Why Intermittent Fasting Has So Many Health Benefits
universal-sci.com
universal-sci.com
Is there a lot of hype around this? Yes, but everyone's physiology is different, and this combo for whatever reason agrees with my body far more than eating high amounts of carbohydrates at random times throughout the day ever did.
edit: I can't understand why someone would downvote this. I'm just trying to share a positive anecdote about my life.
There is a certain stigma about it as it's commonly associated with extreme fad diets. Keto posts typically get quite a lot of hate on generalist communities (like HN and reddit outside of the low carb subs) or even IRL.
It's sad how commercialised the word "keto" has become, lost all of its meaning, and gave free ammunition to its critics.
At least in the zero-carb/carnivore world there is no leeway for companies to package it, or housewives to bastardise it. Good luck turning steaks into zero-carb donuts.
It's funny that these studies don't address any kind of side-effects like this.
I can easily get 40g of fiber with close to zero net carbs per day eating this type of stuff...
I've been intermittent fasting, eating only around 2pm for lunch, and 7pm for dinner, for more than 10 years and I've managed to get quite overweight. Not IF's fault, just pointing out that it's neither worse nor better for your diet.
Eating one fewer meal doesn't stop one from making bad food choices, or doesn't change how much energy you burn through and hunger you feel. Only OMAD might be a little worthy of that hype because it is often physically impossible to overeat your daily caloric expenditure in one sitting, but as a recovering binge eater, I've seen first hand how ultra-processed hyper-palatable food makes it very easy to eat >3000 kcal in one meal.
That said, I agree that breakfast is a silly idea for us office workers. I personally do my best work in the (16) fasted hours between waking up and lunch, so much that I tend to have lunch as late as possible these days. You certainly don't need to eat 3 times a day for sitting on a chair 12 hours. Let alone that most idiotic, first-world idea of needing to eat "at least 5 small meals" around the clock never to feel hungry. Well, stop eating low-fat carby food and you won't feel hungry 5 times a day.
Annoyingly, it's hard to find good figures on relative risk for smokers and non-smokers, probably because of the current public health fad of dissembling to attempt to encourage desired behaviors. All I can find is that for the total population lifetime chance is 1/15 for men and 1/17 for women[2], with some weasel words about smoking increasing risk, but no actual quantification.
Edit: I appreciate the replies, but note that none of the sources cited actually list any meaningful quantifiable data. So I dug a bit more and found this[3]. It indicates that the effect is largely dose dependent and only really shows up in smokers of ten years or more. While p=.05 might fly for psychology studies, it's not a convincing bar for serious science. On the other hand the decade and longer smokers show a very respectable p=.001. For the heaviest smokers it looks like a bit over a 5x increase. Assuming continuity, there also exists some level of moderate smoking where my proposed 20% increased risk is accurate and even more limited levels of smoking where the risk is not appreciably higher than not smoking. In fact the data indicate that former smokers who quit for more than ten years actually have lower risk of lung cancer than never smokers! Surely that's some kind of noise, but it still goes to show.
[1] It's true that most people with lung cancer are or were smokers. But it's also true that most people with lung cancer are over 65, and they're from a period where most everyone was a smoker or exposed to smoke regularly. That's a pretty major confound. Over the next few decades we should get better data due to the relative decline in smoking making the effects of choosing to smoke clearer.
[2] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/lung-cancer/about/key-statisti...
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[0]https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm
> The risk of lung cancer for people who smoke is many times higher than for people who don't smoke. The longer you smoke and the more packs a day you smoke, the greater your risk.
MANY TIMES
first of all, Worldwide, 15–20 percent of men with lung cancer are non-smokers while over 50 percent of women with lung cancer are non-smokers [1], so if you are a woman, chances are similar.
Secondly, former smokers and current smokers have similar risks of getting lung cancer.
Last, but not least, once you get it, survival rates are similar for non smokers, former smokers and current smokers (in similar groups of course).
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7431055/
EDIT: it is overhyped because not smoking is in the public discourse treated as a cure, but it's not, especially if you are a woman.
In USA, for example, black men have higher chances of getting lung cancer than white men, but black women risk much less than white women.
So it's like saying that being a black woman saves you from lung cancer.
Risks are expressed as probabilities, people too often don't get it.
50% seems like a big number but it's a pretty meaningless statistic if women overall smoke less than men. It just means that when you have few smoking-related cancer cases, the other cases make up a larger percentage. Using that ratio to justify "you might as well smoke, 50% of women with lung cancer were non-smokers" is... not a good use of the statistics.
