14 ms·

Intermittent fasting from dawn to sunset induces anticancer response

552 points by voisin 6y ago

Nemant 6y ago
Welcome to Ramadan!
- kylebenzle 6y ago
  Good point. Do practicing Muslims have lower cancer rates?
  - tptacek 6y ago
    They're only fasting for a month out of the year.
    - Schiendelman 6y ago
      That’s literally the fasting term in the study.
    - mathattack 6y ago
      The duration in the article is 4 months. The real issue is small sample size. (14 people)
      - jp0d 6y ago
        That's a really small sample size. Are they allowed to publish a study like this for such a small sample? Does anyone know if there is a minimum threshold size?
        dr_dshiv 6y ago
        Allowed to publish? First it's a pilot study. Second, it's actually not a small sample size if you reasonably anticipate big effects and have multiple measures for each of the people at multiple time points. It isn't an observational study, though believers might have wished for a matched control group - - the anticancer effects might have come from the Ramadan prayer vs fasting!
      - hammeiam 6y ago
        From the title: "Intermittent fasting from dawn to sunset for four consecutive weeks..."
      - oh_sigh 6y ago
        Also, not just 14 people, but 14 people with a metabolic disorder.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      So do they have fewer early stages cancers diagnosed in the months after?
    - Nemant 6y ago
      A lot of practicing Muslims also fast Mondays and Thursdays and the “3 white days” of the month[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_in_Islam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_in_Islam see “Days of voluntary fasting”
      - tptacek 6y ago
        TIL! Thank you!
  - kranner 6y ago
    You'll have to account for increased rates of smoking in both Muslim-majority countries and Muslim populations in non-Muslim-majority countries. From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360407/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360407/ > A fifth of the world's population is Muslim, and most Muslims live in areas where the prevalence of smoking is high and often increasing. But even among the many Muslims living in Europe, smoking prevalence (particularly among men) remains high. For example, in England in 2004 the overall prevalence of smoking was 40% in Bangladeshi men and 29% in Pakistani men compared with 24% among the male general population.
    - erklik 6y ago
      That's interesting. I believe smoking is discouraged in Islam, so I wonder why the uptake is higher. Guessing it's a general education issue?
      - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
        Tobacco companies actively and aggressively advertise and market their products in LEDC countries: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1363897/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1363897/
      - sharadov 6y ago
        Smoking not so much, alcohol is considered "haram", you see smoking to be a lot more prevalent.
      - ibn_khaldun 6y ago
        Smoking, like alcohol and other vices are prohibited. It is in fact an unfortunate reality that is a matter of miseducation for those who are not victim to the statistical conflation of nationality as an indicator of belief.
      - c8g 6y ago
        As a Muslim and live in a country with 90% Muslim, I can tell, most of the people are Muslim, because they have a Muslim parent. Rape, corruption, addiction, sexual harassments, hate speech are common things here. No Muslim can do these. 5 times prayers (Salah) in a day is absolutely mandatory, absolutely no excuse for Muslim. But most people don't even care, including me :)
  - Zenst 6y ago
    Nothing stand-out from https://ourworldindata.org/cancer https://ourworldindata.org/cancer that would indicate that. Alcohol would also be a factor in play as that would increase the risk of some cancers, so the lack of you would of thought also be a factor with that lifestyle.
  - esalman 6y ago
    I don't see any predominantly Muslim country listed high up here- https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer-frequency-country https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer... . Which is kinda surprising to me. My father never smoked and still got cancer. I am from a Muslim-majority country and I know of a bunch of other friends/family who suffered or perished from cancer.
  - anticensor 6y ago
    Not significantly affected, as most Muslims eat too much when breaking the fast.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- cocoland2 6y ago
  This is not just pertinent to Ramadan. Every 2 days in the month , there is this Hindu thing of Ekadasi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekadashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekadashi). Each of these depending on the month have a presiding deity! The rules are simple , the day before should be a light meal , on Ekadasi dawn to next day dawn (about 36 hours in all) fasting. On Dwadasi , break this fast by first having water , meditation and then a light meal (usually milk+milk products) and community feeding if possible . Other rules include not sleeping during day and so on. My parents do it still , very few follow this regimen though these days. I think very similar eating/fasting habits are pertinent during the lent as well. When i was younger , during Ramadan we used to go to break the fast post dusk. In my homestate in India , there is usually a gruel that is prepared with sooji (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_rava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_rava) and lot of fruits. As a veggie , i would go there and eat :) . Sadly it has become a hog show now ,eating as much during dawn and dusk to keep the day full
  - skohan 6y ago
    When I was in Nepal I talked to a guy who said he was not eating that day "to balance the body". The way he spoke about it made it seem like it must be a normal practice there which everyone understood and was aware of.
- PeterStuer 6y ago
  Christianity used to have a 40 day fasting period as well.
- dragonelite 6y ago
  Funny how a lot of old religions have some components of fasting in their teaching. For myself i go 5 days without food every season of the year, seem to be enough to keep my weight quiet stable. Without anything socially going on i have a daily 90 min eating window. And i allow myself some guilty pleasures on Fridays and Saturdays. Like going out and drinking beers with friends
mikenew 6y ago
> Subjects had a significant reduction in body mass index, waist circumference, and improvement in blood pressure Would really like to see this compared to another group with a similar level of calorie restriction but without the intermittent fasting. The question with intermittent fasting is really just "is it better than plain old calorie restriction". Seems like there's some evidence that points to "yes" and some evidence that points to "not really". EDIT: To be clear, by "is it better" I meant aside from just adherence. I've used IF quite a bit myself and I find it much easier than eating frequent, small meals throughout the day if I want to be hypocaloric. There are a lot of claims around autophagy, a more favorable metabolic adaptation, better body composition, and in this case actual cancer treatment. That is what I would like to see evidence for.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  My suspicion is that you would see similar improvement with things like waist circumference, BMI, blood pressure, at least initially, but that the difference with intermittent fasting is that it introduces enough of a "fasted state" that the body is able to perform repair and autophagy of senescent cells that would occur much less in a constantly fed state. (something about telomerase, but I probably shouldn't mention that because my memory about that is foggy) If you increased the amount of fasting, I'd bet good money that people would lose more weight than on a calorie-equivalent diet. Intermittent fasting, in my experience, is helpful in sticking to a diet that is lower in calories because it allows you to eat satisfying meals.
  - voisin 6y ago
    From what I understand, autophagy doesn’t start until 18 hours and doesn’t peak until 72 hours.
    - JohnGB 6y ago
      Autophagy is always active, the real question is how that activity changes during fasting. The number of 18 hours is fairly arbitrary, as even after a few hours of fasting autophagy increases.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
The gut is home to 70 to 80 percent of the immune cells in the body. It seems to me when you give it a break from a constant influx of food, that potentially frees up immune cells to do other things for a bit.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I do believe that makes sense and is part of the common "wisdom" of the diet. However more sizeable research studies need to be done in order to add strength to the hypothesis. These are far to small other than as pointers of what might be possible
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    There are hundreds of studies on NCBI about the benefits of fasting. Time to stop guessing that it's fringe science.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Also frees up your entire body from being constantly bathed in hormones like insulin.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I sort of think of it like "maintenance downtime." It was my son that first suggested to me it helps by freeing up immune cells and letting them concentrate on other things for a bit and I think that makes a lot of sense. I also suspect that dropping your blood sugar levels low enough, long enough helps starve some invaders. We are bigger than the bacteria in our system. We can survive for a bit without those resources. Maybe some of them can't.
    - blastro 6y ago
      you make good points!
404mm 6y ago
By “no drinking”, do they really mean no drinking plain water? 14 hr stretches are doable but it’s interesting to find your body improving while becoming dehydrated.
- millstone 6y ago
  The study focused on Muslims observing Ramadan, which does forbid drinking liquids (including water) during the daytime.
- voisin 6y ago
  “Dry fasting” is a thing, but it seems most people recommend against it. Not sure what the added advantage is for avoiding zero calorie water consumption.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    Pleasing god. The high you might get from knowing you have the amount of self control necessary to dry fast.
  - erklik 6y ago
    I mean, there's the religious "high". But I think the goal behind it is to allow one to feel how those who are much more unfortunate than us feel on a hot summer's day and so on.
- fyfy18 6y ago
  I'm not sure how things used to be, but having lived in a Muslim country a decade ago, my experience was during Ramadan daily life carried on as usual with people going to work and school. Instances of car accidents (often fatal) during this time were much higher than other times of the year.
rattray 6y ago
Noted elsewhere in the thread, but this is a pilot study with 14 subjects.
haram_masala 6y ago
No control group, and n=14. This study says nothing.
- marketingPro 6y ago
