19 ms·

Does “skipping meals make you live longer”?

54 points by evo_9 5y ago

kgin 5y ago
Fwiw there was a very recent study seeking to compare the longevity increases (in mice) from time-restricted eating vs calorie restriction. In this study, 100% of the benefit was due to time-restricted eating, none from calorie restriction. https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450120927195406342?s=20 https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450120927195406342?s=...
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  You've clearly indicated this, but I think it's worth highlighting because it's so crucial a caveat: In Mice.
  - neaden 5y ago
    Even moreso in this studies than many others, as the tweets point out the mice were doing the human equivalent of fasting for a week.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- lurquer 5y ago
  A follow-up study followed a group of people who only ate calorie-restricted mice once a day. I can’t find the link, unfortunately.
artful-hacker 5y ago
Unrolled the thread here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449973547485384704.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449973547485384704.html
DiabloD3 5y ago
Dear content creators: I don't know why people keep typing actual thoughts on Twitter: PLEASE STOP AND GET A BLOG. Nobody will read this, and this is actually important information that can save lives. Also, stop using clickbait headlines when presenting information; the correct headline for this example would be "Managing insulin levels naturally leads to longer lives with higher quality of life and less health problems". That said, fellow HN addicts, switch to one meal a day (OMAD) like I did. My brain feels like its ten years younger, and my body more-so. Also, stop eating foods that are just made of empty filler, like refined carbs and refined vegetable oils, this also helps a ton and segues naturally into OMAD.
- ahevia 5y ago
  Doesn’t that exact Twitter thread not advocate for OMAD because of the lack of evidence in human studies? (and what human studies there are for eating late in the day aren’t positive) Agreed on the refined carbs & oils though.
- bobobob420 5y ago
  Thank you for your first paragraph. I don’t know why even respected people like John Carmack will make huge Twitter threads, like are they not self aware it’s unreadable and looks like an unorganized mess
  - stnmtn 5y ago
    It's different context when you're writing a thread a thread in twitter vs doing a blog post or something else like that. If John Carmack just wants to get a couple thoughts out there, not worry about paragraph structure, and just kinda type and send as he thinks of it, then twitter is perfect for that. There's probably many ideas that people like Carmack have that they don't think is 'good enough' for a whole blog post, but fits right in on a casual twitter thread.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Tons of people read tweet threads on Twitter, that’s why people and organizations do them. As an author or organization, it’s easy to measure and compare audiences between the two channels (Twitter and website) and see this. The two channels are also not mutually exclusive. Tweet threads can get turned into articles if they get traction, or vice versa.
djyaz1200 5y ago
Anecdotally, I've been skipping breakfast and lunch M-F with first food at 4pm and I've been losing a little bit of weight (.5%/month) and have a lot more energy. I probably eat about the same caloric volume of food, maybe slightly less. Been at it for about 6mo. Not saying this is right for others but I've been encouraged by the results thus far. I started after reading (some of) the book "The Energy Paradox" by SR Gundry. It's too long but the point is eating requires energy and can make you feel tired. I imagine I'll stick with this program.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  I know exactly what you mean on "eating requires energy and can make you feel tired". I get this too, and what avoids it is to eat as cleanly and naturally as possible - whole plants, no processed carbs, no salt and oil and sugar. I believe the "eating makes you tired" is a hibernation reflex. Mammalian bodies are designed to pack on calories when food is plentiful in order to survive an upcoming winter. The tiredness is for the body to process the calories into stored fat. Of course, with modern technology, there is no such thing as that food winter, and we never deplete what we had the instinct to store.
- tconfrey 5y ago
  Again anecdotally. I'm mid 50's, always been fit with a healthy diet and BMI range, but the weight had started to build up of late. I tried informally exercising more and eating/drinking less, with no visible results. Six weeks back I switched to a weekday 18 hour fast, 6 hour eating window (lunch ~2pm, finish dinner before 8), no alcohol on weekdays. It was hitting 170 that triggered me to try the change. This morning I was 158 with 2% lower body fat. For me I think the fasting window just gives me an easy to follow schedule without having to make all those tiny little decisions. Once you get used to it, having your body tell you it's hungry gets easy to ignore (plus a 2pm lunch reduces the temptation for a mid afternoon snack). I don't feel any different TBH! YMMV.
taylodl 5y ago
My doctor recommended I begin intermittent fasting - no breakfast, light lunch, normal dinner; 8 hour "eating window" per day. I've been at it for about 18 months now. About 8 months ago I started really watching how much sugar and highly processed carbs I eat (not a keto diet, just not going crazy with pasta and sweets). I've lost 50 pounds and no longer have to take my hypertension medication. If this were the olden days before you could take medication to treat hypertension then sure, an argument could be made that skipping meals can make you live longer. Today things are slightly different but even so, "skipping meals can reduce your medications" is still pretty significant.
- rednerrus 5y ago
  Eating less calorie will give you the same benefit.
  - bityard 5y ago
    The human body's energy management system is incredibly complicated and rife with subtleties. To the point that the whole "calories in == calories out" meme, while not factually untrue by the standard of Newtonian physics, is just about as useful as saying that gravity is the cause of all airplane crashes.
    - Engineering-MD 5y ago
      Yet people seem to forget about that with diets and that is why it’s useful to remind people in some cases. Your diet doesn’t matter if in the end you consume more calories than expended- you will gain weight. I see it more as a first test of reasonability of a diet, a law of weight loss if you will.
