the effect alcohol has on my body afterwards (elevated heart rate, booze blues, etc etc). But at the time was like a fog being lifted for the first time in almost 20 years.
We're all different, what works for me might not for you, etc - but personally was hugely enlightening to just reset and play around with what does what.
Typo?
It's probably best to go the full diet change route & slowly introduce new foods again, but if you read the OP's recommendations and think "I can't do that" there are other ways.
Your comment appears to have zero relation to the article and could be posted on ant article about food or digestion.
And while there are drawbacks, I can't bench press 215lbs anymore, the overall benefits have been pretty significant that I will keep doing it.
My weight was pretty erratic, given the high stress load and super active lifestyle I could fluctuate 8lbs in a day. Now my weight has stabilized and my head is clearer.
I studied biology with an understanding of autophagy and I only ate once a day for nearly a decade now (2011), but I used to eat 3000+ calories in one sitting, but now I've decided to limit my overall caloric intake (1500-2000) and reduced it to a 8-4 hour window and saw even better results.
Also, as a former chef, I now savor my food way more and take the time to enjoy it more than when I tasted and ate all day and suffered from a sort of palate fatigue and made my gravitate to salty, greasy food late at night when I actually had an appetite.
While I wouldn’t dare to comment on someone else’s mental health situation, I’d note for anyone else reading and considering this that traditional SSRIs are very effective for some people, cheap, and you won’t have trouble taking them across borders or getting them prescribed in an emergency from a random doctor if you lose your stash
With immense amount of side-effects, I'd advise people to use CBD to see if it alleviates the symptoms before any SSRI.
In addition to the anxiety, I needed it for inflammation and pain relief which is a massive component to many ailments that have compounding effects. I worked 70+ hours a week in the peak season(s), so sleeping became a rare commodity which high loads of CBD with some CBG/CBN/THC made it happen nearly on demand.
This idea kept me from trying them for years, and I have not found this to be true at all for me. Again, I'm not trying to speak to _your_ situation -- for some people they're ineffective and laden with side-effects -- but there's a lot of scare-mongering for a treatment that works absolute wonders for a lot of people. I'd encourage people with anxiety to absolutely try them before deciding they're not for them.
SSRIs are often for life. And is a gateway drug for other pharmaceuticals to deal with the side effects.
One day..a hundred or so years from now when the world is saner, our children will read about it in their textbooks and stare at each other w/disbelief.
Foods containing rosemary, sage and dill are some things I find helpful with anxiety. Also licorice with real licorice extract.
Another effective herb for anxiety would be holy basil or tulsi. Easy to grow everywhere. Leaving a few leaves of holy basil in a copper container overnight and having a few sips in the morning on an empty stomach is my old grandmother’s remedy/morning ritual. Later when I started growing holy basil at the farm, one of the herbalist who bought from me said that the copper vessel has something to do with enhancing bio availability of chromium and other trace minerals in holy basil.
Other stress reducing adaptogen herbs that are a tad uncommon(and need herbalist guidance), ashwagandha and rhodiola. I can grow the former but not the latter in CA. Maca too is said to have a balancing effect on adrenals and thereby reducing stress and related anxiety.
Of course, there is always lavender. My favorite.
If you want to go the herbal route I think commonly used herbs with more of a medical precedent could be useful like:
- Garlic - Ginseng - Green Tea - Aloe Vera - Ginger - Chamomile
[1] Singh, S., Majumdar, D. K., and Rehan, H. M. Evaluation of anti-inflammatory potential of fixed oil of Ocimum sanctum (Holybasil) and its possible mechanism of action. J Ethnopharmacol. 1996;54(1):19-26
Rosemary has good anti inflammation properties and it’s proven. However turmeric is superior to rosemary and CBD even better. But rosemary and turmeric* can be easily incorporated in food. Garlic is also good.
One must be careful with rosemary(don’t ingest ‘Rosemary tea’ etc..high in volatiles. you will likely end up with a headache or throw up)..but because it has mild to moderate vasodilation properties, it is excellent for circulation issues tho’ especially when applied topically. I want to say that rosemary’s efficiency is more due to it being a rubefacient rather than a powerful anti inflammatory. Example: you are better off using rosemary infused oil for massaging your scalp than ingesting a cup of even mild rosemary tea. The former application will greatly improve circulation to head as the oil topically works better and has less side effects.
Ditto with arnica..arnica gel is better than arnica tincture or herb for internal use. They are useful for hematomas and bruising. But will cause internal bruising and bleeding/inhibit clotting factor when taken internally or applied over an open wound or cut or used subcutaneously. Topical application? It’s golden!