  Generally it's good to be skeptical but this- "We found a significant fold increase in the levels of several tumor suppressor and DNA repair gene protein products (GP)s at the end of 4th week during 4-week intermittent fasting (CALU, INTS6, KIT, CROCC, PIGR), and 1 week after 4-week intermittent fasting (CALU, CALR, IGFBP4, SEMA4B) compared with the levels before 4-week intermittent fasting." But why would this suddenly happen? There's some physiology here to be uncovered. That hardly is 'nothing'. Is it calories? Is it fasting? Is it nutrient timing? You can't find out which from "no control", but there's definitely a physiological effect being seen, correct?
  - aaaxyz 6y ago
    Is it climate change? Is it because the stock market went up 10%? Because Saturn's orbit crossed it's periphelion? Or more seriously, could it just be the Hawtorne effect? As you pointed out, without a control group, you cannot claim that any change in your measurements are due to anything. The fact that the researchers do attribute it to fasting is just bad science and makes me doubt the rest of their findings.
    - marketingPro 6y ago
      If any of those happened, wouldn't the entire world see those physiological effects? Being a bit more realistic is the hawthorne effect, which can be easy to test with follow up experiments. My biggest takeaway isn't to do IF or cut calories, but rather it seems some phenomena was found. If you asked me if diet, fasting, etc... Would cute cancer, I'd have said NO! but this study has changed that answer to "I don't know". I suggest that is a huge difference and benefit.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Well, could be a different thing altogether. This was probably done in Ramadan (the no-drinking thing, and the researches from Turkey as I saw in a different comment). So there would also be no smoking allowed for 14h per day. Maybe this has an effect.
skynetv2 6y ago
Can someone post a TL;DR
- aaaxyz 6y ago
  >[...] we conducted a pilot study in 14 subjects with metabolic syndrome who fasted (no eating or drinking) from dawn to sunset for more than 14 h daily for four consecutive weeks. [...] Further studies are needed to test the intermittent fasting from dawn to sunset in the prevention and treatment of metabolic syndrome-induced cancers. That's the gist of it.
theNJR 6y ago
Some of Peter Attia’s thoughts on the more robust study from a few weeks ago that is relevant https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j7AZF8bvcR0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j7AZF8bvcR0
- froh 6y ago
  Direct link to the study that's discussed, n=116, w/ control, fasting from 8pm to 12pm the next day. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2771095 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
scott31 6y ago
The "research" is politically motivated, it is thus garbage. Especially considering that it would be dangerous to publish the result if it were to show the other way, not that they would want to publish it. Besides, not having even a drop of water for longer than 12 hours during summer is dangerous, not only to fasting people themselves but to the society as a whole since they drive cars and they have higher rate of fainting during that. But doing those for the name of religion is somehow acceptable in our society..
- millstone 6y ago
  This is published in Nature, which does not traffic in garbage. This is an observational (not experimental) study which means that the subjects already planned to fast in observance of Ramadan, and the paper discussed what was observed wrt to health and cancer indicators. It's not a polemic.
- deleted 6y ago
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- erklik 6y ago
  > Besides, not having even a drop of water for longer than 12 hours during summer is dangerous, not only to fasting people themselves but to the society as a whole since they drive cars and they have higher rate of fainting during that. It's clear that many in the world do exactly that. It might be interesting to see a study similar to above as to whether accident rates increase during Ramadan.
zerop 6y ago
I have been fasting weekly once from morning to evening. I eat only dinner on Tuesday. I have been doing it since past 6 years.. it makes a difference. It improved digestion and overall I feel good at end of fasting day. Good from cnn on fasting advantages https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/01/health/fasting-longevity-food-drayer/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/01/health/fasting-longevity-food...
- soulofmischief 6y ago
  Any other effects you think could also be contributing? A change in exercise, diet, etc?
  - ketzo 6y ago
    Anecdotally, my dad tried to lose weight with moderate exercise and light diet, and struggled to keep off 5 pounds; intermittent fasting (2 days a week of 1200 calories) dropped him something like 15 lbs in 40 days?
viburnum 6y ago
Also recommended, stretching your low back five times a day.
- voisin 6y ago
  In what way? Do you have a lower back routine?
  - amingilani 6y ago
    I believe he's humorously referring to how Muslims already do this by praying five times a day. The routine requires prostrating multiple times, therefore stretching your back :)
- imranq 6y ago
  And possibly giving charity each year
  - frequentnapper 6y ago
    ...
    - oa335 6y ago
      The other comments are in-jokes referring to the 5 pillars of Islam, and you are making an irrelevant snide comment under the guise of a joke.
      - deleted 6y ago
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  - esalman 6y ago
    tbh I think the practice of giving away flat-rate 2.5% of their wealth each year instead of 40-50% brackets would encourage more wealthy people to actually donate and not dodge taxes.
RmzH 6y ago
- Anticancer - Anti-diabetes - Anti-aging - Reduction in body mass index, waist circumference - Improvement in blood pressure
- moneytide1 6y ago
  It makes sense to fast temporarily in order to "jolt" the body into action (reduced external input activates internal compensation processes) as our genetics have ancient embedded protocols developed to push through resource restrictions. If not for your listed reasons - do it to knock the rust off of safely stored emergency equipment. I've noticed that once you get past the first "hump" of hunger pangs, famish subsides into the background, and I'd imagine it is at this point where the metaphorical "adrenaline" dosage is injected by nature to make available the bodies reserve energy to get through inevitable temporary nutrient deficiency back in our hunter-gatherer days.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - erklik 6y ago
    > I've noticed that once you get past the first "hump" of hunger pangs, famish subsides into the background, and I'd imagine it is at this point where the metaphorical "adrenaline" dosage is injected by nature to make available the bodies reserve energy to get through inevitable temporary nutrient deficiency back in our hunter-gatherer days. I haven't personally fasted as such in this manner but was always quite fascinated and am quite fascinated by how various Muslim colleagues and friends are able to do it during the summer with 45 degree heat and so on. All of them say that the first two days are the toughest while the rest of the month of Ramadan seems basically the same as the rest of their lives. It does put into perspective as to how much of our "hunger" is psychological than resource needs.
    - moneytide1 6y ago
      I've not intentionally fasted over sustained periods - my reference comes from being inconvenienced by hunger in the middle of necessary activity and persisting anyways. I should try to discipline myself for a few days and see what happens to my psyche. I've wondered if high function brain pharmaceutical intervention (depression pill) succeeds because of a similar effect - the side effects themselves are the "cure" because the body is purposely affected at the base of Maslow's pyramid. This distracts the user from existential angst or threats out of the realm of control of the individual because this is a self inflicted "problem" that can be solved (guaranteed) by patience and temporary suffering.
ggregoire 6y ago
Related studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=cancer+fasting https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=cancer+fasting
- burgerquizz 6y ago
  anyone can give a conclusion of those studies on the effect of fasting on cancers?
optymizer 6y ago
Anecdata: I have followed IF with a 1100 calorie deficit per day by only eating 1200 calories at dinner for 3 months. This translated to more than 1kg weight loss per week, pretty reliably. Overall I lost 17kg. I adjusted the TDEE and calorie values as needed to maintain the weight loss speed. The weight loss was extremely fast, but so was the rate at which I lost lean mass. This makes sense, as I didn't exercise much, aside from occasional long walks / 1 mile run. According to this study [0], exercising should maintain lean muscle mass. My personal observations are in line with the studies I have read about IF. Some other observations I have made: * The rate at which I gained 75% of the weight back was stunning to me. It was as fast as I lost it. * My partner does not feel well when fasting, so IF doesn't work for everyone. I think it worked well for me. I did supplement with vitamins to account for the decreased amount of food intake. * I noticed that whenever I had alcohol, while still adhering to the daily calorie limit, my weight would not go down until about 3 days have passed. I had assumed alcohol would only contribute its caloric energy, but, sure enough, every time I had a beer, I could see in the weight graph a bump that lasted for about 3 days, then the weight would suddenly jump down to where I was expecting it to be, based on the weight loss slope. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7468742/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7468742/
- ketzo 6y ago
  Yeah, fasting is one of those ""health fads"" that really does seem to work miraculously... for some people. For some, it's just nothing; for some, it's miserable. Kind of bizarre how different our metabolisms can be.
  - miffy900 6y ago
    I would argue it's definitely not a fad (at least in the sense it's something that's been happening only very recently); people have been fasting for literally thousands of years, though mostly for religious reasons. It has an aura of being a fad nowadays since some modern research has indicated it actually does have health benefits, which I think some people have been a bit too quick to pounce on.
    - 6y ago
innerzeal 6y ago
There are other studies that contradict IF: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/09/418611/time-restricted-eating-doesnt-work-weight-loss https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/09/418611/time-restricted-eat...
pyryt 6y ago
they seem to also think that this fasting might be helpful for covid response
sbmthakur 6y ago
Has anyone tried fasting from sunset to dawn? I believe that will be easier to do as we are less active during that period.
- henry_bone 6y ago
  By coincidence, I am doing it now. I always drink water first thing in the morning in order to restore fluids after sleep. I am also drinking coffee with milk, but no sugar. Lastly, I am drinking some psyllium husk powder that I blend into a couple of mugs of water. I take the psyllium husk at about 10am. Then I have another coffee or two, but no meals until dinner time, about 6pm. I started doing this just this week because my father had an angiogram which lead to the discovery that some of his coronary arteries where quite block with plaque. This is disturbing for me as he has looked after himself pretty well for his whole life. He's not a smoker or heavy drinker, eats well, doesn't snack, isn't a sweet tooth. And he has exercised consistently for his whole life. And yet, his arteries are in shit state. So I have to wonder if it's genetic. So I figure I'll try to increase the soluble and insoluble fibre intake as it is said to inhibit the absorption of cholesterol. I also want to drop a couple of kilos I've put on during lockdown.