As a thought exercise with made up numbers, suppose that you have 10 people, 1 will naturally get lung cancer, and everyone who smokes will get lung cancer.
If 4 men smoke and get cancer, that's 5 with cancer and 1 of them was a non-smoker. 20% are non-smokers.
If 1 woman smokes and gets cancer, that's 2 with cancer and 1 of them was a non-smoker. 50% are non-smokers.
In this scenario you can say the exact same statistic about "50% of women with lung cancer are non-smokers" and brush it off as not a big deal even though 100% of smokers are getting cancer.
That's not a useful number to be looking at to judge the risk of smoking vs not smoking.
I don't know why I thought that linking a scientific paper reporting accurately all the data would be helpful to the discussion.
Not my opinions my friend.
> but it's a pretty meaningless statistic women overall smoke less than men
That's not how epidemiology works.
The fact that black men in USA have ~20% higher risk of getting lung cancer, despite being less than white men, says anything to you?
No, they don't smoke more.
No, risk of getting cancer is not linked to how many cigarettes you smoke in a lifetime, once a smoker, the risk gets higher and stays higher for as long as you live, even if you quit.
> even though 100% of smokers are getting cancer
they are absolutely not!
See why I say non smocking is over hyped?
Because it leads to ideology, which is not the same thing of being informed.
Right, but you cherry-picked the most uninformative statistic possible out of the whole thing to make it sound like smoking isn't a major factor.
These ones would have painted a different picture:
> In a study performed in the United States, roughly 19 percent of women with lung cancer were non-smokers, and only 9 percent of men with lung cancer were non-smokers.13 As this data has shown, lung cancer in non-smokers tends to be more common in females
> Importantly, there is also an increased risk for those non-smokers that have a spouse that is a smoker. In a meta-analysis that included 55 studies, it was found that women who were married to a smoker had a 27% increase in risk of lung cancer.
So a pretty good chunk of those non-smoker cancer cases are caused by smoking, it's just someone else's. And that 27% is just spouses who smoke, another chunk of that will be waitstaff with workplace smoke exposure (an occupation which skews female) since restaurants were one of the last public places people where kept smoking all the time. Indoor smoking bans will reduce those cases, but we're a long way yet from seeing the long terms effects of that.
> they are absolutely not!
I'm aware. As I said in my comment, that was a hypothetical scenario with made up numbers to illustrate how the 50% statistic on its own could give you the wrong impression of the safety of smoking.
in your opinion.
> In a study performed in the United States
I specifically wrote Worldwide, USA is only 4% of the World's population.
Who's actually cherry picking?
USA population is in particular quite shielded from all the other very numerous factors that can lead to lung cancer.
Smocking is only the most obvious and self inflicted
For example: China has the heaviest lung cancer burden, representing 36.98% of cases and 39.21% of deaths globally [1]
By choosing the USA as a reference, you're highly skewing the stats.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7797233/
> that was a hypothetical scenario with made up numbers to illustrate how the 50% statistic on its own is uninformative
so, basically, a strawman to sell opinions as facts.
But I think you're missing my broader point, which is that even living in a smoggy coal-burning area like China it's still not reasonable to say "might as well smoke, I'm already exposed to other lung cancer risks." That's like saying "My car is older and not up to modern safety standards, and I'm probably going to die in a crash anyway, so I won't wear my seat belt."
You have a risk factor that you can't do anything about, and that does push up the statistics about how many non-smokers get lung cancer, but smoking is still a pointless additional factor that will only raise your odds of getting lung cancer further.
Agree, but that's not the point I am making.
The point I am making is that we know that smoking is linked to lung cancer but the opposite is not a certainty. We don't know if the smokers getting lung cancer would not get it if they did not smoke.
Unfortunately.
So it is wise to not smoke, of course, but that's only a fraction of the entire story.
People are getting cancer in the west more now than in the 60s and 70s, when smoking was vastly more spread.
The peak was in the 90s, we are slowly going back to the numbers of the mid 1970s.
We know that cancer is linked to age, so maybe an aging population has more chances of getting cancer than a younger one.
This seems to be confirmed by the fact that in USA ~5% of the population has cancer, while in large areas of Central Africa, for example Somalia, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, it's less than 0.5%.
I'm quite sure it is not due to better living conditions and less cigarettes. But another reason could be that it is not detected nor reported.
Also in USA there are ~140 deaths every 100,000 people, in Iran ~95, in Mexico is ~90, in Algeria ~75.
Just to say that we still haven't found the root cause and why there are people living the same exact life in the same exact place, one gets it and the other don't.