*anecdote: when I was growing up, one of the home herbal lores I heard was how every mother needs three things: turmeric, holy basil and neem. So every home has neem in the front of the house, a basil shrine at the back(hence ‘holy’. It’s similar to elderberry. If something is ‘holy’, one never over harvests it and will keep propagating the plant species). The turmeric used to hang around the woman’s neck or the dried rhizomes given as gifts. Similarly on the kitchen, for food: Ginger, black pepper and long pepper.
I used to work as a chef and trained classical French. I gave a couple of classes to non indian chefs about loading up spice boxes. A typical spice box(South Indian. It differs regionally) will have seven compartments. cumin, coriander seeds, dried red chilies, turmeric, fenugreek seeds, fennel and cardamom. They are all medicinal. This is all you need in small quantities every day. It’s more effective in food everyday with a pinch here and there 2-3x/day. not as much when taken as capsules or a high medicinal dose sporadically. Herbs and spices don’t act like pharmaceutical doses. You have to think of them as preventative therapies rather than curative ones. Asafoetida goes separately in another shelf and clad in multiple layers of metal as does saffron because they are volatile and delicate+expensive respectively. There is another set of tempering seeds but my system was to use one box for flavoring spices and another for tempering.
From the FDA [2]:
"If you’re 40 or older, eating 2 ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks could land you in the hospital with an irregular heart rhythm or arrhythmia."
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/rare-case-of-black-l...
[2]: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/black-licoric...
That's dangerous internet 'advice' for anyone physically active.
For example I can manage two hours before needing to eat again due to physical reaction.
"In a physiological context, [...] a person is assumed to be fasting once 8–12 hours have elapsed since the last meal. Metabolic changes of the fasting state begin after absorption of a meal (typically 3–5 hours after eating)."[0]
So yes, it really is fasting.
> 36-40 hours, although even that I don't find particularly special
Don't make such claims without sources. And for what it's worth: most people don't fast in hope of others finding it special anyway.
actually most of the population is fasting by this logic, if you sleep at least 6-8 hours and don't eat right before sleeping and immediately after waking up
so sorry for considering this pretty stupid definition of fasting when 80-90% of population is fasting during sleep
Ironic, because what I've noticed is my anxiety goes absolutely haywire after a long period without food. I can go with OMAD, but I have to be careful to have some nuts or something on hand if I need them
I have followed IF with a 1100 calorie deficit per day by only eating 1200 calories at dinner for 3 months. This translated to more than 1kg weight loss per week, pretty reliably. Overall I lost 17kg. I adjusted the TDEE and calorie values as needed to maintain the weight loss speed.
The weight loss was extremely fast, but so was the rate at which I lost lean mass. This makes sense, as I didn't exercise much, aside from occasional long walks / 1 mile run. According to this study [0], exercising should maintain lean muscle mass.
My personal observations are in line with the studies I have read about IF.
Some other observations I have made:
* The rate at which I gained 75% of the weight back was stunning to me. It was as fast as I lost it.
* My partner does not feel well when fasting, so IF doesn't work for everyone. I think it worked well for me. I did supplement with vitamins to account for the decreased amount of food intake.
* I noticed that whenever I had alcohol, while still adhering to the daily calorie limit, my weight would not go down until about 3 days have passed. I had assumed alcohol would only contribute its caloric energy, but, sure enough, every time I had a beer, I could see in the weight graph a bump that lasted for about 3 days, then the weight would suddenly jump down to where I was expecting it to be, based on the weight loss slope.
It has an aura of being a fad nowadays since some modern research has indicated it actually does have health benefits, which I think some people have been a bit too quick to pounce on.
1100 calorie deficit is a bit extreme. Shoot for 500, or maybe 750 if you are pretty heavy.
How much protein did you eat? You'll maintain more muscle if you eat more protein.. consider 50% of calories from protein. Lifting weights also helps with maintaining lean muscle mass.
Alcohol can mess a lot with fluid retention. A good strategy for that when measuring progress is to weigh yourself each day but only look at the average weight over two weeks to see if you are progressing in the right direction.
I read somewhere that IF was beneficial for men, but for women there was no proven benefit, and a possible negative effect.
The last two can be somewhat accounted for (and already are: Folks that can't fast are exempt and special rules for places that get midnight sun). We can't really control for the first one, especially with real cultural taboo against breaking the fast during the day.
A religious obligation won't count as justification?
After realizing that water is a byproduct of catabolism, I'm willing to entertain the idea that it is beneficial.