      - pengaru 5y ago
        > Your diet doesn’t matter if in the end you consume more calories than expended- you will gain weight. This isn't true though, it's not the amount of calories you consume but the amount of calories your body actually accesses out of those consumed. If most of the calories you consume simply pass through or get consumed by the parasites living in your large intestine, calories consumed can exceed calories expended by you while still losing weight. The researcher who discovered the general role a pancreas plays in weight gain back in the 1800s had dogs living normal lives after removing their pancreases. Except no matter how much food they consumed, they continuously lost weight, and eventually died as if they'd starved to death. He discovered their urine was sweet after seeing flies were more attracted to their urine than the normal; without pancreas-created insulin the fat cells wouldn't store the energy, it was leaving the system in the urine. This illustrates the role hormones play in energy storage/release. Everyone's hormone levels are different, and how they respond to different foods varies, it's all very subjective, sex, and age-dependent. So even within those calories accessed via the GI tract, there's hormonal variability in what gets stored vs. used vs. excreted. Calories consumed only sets an upper bound; if you consume less calories than expended, you will lose weight. It's not a symmetric relationship like your statement assumes.
shapefrog 5y ago
Everything make you live longer than the SAD standard american diet.
maskedinvader 5y ago
I switched to eating light lunches and skipping breakfast a couple of years ago, lost 12 pounds, feel fitter and able to keep up with the demands of being a dad of a 11 month old baby along with a full time job. I would highly recommend this diet for folks finding it tough to restrict calories, restrict eating window and don't try to restrict calories as much.
greenail 5y ago
Qualitatively what effect does living longer have on your happiness? I would guess that there is an emotional impact to surviving after all your friends have died. I'd also guess that the quality of your family life has a big impact.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
padobson 5y ago
Diet science is chaos. What we all need is not another fad diet or fasting strategy or super food, but rather a process that looks like a flowchart so an individual can achieve certain goals. I'd be shocked if we ever found a one-size-fits-all diet, but there should be some kind of process to design a good diet specific to an individual, using feedback from measurements like weight, blood sugar, vitamin levels, energy levels and mood. Want to lose weight? Try fasting for a month. Then stop and try calorie restriction for a month. Was one easier? Did one help you lose more weight? Make adjustments to the more effective one and keep going. Want to have more energy? Pick a group of healthy foods eat only them for a week. Then, pick a separate group and do that for a week. Journal every day so you can make comparisons about how you feel and how much energy you have. Wondering what foods are making you feel tired/sick? Pick a handful of vegetables and eat them for a week, then slowly add in the usual suspects that might be sapping your energy. When you find the food that's slowing you down, cut it out of your diet permanently. Want to save money on groceries? Find the foods that are working best for you and swap out cheaper alternatives or buy in bulk. I have no idea what the process should look like, these are just possible examples, but a process is what I want.
- Spivak 5y ago
  You're just describing how nutritionalists help people. You can of course apply the scientific method yourself without them but the reason you pay them to borrow their knowledge and experience to help you minimize the number of experiments you have to do to find "your" diet.
  - cheese_van 5y ago
    What I found interesting about adopting a diet was how it changed my perception of shopping for food. When I now walk into a modern well-stocked supermarket, it's shocking (now) that the vast majority of their inventory is useless and harmful (or at least to me). Vast isles of delicious utter crap. Crap in bags, crap in cans, colorful packaged crap wherever you turn. Food that will kill you given time enough. Is there a solution to this self-induced (the market gives us what we want) madness?
fouc 5y ago
> This suggests that fasting might have negatively affected the health of the mice, to cause less benefit than simple calorie restriction at the same body weight did. This doesn't make sense. He's comparing 28% lifespan increase on calorie-restriction vs 11% on fasted, and then wildly jumping to "fasted is NEGATIVELY healthy" Fasting is a helluva lot easier than calorie-restriction, and I'd take a gain of +11% lifespan increase.
- rajup 5y ago
  Yeah agreed, that Twitter thread is weird. Sinclair promoting his company does seem like a conflict of interest as far as his tweets are concerned, but the claims in this Twitter thread were equally all over the place.
  - fouc 5y ago
    Yeah, good point about that conflict of interest
- salmonellaeater 5y ago
  In the mouse study, both groups were on calorie-restriction. The difference was whether they fasted or not. "fasted is NEGATIVELY health" is right.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
motohagiography 5y ago
It's hard to reconcile this with personal anecdata, although it probably works because of behavioural side effects and not because of direct metabolic ones. I dropped 35lbs in 6 months using IF/OMAD, but I could easily attribute the ~6 lbs/mo weight loss to just applying any discipline at all to eating habits. It's a bit of a magic feather. I compare IF to religious people tithing a percentage of their income, where that exercise itself creates a habit of fiscal discipline that has a higher overall returns as a near term strategy than simply relying on ones already failed discipline for budgeting or saving would. It's like it's subject to the trade off of knowing results, truth, causality, pick two.
- aviancrane 5y ago
  There's a slippery slope us STEM people fall into sometimes, where we step-out a level of abstraction and say that all instances of that abstraction were actually just the abstraction itself. I can step-out of any diet or behavior change and just say that if CaloriesIn < CaloriesOut, you win. But there are context-specific benefits to different implementations. I'm not saying you're wrong; you're right; but you don't want to end up stuck in a loop of depression thinking: Everything is The Same and Nothing Matters because everything possible can just be represented by Objects (or No Objects) with Relations (or No Relations) creating a graph on which everything else is generated (graphs concatenated with graphs).