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  I do every summer, but that isn't very interesting...
hirundo 6y ago
I've tried various IF protocols, particularly a four hour feeding window, and have mostly struggled with it. I've just gotten hungry early or late, and after a few weeks succumbed. Or I find myself going to bed way early to evade my hunger. IF hasn't been impossible for me, but difficult. And then suddenly, it's easy, natural. Now I eat just once or twice a day without intending to. It would be an effort to eat more. The difference for me is a carnivore diet, mostly beef. It's just far more satiating than anything else I've tried and I've done most things from raw veganism to this. I do believe that when I eat matters, but what I eat makes a big difference to when.
aaron695 6y ago
So they seriously threw in it cures Covid-19 at the same time in this study. Cancer and Covid-19. At what stage do we admit science is flawed, not it's implementation?
azifali 6y ago
I do this every year as a part of Ramadhan. Though I am not very religious - fasting and taking a break from the usual each year is uplifting, deeply spiritual and of course has health benefits..
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  A slightly different perspective from another religion. I am trying to follow the Hindu Lunar calender. But it’s a 2 week schedule based on full moon and new moon. Basically on the 11th day after full moon and new moon, one fasts from sunrise to sunset. That’s twice a month. It’s called Ekadasi Fast. But the real trick is preparing to fast 6-8 hours before and after the day of the fast. Also the day after the fast, the food has to be grain/gluten free(rice seems to be ok) and has certain ingredients like greens, herbs and spices. It’s very light. Full moon and new moon days are always food for milk and fruit fasts. And there is a whole bunch of other religious day fasts. Example: no salt on 6th day after full/new moon..a lot of ingredient restrictive fasts etc. I don’t know a lot about that but I have seen my mother observe it. I must find out more. There seems to be a whole method to the madness and when scheduled properly, one can do staggered and scheduled partial fasts 6-7 days for a lunar fortnight. The calorie restriction mostly comes from the rules against certain ingredients. Even in the pared down format I follow, I feel like I connect more with my food and am more mindful when I cook. Most of all, I don’t waste as much food because it’s so much work preparing the food! Of course, it’s seasonal. Having said that, I guess annual menu and schedule format has to be reversed for those in the Southern Hemisphere.
  - hi41 6y ago
    Asking you question since you may know the answer. I want to learn more about the lunar calendar and what need to done on which day. I need to perform shardham for my deceased parents and it will be great help to know lunar cycles. I am trying to practice my religion. I grew up mostly without paying much attention to anything so learning these things would be useful to me. tia. I am not sure if there a way in hn to dm someone.
    - deleted 6y ago
Melting_Harps 6y ago
I've been doing a 16-20 hour fast since the lockdown and WFH, and to be honest I saw a significant decrease in my overall anxiety as a result. Anxiety I often offset with significant amounts of CBD (a $100/month expense). And while there are drawbacks, I can't bench press 215lbs anymore, the overall benefits have been pretty significant that I will keep doing it. My weight was pretty erratic, given the high stress load and super active lifestyle I could fluctuate 8lbs in a day. Now my weight has stabilized and my head is clearer. I studied biology with an understanding of autophagy and I only ate once a day for nearly a decade now (2011), but I used to eat 3000+ calories in one sitting, but now I've decided to limit my overall caloric intake (1500-2000) and reduced it to a 8-4 hour window and saw even better results. Also, as a former chef, I now savor my food way more and take the time to enjoy it more than when I tasted and ate all day and suffered from a sort of palate fatigue and made my gravitate to salty, greasy food late at night when I actually had an appetite.
- James_Henry 6y ago
  Perhaps the weight loss improved sleep breathing. Have you ever had a sleep test before?
- peteretep 6y ago
  > Anxiety I often offset with significant amounts of CBD (a $100/month expense). While I wouldn’t dare to comment on someone else’s mental health situation, I’d note for anyone else reading and considering this that traditional SSRIs are very effective for some people, cheap, and you won’t have trouble taking them across borders or getting them prescribed in an emergency from a random doctor if you lose your stash
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > traditional SSRIs are very effective... With immense amount of side-effects, I'd advise people to use CBD to see if it alleviates the symptoms before any SSRI. In addition to the anxiety, I needed it for inflammation and pain relief which is a massive component to many ailments that have compounding effects. I worked 70+ hours a week in the peak season(s), so sleeping became a rare commodity which high loads of CBD with some CBG/CBN/THC made it happen nearly on demand.
deleted 6y ago
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jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
Hm... I think the title is misleading. The 14 individuals they studied had metabolic syndrome, not cancer, so there's no telling how a real cancer patient would react to a fasting diet. I recently had a friend starve to death during her cancer treatment. I really think she would have recovered if we had fed her more. We had 3 doctors agree, their reasoning being that cancer wastes a lot of energy that normally would be used by non-cancerous body parts, so a cancer patient should try to eat more food than they normally would have before developing cancer, on top of whatever other treatments they may be doing.
owais12345 6y ago
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d--b 6y ago
All the muslim world does 4-week intermittent fasting every year. That'd make it easy to test the asumption of the paper on a large scale population
- alltakendamned 6y ago
  They do, but my colleagues tell me that the food they eat when they break their fast is often heavier than usual, and they might eat more as well. More than one is gaining weight during Ramadan :)
  - amingilani 6y ago
    It may be wise to test your colleagues assumption while we're at it as well :)
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  1. Some folks cheat. 2. Some, who you would think are otherwise healthy, cannot fast (I have a friend that found out he cannot fast. He was instead hospitalized). 3. The severity of the fast depends on the time of year the fast falls and where in the world you are. Right now, it is certainly worse in Norway (where the days very long in June) than it is in the southern hemisphere, where the days have their winter lengths. The last two can be somewhat accounted for (and already are: Folks that can't fast are exempt and special rules for places that get midnight sun). We can't really control for the first one, especially with real cultural taboo against breaking the fast during the day.
- st1x7 6y ago
  A very important difference is that you can't drink water during a Ramadan fast. Regardless of what you're doing with your food, deliberately dehydrating yourself is pretty much never justified.
  - snicker7 6y ago
    "never justified" A religious obligation won't count as justification?
theshrike79 6y ago
"Dawn to Sunset" laughs nervously in Scandinavian So we can't eat anything in the summer, as the sun doesn't really go down? :) On the other hand, we can gorge ourselves during winter.
- sorennielsen 6y ago
  I had the exact same thought and then checked where the authors was from.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  The islamic 40 day fasting is exactly like that and it’s fun to entertain the idea of fasting close to the poles. The fasting dates are determined by the moon calendar so it moves between extremely easy and extremely hard. Do you know if the muslims are actually going through it on hardcore level or have some kind of rationalisation for not doing it or a cheating method like sleeping all day?
  - nethunters 6y ago
    According to traditional scholars from the four schools of thought, Muslims who live near the poles and either have the sun all day or darkness all day follow the timings for both the five daily prayers, and the times to open and close the fast as well as the dates of when fasting starts and finishes of their nearest neighbouring country which has sunset and sunrise.
    - mrtksn 6y ago
      Looks very imprecise considering the precision timing of the usual prayers(The prayers start at very exact astronomical time, in a large city like Istanbul you can hear a mosque from a far , then closer and closer ones start the broadcast, then the mosque next to you, then the ones far from you. You can literally observe earths rotation from mosque timings). There's no such thing like national prayer time, muslims use apps or leaflets with the timings calculated for each city. That said, I don't know much about religion practices. Maybe the precision timing is a Turkish thing.
jraby3 6y ago
Relevant link showing IF with a control not being very effective. Not related to cancer study, more IF for weight loss. https://mobile.twitter.com/ethanjweiss/status/1310595463452614656 https://mobile.twitter.com/ethanjweiss/status/13105954634526...
jonmc12 6y ago
"The Switch", by James Clement, is a great roundup of fasting and other longevity-related behaviors. It's a synthesis of hundreds of research papers, with an emphasis of the 2016 discovery of the mTor switch that triggers autophagy in cells. The findings in the NIH paper seem pretty consistent with the overview of the research. More specifically, mortality from obesity and cancer drastically fall when: a) insulin and iGF-1 are suppressed, and b) mTor pathway (and autophagy) is triggered somewhat regularly. The Fasting Mimicking Diet is a well studied diet that mimics the effects of fasting while eating 800-1200 calories per day and abstaining from protein (<15g/day). Check out this spreadsheet for a DIY guide to measure how fasting impacts your own biomarkers. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_f-UhsloOxvLbNLgyAouMGb1C6FoTHbkXAukR_-AH94/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_f-UhsloOxvLbNLgyAou... Dave Feldman's (engineer turned citizen scientist) independent research into the impact of low-carb, high-fat diets is also inspirational to learn first-hand how a diet can effect your body. He's replicated experiments of how several dietary approaches, including fasting, affect the lab measurement of cholesterol levels. He's been able to reproduce findings on his own body, with small sample sizes of other dieters. He's even proposed a Lipid Energy Model to describe how fats distribute energy to cells in a way that matches the data he's collected. https://cholesterolcode.com/model/ https://cholesterolcode.com/model/ Reading enough of this research, I start to think about context-dependent metabolic pathways that can be triggered with inputs as simple as varied macronutrients. It feels like a very meaningful frame to interpret research about diet and longevity.
