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I have long believed, due entirely to anecdotal evidence, that restricting calories and eating less is one of the best ways to add years to your life. It seems

I have long believed, due entirely to anecdotal evidence, that restricting calories and eating less is one of the best ways to add years to your life. It seems that eating is inherently stressful for the body. Though obviously necessary, eating is something that we should strive to minimize. Any more than necessary, and the stress induced from digestion, and inflammatory molecules, damages the body and undermines our ability to fight infection.

RobertoG 10y ago
"It seems that eating is inherently stressful for the body." I don't think that's the proper way to think about it. It's more probably that what is going on is that fasting was unavoidable for our ancestors, and the body evolved for that to be a period where some kind of repair action was activated. Without fasting something doesn't happen. That something is probably related to autophagy.
sigi45 10y ago
Whatever it ist or whatever effect it might have, it doesn't matter. We are living longer than ever. Why bothering? Life a normal life, do a little bit of sports, try to reduce stress etc. Will not change my diet or eating habbits.
dualogy 10y ago
> It seems that eating is inherently stressful for the body. Broadly speaking, somewhat accurate, but in the details it can vary greatly. Digestability, resources required to be mobilized for certain foods vs others (enzymes, how much stomach acid & how often etc), and certainly insulin among other "signaling hormones" are crucial factors. In mammals insulin especially is almost always a quite potent "stress/damage" agent ---observe the capacity of human pets to develop diabetes (not exactly something a wolf in the wild could ever catch, even when absent abundance of prey animals munching some berries or fallen apples in the applicable very short season)--- even wild pigs are nowhere near as fat as our agri-breeds, and practically all mammals given abundance of their preferred natural food choices, eat a high-fat diet (in herbivores this is effected by a radically more potent microbiome of bacteria and other microorganisms converting cellulose and most-not-all other carbohydrate into chiefly short-chain fatty acids, plus synthesization of some vitamins/etc for that mammal) --- my point? "Eating is doubly stressful for humans" if we consider the foods we have invented since the dawn of agriculture, namely (A) quickly and easily digested carbohydrate loads (B) available year-round, and (C) 24/7 --- a real triple-whammy for the mammal. OTOH we're quite robust mammals (systemic damage only really gets noticed/troublesome with age! it's amazing the assaults human bodies can handle for so many decades, whether we're talking foods or other substances) on the whole IMHO and we're quite a bit "better at fasting" in a way (we can utilize more ketones for longer and more efficiently esp our brains, no other mammal could fast as long as we can, indeed if you're 200-300+lbs with a handy source of just-the-water-soluble-vitamins you can easily fast a year, as an interesting pre-1971 study investigated before "ethics guidelines for research" were.. "cultivated") which could well mean that it has less pronounced / fewer of such "benefits" as is the case for MICE! Well now.. what was my point just now..
dualogy 10y ago
Another point to highlight here is that it helps to contrast acute stressors vs. chronic stressors. I'd characterize decades of insulin-raising (or roughage/indigestables-heavy) overfeeding as a chronic stressor, and a 3-week fast every month or other month too, whereas intermittent fasting is probably more of an acute stressor --- somewhat akin to "the right amount, not too little not too much" of exercise, the kind of stressor that rapidly mobilizes heightened repair and protection mechanisms, as well as stored excess resources to pay for this. Not a bad deal.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> It seems that eating is inherently stressful for the body. It seems that eating 3 meals a day, every day, like clockwork, is not the best strategy overall (to say nothing of perpetual snacking in between). I think some signal starts to show above the noise in the data, indicating that our metabolism is optimized for a less regular schedule - or at least a schedule interspersing times of abundance with intervals of constraint. If that's the case, then we have to simulate and replace the external constraints of Stone Age yore with voluntary restraint.
- cagenut 10y ago
  right but "educate people and then they will use their will power" never even remotely works. imho the next step is to learn how to measure in much greater detail (and on a personal level) where thresholds for immune, organ, hormone, etc responses occur. Then use that to design and customize diets. Essentially I wanna capacity plan my carb/sugar intake to keep it just about 20% shy of of triggering an insulin response. That's just one potential example.
Trundle 10y ago
You might be interested in this. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/science/10aging.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/science/10aging.html?_r=1