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    Hah, your depression is my manic.:) This objects and morphisms analogy (the ur-analogy, really) is just a fast path for analysis, but artifacts in-and-of analysis are definitely a thing, sample bias in methods, etc. Depression thinking to me is described by Sapolsky's "aggression turned inward," whereas if you wanted to change your own behaviour (like eating) into something goal oriented like weight loss, having a magic feather isn't a bad thing. Magic feather militancy is its own problem, but I think it's generally true that we're wired to believe whatever preserves the idea of self, and whether our beliefs are real or not has no bearing on our attachment to them. That said, thinking about how to manage eating is alien to my personality, so the OMAD habit is a way to eat for pleasure while cultivating one less comorbidity.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I'm glad there are controlled studies that are documented so that we can have this discussion meaningfully and attempt to sequester the quacks. There's a reason why we have chi-squared and T-tests, and an entire branch of math dedicated to statistical analysis for empirical studies. (And please don't quote Mark Twain, someone always does...) That being said, I think the meta-analysis of decades of research is showing diet science is complicated a/f. It would not surprise me of we ultimately can create bespoke diets since we all are complex machines and different environments. For anyone who's never heard, Michal Pollan has 7 great rules, but there's one golden rule: "Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants." Here are the more "controversial" 7. 1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says. 2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce. 3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad. 4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says. 5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'" 6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks. 7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.
- pkroll 5y ago
  Twinkies are baked goods that have a shelf life of 25 days. The "never go bad" thing is a Simpsons' joke, not a reality.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I think you are being overly pedantic. Do you not understand the message, or should Pollan be less whimsical? If it is going to turn people off the message, perhaps he should be a little more serious.
armchairhacker 5y ago
I'm really interested in how time-restricted eating and extended fasting affects people who are very fit or don't have much weight to lose. Many people say "low-calorie diets" extend lifespan, but I highly doubt, because once you reach a low enough bodyfat you actually experience lots of negative effects (which are actually similar to a high bodyfat). Maybe it's correlation, because the people who eat lower-calories have a lower natural metabolism which makes them age slower? But fasting isn't the same as low-calorie. Anecdotally in my experience fasting really does help short-term: I have more energy and better mood and feel "lighter". Maybe because my body doesn't have to spend energy digesting food. But if I fast too long or often I start to "crash". And once I start eating I usually also "crash". The latter is probably because I usually eat a big meal, but if I don't eat a big meal I would continue dropping too much weight and cause the former. Fasting also screws up my digestion, because when my digestive system restarts it starts slow and gets backed up more easily - the same meal breaking a fast leaves me bloated and lethargic, which I handle fine after a while of eating regularly.
capitainenemo 5y ago
https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/10.1056/NEJMra1905136 https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/10.1056/NEJMra1905136 A review of the research covering a fair number of human and animal studies and proposed mechanisms. I feel like the twitter thread above is missing a bit of context, this isn't just a couple of studies.
ve55 5y ago
Would like to add a few things to these tweets myself: - It's moderately well-accepted that fasting for short periods such as 8-23 hours in humans is not at all metabolically equivalent to fasting for longer periods such as 1-7+ days in humans. I'd personally believe you could get some interesting (potentially beneficial!) effects by fasting for a week here and there due to mTOR, but we're obviously lacking the level of evidence we'd want to confidently make this claim. Regardless, intermittent fasting can help in other areas, so it doesn't mean it is useless. - As is always the case, there's some other studies to consider: for example this one a few days ago that showed (in mice!) that fasting periods specifically were what drove lifespan increases, and that caloric restriction without any change in diet schedule did not improve lifespan: https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450121276270514181 https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450121276270514181 (many studies 'accidentally' combine both of them and end up with a partially confounded result. there's also some literature contrary to this, but it's an additional data point). - As far as fat loss goes, there's some papers that show that intermittent fasting (that is, alternate-day fasting in this case) is worse than eating daily(a recent summary of one from Peter Attia: https://peterattiamd.com/is-alternate-day-fasting-superior-to-calorie-restriction-for-fat-loss-in-lean-adults/ https://peterattiamd.com/is-alternate-day-fasting-superior-t...). This study precisely manages calories in participants, so one reason this could not apply to an individual is that eating patterns obviously influence how much you eat and of what. - One of the best points from this thread is that translating results from mice to humans is hard and nontrivial, and there's many reasons for this that go beyond the obvious fact that, well, they're very different organisms. Similar to how translating the proper dose of a supplement may be difficult, translating the time period(s) of various effects and interventions is also difficult! My takeaway as usual is that science is pretty hard, so exercising healthy skepticism is generally the right option, especially in areas that involve nutrition/diet/biology, since this is even harder than many other areas of science.