krm01 6y ago
This is why muslims have been fasting for an entire month (Ramadan [1]) for over 1400 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan
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didibus 6y ago
What's interesting here is that they also didn't drink. That's new to me, I normally allow myself to drink when I intermittent fast.
- skohan 6y ago
  This is essentially the protocol for Ramadan no?
JacKTrocinskI 6y ago
I don’t think you should be looking at studies when it comes to how you eat, you should be focusing on how you feel, observing your own body and possibly talking to a doctor. I had a really big problem with acid reflux a while back after I stopped drinking alcohol. I visited many gastrologists and most of them offered little to no help, most only prescribed me drugs which was in my opinion not a solution. I finally meet with a gastrologist that did an endoscopy and basically sat me down and said that if I wanted to get over my acid reflux I needed to eat really light over the next four months, no fruits, no tomatoes, no pork or beef only poultry, no fried food, no greasy food, and the list went on. I did the diet, had a few cheat days because it was hard, and my stomach recovered. After the four months I reintroduced certain foods and started learning about how my body reacted to them. I also realized that I feel a lot better with a full stomach than with an empty one. My point is we all have slight different bodies and that while studies are great, sometimes it just good to study yourself and how you feel. On a side note, if you’re one of those people fasting to be healthy yet haven’t cut out drugs, alcohol and tabaco out of your life then do that first, it is the first step to good health.
- skohan 6y ago
  I agree that ultimately your own subjective experience is the best measure of how your diet is working for you, surely studies like this are good information about what diet protocol might be interesting to try, especially since it can take a couple weeks to really feel the effects of a new diet.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  The problem with this, for too many people, is that they've never felt "good". They don't have a point of reference they could use to guide them to a better lifestyle They only know the right-now and that's good enough for them. This is something I've seen with my friends and family who have never been in good shape. They don't know that it's possible to go up 3 flights of stairs 2-3 steps at a time at a brisk pace and NOT be panting with exhaustion afterwards. They don't know that it's not normal to fart 24/7 and have constant heartburn, because that's all they've ever known.
Flow 6y ago
I wonder how this is related to the so called "mediterranian diet"? I mean, the advantages for the mediterranian diet could perhaps at least in part be attributed to the times at which people eat rather than the exact food they eat? My experience with Spain et al is that they are hot during the day and locals tend to eat a lot late at night and very little during the day.
kimi 6y ago
I'd say this - while interesting - does not show a thing. It happens that a billion or so people do this every year, so any actual public health effect should be quite noticeable. Instead, "the highest percentage change in age-standardized BMI related deaths and disability-adjusted life-years occurred in Bangladesh" (that is mostly a Sunni country) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5866840/#Sec3title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5866840/#Sec3ti... Or see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263199/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263199/ - "The recorded high prevalence of the MS and its key cardiovascular risk factors (15-60%) among Middle East population mandates the need for a national and international prevention programs to combat obesity, diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, smoking and related comorbidities." So I'm not sold.
- fragsworth 6y ago
  If you're referring to Ramadan, I don't believe that's the same thing, because it is two meals a day, spaced apart significantly, and only lasts a month. I also question religious devotees adherence to their religion. There are no stats on it and it is impossible to measure... Perhaps a significant number of them secretly cheat.
  - chimen 6y ago
    Isn;t it from down till sunset?
    - fragsworth 6y ago
      Yes, so they eat before dawn and after sunset.
  - kimi 6y ago
    This study is exactly Ramadan, by design (but it does not say so in the title). In fact one of the recruiting rules was "2) Subjects who plan to fast during the religious month of Ramadan" and therefore "All subjects fasted for more than 14 h daily for 29 days beginning from May 06, 2019, until June 03, 2019". See full text https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73767-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73767-w
Markoff 6y ago
Honestly why not go for proper fasting, 24 hours is absolutely nothing without any preparation and so it's basically 36 hours, you start Monday after dinner, then just don't eat through Tuesday (I have crisis usually around next dinner) and then just go sleep and when you wake up it's 36 hours. By my experience by then the body is used to ist and you can easily push it to 40 hours, didn't really try 48 hours, but I guess with some preparation also not that big deal. It's pity can't really do it anymore, since I cook for whole family and need my brain working at full capacity, which is not big deal during first day of fasting, but on the 2nd one it would take its toll already, maybe doable during weekend.
Kiro 6y ago
I don't understand how this is considered fasting. Aren't a lot people unknowingly fasting then? I eat breakfast at 8 and dinner at 18 so I have a natural 14 hour window.
jmnicolas 6y ago
I'm a bit surprised by the recommendation to eat in the evening: I can't find it now, but I clearly remember reading an article that the liver was expanding during the day to adapt to the incoming food intakes. And my own experience confirms it: on one meal a day I will loose much more weight if I eat at noon than if I eat the evening.
- AlphaGeekZulu 6y ago
  I was surprised as well. I always thought, the whole idea of intermittent fasting is to have no sugar floating in the body when you go to sleep. And that would be accomplished by a last meal at 4pm or 5pm and then no intake (except water, sugar-free tea/coffee) for 16 hours.
austincheney 6y ago
I don't know if its related, but more than a decade ago there is research conducted in Utah that identified intermittent fasting as reducing blood pressure and lowering cholesterol. The Mormons there fast one day a month but eat the same foods and live the same as non-Mormons in the area.
ypcx 6y ago
I was trying to lose weight with calorie restriction, keto, intermittent fasting, etc. but it had never really fully worked. I wish I had known earlier that even a 7 day prolonged water-only fast can almost completely get me rid of any excess weight, and make me much healthier overall. For more info, check either Loren Lockman (Tanglewood Wellness Center, Costa Rica) or Alan Goldhammer (TrueNorth Health Center, California) - they both have a nice YouTube presence.
jmpeax 6y ago
Scientific Reports is the dreg journal of Nature, and this clickbait title of "become a muslim and don't get cancer" with its extremely low sample size and no control group doesn't help to improve that journal's standing.
- BeatLeJuce 6y ago
  I thought that's exactly the point of Scientific Reports: to publish "reports" (i.e., not proper "papers") without caring about their impact or importance, as long as the science (however little of it there is) is done properly. i.e., you literally send them stuff that isn't good enough to be published in a proper journal. It's meant to be a dreg journal with low reputation; it's a feature, not a bug. The idea is to allow people to publish their work (e.g. to finish their PhD), but everyone knows that further investigation is needed before stuff should be called a proper finding. I think of it as the "workshop" version of a journal.
irrational 6y ago
Dawn to sunset where and at what time of year? People in the arctic during the summer might get a tad hungry.
rashthedude 6y ago
Time to join Islam
mih 6y ago
Also relevant: Press release - Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system (2014) - https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regeneration-of-damaged-old-immune-system/ https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regene... Full Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(14)00151-9 https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(14)0...
amriksohata 6y ago
Hindus have been fasting for millennia, it was recommended as part of Ayurveda. You can't work 365 days in a year and neither should your stomach, it needs a rest. Then many other cultures took this one in different forms.
- kranner 6y ago
  > You can't work 365 days in a year and neither should your stomach, it needs a rest. These analogies are often misleading. Your heart for one definitely needs to work every day.
Angusscript 6y ago
Nice! Hope this helps people who are seriously overweigh.
jfcorbett 6y ago
"pilot study in 14 subjects" Stop reading.
nikanj 6y ago
Alaskans would have a really rough summer, dawn is mid-may and sunset in late july
graeme 6y ago
From dawn to sunset. Suppose sunrise is 5:30 and sunset is 6 pm. Does that mean you get up at 5 am, eat quickly, then eat again from 6pm until bedtime?
- sbinthree 6y ago
  In practice it almost certainly means OMAD after dark.
qazpot 6y ago
I am not surprised, our bodies's core mechanisms have not changed since our hunter gatherer days when what's is being called fasting was just any other day occasionally punctuated by large feasts after a successful hunt.
cjbenedikt 6y ago
Ramadan springs to mind...
thrownaway954 6y ago
"for four consecutive weeks" that's the key to this whole things, is that you have to stick with it for at least 4 weeks. i know quite a few people who have tried IF and rarely do they make it through the first week without cheating (including myself when i first started). IF is one of _the_ best ways to lost weight in my opinion (second only to hot yoga), but the key is that you have to very regime with it and follow it precisely in order to get the benefits. you cannot have _any_ calories what so ever in order to trigger the fast response of the body. even taking vitamins or protein powders breaks the fast. also most non-calorie drinks do contain calories just not in a single serving (which is VERY deceptive), so the best things to drink is just plain cold water through out the day.
icemelt8 6y ago
Muslims have been doing this for centuries
newlikeice 6y ago
I though digestive enzymes only activate during the day matching our circadian rhythm.
- frank2 6y ago
  They activate in response to eating.
travisos 6y ago
Thanks
hi41 6y ago
The article says no eating or drinking during the fasting hours. Does it mean one cannot drink water?
mgh2 6y ago
Harvard makes it easier to read: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising-update-2018062914156 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-sur...
AtOmXpLuS 6y ago
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- AtOmXpLuS 6y ago
  [GiThUb_AtOmXpLuS](https://atomxplus.com https://atomxplus.com)