> After realizing that water is a byproduct of catabolism, I'm willing to entertain the idea that it is beneficial.
The two parts of this sentence aren't connected by logic.
The body produces water as a byproduct of ATP (energy) metabolism. During a fast, fat and other tissues are broken down by catabolic reactions to accomplish this. Knowing this, I am willing to entertain the idea that abstaining from water for a period of time can be beneficial, or perhaps I should say at least not harmful, because there are mechanisms in the body that synthesize water. Obviously, a sufficiently long period of time without water would be harmful.
I haven't done the math to figure out how much water this is, and so I do not know how sufficient it is to keep minimally hydrated during a water-fast. I'm just saying that the thought of abstaining from water during a fast isn't necessarily as dangerous as it sounds, because your body can and does produce it's own water as a by-product of energy metabolism.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_water
> Humans obtain only about 8-10% of their water needs through metabolic water production
laughs nervously in Scandinavian So we can't eat anything in the summer, as the sun doesn't really go down? :)
On the other hand, we can gorge ourselves during winter.
Do you know if the muslims are actually going through it on hardcore level or have some kind of rationalisation for not doing it or a cheating method like sleeping all day?
That said, I don't know much about religion practices. Maybe the precision timing is a Turkish thing.
This is the view and ruling of all 4 schools of jurisprudence within the Sunni sect.
Bit of background on schools of thought and sects. Islam is split between Sunni Muslims and Shias. Sunnis make up the majority and within Sunni Muslims there are 4 schools of thought. The rulings between the schools differ based on interpretations of the Quran, Ahaadith (Prophetic sayings), consensus of the Prophet Muhammad's companions and deductive analogy.
The 4 schools of thoughts are not sects, i.e. they consider each other to be Muslims, unlike Sunni Muslims who consider (most) Shia sects, Ahamdis et al to not be Muslim.
An example of a difference in interpretation is the Quran instructs people to wash their faces, arms to the elbows, head and feet to ankles. Now does they include the ankles or not? Does the word "to" define a limit? Then different scholars from the schools of thoughts give their opinion, some say that it does based on certain linguistic evidences, eyewitness accounts of the Prophet Muhammed (p.b.u.h) actions or his sayings and hence that's how the rulings differ.
Source - I am studying, alongside my professional career, Islamic sciences such as theology, jurisprudence, classical Arabic, Hadith and Quran exodus etc and hopefully graduate as an Islamic scholar soon!
Basically on the 11th day after full moon and new moon, one fasts from sunrise to sunset. That’s twice a month. It’s called Ekadasi Fast.
But the real trick is preparing to fast 6-8 hours before and after the day of the fast.
Also the day after the fast, the food has to be grain/gluten free(rice seems to be ok) and has certain ingredients like greens, herbs and spices. It’s very light.
Full moon and new moon days are always food for milk and fruit fasts. And there is a whole bunch of other religious day fasts. Example: no salt on 6th day after full/new moon..a lot of ingredient restrictive fasts etc. I don’t know a lot about that but I have seen my mother observe it. I must find out more.
There seems to be a whole method to the madness and when scheduled properly, one can do staggered and scheduled partial fasts 6-7 days for a lunar fortnight. The calorie restriction mostly comes from the rules against certain ingredients.
Even in the pared down format I follow, I feel like I connect more with my food and am more mindful when I cook. Most of all, I don’t waste as much food because it’s so much work preparing the food! Of course, it’s seasonal. Having said that, I guess annual menu and schedule format has to be reversed for those in the Southern Hemisphere.
Your best bet is to connect with someone in your community or local temple and ask them.
But why would this suddenly happen?
There's some physiology here to be uncovered. That hardly is 'nothing'.
Is it calories? Is it fasting? Is it nutrient timing?
You can't find out which from "no control", but there's definitely a physiological effect being seen, correct?
As you pointed out, without a control group, you cannot claim that any change in your measurements are due to anything. The fact that the researchers do attribute it to fasting is just bad science and makes me doubt the rest of their findings.
Being a bit more realistic is the hawthorne effect, which can be easy to test with follow up experiments.
My biggest takeaway isn't to do IF or cut calories, but rather it seems some phenomena was found. If you asked me if diet, fasting, etc... Would cute cancer, I'd have said NO! but this study has changed that answer to "I don't know".
I suggest that is a huge difference and benefit.
It certainly doesn't say that intermittent fasting will cure/prevent cancer.
How many research groups tried this with a similar N=14 size group but got statistically insignificant results and thus were not able to publish results?