54 points by evo_9 5y ago

kgin 5y ago

Fwiw there was a very recent study seeking to compare the longevity increases (in mice) from time-restricted eating vs calorie restriction. In this study, 100% of the benefit was due to time-restricted eating, none from calorie restriction. https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450120927195406342?s=20 https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450120927195406342?s=...

kspacewalk2 5y ago
You've clearly indicated this, but I think it's worth highlighting because it's so crucial a caveat: In Mice.
- neaden 5y ago
  Even moreso in this studies than many others, as the tweets point out the mice were doing the human equivalent of fasting for a week.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lurquer 5y ago
A follow-up study followed a group of people who only ate calorie-restricted mice once a day. I can’t find the link, unfortunately.

artful-hacker 5y ago

Unrolled the thread here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449973547485384704.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449973547485384704.html

DiabloD3 5y ago

Dear content creators: I don't know why people keep typing actual thoughts on Twitter: PLEASE STOP AND GET A BLOG. Nobody will read this, and this is actually important information that can save lives. Also, stop using clickbait headlines when presenting information; the correct headline for this example would be "Managing insulin levels naturally leads to longer lives with higher quality of life and less health problems". That said, fellow HN addicts, switch to one meal a day (OMAD) like I did. My brain feels like its ten years younger, and my body more-so. Also, stop eating foods that are just made of empty filler, like refined carbs and refined vegetable oils, this also helps a ton and segues naturally into OMAD.