552 points by voisin 6y ago

Nemant 6y ago

Welcome to Ramadan!

kylebenzle 6y ago
Good point. Do practicing Muslims have lower cancer rates?
- tptacek 6y ago
  They're only fasting for a month out of the year.
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    That’s literally the fasting term in the study.
  - mathattack 6y ago
    The duration in the article is 4 months. The real issue is small sample size. (14 people)
    - jp0d 6y ago
      That's a really small sample size. Are they allowed to publish a study like this for such a small sample? Does anyone know if there is a minimum threshold size?
      - dr_dshiv 6y ago
        Allowed to publish? First it's a pilot study. Second, it's actually not a small sample size if you reasonably anticipate big effects and have multiple measures for each of the people at multiple time points. It isn't an observational study, though believers might have wished for a matched control group - - the anticancer effects might have come from the Ramadan prayer vs fasting!
    - hammeiam 6y ago
      From the title: "Intermittent fasting from dawn to sunset for four consecutive weeks..."
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
      Also, not just 14 people, but 14 people with a metabolic disorder.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    So do they have fewer early stages cancers diagnosed in the months after?
  - Nemant 6y ago
    A lot of practicing Muslims also fast Mondays and Thursdays and the “3 white days” of the month[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_in_Islam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_in_Islam see “Days of voluntary fasting”
    - tptacek 6y ago
      TIL! Thank you!
- kranner 6y ago
  You'll have to account for increased rates of smoking in both Muslim-majority countries and Muslim populations in non-Muslim-majority countries. From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360407/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360407/ > A fifth of the world's population is Muslim, and most Muslims live in areas where the prevalence of smoking is high and often increasing. But even among the many Muslims living in Europe, smoking prevalence (particularly among men) remains high. For example, in England in 2004 the overall prevalence of smoking was 40% in Bangladeshi men and 29% in Pakistani men compared with 24% among the male general population.
  - erklik 6y ago
    That's interesting. I believe smoking is discouraged in Islam, so I wonder why the uptake is higher. Guessing it's a general education issue?
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      Tobacco companies actively and aggressively advertise and market their products in LEDC countries: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1363897/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1363897/
    - sharadov 6y ago
      Smoking not so much, alcohol is considered "haram", you see smoking to be a lot more prevalent.
    - ibn_khaldun 6y ago
      Smoking, like alcohol and other vices are prohibited. It is in fact an unfortunate reality that is a matter of miseducation for those who are not victim to the statistical conflation of nationality as an indicator of belief.
    - c8g 6y ago
      As a Muslim and live in a country with 90% Muslim, I can tell, most of the people are Muslim, because they have a Muslim parent. Rape, corruption, addiction, sexual harassments, hate speech are common things here. No Muslim can do these. 5 times prayers (Salah) in a day is absolutely mandatory, absolutely no excuse for Muslim. But most people don't even care, including me :)
- Zenst 6y ago
  Nothing stand-out from https://ourworldindata.org/cancer https://ourworldindata.org/cancer that would indicate that. Alcohol would also be a factor in play as that would increase the risk of some cancers, so the lack of you would of thought also be a factor with that lifestyle.
- esalman 6y ago
  I don't see any predominantly Muslim country listed high up here- https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer-frequency-country https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer... . Which is kinda surprising to me. My father never smoked and still got cancer. I am from a Muslim-majority country and I know of a bunch of other friends/family who suffered or perished from cancer.
- anticensor 6y ago
  Not significantly affected, as most Muslims eat too much when breaking the fast.
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cocoland2 6y ago
This is not just pertinent to Ramadan. Every 2 days in the month , there is this Hindu thing of Ekadasi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekadashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekadashi). Each of these depending on the month have a presiding deity! The rules are simple , the day before should be a light meal , on Ekadasi dawn to next day dawn (about 36 hours in all) fasting. On Dwadasi , break this fast by first having water , meditation and then a light meal (usually milk+milk products) and community feeding if possible . Other rules include not sleeping during day and so on. My parents do it still , very few follow this regimen though these days. I think very similar eating/fasting habits are pertinent during the lent as well. When i was younger , during Ramadan we used to go to break the fast post dusk. In my homestate in India , there is usually a gruel that is prepared with sooji (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_rava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_rava) and lot of fruits. As a veggie , i would go there and eat :) . Sadly it has become a hog show now ,eating as much during dawn and dusk to keep the day full
- skohan 6y ago
  When I was in Nepal I talked to a guy who said he was not eating that day "to balance the body". The way he spoke about it made it seem like it must be a normal practice there which everyone understood and was aware of.
PeterStuer 6y ago
Christianity used to have a 40 day fasting period as well.
dragonelite 6y ago
Funny how a lot of old religions have some components of fasting in their teaching. For myself i go 5 days without food every season of the year, seem to be enough to keep my weight quiet stable. Without anything socially going on i have a daily 90 min eating window. And i allow myself some guilty pleasures on Fridays and Saturdays. Like going out and drinking beers with friends

mikenew 6y ago

> Subjects had a significant reduction in body mass index, waist circumference, and improvement in blood pressure Would really like to see this compared to another group with a similar level of calorie restriction but without the intermittent fasting. The question with intermittent fasting is really just "is it better than plain old calorie restriction". Seems like there's some evidence that points to "yes" and some evidence that points to "not really". EDIT: To be clear, by "is it better" I meant aside from just adherence. I've used IF quite a bit myself and I find it much easier than eating frequent, small meals throughout the day if I want to be hypocaloric. There are a lot of claims around autophagy, a more favorable metabolic adaptation, better body composition, and in this case actual cancer treatment. That is what I would like to see evidence for.

ravenstine 6y ago
My suspicion is that you would see similar improvement with things like waist circumference, BMI, blood pressure, at least initially, but that the difference with intermittent fasting is that it introduces enough of a "fasted state" that the body is able to perform repair and autophagy of senescent cells that would occur much less in a constantly fed state. (something about telomerase, but I probably shouldn't mention that because my memory about that is foggy) If you increased the amount of fasting, I'd bet good money that people would lose more weight than on a calorie-equivalent diet. Intermittent fasting, in my experience, is helpful in sticking to a diet that is lower in calories because it allows you to eat satisfying meals.
- voisin 6y ago
  From what I understand, autophagy doesn’t start until 18 hours and doesn’t peak until 72 hours.
  - JohnGB 6y ago
    Autophagy is always active, the real question is how that activity changes during fasting. The number of 18 hours is fairly arbitrary, as even after a few hours of fasting autophagy increases.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

The gut is home to 70 to 80 percent of the immune cells in the body. It seems to me when you give it a break from a constant influx of food, that potentially frees up immune cells to do other things for a bit.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
I do believe that makes sense and is part of the common "wisdom" of the diet. However more sizeable research studies need to be done in order to add strength to the hypothesis. These are far to small other than as pointers of what might be possible
- deleted 6y ago
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- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  There are hundreds of studies on NCBI about the benefits of fasting. Time to stop guessing that it's fringe science.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Also frees up your entire body from being constantly bathed in hormones like insulin.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I sort of think of it like "maintenance downtime." It was my son that first suggested to me it helps by freeing up immune cells and letting them concentrate on other things for a bit and I think that makes a lot of sense. I also suspect that dropping your blood sugar levels low enough, long enough helps starve some invaders. We are bigger than the bacteria in our system. We can survive for a bit without those resources. Maybe some of them can't.
  - blastro 6y ago
    you make good points!

404mm 6y ago

By “no drinking”, do they really mean no drinking plain water? 14 hr stretches are doable but it’s interesting to find your body improving while becoming dehydrated.

millstone 6y ago
The study focused on Muslims observing Ramadan, which does forbid drinking liquids (including water) during the daytime.
voisin 6y ago
“Dry fasting” is a thing, but it seems most people recommend against it. Not sure what the added advantage is for avoiding zero calorie water consumption.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Pleasing god. The high you might get from knowing you have the amount of self control necessary to dry fast.
- erklik 6y ago
  I mean, there's the religious "high". But I think the goal behind it is to allow one to feel how those who are much more unfortunate than us feel on a hot summer's day and so on.
fyfy18 6y ago
I'm not sure how things used to be, but having lived in a Muslim country a decade ago, my experience was during Ramadan daily life carried on as usual with people going to work and school. Instances of car accidents (often fatal) during this time were much higher than other times of the year.

rattray 6y ago

Noted elsewhere in the thread, but this is a pilot study with 14 subjects.

haram_masala 6y ago

No control group, and n=14. This study says nothing.

