Inflammation, but Not Telomere Length, Predicts Ageing at Extreme Old Age
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
1. This is a single study published in 2015, what does the wider literature say? Any dieticians or clinicians recommending anything from this?
2. The journal is EBioMedicine, which is not nothing but not exactly pre-eminent either.
3. This seems like just a common sense conclusion: "In Cox proportional hazard models, inflammation predicted all-cause mortality". So...people who die have inflammation? Wouldn't that be expected that people who are dieing are likely experiencing significant inflammation of at least one organ of their body?
4. In short, the conclusion of this paper seems like essentially "people who are dying are likely to die". Am I missing something here?
It’s wrong to frame the question as you did. The evidence should be provided to prove something, not disprove it. Is there enough evidence that fasting ultimately leads to better aging? If so, for which groups of people? Is there any underlying condition that negates the effect? That’s how science work, not the other way around.
There never is any evidence than anything leads to better aging because longevity studies are notoriously expensive, hard to do, and prone to be inconclusive. like those diet studies that pinhole certain foods like chili peppers which supposedly reduce vascular disease.
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/people-who-eat-chili-pepper-...
"eating chili pepper has an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer and blood-glucose regulating effect" Similar things have been said for fasting. But just like people who eat chili peppers in these studies, they differ from the normal population, most likely in more ways than just consuming chili peppers. even though there is significant consensus, like this article also affirms, that reducing inflammation might help you live longer.
You could test the theory more conclusively if you had 100.000 people participating in fasting over entire generations but you'd also have to account for changes in their diet as response to such insane study. I bet everyone would think longer and harder over shoving high-sugar foods in their mouths after explicitly consuming nothing for a period of time.
we combined community-based prospective cohorts: Tokyo Oldest Old Survey on Total Health (TOOTH), Tokyo Centenarians Study (TCS) and Japanese Semi-Supercentenarians Study (JSS) comprising 1554 individuals including 684 centenarians and (semi-)supercentenarians, 167 pairs of centenarian offspring and spouses, and 536 community-living very old (85 to 99 years).
One of the good points is that it tends to include data from a great many more people than most studies can include. One of the pitfalls is that it is challenging to combine data from multiple studies because they probably used different methodologies, were measuring different things, etc and this puts a lot of noise in the data and cleaning the data to get something useful and meaningful can be quite hard.
Meta studies can be a case of "garbage in, garbage out." But when they are done well, they can roll up a whole lot of information together to draw conclusions we simply don't have the resources to meaningfully study some other way.
Certain studies gain so many upvotes on HN because they generate interesting discussion, and may be worth storing in our favorites for sharing and/or future reference.
I almost always upvote articles when there is interesting discussion (or the potential for interesting discussion) related to the article. I very rarely (but do sometimes) upvote articles solely based on the content of the articles themselves.
Or rather, I’m much more interested in a collection of people’s thoughts vs. a single person’s thoughts.
Peer-reviewed just means:
(a) a bunch of guys had a cursory look at the research, which they might or might not be able to follow (even basic math), and left some hasty criticism on low hanging fruits (or the personal pet peeves they always mention) to pretend they thoroughly read it, and accepted it
(b) Some scholar friends accepted this as a favor to other academic friends, who will backrub them when they submit their own research, and help each other pad their paper counts
And meta-analysis means:
(c) Let's take 80 crap papers, study them as if they're relevant, and get some statistical takeways...
I think type 2 diabetes is basically an inflammatory disease. More and more people are "pre-diabetes", which is basically lifestyle moving them towards type 2 diabetes.
You really don't want a section of a nerve to be inflamed because the body is attacking the coating, for example. You do, however, want the skin surrounding the scratch on your leg to have some inflammation to help close the cut.
None of this means you should regularly take an anti-inflammatory drug nor does it mean that an "anti-inflammatory" diet or other preventative measures will help, either. I view some of this as the latest pseudo-science, at least in the hands of most folks.
Chronic systemic inflammation is known to play a role in the development and progression of coronary heart disease and diabetes, and accelerate the transformation of the immune system into an aged state, which makes it more likely to develop immune system disregulations such as autoimmune diseases, and to cause cytokine storms when exposed to agents such a N1H1, Epstein-Barr or Covid.
The immune system consists of many moving parts coordinating each other via the exchange of signalling molecules, which results in a large distributed system with lots of unintuitive emergent behaviors. We are only just starting to understand what effects our everyday behavior has on the immune system, and what happens to it when we age.
