The Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Human and Animal Health
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But that doesn't matter anyway because he reaches only weak conclusions, indicating the data in humans is murky. The author clearly believes IF is beneficial anyway and writes as if he is an advocate for it in the intro at the top of the web page, before the paper appears. Even more damning, portions of the paper itself read like they were written by an advocate. He just couldn't help himself. His job there is to attempt to be neutral and discover and summarize what the data shows (with conclusions) for his systematic review.
However, this paper can serves as a handy compilation of references on the subject which could help other researchers. Given the author's advocacy of the subject, if used as such care should be taken to ensure the references are thorough and nothing is omitted.
That kind of hinted to me where the bias of the paper would be. However, such bias could've resulted from the information he found during his studies.
"Without hesitation the best online recourse on the topic is my dear friend Martin Berkhan’s Leangains.com"
And from Berkhan: "I co-sign on pretty much everything"
Things that work well for the physical body usually has a corollary beneficial effect on mental state, which is no less of an upside than the health benefits.
Do you have any evidence to support this theory? I very much doubt this holds any truth. Time is not an indication of truth, empirical evidence is.
People have being praying for thousands of years, yet I have seen no conclusive evidence of its effectiveness.
The question I was asking, and which your response does not address, is whether or not a certain activity that claims to be beneficial becomes beneficial purely on the basis that it is practiced over 'x' period of time. Which I do not believe to be true. If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it.
Keep in mind, practiced over 'x' amount of time where x > 2000 years.
>"if something survives a really long time (thousand of years scale) it is very likely to be of use."
Whereby time was the factor by which something is considered 'of use'. The things you've mentioned evolution, the wheel, research papers etc. Have more concrete evidence than just time to back them up.
Although on the topic of food, do you have any evidence to support that?
From an anecdotal perspective, I found that I suffered more stress and frustration via praying than not.
Prayer is like meat - it isn't for everyone, but if you're not getting it you have to be careful not to miss out on certain things.
Do you have any evidence to support the benefits of a placebo effect in relation to religion and/or prayer?
>"plus there's the social benefits of people focusing on good things and potentially manifesting them, and the community benefit of coming together to pray, and psychological benefits are a possibility,"
What social benefits? What good things? What psychological benefits?
>"Although I don't think that's well-studied (or even measurable?) enough to start that debate."
Seems very convenient to me.
>"Prayer is like meat - it isn't for everyone, but if you're not getting it you have to be careful not to miss out on certain things."
What certain things?
Your comment seems awfully shallow in content to me, lacking in any specifics.
tl/dr; inconclusive, hard to get funding.
So, you are implying that there is a switch that will magically turn off beneficial parts of human biology (such as some well known and researched mechanisms like the placebo effect) for those and only those humans that engage in activities that you find personally disgusting (such as religion and prayer).
That's the most overtly religious belief I have seen expressed by a self professed rationalist, you know...
If someone makes a particular claim, the burden of proof is on them.
What you are saying is that if the "cure" in question is prayer instead of sugar pill, then this requires extra burden of proof because the universe is somehow bound to not listen to religious people. Or, to put it more bluntly, prayer would have to be extra harmful in order to counter whatever placebo effect might be at play.
This is a very peculiar belief, not rational but political in nature. In the economics of rhetoric there is a zero sum game: "for my argument to win my opponents must be seen to be in the wrong".
Praying isn't likely to mess with the metabolism. It is, in fact, entirely difficult to tell what it would mess with. Fasting is relatively easy to observe: if it fails, people starve to death.
Meanwhile, people all over the world incorporate fasting into their world intentionally. Far before civilization, they probably did so unintentionally. I highly doubt the body is not equipped in some form to deal with regular period of not eating. It is only extremely recently that the median human has reliable food sources.
But it's a far jump from there to "very likely to be of use." The body is adapted to withstand all sorts of cultural practices that we no longer think are particularly medically useful, like haircuts, shaving, piercings, circumcision, branding, tattoos, foot binding, neck lengthening, bleeding (leeching), etc.