marketingPro 6y ago
Generally it's good to be skeptical but this- "We found a significant fold increase in the levels of several tumor suppressor and DNA repair gene protein products (GP)s at the end of 4th week during 4-week intermittent fasting (CALU, INTS6, KIT, CROCC, PIGR), and 1 week after 4-week intermittent fasting (CALU, CALR, IGFBP4, SEMA4B) compared with the levels before 4-week intermittent fasting." But why would this suddenly happen? There's some physiology here to be uncovered. That hardly is 'nothing'. Is it calories? Is it fasting? Is it nutrient timing? You can't find out which from "no control", but there's definitely a physiological effect being seen, correct?
- aaaxyz 6y ago
  Is it climate change? Is it because the stock market went up 10%? Because Saturn's orbit crossed it's periphelion? Or more seriously, could it just be the Hawtorne effect? As you pointed out, without a control group, you cannot claim that any change in your measurements are due to anything. The fact that the researchers do attribute it to fasting is just bad science and makes me doubt the rest of their findings.
  - marketingPro 6y ago
    If any of those happened, wouldn't the entire world see those physiological effects? Being a bit more realistic is the hawthorne effect, which can be easy to test with follow up experiments. My biggest takeaway isn't to do IF or cut calories, but rather it seems some phenomena was found. If you asked me if diet, fasting, etc... Would cute cancer, I'd have said NO! but this study has changed that answer to "I don't know". I suggest that is a huge difference and benefit.
- andi999 6y ago
  Well, could be a different thing altogether. This was probably done in Ramadan (the no-drinking thing, and the researches from Turkey as I saw in a different comment). So there would also be no smoking allowed for 14h per day. Maybe this has an effect.

skynetv2 6y ago

Can someone post a TL;DR

aaaxyz 6y ago
>[...] we conducted a pilot study in 14 subjects with metabolic syndrome who fasted (no eating or drinking) from dawn to sunset for more than 14 h daily for four consecutive weeks. [...] Further studies are needed to test the intermittent fasting from dawn to sunset in the prevention and treatment of metabolic syndrome-induced cancers. That's the gist of it.

theNJR 6y ago

Some of Peter Attia’s thoughts on the more robust study from a few weeks ago that is relevant https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j7AZF8bvcR0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j7AZF8bvcR0

froh 6y ago
Direct link to the study that's discussed, n=116, w/ control, fasting from 8pm to 12pm the next day. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2771095 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

scott31 6y ago

The "research" is politically motivated, it is thus garbage. Especially considering that it would be dangerous to publish the result if it were to show the other way, not that they would want to publish it. Besides, not having even a drop of water for longer than 12 hours during summer is dangerous, not only to fasting people themselves but to the society as a whole since they drive cars and they have higher rate of fainting during that. But doing those for the name of religion is somehow acceptable in our society..

millstone 6y ago
This is published in Nature, which does not traffic in garbage. This is an observational (not experimental) study which means that the subjects already planned to fast in observance of Ramadan, and the paper discussed what was observed wrt to health and cancer indicators. It's not a polemic.
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erklik 6y ago
> Besides, not having even a drop of water for longer than 12 hours during summer is dangerous, not only to fasting people themselves but to the society as a whole since they drive cars and they have higher rate of fainting during that. It's clear that many in the world do exactly that. It might be interesting to see a study similar to above as to whether accident rates increase during Ramadan.

zerop 6y ago

I have been fasting weekly once from morning to evening. I eat only dinner on Tuesday. I have been doing it since past 6 years.. it makes a difference. It improved digestion and overall I feel good at end of fasting day. Good from cnn on fasting advantages https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/01/health/fasting-longevity-food-drayer/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/01/health/fasting-longevity-food...

soulofmischief 6y ago
Any other effects you think could also be contributing? A change in exercise, diet, etc?
- ketzo 6y ago
  Anecdotally, my dad tried to lose weight with moderate exercise and light diet, and struggled to keep off 5 pounds; intermittent fasting (2 days a week of 1200 calories) dropped him something like 15 lbs in 40 days?

viburnum 6y ago

Also recommended, stretching your low back five times a day.

voisin 6y ago
In what way? Do you have a lower back routine?
- amingilani 6y ago
  I believe he's humorously referring to how Muslims already do this by praying five times a day. The routine requires prostrating multiple times, therefore stretching your back :)
imranq 6y ago
And possibly giving charity each year
- frequentnapper 6y ago
  ...
  - oa335 6y ago
    The other comments are in-jokes referring to the 5 pillars of Islam, and you are making an irrelevant snide comment under the guise of a joke.
    - deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- esalman 6y ago
  tbh I think the practice of giving away flat-rate 2.5% of their wealth each year instead of 40-50% brackets would encourage more wealthy people to actually donate and not dodge taxes.

RmzH 6y ago

- Anticancer - Anti-diabetes - Anti-aging - Reduction in body mass index, waist circumference - Improvement in blood pressure

moneytide1 6y ago
It makes sense to fast temporarily in order to "jolt" the body into action (reduced external input activates internal compensation processes) as our genetics have ancient embedded protocols developed to push through resource restrictions. If not for your listed reasons - do it to knock the rust off of safely stored emergency equipment. I've noticed that once you get past the first "hump" of hunger pangs, famish subsides into the background, and I'd imagine it is at this point where the metaphorical "adrenaline" dosage is injected by nature to make available the bodies reserve energy to get through inevitable temporary nutrient deficiency back in our hunter-gatherer days.
- deleted 6y ago
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- erklik 6y ago
  > I've noticed that once you get past the first "hump" of hunger pangs, famish subsides into the background, and I'd imagine it is at this point where the metaphorical "adrenaline" dosage is injected by nature to make available the bodies reserve energy to get through inevitable temporary nutrient deficiency back in our hunter-gatherer days. I haven't personally fasted as such in this manner but was always quite fascinated and am quite fascinated by how various Muslim colleagues and friends are able to do it during the summer with 45 degree heat and so on. All of them say that the first two days are the toughest while the rest of the month of Ramadan seems basically the same as the rest of their lives. It does put into perspective as to how much of our "hunger" is psychological than resource needs.
  - moneytide1 6y ago
    I've not intentionally fasted over sustained periods - my reference comes from being inconvenienced by hunger in the middle of necessary activity and persisting anyways. I should try to discipline myself for a few days and see what happens to my psyche. I've wondered if high function brain pharmaceutical intervention (depression pill) succeeds because of a similar effect - the side effects themselves are the "cure" because the body is purposely affected at the base of Maslow's pyramid. This distracts the user from existential angst or threats out of the realm of control of the individual because this is a self inflicted "problem" that can be solved (guaranteed) by patience and temporary suffering.

ggregoire 6y ago

Related studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=cancer+fasting https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=cancer+fasting

burgerquizz 6y ago
anyone can give a conclusion of those studies on the effect of fasting on cancers?

optymizer 6y ago

Anecdata: I have followed IF with a 1100 calorie deficit per day by only eating 1200 calories at dinner for 3 months. This translated to more than 1kg weight loss per week, pretty reliably. Overall I lost 17kg. I adjusted the TDEE and calorie values as needed to maintain the weight loss speed. The weight loss was extremely fast, but so was the rate at which I lost lean mass. This makes sense, as I didn't exercise much, aside from occasional long walks / 1 mile run. According to this study [0], exercising should maintain lean muscle mass. My personal observations are in line with the studies I have read about IF. Some other observations I have made: * The rate at which I gained 75% of the weight back was stunning to me. It was as fast as I lost it. * My partner does not feel well when fasting, so IF doesn't work for everyone. I think it worked well for me. I did supplement with vitamins to account for the decreased amount of food intake. * I noticed that whenever I had alcohol, while still adhering to the daily calorie limit, my weight would not go down until about 3 days have passed. I had assumed alcohol would only contribute its caloric energy, but, sure enough, every time I had a beer, I could see in the weight graph a bump that lasted for about 3 days, then the weight would suddenly jump down to where I was expecting it to be, based on the weight loss slope. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7468742/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7468742/

ketzo 6y ago
Yeah, fasting is one of those ""health fads"" that really does seem to work miraculously... for some people. For some, it's just nothing; for some, it's miserable. Kind of bizarre how different our metabolisms can be.
- miffy900 6y ago
  I would argue it's definitely not a fad (at least in the sense it's something that's been happening only very recently); people have been fasting for literally thousands of years, though mostly for religious reasons. It has an aura of being a fad nowadays since some modern research has indicated it actually does have health benefits, which I think some people have been a bit too quick to pounce on.
  - 6y ago

innerzeal 6y ago

There are other studies that contradict IF: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/09/418611/time-restricted-eating-doesnt-work-weight-loss https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/09/418611/time-restricted-eat...

pyryt 6y ago

they seem to also think that this fasting might be helpful for covid response

sbmthakur 6y ago

Has anyone tried fasting from sunset to dawn? I believe that will be easier to do as we are less active during that period.

henry_bone 6y ago
By coincidence, I am doing it now. I always drink water first thing in the morning in order to restore fluids after sleep. I am also drinking coffee with milk, but no sugar. Lastly, I am drinking some psyllium husk powder that I blend into a couple of mugs of water. I take the psyllium husk at about 10am. Then I have another coffee or two, but no meals until dinner time, about 6pm. I started doing this just this week because my father had an angiogram which lead to the discovery that some of his coronary arteries where quite block with plaque. This is disturbing for me as he has looked after himself pretty well for his whole life. He's not a smoker or heavy drinker, eats well, doesn't snack, isn't a sweet tooth. And he has exercised consistently for his whole life. And yet, his arteries are in shit state. So I have to wonder if it's genetic. So I figure I'll try to increase the soluble and insoluble fibre intake as it is said to inhibit the absorption of cholesterol. I also want to drop a couple of kilos I've put on during lockdown.
plorkyeran 6y ago
I do every summer, but that isn't very interesting...

hirundo 6y ago

I've tried various IF protocols, particularly a four hour feeding window, and have mostly struggled with it. I've just gotten hungry early or late, and after a few weeks succumbed. Or I find myself going to bed way early to evade my hunger. IF hasn't been impossible for me, but difficult. And then suddenly, it's easy, natural. Now I eat just once or twice a day without intending to. It would be an effort to eat more. The difference for me is a carnivore diet, mostly beef. It's just far more satiating than anything else I've tried and I've done most things from raw veganism to this. I do believe that when I eat matters, but what I eat makes a big difference to when.

aaron695 6y ago

So they seriously threw in it cures Covid-19 at the same time in this study. Cancer and Covid-19. At what stage do we admit science is flawed, not it's implementation?

azifali 6y ago

I do this every year as a part of Ramadhan. Though I am not very religious - fasting and taking a break from the usual each year is uplifting, deeply spiritual and of course has health benefits..

