Eat less, remember more | Hacker News Reader

Eat less, remember more

newscientist.com

31 pointsnreece18 comments

I was watching a documentary today titled 'How To Live To 101 Without Trying'. It explores the towns where people live the longest: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7250675.stm

In Okinawa (Japan), the residents actually age more slowly than almost anyone else on earth.

It's what they don't eat that may be at the heart of their exceptionally long lives. The Okinawan's most significant cultural tradition is known as hara hachi bu, which translated means eat until you're only 80% full.

Scientists call it caloric restriction, but don't entirely understand why it works. They think it sends a signal to the body that there is going to be a impending famine, sending it into a protective, self-preservation mode.

Eating less (and healthy) does have its merits.

Dunno if "most significant cultural tradition" is an appropriate appelative when the Okinawans invented Karate, and hara hachi bu was independently developed in Western civilization ("Eat not to satiety," Benjamin Franklin).

I don't think "Eat not to satiety" became a cultural tradition in Benjamin Franklin's homeland.

.. or even for Ben himself ;)

I seem to find the Zone better when I haven't eaten all day. I wonder if the principles are the same. The studies in rats would seem to be very straightforward - combining a restricted calories diet with maze tests. I'm surprised they haven't been done yet.

I seem to find the Zone better when I haven't eaten all day. I wonder if the principles are the same.

This works fine for me, but I've seen counter-examples too - I've had colleagues that are absolutely braindead/grumpy/etc unless they eat.

To add another anecdote, one of my most productive programming periods was when I was eating a single (small) meal per day at 6pm.

I used to actually enjoy skipping breakfast and sometimes lunch. I'm thinking at the moment particularly of college when I would be in "crunch mode". I'd get a bit hungry, but it somehow "felt" as if it lent itself to the overall push to get stuff done.

I'm generally an evening person, but I could have a very enjoyable morning by jumping, sans breakfast, straight into work while things were still quiet and somehow associate my work and progress with a certain "leanness" in the gastrointestinal area. I don't know quite how to describe it, but it was a distinct and useful impression.

I seem to remember reading a study (cannot find it at the moment) hypothesizing a lower food intake triggers an evolutionary response. Basically: hungry->must find food->more alert

A friend last week described some study which he said showed some evidence that as you consume calories, your body winds forward in age, and that very simply calorie restriction may wind your clock forward more slowly. I believe he said something about mitochondria was involved, but I might have just been having flashbacks to Parasite Eve. I just did a little googling and there are a few abstracts out there.

calorie restriction may wind your clock forward more slowly.

There is some recent evidence against the efficacy of calorie restriction: http://www.mailbucket.org/ieet-life-11416105.html

Sat, 01/24/2009 - 04:37 - NLN

If you are a mouse on the chubby side, then eating less may help you live longer. For lean mice - and possibly for lean humans, the authors of a new study predict -- the anti-aging strategy known as caloric restriction may be a pointless, frustrating and even dangerous exercise.

Metabolically humans alternate between anabolic and catabolic modes: sleep and eat more, then work more with less sleep and food. Human metabolism is a sophisticated system for smoothing out highly variable energy intake. Always eating the same three squares a day isn't synergistic. I have found skipping meals when busy to be a very good idea. There's a reason all cultures have traditional fast and feast cycles.

The idea of sustained caloric restriction, however, is probably stupid. You just want variable intake, not low intake. First of all, the studies are only of rats and worms. Secondly, the studies fail to control for the fact that the starved animals get more exercise whereas the well fed animals languidly sit around.

I started dieting with small meals recently and found the same thing happening. The co-founder I worked for at my last job was well-known for being a well-focused hacker as well as skipping lunch. He seemed to run on tea alone.

There may be something to the hungry hacker hypothesis... perhaps it's another reason for startup productivity!

"Two words may not seem like much, but it's more than the difference between people under 30 and above 50."

So you lose less than 16% of your memory capacity in 20+ years. Interesting. I was afraid it was worse.

Though I don't think it was really "short term memory" they tested [1]. Even normal adults can recall just 7±2 chunks stored in the short term memory, so 10.5/12.5 for elderly would be extraordinary.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_term_memory

I'm going to give this a shot. Not radically like the CR people I will just randomly skip meals and not eat after 6pm(good practice anyways).

Maybe it will break my procrastination cause my body begins to work harder to find food. Just gotta make sure my stomach doesn't grumble during the wrong times though.

Buddhist monks don't eat after midday. They also likely wake up earlier than programers, though ;)

Dostoevsky Hunger

Since the experiment started with overweight people, I can't see it distinguished between losing weight to improve memory and reducing calories to improve memory.

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