Thanks to p-hacking, I would expect most small studies to get statistically significant results. Though that doesn't settle the more important question of whether they manage to get published.
Now, that justifies why they were interested in studying this, since it's very similar to Ramadan, but it also could show a bit of a bias in hoping to find positive results.
I'd like to see further evidence before I change my IF routine to be from dawn to sunset and also limit drinking intake personally.
Or see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263199/ - "The recorded high prevalence of the MS and its key cardiovascular risk factors (15-60%) among Middle East population mandates the need for a national and international prevention programs to combat obesity, diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, smoking and related comorbidities."
So I'm not sold.
I also question religious devotees adherence to their religion. There are no stats on it and it is impossible to measure... Perhaps a significant number of them secretly cheat.
In fact one of the recruiting rules was "2) Subjects who plan to fast during the religious month of Ramadan" and therefore "All subjects fasted for more than 14 h daily for 29 days beginning from May 06, 2019, until June 03, 2019".
See full text https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73767-w
1. Why ramadan is not explicitely told in the title. 2. Why using "dawn to sunset" which is not helpful at all to make generalisation (scientists usually have a clock). 3. Why the diet during the night is not explicited (at least in the abstract). 4. Why this would have different results if the diet is during the night or during the day.
All of this makes me suspicious that this is a kind of retro-science propaganda to make Ramadan looks healthy and justify the religion.
I maybe wrong but the abstract raises too many flags to not care about this hypothesis.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
And my own experience confirms it: on one meal a day I will loose much more weight if I eat at noon than if I eat the evening.
I also suspect that dropping your blood sugar levels low enough, long enough helps starve some invaders. We are bigger than the bacteria in our system. We can survive for a bit without those resources. Maybe some of them can't.
The real issue is small sample size. (14 people)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_in_Islam see “Days of voluntary fasting”
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360407/
> A fifth of the world's population is Muslim, and most Muslims live in areas where the prevalence of smoking is high and often increasing. But even among the many Muslims living in Europe, smoking prevalence (particularly among men) remains high. For example, in England in 2004 the overall prevalence of smoking was 40% in Bangladeshi men and 29% in Pakistani men compared with 24% among the male general population.
It is in fact an unfortunate reality that is a matter of miseducation for those who are not victim to the statistical conflation of nationality as an indicator of belief.
> The Spanish introduced tobacco to Europeans in about 1528
Perhaps there is an inference of prohibition
After doing some searching, it does seem that Smoking is mostly considered to be prohibited in Islamic Law, now people likely don't follow that but that's a different story.
Smoking is therefore not considered forbidden (haram) in the same sense as alcohol. I am a little too sensitive to drugs and smoke and betel leaves ('paan') make my head go south just as much.
So it correctly is issue of education I would say.
Alcohol would also be a factor in play as that would increase the risk of some cancers, so the lack of you would of thought also be a factor with that lifestyle.
I think very similar eating/fasting habits are pertinent during the lent as well.
When i was younger , during Ramadan we used to go to break the fast post dusk. In my homestate in India , there is usually a gruel that is prepared with sooji (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_rava) and lot of fruits. As a veggie , i would go there and eat :) . Sadly it has become a hog show now ,eating as much during dawn and dusk to keep the day full
For myself i go 5 days without food every season of the year, seem to be enough to keep my weight quiet stable. Without anything socially going on i have a daily 90 min eating window. And i allow myself some guilty pleasures on Fridays and Saturdays. Like going out and drinking beers with friends
The main problems with the argument that if wealthy people didn't get taxed then they would donate to charity more are 1) it's not proven to be true 2) where the money goes gets decided by the donor.
For some people letting the donor decide where their money goes sounds like a good idea, as it's there money. However donors do not take a holistic view of the needs of a society and are very influenced by what visible to them, their opinions & prejudices, etc... For example rich people donate billions to Harvard University, which already has an endowment of over $40 billion, which benefits almost nobody. That's arguably not a great use of charity donations where there are other more pressing needs, also in education, which would be much more efficient uses of that money.
The wealthy also often think that they are best placed to solve problems that they have zero experience with, based on being successful in a completely different field. Typically this leads to failure or inefficient and suboptimal results.
Governments are not perfect, nowhere close, but in terms of taking a holistic view of the needs of society and applying funds where needed, they are generally much better than assigning that function to a financial elite, especially if that government is a social democracy.
