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Comment by hathawsh | Hacker News Reader

The authors disclosed they have equity in a company called L-Nutra, which intends to sell diet food packs:

http://www.l-nutra.com/index.php/products/prolon

Nothing for sale yet, but hopefully the price will be competitive with do-it-yourselfers. I am cautiously optimistic about this direction.

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An easy way to fast frequently is to just skip breakfast everyday. Then you automatically get a 16+ hour fast and keep your eating to a short window during the day. This helps kick in autophagy [1], a process whereby our cells repair themselves; a garbage collector for our body if you will. This is most likely the process the scientists are observing as slowed down aging. It's not really a foreign topic as there's 397 published papers on autophagy on PubMed. No fancy hyphenated diet products needed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy

Oh cool, I love your hypothesis. Based on science, easy to implement. I definetly have to test this.

There's lots of studies behind intermittent fasting and there definitely seems to be an effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting

In the case cancer, I heard the reason it's good is that the cancer cells die off faster than the normal ones do, when they're not being fed.

Most of this and related studies seem to tie back to insulin one way or the other (the article mentioned IGF1, many of the autophagy studies mention the process only happening with low insulin levels eg http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131(10)0...). It would stand to reason managing meal glygemic index would be important (naturally fasting lowers insulin, presumably so would low glygemic index diets)

I've been doing this for quite a while and it works great for me. It's 1:30PM here and all I've had so far:

1. a cup of milked tea in the morning

2. a chicken salad for lunch

My dinner will be slightly heavier (usually low carb) and will be before 8:00pm. Throw in 2 more cups of tea and that's my day.

It took me a very gradual tapering off of caloric intake lasting over a year to get to a point where I can do this without actually feeling hungry. My body weight is constant (so I know I'm not at a deficit) and I take vitamin supplements (to cover the proportional loss of micro-nutrient due to cutting down on food).

Once a week I have a pig-out day when I usually drink a lot of beer and eat steak, pork chops or something along those lines.

That's exactly what I've been doing for more than a year, including the pig-out day! I lost more than 15 kg 10 months and now my BMI is constant too. I don't need vitamin supplements though and i drink more coffee than tea :)

Vitamin supplements are generally in a form that is more difficult to absorb; for long-term health, I'd consider including foods with high vitamin content.

Exactly. I've been using Ambronite instead of Soylent to get my vitamins as well as calories from real food ingredients but in a liquid form.

So, I tend to skip dinner as it lets me sleep through the parts where I'm hungry :p

My real question is why would breakfast be optimal? Dinner for me would typically be a bigger meal and at a time when I'm most inactive (and will be for another 10-12 hours)

Skipping dinner would work too. I don't know which is more optimal. Skipping breakfast just works better for me.

I have skipped breakfast for the last 10 years of my life (not anymore though), and I would hardly call it fasting. I tend to just compensate it later with lunch and dinner. In fact it's less healthy according to the "many small meals instead of a few big ones" theory.

Me too! I used to burn like a factory. Big meals including breakfast, snacks all day, weighed 140 lbs. Then I started gaining, so I cut out snacks until after lunch. Then until after 2:30. Then altogether. Then I cut out breakfast. Nowadays I sometimes skip dinner too.

Ultimately I expect to be eating a slice of bread at 1:00 and exist on oxygen otherwise.

I used to think this but then I read a few studies showing larger breakfast breaking the overnight fast result in better blood sugar/insulin/body fat scores.

In comparison to intermittent fasting, chronic fasting/starvation everyday like you're doing is probably not good for your body. It responds by keeping more bodyfat to last you through your 16 hr window, giving you a belly and raising your insulin when you start eating.

It seems the best balance for insulin/optimum bmi is a large breakfast, medium lunch and small dinner http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/08August/Pages/Is-breakfast-the-...

Agree! There's also a BBC documentary on intermittent fasting. The idea is to eat just normally 5 days a week, and then two days a week you eat 500 calories if you are a woman, or 600 calories, if you are a man - pretty optimal routine for modern lifestyle :)

Ah, this gets me extremely suspicious until there's independent verification.

If it can't be independently verified, it can't be called science, no matter how promising the study is when they run it.

Why do you think it can't be independently verified? There is a link elsewhere in this thread to the related patent application which I would think contains enough info to verify.

Well, to be fair, I have no idea. I saw some reference here in the comments that there was not enough data for someone to replicate it. I saw some other reference here in the comments that they are going to sell diet packs and have a commercial interest. That's not really enough to draw a conclusion, is it?

Thing is, it isn't my intent to draw a conclusion. Merely to say that if they do not make it reproducible and testable by another team, then all the studies and data in the world do not qualify as science.

Inversely, if it can be independently verified, it can be called science, no matter how suspect they are.

Exactly so.

You are probably talking specifically about the four day diet cycle referenced in this article, but I want to point out that there are already many, many studies supporting the link between calorie restriction and slow aging -- this literature review has links to many peer-reviewed papers: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/361

it is going to be very hard to be price-competitive with "not eating"

just sell the test kits for all the supposed markers of longevity.

Perhaps. I remember when bottled water became a big thing. I thought "What the? This is stupid, choice between free at the tap or buying a bottle of water? This will never work."

If you have kids check out The Lorax movie where the two marketing dudes are pitching the ad for bottled air.

I'd love to see this study replicated, only instead of "proprietary (expensive?) product", it was just 40% of your daily caloric intake.... in soylent.

There's been multiple studies I've seen now indicating that fasting does this, the questions I want to know are:

1. How much of a caloric intake drop is required?

2. How much does it matter what specific types of calories are used for the lower-calorie period? (ie, 500 cals of fast-food vs. soylent vs. prolon vs. ensure)

3. Is there any tell-tale sign we can test for indicating when a sufficient 'period' has occurred for the benefits, thus knowing we can resume normal diet?

I can only imagine if these scientists are associated with a specific product, they probably don't have a huge reason to find out if a cheap existing product (soylent/ensure) works just as well as their most-likely-more-expensive-proprietary one. But it's the first thing I want to know.

I'd love to see this study replicated, only instead of "proprietary (expensive?) product", it was just 40% of your daily caloric intake.... in soylent.

Why? Soylent's just another proprietary product.

Soylent open-sourced their recipe afaik, that was part of the whole appeal for many, they could replicate the entire formula and tweak as desired. There's other food-replacements as well, like ensure, which I cited.

Edit: Soylent has an entire forum of various varients of their recipe: https://diy.soylent.com/recipes

You can also automatically generate recipes using auto-soylent: https://github.com/nick/auto-soylent The nutrient profile can be taken from the patent.

There was a 10 year study that concluded this year that vitamins pills don't help with cancer and heart disease. The quality of delivery of vitamins to the body is important and based on this study, I don't think soylent is a good long term solution for overall health - unless you eat it with fruit and vegetables.

As to what it is: "Prolon™1 and 2 are proprietary, solely plant-based products, comprised of vegetable medleys, broths, energy drinks, teas, and nutrition bars." So, it's a limited, plant-based diet you follow at intervals. I wonder if adopting a full-time plant-based diet would have similar effects, but without the caloric restriction.

"V.D.L. and T.E.M. have equity interest in L-Nutra, a company that develops medical food. 100% of the L-Nutra equity belonging to V.D.L. will be donated to non-profit organizations. Neither author had any role in data analysis."

from the paper.

VDL is the PI though.

That page has an exceedingly high ratio of TM superscript.

That's interesting. Thanks for sharing.

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