RobertoG 10y ago

"It seems that eating is inherently stressful for the body." I don't think that's the proper way to think about it. It's more probably that what is going on is that fasting was unavoidable for our ancestors, and the body evolved for that to be a period where some kind of repair action was activated. Without fasting something doesn't happen. That something is probably related to autophagy.

sigi45 10y ago

Whatever it ist or whatever effect it might have, it doesn't matter. We are living longer than ever. Why bothering? Life a normal life, do a little bit of sports, try to reduce stress etc. Will not change my diet or eating habbits.

dualogy 10y ago

> It seems that eating is inherently stressful for the body. Broadly speaking, somewhat accurate, but in the details it can vary greatly. Digestability, resources required to be mobilized for certain foods vs others (enzymes, how much stomach acid & how often etc), and certainly insulin among other "signaling hormones" are crucial factors. In mammals insulin especially is almost always a quite potent "stress/damage" agent ---observe the capacity of human pets to develop diabetes (not exactly something a wolf in the wild could ever catch, even when absent abundance of prey animals munching some berries or fallen apples in the applicable very short season)--- even wild pigs are nowhere near as fat as our agri-breeds, and practically all mammals given abundance of their preferred natural food choices, eat a high-fat diet (in herbivores this is effected by a radically more potent microbiome of bacteria and other microorganisms converting cellulose and most-not-all other carbohydrate into chiefly short-chain fatty acids, plus synthesization of some vitamins/etc for that mammal) --- my point? "Eating is doubly stressful for humans" if we consider the foods we have invented since the dawn of agriculture, namely (A) quickly and easily digested carbohydrate loads (B) available year-round, and (C) 24/7 --- a real triple-whammy for the mammal. OTOH we're quite robust mammals (systemic damage only really gets noticed/troublesome with age! it's amazing the assaults human bodies can handle for so many decades, whether we're talking foods or other substances) on the whole IMHO and we're quite a bit "better at fasting" in a way (we can utilize more ketones for longer and more efficiently esp our brains, no other mammal could fast as long as we can, indeed if you're 200-300+lbs with a handy source of just-the-water-soluble-vitamins you can easily fast a year, as an interesting pre-1971 study investigated before "ethics guidelines for research" were.. "cultivated") which could well mean that it has less pronounced / fewer of such "benefits" as is the case for MICE! Well now.. what was my point just now..

dualogy 10y ago

Another point to highlight here is that it helps to contrast acute stressors vs. chronic stressors. I'd characterize decades of insulin-raising (or roughage/indigestables-heavy) overfeeding as a chronic stressor, and a 3-week fast every month or other month too, whereas intermittent fasting is probably more of an acute stressor --- somewhat akin to "the right amount, not too little not too much" of exercise, the kind of stressor that rapidly mobilizes heightened repair and protection mechanisms, as well as stored excess resources to pay for this. Not a bad deal.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

> It seems that eating is inherently stressful for the body. It seems that eating 3 meals a day, every day, like clockwork, is not the best strategy overall (to say nothing of perpetual snacking in between). I think some signal starts to show above the noise in the data, indicating that our metabolism is optimized for a less regular schedule - or at least a schedule interspersing times of abundance with intervals of constraint. If that's the case, then we have to simulate and replace the external constraints of Stone Age yore with voluntary restraint.

cagenut 10y ago
right but "educate people and then they will use their will power" never even remotely works. imho the next step is to learn how to measure in much greater detail (and on a personal level) where thresholds for immune, organ, hormone, etc responses occur. Then use that to design and customize diets. Essentially I wanna capacity plan my carb/sugar intake to keep it just about 20% shy of of triggering an insulin response. That's just one potential example.

Trundle 10y ago

You might be interested in this. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/science/10aging.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/science/10aging.html?_r=1