Take the example of sacrifice. In dozens of cultures spanning ((in some cases) hundreds of) thousands of years, people have believed that the sacrifice of <insert species here> will stop the rain/volcano/thunder & lightning/etc. we now know this to be completely false, even though many of these cultures have writings and other 'empirical evidence' that says it does work.
But of course, it is really easy to demand more evidence for the facts we "very much doubt" that for those that confirm our preexisting ideas.
This is actually one of the fallacies related to evolution. Selection only happens against negative pressure, not for positive pressure. In other words, adaptation generally only happens for things which harm survival. Things which are neutral or even benefit survival are not selected for.
Therefore, the proper statement to make would be more along the lines of, "Well, it can't hurt too much."
But, in all, the original statement still stands: Selections only work negatively. That is, a peacock with better plumage might get more chances of reproducing due to sexual selection, but as long as he gets at least one chance of reproduction, he has not been selected against.
Different organisms have evolved different reproduction strategies through selection:
Things which impact reproduction will be selected for. Things which kill you before you can finish raising a child will be most strongly selected against. Things that allow you to keep reproducing longer will be less strongly selected for. I guarantee that if there were a gene that let men and woman keep popping out babies for a century, it would be very likely to be preserved.
No. This is the fallacy.
> I guarantee that if there were a gene that let men and woman keep popping out babies for a century, it would be very likely to be preserved.
It would be preserved, yes. The fallacy is that it will not be perserved in preference of lack of the gene, because there is nothing selecting against not having that gene. In other words, both lines will continue to live on, because there is nothing selecting against either of them.
As long as individuals can reproduce, then their traits are not being selected against. If there are multiple variations of the traits, those will become part of the population's natural variation. Which is a good thing to have in terms of the population, because natural variation helps prevent genetic bottlenecks.
I simply don't believe you.
As the one making the preposterously counterintuitive claim, it's up to you to support this with facts, beyond just saying "nope, you're wrong, it's a fallacy."
Put 9 Smiths and a Johnson on a boat. Now kill half of them. What are the odds that Johnsons are extinct? Now repeat the experiment until my point sinks in.
Also, you are no longer discussing the fallacy. The fallacy is believing that something that allows an individual to survive better than another individual will be selected for, when in fact individuals can only selected against by preventing reproduction, thereby restricting the expression of those traits in the future population. The mere existence of a Johnson in the first place indicates that Johnsons were not previously selected against. An event killing the Johnson would then be the selection against.
The end result looks like Smiths were selected for, but the actuality is that not-Smiths were selected against.
Would THAT weird flap trait be selected against? After all, it "prevents reproduction, thereby restricting the expression of those traits in the future population."
And how is that scenario in any way different than the Smiths which merely reproduce 10 times as often, by virtue of the aforementioned century of fertility?
If a individual does not successfully reproduce because of an individual trait, then that individual was selected against for not being fit. This is true no matter what the trait. As soon as an individual successfully reproduces, then that individual was not select against. This is a binary proposition: selected-against ⊕ ¬selected-against.
Now if some other individual happens to be capable of reproducing more, then that individual's traits will be proportionately better represented in the next generation. Over time, these different traits will spread throughout a population and become part of its natural variation.
HERE'S THE IMPORTANT PART: BUT they will both continue to exist within the population because there is no such thing as selecting for a trait. More successful traits will carry a higher proportion within the equilibrium than less successful traits, but all traits not selected against will exist in the population.
It's important to realize that this is a GOOD THING. If individuals were selected for, reductio ad absurdum, only the "best" individuals would survive. This would lead to lower variation within the population, which would make it extremely fragile to changes. What was a relatively unsuccessful trait yesterday might become a very successful trait today.
Finally, take activities that are strongly beneficial. Not doing these things will put one at a selective disadvantage against one's rivals.
If you agree with the above, there is no validity at all left in your original claim:
>Things which are neutral or even benefit survival are not selected for.
