> It seems that eating is inherently stressful for the body. Broadly speaking, somewhat accurate, but in the details it can vary greatly. Digestability, resou

> 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..