So, in the end, intermittent fasting has mostly the same effects of eating less in general, it shouldn't be surprising, like it shouldn't surprise anybody that a lot of people, who never smoked, still die of cancer.
A more healthy diet would have a large impact on mortality in USA, where the leading cause of death is hearth disease cause by unhealthy diets.
Especially when intermittent fasting is defined as "the other group only had access to food 9 hours a day", which is how most people eat, simply following local traditions.
the usual suspects
- older population, surviving the most common disease that once killed millions of people at younger age
- pollution
- toxic substances (asbestos for example)
- radiations
- exposure to highly carcinogenic substances (nickel, cadmium, radon, vinyl chloride, benzidene, and benzene, etc.)
- DNA
also second hand smocking, realizing that you are making the life of the people around you, especially kids, a living hell should be enough.
But I actually don't care.
I'm quite sure my English is way better than your Italian, Spanish, some French and some German, will ever be.
I know second hand smoke has been downplayed in recent years, but in this case we’re not talking about occasionally being exposed to smoke, but rather sharing and breathing the same smoke filled air with a smoker.
This also seems to depend on country and culture. In some cultures, it seems most nonsmoking women would instantly disqualify a smoking man as a partner, but in others it doesn’t seem to be quite the same dealbreaker.
second hand smoke is a known risk factor.
still it doesn't explain the difference, which is rather large.
the most probable explanation is that women are more exposed or more susceptible to some other risk factor than men.
A wild guess, for example, could be: women are in charge of cooking and are exposed to the fireplace wood smoke. There are studies associating fireplace wood smoke to an increase of breast cancer. [1]
Indoor pollution is also thought to be harmful for respiratory system health.
This is a strange take. For one thing, intermittent fasting is not a diet.
IF is also not about eating less than you did before. You can, and many people do, eat the same number of calories as they did before. Eating more or less calories should be a separate decision made in the context of what you are trying to achieve.
I found my brain burn a lot of energy even if I just sit for a couple hours. So breakfast is needed.
Not quite. Intermittent fasting is, typically, eating in a restricted time range in the day, usually an 8 hour period. As you point out, most practitioners skip breakfast. As you also point out it's also possible to overeat.
Eating between 11am - 7pm works well. You can have a late morning snack, a mid afternoon snack, and a normal dinner. No snacking at night. No consumption of alcohol outside of this eating range.
What IF isn't about is gorging yourself during the window when you're able to eat. The goal then isn't just about when you eat, but also paying attention to what you eat, and how much you're eating.
Also, more speculatively I wonder if the food we eat is even worse than we already know it is and these studies are basically observing what happens when "poison ingestion" for lack of a better word is temporarily halted
In a mobile culture without access to lots of salt, there are few ways to preserve food. You eat what you find as you find it, as much as you can. Then you go hungry until you find the next big score. Hunters may go many days or weeks between large kills or a group reaches a more promising foraging ground, everyone scraping by on minimal nutrition like dried jerky and plants collected on the move. But doing that for a few weeks, or even months, is just fine, if everyone was well-fed at the start, anyway.
I know some people who have NEVER in their lives gone more than ~12 hours without a meal, and all of them are ~30 years old but with the standard array of contemporary american health problems more typical of people in their 40s. Our ancestors certainly entered ketosis at least occasionally. It seems like a drastic change to switch to never using that cellular process over a span of just 1 or 2 generations.
The actual science studied TRF (time restricted fasting), not intermittent fasting. Which is eating over a 8-10 hour period per day, and that is just... normal eating? Skipping breakfast is all you need to do.
The info-nibble doesn't detail some of the downsides of IF - like how difficult it can be to practice it in social life (married? good luck telling your spouse you're not eating with them for months/years/ever). I did the 18-6 and 20-4 cycles and it worked. However, I gained back all the weight when I stopped due to my partner pleading daily for months to "eat like a normal person" again.
I know couples where one does IF and they just eat dinner together, but that's the only meal most couples/families eat together anyway.
"After seven weeks, tissue samples from 22 organ groups and the brain were taken at various periods during the day or night to examine their genetic makeup."
They are doing major surgery (multiple times by the looks of it), including removing brain tissue...
I've a son who's worked a physical job for 4 years and started IF two years ago. Starting at ~300lbs, he went to ~200lbs in 4 months and has been <200lbs since. His first meal is a late day lunch; the sort of food he eats hasn't changed.
It may be my genetic line has a disposition to sharply lose weight. In 2021, I went from 225 to 192 in one month (panic + light eating).
Effects of Fasting & Time Restricted Eating on Fat Loss & Health
https://hubermanlab.com/effects-of-fasting-and-time-restrict...