My rebuttal would be that you are looking at the wrong side of the equation. Eating is not selected for; not eating is selected against. So no, your argument does not counter my original claim. Such reworkings of the argument may seem petty, but they are centered around a deeper understanding of what exactly selection is and how it works.
I was simply trying to point out that this sort of phrasing is constantly being used in a religious context to try to create an argument for the whole of the religion rather than to just stop at "here is something about my culture that might work". These things are constantly being conflated as being scientific evidences of the "deeper" truth lying within religion. Before you know it they become yet another thing that people brow beat as they try to convert the people around them. It simply isn't an interesting argument from my point of view.
I've never really understood the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day because I've never suffered from any ailments because not eating breakfast. Or maybe I have and I just don't know it? But then I could apply that same logic to times when I got inexplicably ill or just was not performing at my peak and I did have breakfast. My point is that I don't notice any significant changes in my health and or behaviour.
Of course I don't advise anyone doing this (or NOT doing - check with your physician first), but I still firmly believe that there is a lot of about diet and fitness that has to do with the physiology of the individual.
(BTW, if anyone else thought the linked article sounded familiar it might be because you've read it already. It was published 1 year ago)
This haven't prevented me from gaining weight though. So just skipping breakfasts in the long term wouldn't be enough.
I've always heard that you should have the most calories and greatest diversity of food at the first meal of the day, slightly less so at the midday meal, and a very light/low calorie dinner. This is supposedly because you need that huge energy and mental boost to get your day started, and as the day goes on your caloric intake should taper off as you won't need it as much by the time you get home from work, and a light dinner because within a few hours you'll be sleeping and won't need it either.
Now that being said, it wouldn't work for me. I am up around 6-6:30am, I have breakfast (when I do eat it) at 7:15-7:30am, and my morning at work is decidedly not busy nor does it require critical thinking (I'm basically stuck answering the sales lines in the morning as the rest of the team doesn't roll into work until nearly lunchtime). This is off-season, so I might get ten calls before lunch, and about half of those are non-productive. I take an early lunch, around 11:30am, so I'm available for the larger part of the afternoon. So, the time between breakfast and lunch is usually four hours. That's not enough time to fully digest a large breakfast and be hungry again, so I usually either eat a light breakfast or none at all.
What I've found is that if I eat small meals for breakfast and lunch, with a snack available should I need it in the mid afternoon, I tend to focus better and get more done. The only downside is that by the time I get home and finish cooking dinner, I'm ravenous and I end up eating way too much for that meal. That's the part I'm trying to focus on now and cut down to about half. This will put my overall caloric intake at less than the "maintain" level for my build and age, which will hopefully help me to slowly lose weight.
This theory seems to ignore how effectively we can run on glycogen reserves, and sounds like it assumes a full night of sleeping takes less energy than a few hours awake. Also, most nutrients don't need to be consumed just before you're most active; the body can figure out when to use what, and a lot of resources go more to "repair/maintenance" than "fuel".
I don't know about the long-term side effects of this sleep schedule, but I'm lucky that I have the freedom to sleep as long as I want.
A side-note: Breakfast food is the best food! Nothing wrong with bacon and eggs for dinner. And sometimes I have cereal for lunch.
I don't even get hungry before 1-3pm so I always found it odd when people couldn't function without a breakfast.
Following IF makes it easier to follow a diet since you only have 8h or less to eat all of them.
I started skipping breakfast not for intermittent-fasting benefits but in hopes of better sleep: the anticipatory appetite can contribute to waking up early, and my sleep needed help.
Added: the article supports this. "The rise in ghrelin is independent of meal timing as demonstrated by similar peaks before an anticipated meal in various meal frequencies, thus suggesting that subjective feelings of hunger and energy intake is highly dependent on the individual’s preferred meal pattern (76)."
By the second day, you are no longer hungry anyway, so, for me, a 3 day fast is next to ideal. But I can do rather easily 5 days.