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
A slightly different perspective from another religion. I am trying to follow the Hindu Lunar calender. But it’s a 2 week schedule based on full moon and new moon. Basically on the 11th day after full moon and new moon, one fasts from sunrise to sunset. That’s twice a month. It’s called Ekadasi Fast. But the real trick is preparing to fast 6-8 hours before and after the day of the fast. Also the day after the fast, the food has to be grain/gluten free(rice seems to be ok) and has certain ingredients like greens, herbs and spices. It’s very light. Full moon and new moon days are always food for milk and fruit fasts. And there is a whole bunch of other religious day fasts. Example: no salt on 6th day after full/new moon..a lot of ingredient restrictive fasts etc. I don’t know a lot about that but I have seen my mother observe it. I must find out more. There seems to be a whole method to the madness and when scheduled properly, one can do staggered and scheduled partial fasts 6-7 days for a lunar fortnight. The calorie restriction mostly comes from the rules against certain ingredients. Even in the pared down format I follow, I feel like I connect more with my food and am more mindful when I cook. Most of all, I don’t waste as much food because it’s so much work preparing the food! Of course, it’s seasonal. Having said that, I guess annual menu and schedule format has to be reversed for those in the Southern Hemisphere.
- hi41 6y ago
  Asking you question since you may know the answer. I want to learn more about the lunar calendar and what need to done on which day. I need to perform shardham for my deceased parents and it will be great help to know lunar cycles. I am trying to practice my religion. I grew up mostly without paying much attention to anything so learning these things would be useful to me. tia. I am not sure if there a way in hn to dm someone.
  - deleted 6y ago

Melting_Harps 6y ago

I've been doing a 16-20 hour fast since the lockdown and WFH, and to be honest I saw a significant decrease in my overall anxiety as a result. Anxiety I often offset with significant amounts of CBD (a $100/month expense). And while there are drawbacks, I can't bench press 215lbs anymore, the overall benefits have been pretty significant that I will keep doing it. My weight was pretty erratic, given the high stress load and super active lifestyle I could fluctuate 8lbs in a day. Now my weight has stabilized and my head is clearer. I studied biology with an understanding of autophagy and I only ate once a day for nearly a decade now (2011), but I used to eat 3000+ calories in one sitting, but now I've decided to limit my overall caloric intake (1500-2000) and reduced it to a 8-4 hour window and saw even better results. Also, as a former chef, I now savor my food way more and take the time to enjoy it more than when I tasted and ate all day and suffered from a sort of palate fatigue and made my gravitate to salty, greasy food late at night when I actually had an appetite.

James_Henry 6y ago
Perhaps the weight loss improved sleep breathing. Have you ever had a sleep test before?
peteretep 6y ago
> Anxiety I often offset with significant amounts of CBD (a $100/month expense). While I wouldn’t dare to comment on someone else’s mental health situation, I’d note for anyone else reading and considering this that traditional SSRIs are very effective for some people, cheap, and you won’t have trouble taking them across borders or getting them prescribed in an emergency from a random doctor if you lose your stash
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > traditional SSRIs are very effective... With immense amount of side-effects, I'd advise people to use CBD to see if it alleviates the symptoms before any SSRI. In addition to the anxiety, I needed it for inflammation and pain relief which is a massive component to many ailments that have compounding effects. I worked 70+ hours a week in the peak season(s), so sleeping became a rare commodity which high loads of CBD with some CBG/CBN/THC made it happen nearly on demand.

deleted 6y ago

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jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

Hm... I think the title is misleading. The 14 individuals they studied had metabolic syndrome, not cancer, so there's no telling how a real cancer patient would react to a fasting diet. I recently had a friend starve to death during her cancer treatment. I really think she would have recovered if we had fed her more. We had 3 doctors agree, their reasoning being that cancer wastes a lot of energy that normally would be used by non-cancerous body parts, so a cancer patient should try to eat more food than they normally would have before developing cancer, on top of whatever other treatments they may be doing.

owais12345 6y ago

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d--b 6y ago

All the muslim world does 4-week intermittent fasting every year. That'd make it easy to test the asumption of the paper on a large scale population

alltakendamned 6y ago
They do, but my colleagues tell me that the food they eat when they break their fast is often heavier than usual, and they might eat more as well. More than one is gaining weight during Ramadan :)
- amingilani 6y ago
  It may be wise to test your colleagues assumption while we're at it as well :)
Broken_Hippo 6y ago
1. Some folks cheat. 2. Some, who you would think are otherwise healthy, cannot fast (I have a friend that found out he cannot fast. He was instead hospitalized). 3. The severity of the fast depends on the time of year the fast falls and where in the world you are. Right now, it is certainly worse in Norway (where the days very long in June) than it is in the southern hemisphere, where the days have their winter lengths. The last two can be somewhat accounted for (and already are: Folks that can't fast are exempt and special rules for places that get midnight sun). We can't really control for the first one, especially with real cultural taboo against breaking the fast during the day.
st1x7 6y ago
A very important difference is that you can't drink water during a Ramadan fast. Regardless of what you're doing with your food, deliberately dehydrating yourself is pretty much never justified.
- snicker7 6y ago
  "never justified" A religious obligation won't count as justification?

theshrike79 6y ago

"Dawn to Sunset" laughs nervously in Scandinavian So we can't eat anything in the summer, as the sun doesn't really go down? :) On the other hand, we can gorge ourselves during winter.

sorennielsen 6y ago
I had the exact same thought and then checked where the authors was from.
mrtksn 6y ago
The islamic 40 day fasting is exactly like that and it’s fun to entertain the idea of fasting close to the poles. The fasting dates are determined by the moon calendar so it moves between extremely easy and extremely hard. Do you know if the muslims are actually going through it on hardcore level or have some kind of rationalisation for not doing it or a cheating method like sleeping all day?
- nethunters 6y ago
  According to traditional scholars from the four schools of thought, Muslims who live near the poles and either have the sun all day or darkness all day follow the timings for both the five daily prayers, and the times to open and close the fast as well as the dates of when fasting starts and finishes of their nearest neighbouring country which has sunset and sunrise.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    Looks very imprecise considering the precision timing of the usual prayers(The prayers start at very exact astronomical time, in a large city like Istanbul you can hear a mosque from a far , then closer and closer ones start the broadcast, then the mosque next to you, then the ones far from you. You can literally observe earths rotation from mosque timings). There's no such thing like national prayer time, muslims use apps or leaflets with the timings calculated for each city. That said, I don't know much about religion practices. Maybe the precision timing is a Turkish thing.

jraby3 6y ago

Relevant link showing IF with a control not being very effective. Not related to cancer study, more IF for weight loss. https://mobile.twitter.com/ethanjweiss/status/1310595463452614656 https://mobile.twitter.com/ethanjweiss/status/13105954634526...

jonmc12 6y ago

"The Switch", by James Clement, is a great roundup of fasting and other longevity-related behaviors. It's a synthesis of hundreds of research papers, with an emphasis of the 2016 discovery of the mTor switch that triggers autophagy in cells. The findings in the NIH paper seem pretty consistent with the overview of the research. More specifically, mortality from obesity and cancer drastically fall when: a) insulin and iGF-1 are suppressed, and b) mTor pathway (and autophagy) is triggered somewhat regularly. The Fasting Mimicking Diet is a well studied diet that mimics the effects of fasting while eating 800-1200 calories per day and abstaining from protein (<15g/day). Check out this spreadsheet for a DIY guide to measure how fasting impacts your own biomarkers. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_f-UhsloOxvLbNLgyAouMGb1C6FoTHbkXAukR_-AH94/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_f-UhsloOxvLbNLgyAou... Dave Feldman's (engineer turned citizen scientist) independent research into the impact of low-carb, high-fat diets is also inspirational to learn first-hand how a diet can effect your body. He's replicated experiments of how several dietary approaches, including fasting, affect the lab measurement of cholesterol levels. He's been able to reproduce findings on his own body, with small sample sizes of other dieters. He's even proposed a Lipid Energy Model to describe how fats distribute energy to cells in a way that matches the data he's collected. https://cholesterolcode.com/model/ https://cholesterolcode.com/model/ Reading enough of this research, I start to think about context-dependent metabolic pathways that can be triggered with inputs as simple as varied macronutrients. It feels like a very meaningful frame to interpret research about diet and longevity.

krm01 6y ago

This is why muslims have been fasting for an entire month (Ramadan [1]) for over 1400 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan

deleted 6y ago

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didibus 6y ago

What's interesting here is that they also didn't drink. That's new to me, I normally allow myself to drink when I intermittent fast.

skohan 6y ago
This is essentially the protocol for Ramadan no?

