"The Switch", by James Clement, is a great roundup of fasting and other longevity-related behaviors. It's a synthesis of hundreds of research papers, with an emphasis of the 2016 discovery of the mTor switch that triggers autophagy in cells. The findings in the NIH paper seem pretty consistent with the overview of the research. More specifically, mortality from obesity and cancer drastically fall when: a) insulin and iGF-1 are suppressed, and b) mTor pathway (and autophagy) is triggered somewhat regularly.

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.