I mostly start on the monday morning and finish on friday, or saturday if I feel brave and there's nothing too exciting in the fridge!
As to why do do it? Well I like cooking, and eating, and drinking, and I rather hate counting calories and such, I'm much more of a 'on/off' sort of guy, and I rather like a bit of a challenge. That also helps me control my weight, without having to spend stupid amount of time in the gym.
Also, there /is/ a 'high' to a fast, I feel like on the third and fourth day you feel particularly sharper; it then decline a bit and you can feel a bit woozy. But the high is pretty cool...
Fasting with just water is a bit tough, as you can get a metallic taste in your mouth that is rather disagreeable. So that's my 'fix' for that problem.
I personally don't mind taking fruit juice, as it does give a small energy boost, especially in the morning.
If you really goose your ketogenic metabolism, your body gets better at using ketones and the taste will go away. You should also be sure to eat/drink extra salt during a fast or ketogenic diet due to water loss.
In the absence of metabolic disease, the body breaks down fat to use the resulting energy. Think about it evolutionarily; "there's no food right now, time to jettison my energy stores"?
It is mostly unrelated to diabetes as that relates to insulin response.
Also, how do you keep sufficient energy to perform daily tasks and things like intense programming sessions?
But as I mentioned, the fruit juice input in the morning does help get the day started. Oh, and the coffee contains some nutrients too, so it's not like I'm totally starving.
After 3 days, I could easily do a week, and I managed to do a 30 day fast one year.
I don't recall feeling high, I just remember a lot of laying down, dreaming and thinking about food, baking, and not doing much of anything else.
I really rather prefer being able to eat everything I want, and spend 2-3 hours a week at the gym. But my weight has gone up by 10-15 lbs (and I have also aged from 17 years old to 29).
I can't say I'm the same size as when I was fasting, but I have a defined shape, whereas before I was bone and skinny fat.
I dropped from 140 lbs to 110 lbs in a month. I'm 5'4 female, and a 'skinny' weight for me is about 130 lbs as I am fairly muscular.
I used to want to look like a skeleton, I had no medical supervision and this was probably one of my worst eating disorder periods, the other being at college where I ate a microwaved apple or orange and 2 cups of broccoli / carrots only every day, for most of my freshman/sophmore year.
When I was ill, I knew I what I was doing with a disorder in mind, but I didn't admit it to anyone outside of me. I think most people who have an eating disorder know they have it inside, it's just something kept carefully secret.
I've been in recovery for about 2 years now, with healthy thoughts and no food restriction, excess exercising, starvation or purging. When I was sick I really didn't care if I died, as I have major depressive disorder comorbid, which I continue to have more difficulty beating than I did the eating disorder. I've fainted from fasting and I've been hospitalized from starvation. It's hell, pretty much.
I think it's important to take a step back from whatever the goal of these diets are, and look at the bigger picture. My weight only varied between 30 lbs over 15 or so years, and it controlled me entirely. It made me have to put a lot of my life on hold, when I had to focus what little energy I had towards getting better. I would really recommend anyone take a more careful, therapeutic look at their life if the above sounds tempting, and they find themselves going into cycles of fasting and 'losing' control over how they manage their diet.
For example my wife can eat is a notch over 5 foot tall, and eat as much as I do, and does not put on weight, however, if she misses a meal, she gets wobbly and dizzy. So fasting is definitely not for her!
I have a pet theory that some people are just very good at extracting energy from food, and some people are very bad at it. Perhaps it's related to a difference in gut bacteria mix or something.
With replication, somebody has to actually try and duplicate experiments.
There have been some interesting studies into replicating results from published research that have found that only a very small fraction of peer reviewed papers present actually replicable results. That's shocking.
First, the idea was publication in a scientific magazine. For many reasons, taking time from becoming a good clinician being the most important, but far from single one, I eventually decided not to go that route.
At the same time, I doubt IF by itself would do much if during the rest of the time you ate 3000 calories from chocolate and chips.