JacKTrocinskI 6y ago

I don’t think you should be looking at studies when it comes to how you eat, you should be focusing on how you feel, observing your own body and possibly talking to a doctor. I had a really big problem with acid reflux a while back after I stopped drinking alcohol. I visited many gastrologists and most of them offered little to no help, most only prescribed me drugs which was in my opinion not a solution. I finally meet with a gastrologist that did an endoscopy and basically sat me down and said that if I wanted to get over my acid reflux I needed to eat really light over the next four months, no fruits, no tomatoes, no pork or beef only poultry, no fried food, no greasy food, and the list went on. I did the diet, had a few cheat days because it was hard, and my stomach recovered. After the four months I reintroduced certain foods and started learning about how my body reacted to them. I also realized that I feel a lot better with a full stomach than with an empty one. My point is we all have slight different bodies and that while studies are great, sometimes it just good to study yourself and how you feel. On a side note, if you’re one of those people fasting to be healthy yet haven’t cut out drugs, alcohol and tabaco out of your life then do that first, it is the first step to good health.

skohan 6y ago
I agree that ultimately your own subjective experience is the best measure of how your diet is working for you, surely studies like this are good information about what diet protocol might be interesting to try, especially since it can take a couple weeks to really feel the effects of a new diet.
theshrike79 6y ago
The problem with this, for too many people, is that they've never felt "good". They don't have a point of reference they could use to guide them to a better lifestyle They only know the right-now and that's good enough for them. This is something I've seen with my friends and family who have never been in good shape. They don't know that it's possible to go up 3 flights of stairs 2-3 steps at a time at a brisk pace and NOT be panting with exhaustion afterwards. They don't know that it's not normal to fart 24/7 and have constant heartburn, because that's all they've ever known.

Flow 6y ago

I wonder how this is related to the so called "mediterranian diet"? I mean, the advantages for the mediterranian diet could perhaps at least in part be attributed to the times at which people eat rather than the exact food they eat? My experience with Spain et al is that they are hot during the day and locals tend to eat a lot late at night and very little during the day.

kimi 6y ago

I'd say this - while interesting - does not show a thing. It happens that a billion or so people do this every year, so any actual public health effect should be quite noticeable. Instead, "the highest percentage change in age-standardized BMI related deaths and disability-adjusted life-years occurred in Bangladesh" (that is mostly a Sunni country) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5866840/#Sec3title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5866840/#Sec3ti... Or see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263199/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263199/ - "The recorded high prevalence of the MS and its key cardiovascular risk factors (15-60%) among Middle East population mandates the need for a national and international prevention programs to combat obesity, diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, smoking and related comorbidities." So I'm not sold.

fragsworth 6y ago
If you're referring to Ramadan, I don't believe that's the same thing, because it is two meals a day, spaced apart significantly, and only lasts a month. I also question religious devotees adherence to their religion. There are no stats on it and it is impossible to measure... Perhaps a significant number of them secretly cheat.
- chimen 6y ago
  Isn;t it from down till sunset?
  - fragsworth 6y ago
    Yes, so they eat before dawn and after sunset.
- kimi 6y ago
  This study is exactly Ramadan, by design (but it does not say so in the title). In fact one of the recruiting rules was "2) Subjects who plan to fast during the religious month of Ramadan" and therefore "All subjects fasted for more than 14 h daily for 29 days beginning from May 06, 2019, until June 03, 2019". See full text https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73767-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73767-w

Markoff 6y ago

Honestly why not go for proper fasting, 24 hours is absolutely nothing without any preparation and so it's basically 36 hours, you start Monday after dinner, then just don't eat through Tuesday (I have crisis usually around next dinner) and then just go sleep and when you wake up it's 36 hours. By my experience by then the body is used to ist and you can easily push it to 40 hours, didn't really try 48 hours, but I guess with some preparation also not that big deal. It's pity can't really do it anymore, since I cook for whole family and need my brain working at full capacity, which is not big deal during first day of fasting, but on the 2nd one it would take its toll already, maybe doable during weekend.

Kiro 6y ago

I don't understand how this is considered fasting. Aren't a lot people unknowingly fasting then? I eat breakfast at 8 and dinner at 18 so I have a natural 14 hour window.

jmnicolas 6y ago

I'm a bit surprised by the recommendation to eat in the evening: I can't find it now, but I clearly remember reading an article that the liver was expanding during the day to adapt to the incoming food intakes. And my own experience confirms it: on one meal a day I will loose much more weight if I eat at noon than if I eat the evening.

AlphaGeekZulu 6y ago
I was surprised as well. I always thought, the whole idea of intermittent fasting is to have no sugar floating in the body when you go to sleep. And that would be accomplished by a last meal at 4pm or 5pm and then no intake (except water, sugar-free tea/coffee) for 16 hours.

austincheney 6y ago

I don't know if its related, but more than a decade ago there is research conducted in Utah that identified intermittent fasting as reducing blood pressure and lowering cholesterol. The Mormons there fast one day a month but eat the same foods and live the same as non-Mormons in the area.

ypcx 6y ago

I was trying to lose weight with calorie restriction, keto, intermittent fasting, etc. but it had never really fully worked. I wish I had known earlier that even a 7 day prolonged water-only fast can almost completely get me rid of any excess weight, and make me much healthier overall. For more info, check either Loren Lockman (Tanglewood Wellness Center, Costa Rica) or Alan Goldhammer (TrueNorth Health Center, California) - they both have a nice YouTube presence.

jmpeax 6y ago

Scientific Reports is the dreg journal of Nature, and this clickbait title of "become a muslim and don't get cancer" with its extremely low sample size and no control group doesn't help to improve that journal's standing.

BeatLeJuce 6y ago
I thought that's exactly the point of Scientific Reports: to publish "reports" (i.e., not proper "papers") without caring about their impact or importance, as long as the science (however little of it there is) is done properly. i.e., you literally send them stuff that isn't good enough to be published in a proper journal. It's meant to be a dreg journal with low reputation; it's a feature, not a bug. The idea is to allow people to publish their work (e.g. to finish their PhD), but everyone knows that further investigation is needed before stuff should be called a proper finding. I think of it as the "workshop" version of a journal.

irrational 6y ago

Dawn to sunset where and at what time of year? People in the arctic during the summer might get a tad hungry.

rashthedude 6y ago

Time to join Islam

mih 6y ago

Also relevant: Press release - Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system (2014) - https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regeneration-of-damaged-old-immune-system/ https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regene... Full Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(14)00151-9 https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(14)0...

amriksohata 6y ago

Hindus have been fasting for millennia, it was recommended as part of Ayurveda. You can't work 365 days in a year and neither should your stomach, it needs a rest. Then many other cultures took this one in different forms.

kranner 6y ago
> You can't work 365 days in a year and neither should your stomach, it needs a rest. These analogies are often misleading. Your heart for one definitely needs to work every day.

Angusscript 6y ago

Nice! Hope this helps people who are seriously overweigh.

jfcorbett 6y ago

"pilot study in 14 subjects" Stop reading.

nikanj 6y ago

Alaskans would have a really rough summer, dawn is mid-may and sunset in late july

graeme 6y ago

From dawn to sunset. Suppose sunrise is 5:30 and sunset is 6 pm. Does that mean you get up at 5 am, eat quickly, then eat again from 6pm until bedtime?

sbinthree 6y ago
In practice it almost certainly means OMAD after dark.

qazpot 6y ago

I am not surprised, our bodies's core mechanisms have not changed since our hunter gatherer days when what's is being called fasting was just any other day occasionally punctuated by large feasts after a successful hunt.

cjbenedikt 6y ago

Ramadan springs to mind...

thrownaway954 6y ago

"for four consecutive weeks" that's the key to this whole things, is that you have to stick with it for at least 4 weeks. i know quite a few people who have tried IF and rarely do they make it through the first week without cheating (including myself when i first started). IF is one of _the_ best ways to lost weight in my opinion (second only to hot yoga), but the key is that you have to very regime with it and follow it precisely in order to get the benefits. you cannot have _any_ calories what so ever in order to trigger the fast response of the body. even taking vitamins or protein powders breaks the fast. also most non-calorie drinks do contain calories just not in a single serving (which is VERY deceptive), so the best things to drink is just plain cold water through out the day.

icemelt8 6y ago

Muslims have been doing this for centuries

newlikeice 6y ago

I though digestive enzymes only activate during the day matching our circadian rhythm.

frank2 6y ago
They activate in response to eating.

travisos 6y ago

Thanks

hi41 6y ago

The article says no eating or drinking during the fasting hours. Does it mean one cannot drink water?

mgh2 6y ago

Harvard makes it easier to read: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising-update-2018062914156 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-sur...

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