Dieticians and clinicians seem to say all kinds of contradicting things all the time, for half a century...
Relevant: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5476783/#s2titl...
It's my deep sleep that's toast; also I get to the REM stage too quickly, I think it's supposed to be a sign of depression.
So it's a bit more complicated.
I'm 37 and I think my room started having the old person smell.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704511304575075...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/aug/03/painkillers-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/health/aspirin-health.htm...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/16/6474154...
Turns out, if you stop putting everything but water/salt in your body, there's not much left that causes inflammation.
First, if this is as well documented as you say then you should provide such documentation as you seem to think it should be at the finger tips of others.
Second, your comment doesn't actually counter the main point of what you are responding to. The point is that what "inflammation" means is too general. Even if it is true that you enter a "heightened inflammation" state when eating, that doesn't discredit the idea that inflammation as a category is being overloaded.
People don't want to be told that alcohol, sugar, too many calories, etc inflames the hell out of the body. So be it.
Wait for your own wakeup call. I hope it never comes.
Everything you have said is true.
What I think you are missing is that there is both a per-calorie inflammation cost for all food inputs and a minimum inflammatory startup cost just to metabolize at all.
More simply: 1000 calories spread across two meals will generate more inflammation than 1000 calories in a single meal.
There are two analogies that I think are useful when thinking about this:
First, introducing food inputs appears to be an interrupt for most other bodily activities - even very essential ones like sleep and reproduction, etc. You might consider how many hours each day your body spends not digesting. It doesn't take much to increase that by 50% or more...
Second, electric motors like pumps and fans have failures ("deaths") that are much more accurately predicted by number of start-stop cycles than by the number of hours run. Startup is expensive for these devices and I suspect that startup is expensive for our food metabolism as well.
You're talking a very long time ago. Shouldn't that be already disregarded from an evolutionary POV?
We've made strong progress in food security in the last 100-200 years, not sure about before that. I suspect hunter/gatherers had it actually better than farmers. What time spans are you talking about?
I would assume (from ignorance) than knowledge about food security is older than us as a species. And by food security I mean "don't eat plant A", or "don't eat plant B raw, put it first on the fire or it will make you sick" etc.
Result: Insulin is anti-inflammatory and antiatherosclerotic hormone.
My skin clears up, brainfog disappears, the white in my eyes get brighter, etc.
After reading a bit i have come to the same conclusion - if your diet is already extremely clean / bland, maybe you won't get the same effect, but for most people that eats lots of different foods, processed stuff, fast food, alcohol, harsh additives, fried/burned food etc. on occasion then i think you really need to give yourself a break at least once a month. For a minimum of 48 hours.
I've done some intermittent fasting before (I think that's where you make sure you don't eat after 18:00 and only start at 9:00)
Drinking water with potassium + magnesium + salt also helps a lot, to replenish electrolytes, but some people can manage without. Some people can continue workouts, others continue for 7+ days. It's all about experimentation.
Atm. i start each week fasting and just fast for as long as it feels ok. Often 1-3 days.
I would recommend 2 fasts per month 36-48 hours, and with electrolyte water for newcomers.
Off course starting weight, activity level etc. is also important factors, i'm personally trying to lose some "corona weight" atm.
If it benefits you, it may get easier over time. I have a serious medical condition. I used to routinely throw up when I was even just underfed for one day.
It now takes longer than one day for me to start having strong reactions. Fasting and semi-fasting have been beneficial for my condition, but it was amazingly hard on me for a really long time and is still not easy.
I tend to semi-fast for somewhere between one and two days (often around 36 hours) most months. I've done longer -- up to a week -- but two per month for a newcomer sounds like a lot to me and I assume that's because of how hard it is on me.
So YMMV and probably will.
Your lack of understanding of the context of use, and underlying meaning, is nobody's problem but your own.
Perhaps you should have asked what He meant by clean, because clearly you don't understand.
https://www.primalorganicmiami.com/eat-clean-miami/ As this website says "There is not a strict definition for “eating clean”. I still assert clean eating is meaningless.
I'm not against healthy eating. But "healthy eating" or "clean foods" don't have definitions.
Think of it this way, there may not be a nailed down definition of “clean” or healthy” eating. However, it gets you in a “range of uncertainty”
Is McDonalds clean? No. Is Pizza clean? Nope. Is brown rice clean? Maybe. I should ask what they mean by their usage of clean.
Have I made my point a little bitter? I view usage of vague terms like that not as useless, but as “gets you close to the target without getting lost in the weeds.”
Hope this helps.