It tastes amazing :-)
I would attribute the improvement in blood pressure to an exercise, not IF (at least this was my case, as I've started going to gym before I started IF and seen the blood pressure drop).
You don't have to care about choosing your food according to the diet or to count calories.
You don't have to figure out if you are withing the limits of the diet, or feel bad if you've eaten something extra.
On the days you're not fasting, you can eat whatever you want.
At first I fasted every Monday for 3 months (no food at all just water), then I fasted for 14 days without interruption.
This is much easier than I was thinking. After 3 days I was not hungry anymore BUT I wanted to eat. What I mean is that I had no pain in my stomach but my mind wanted the comfort of eating something. It grew more and more, at the end I was watching Youtube cooking videos every evening and planning all the great meals I would cook once I restarted to eat ;-)
Physically I could have lasted at least 2 weeks more, but mentally I was tired of it. I'm a software dev I so of course I had it easy compared to someone who has an active lifestyle.
Now for the bad part : no health miracle at all, and all the weight I lost has been regained and then some. And since then I was unable to gather enough willpower to fast again, even for just one day.
Lifestyle changes that impact health require that one habitual adopt the change to realize their benefits long term. Of course if you followed a fasting program just once and then returned to the same habits you had prior to fasting you should expect to gain weight back.
Really it just means that if you want some health change you need to find something that is appealing so you can form a habit. (I don't find fasting appealing either.)
Eating in a 4 hour window from 6pm to 10pm approx.
This diet isn't practical if you're doing any serious exercise, either in the morning, or late evening (during after the eating window), so I often have to cheat and eat lunch, or otherwise extend the window on days when I'm exercising.
Otherwise it's surprising easy to stick to with a coffee or two for comfort, and I've lost a significant amount of weight:
* It's hard to eat enough calories to gain / maintain my (over)weight in 4 hours, at least if I stick to whole, fresh, real food. Some days I can hit a ~1000 calory deficit according to my calculations.
* I find it easy to go to sleep on a full-ish stomach, which helps a great deal compared to other diets.
Eventually I lost 30 pounds. It's not the crazy amounts some people lost, but it was significant for me. Today though, 1500 seems to be my normal. If I go much above it, I start to gain. I think that's the risk of doing it this way. Your body seems to get used to the reduced count for some reason.
It's called "starvation response." Being at a caloric deficit for a long period of time makes your body think that it is going to starve to death. Therefore it reduces your metabolism in response to the lack of calories you intake.
This is why having a cheat day every once in a while is actually physically good for your body not just psychologically.
I've been experimenting with alternate-day fasting for a while now. I allow myself whatever I want for breakfast (usually cereal with fruit, or oatmeal) and then I eat _basically_ nothing until breakfast the next day. If I really want one, I'll eat a banana or a grapefruit after a run.
An interesting observation is that I have absolutely no problem exercising on fast days. In fact a 5m run feels great.
It would reduce my cardiovascular risk, improve my running (easier on knees).
Am not a Muslim, but this month of Ramzan (or Ramadan) does inspire me to try some light fasting.
Nothing severe, no extremes for me. Happy with incremental, over a period of time, changes.
I also went through more traditional programs, where calories are spread more evenly over different meals throughout the day.
In my experience both methods work very well, especially if paired with exercise, and I couldn't really see any difference in terms of health benefits.
Personally though, I found that the IF works better from a psychological standpoint, and I'm more likely to stick to it longer: the single meal I have tends to be much more satisfying and allows for appetizing foods and quantities that I could not afford if spreading the daily allowance on more meals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_and_abstinence_of_the_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Orthodox_Tewahedo_Ch... and beliefs
I try to drink a lot of water during the day too. I am conscious that the water is reverse osmosis and then I'll add a pinch of celtic sea salt, some apple cider vinegar, and lemon. I also use active h2 tablets which I highly recommend.