The Fasting Mimicking Diet is a well studied diet that mimics the effects of fasting while eating 800-1200 calories per day and abstaining from protein (<15g/day). Check out this spreadsheet for a DIY guide to measure how fasting impacts your own biomarkers. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_f-UhsloOxvLbNLgyAou...
Dave Feldman's (engineer turned citizen scientist) independent research into the impact of low-carb, high-fat diets is also inspirational to learn first-hand how a diet can effect your body. He's replicated experiments of how several dietary approaches, including fasting, affect the lab measurement of cholesterol levels. He's been able to reproduce findings on his own body, with small sample sizes of other dieters. He's even proposed a Lipid Energy Model to describe how fats distribute energy to cells in a way that matches the data he's collected. https://cholesterolcode.com/model/
Reading enough of this research, I start to think about context-dependent metabolic pathways that can be triggered with inputs as simple as varied macronutrients. It feels like a very meaningful frame to interpret research about diet and longevity.
Good from cnn on fasting advantages
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/01/health/fasting-longevity-food...
that's the key to this whole things, is that you have to stick with it for at least 4 weeks. i know quite a few people who have tried IF and rarely do they make it through the first week without cheating (including myself when i first started). IF is one of _the_ best ways to lost weight in my opinion (second only to hot yoga), but the key is that you have to very regime with it and follow it precisely in order to get the benefits. you cannot have _any_ calories what so ever in order to trigger the fast response of the body. even taking vitamins or protein powders breaks the fast. also most non-calorie drinks do contain calories just not in a single serving (which is VERY deceptive), so the best things to drink is just plain cold water through out the day.
It's pity can't really do it anymore, since I cook for whole family and need my brain working at full capacity, which is not big deal during first day of fasting, but on the 2nd one it would take its toll already, maybe doable during weekend.
And then suddenly, it's easy, natural. Now I eat just once or twice a day without intending to. It would be an effort to eat more. The difference for me is a carnivore diet, mostly beef. It's just far more satiating than anything else I've tried and I've done most things from raw veganism to this.
I do believe that when I eat matters, but what I eat makes a big difference to when.
Press release - Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system (2014) - https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regene...
Full Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(14)0...
My experience with Spain et al is that they are hot during the day and locals tend to eat a lot late at night and very little during the day.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ethanjweiss/status/13105954634526...
These analogies are often misleading. Your heart for one definitely needs to work every day.
- Anti-diabetes
- Anti-aging
- Reduction in body mass index, waist circumference
- Improvement in blood pressure
If not for your listed reasons - do it to knock the rust off of safely stored emergency equipment.
I've noticed that once you get past the first "hump" of hunger pangs, famish subsides into the background, and I'd imagine it is at this point where the metaphorical "adrenaline" dosage is injected by nature to make available the bodies reserve energy to get through inevitable temporary nutrient deficiency back in our hunter-gatherer days.
I haven't personally fasted as such in this manner but was always quite fascinated and am quite fascinated by how various Muslim colleagues and friends are able to do it during the summer with 45 degree heat and so on. All of them say that the first two days are the toughest while the rest of the month of Ramadan seems basically the same as the rest of their lives. It does put into perspective as to how much of our "hunger" is psychological than resource needs.
I've wondered if high function brain pharmaceutical intervention (depression pill) succeeds because of a similar effect - the side effects themselves are the "cure" because the body is purposely affected at the base of Maslow's pyramid. This distracts the user from existential angst or threats out of the realm of control of the individual because this is a self inflicted "problem" that can be solved (guaranteed) by patience and temporary suffering.
That's the gist of it.
I take the psyllium husk at about 10am. Then I have another coffee or two, but no meals until dinner time, about 6pm.
I started doing this just this week because my father had an angiogram which lead to the discovery that some of his coronary arteries where quite block with plaque. This is disturbing for me as he has looked after himself pretty well for his whole life. He's not a smoker or heavy drinker, eats well, doesn't snack, isn't a sweet tooth. And he has exercised consistently for his whole life. And yet, his arteries are in shit state.
So I have to wonder if it's genetic. So I figure I'll try to increase the soluble and insoluble fibre intake as it is said to inhibit the absorption of cholesterol. I also want to drop a couple of kilos I've put on during lockdown.
Cancer and Covid-19.
At what stage do we admit science is flawed, not it's implementation?
Besides, not having even a drop of water for longer than 12 hours during summer is dangerous, not only to fasting people themselves but to the society as a whole since they drive cars and they have higher rate of fainting during that. But doing those for the name of religion is somehow acceptable in our society..
It's clear that many in the world do exactly that. It might be interesting to see a study similar to above as to whether accident rates increase during Ramadan.