Although I don't know any diet that would be "clean" compared with a water fast...
Vegan perhaps?
It's neither bs nor meaningless. It intuitively describes a good diet if you have a basic knowledge of food and diet. It basically means "what is good for you". What would you describe as "clean", deep fried butter or broccoli sprouts? See how it's intuitive?
The only intuitive difference I see in those scenarios is that one has less calories and less fat (which are obviously both essential components of any diet).
"Clean" is pretty well understood as what's left after you finish an elimination diet.
As i just described it can be different for different people but in general, super high fat, super high carbohydrate, meals that are too large or too frequent, too much alcohol, lots of additives, lots of candy or cake, too many heavy metals from fish, too much fried food, too much low quality processed foods including cheap oils that has gone semi rancid, corn syrup, various carcinogens are all agreed upon across various a large spectrum of diets from Vegan to Paleo including nutrition research.
It probably also depends on ones own gut flora.
Pausing eating or just eating a pretty bland diet without above "luxuries" and you definitely get less of these things, that's partly why fasting works for a lot of people.
The results you feel might not be from the lack of inflammation from food, but from a change in immune responses, some of which can reduce inflammation and other bad feelings.
Considering this is Ramadan and fasting is pretty much on-topic, I notice a big difference between the religious fasts and the self-regulated ones.
The ramadan fasting without water seems to result in a net weight loss between the morning and the first meal.
On the other hand, people like me who do drink water/electrolytes, see our weight go up in the day from drinking water to compensate for the hunger.
A small part of what you experience might just be reaching adequate hydration and dropping salt levels to a more healthy level over the day.
Did a month on sweet potatoes. Very boring but same result.
Just for an extreme example to make the point - say some diet included a poisonous component as well as the antidote. Those eating the diet may well be just fine. However if somebody else simply looked at the poisonous part and copied only that, they would not do so well.
I'm not saying sweet potatoes are bad. And I'm sure this was a somewhat flippant statement, but this is the kind of thinking we're very prone to and I think it's important to recognize when it actually tries to lead us down the wrong path.
This was a pure desperation move.
I have experience here, literally with isolation diets for immune issues on starches, common for immunologists to run, see AIP which can start extreme down to one thing. I had a friend who had to do a super intense version, luckily, mine was quick.
There’s no problem with flippant statements, just bad faith replies that try and pick fights over nothing.
Also didn’t claim benefit. It’s potato. If there were some significant problem we’d have known by now.
I was specifically taking umbrage with the reasoning provided - X does a lot of Y in their complex thing and gets good results, so lots of Y can't be bad - and tried to be clear about that.
> gets good results
You claim I said it’s “good”, but I said “can’t be bad” in relation to a short term allergy diet. Your super pedantic bone you picked is based on exaggerating what I said twice and generalizing it out of context, which is funny coming from a pedant.
Boiled or microwaved. Always plain.
I Felt a lot better afterwards.
Non trigger foods, ie. sweet potatoes allow me to avoid such problems.
As to well managed. No, not really. I was physically doing much better when taking proper meds, (plaqunial)
However side effects were to much.
What's more, it seems that it is possible to reset the epigenetic of cells to their youthful state and reverse actual the biological age of those cells. They don't just "measure younger", they function as they did when they were younger. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4
I don't understand what people mean by statements like this. Per the Wiki page, they found something that on average is highly correlated to chronological age.
But in individual cases, it may be off a little or a lot. What tells you this is meaningful information and not random noise? What is the reference point for the "real" age that is not chronological age?
Because it was more accurate than other data sources we've tried
> There is inflammation everywhere, it's as generic a word as "oxidation" and "metabolism."
He is probably googling for answers and making it up as he goes.
They simply can't process information fast enough to make well informed statements.
Now I don't have an opinion on ayurvedic medicine and it's legitimacy but something being "banned by the government" alone means nothing today.
Swollen gums around a dying tooth? Inflammation.
Sore stomach due to food intolerance? Inflammation.
It's your body trying to fix itself.
If you get injured, the inflammation around the wound is signaling your body to bring white blood cells to that location.
Unless you have some sort of imbalance in your body, like a genetic issue, it's usually better to target controlling the source of the inflammation rather than the inflammation itself.
Inflammation can be more mental than physical in many cases, as your body is going to react to your environment and the way you perceive it and raise and lower your cortisol levels accordingly.
This likely doesn't answer your question fully, but just some items to consider.
Seems a bit obvious to me, but what do I know? I'm not an academic scientist...