My current schedule, I would be asleep for most of your eating window. In the past 6 years, my working schedule has rotated around the entire 24 hour clock - early morning shifts, midday shifts, swing shift, early overnight shift, late overnight shift. My eating rotates around with my work shift, eating a small meal before work, a small one during (whenever during the day or night the shift is, there's a "lunch" break almost in the exact center) and a large meal after work.
Did she drink? smoke? Was she a pescatarian? or her diet consist of lots of leafy greens? Lived in conditions closesly resembling a blue zone[1]?
Anything else besides the IF that was out of the ordinary in her regimen?
[1] Blue Zone
That study suggests (i think) that mice on the 24h fast developed insulin resistance in the liver, a sign of prediabetes.
Since I actually like the one-meal-a-day lifestyle, I wonder which study is more applicable to humans...
This shows a misunderstanding of what science is about. You can set up control groups, that use different eating methods, but consuming the same amount of calories (and micro nutrients, etc.) over a given period of time. In some settings, double-blind experiments (with placebos) are indeed "better"; but it is not required to get scientifically valid results.
Of course it's just air, there's no such thing as a silver bullet diet. Health and longevity depends on so much more than just diet that there will never be such a thing.
But still, since there's money to be made by selling dummies miracle diets, there are some to sell. And since they can't sell the real thing because it can't be made, they do what they can to convince the customers that it is. Among other marketing tricks, pervert science so it looks like their snake oil is based on something more than just the will to make money from gullible people.
There might be some good science in the nutrition field. Sadly, it's drowned in a sea of wishful thinking, bad science and plain charlatanry...
There might be something in it but nobody really knows because no one has studied it properly.
I have a particular hatred for Soylent but thankfully its quick rise to popularity has drawn upon it a lot of scrutiny and with that has alleviated a lot of the bad that it was originally representing. I still think there are superior alternatives on the market that have pre-dated Soylent but the fact that its been iterated and improved by health professionals and not a Software Engineer says a lot for it.
Anecdotally (my personal experience, with zero statistical significance), the last 10 years seems like it had a huge explosion of interest in fad diets among twenty- and thirtysomething tech industry people. Not sure if this is an actual trend or just a consequence of where I live and who I spend time with these days.
I'm solidly middle-aged at this point. When I was in my 20s and 30s, there were just as many fad diets and nutritional voodoo but it was generally super credulous, spacey middle-aged and older people that were into them. The phenomenon of a degreed, professional 23-year-old wanting to have long and enthusiastic conversations with me about the properties of gluten (or whatever) in casual social contexts feels really bizarre.
This is a very roundabout way of saying that for whatever reason, at this point in time there is a big overlap between people who are into voodoo health crazes and the core HN demographic. This seems like a recent trend to me, but that's only anecdotal.
An increasing number of animal studies have shown altered markers for health in subjects exposed to intermittent fasting, i.e. regularly and repeatedly abstaining from eating during 12-36 hours per period. It has been hypothesized that the reported beneficial health effects from caloric restriction on excess body weight, cardiovascular risk factors, glucose metabolism, tumor physiology, neurodegenerative pathology and life span can be mimicked by alternating periods of short term fasting with periods of refeeding, without deliberately altering the total caloric intake. Therefore, a systematic review of available intervention studies on intermittent fasting and animal and human health was performed. In rodents, intermittent fasting exhibits beneficial effects including decreased body weight, improved cardiovascular health and glucose regulation, enhanced neuronal health, decreased cancer risk and increased life span – some of the effects independent of the effects attributed to calorie restriction alone. The human studies performed to date are generally of low-quality design. Beneficial effects such as weight loss, reduced risk for cardiovascular disease and improved insulin sensitivity have been observed, but conflicting data exists. The potential health promoting effects of intermittent fasting in humans and applicability to modern lifestyle are discussed. - See more at: http://www.lift-heavy.com/intermittent-fasting/#sthash.HPQDE...
It is for you to decide whether it was too long, and whether you didn't read it because it was too long.