ahevia 5y ago
Doesn’t that exact Twitter thread not advocate for OMAD because of the lack of evidence in human studies? (and what human studies there are for eating late in the day aren’t positive) Agreed on the refined carbs & oils though.
bobobob420 5y ago
Thank you for your first paragraph. I don’t know why even respected people like John Carmack will make huge Twitter threads, like are they not self aware it’s unreadable and looks like an unorganized mess
- stnmtn 5y ago
  It's different context when you're writing a thread a thread in twitter vs doing a blog post or something else like that. If John Carmack just wants to get a couple thoughts out there, not worry about paragraph structure, and just kinda type and send as he thinks of it, then twitter is perfect for that. There's probably many ideas that people like Carmack have that they don't think is 'good enough' for a whole blog post, but fits right in on a casual twitter thread.
snowwrestler 5y ago
Tons of people read tweet threads on Twitter, that’s why people and organizations do them. As an author or organization, it’s easy to measure and compare audiences between the two channels (Twitter and website) and see this. The two channels are also not mutually exclusive. Tweet threads can get turned into articles if they get traction, or vice versa.

djyaz1200 5y ago

Anecdotally, I've been skipping breakfast and lunch M-F with first food at 4pm and I've been losing a little bit of weight (.5%/month) and have a lot more energy. I probably eat about the same caloric volume of food, maybe slightly less. Been at it for about 6mo. Not saying this is right for others but I've been encouraged by the results thus far. I started after reading (some of) the book "The Energy Paradox" by SR Gundry. It's too long but the point is eating requires energy and can make you feel tired. I imagine I'll stick with this program.

vikingerik 5y ago
I know exactly what you mean on "eating requires energy and can make you feel tired". I get this too, and what avoids it is to eat as cleanly and naturally as possible - whole plants, no processed carbs, no salt and oil and sugar. I believe the "eating makes you tired" is a hibernation reflex. Mammalian bodies are designed to pack on calories when food is plentiful in order to survive an upcoming winter. The tiredness is for the body to process the calories into stored fat. Of course, with modern technology, there is no such thing as that food winter, and we never deplete what we had the instinct to store.
tconfrey 5y ago
Again anecdotally. I'm mid 50's, always been fit with a healthy diet and BMI range, but the weight had started to build up of late. I tried informally exercising more and eating/drinking less, with no visible results. Six weeks back I switched to a weekday 18 hour fast, 6 hour eating window (lunch ~2pm, finish dinner before 8), no alcohol on weekdays. It was hitting 170 that triggered me to try the change. This morning I was 158 with 2% lower body fat. For me I think the fasting window just gives me an easy to follow schedule without having to make all those tiny little decisions. Once you get used to it, having your body tell you it's hungry gets easy to ignore (plus a 2pm lunch reduces the temptation for a mid afternoon snack). I don't feel any different TBH! YMMV.

taylodl 5y ago

My doctor recommended I begin intermittent fasting - no breakfast, light lunch, normal dinner; 8 hour "eating window" per day. I've been at it for about 18 months now. About 8 months ago I started really watching how much sugar and highly processed carbs I eat (not a keto diet, just not going crazy with pasta and sweets). I've lost 50 pounds and no longer have to take my hypertension medication. If this were the olden days before you could take medication to treat hypertension then sure, an argument could be made that skipping meals can make you live longer. Today things are slightly different but even so, "skipping meals can reduce your medications" is still pretty significant.

rednerrus 5y ago
Eating less calorie will give you the same benefit.
- bityard 5y ago
  The human body's energy management system is incredibly complicated and rife with subtleties. To the point that the whole "calories in == calories out" meme, while not factually untrue by the standard of Newtonian physics, is just about as useful as saying that gravity is the cause of all airplane crashes.
  - Engineering-MD 5y ago
    Yet people seem to forget about that with diets and that is why it’s useful to remind people in some cases. Your diet doesn’t matter if in the end you consume more calories than expended- you will gain weight. I see it more as a first test of reasonability of a diet, a law of weight loss if you will.
    - pengaru 5y ago
      > Your diet doesn’t matter if in the end you consume more calories than expended- you will gain weight. This isn't true though, it's not the amount of calories you consume but the amount of calories your body actually accesses out of those consumed. If most of the calories you consume simply pass through or get consumed by the parasites living in your large intestine, calories consumed can exceed calories expended by you while still losing weight. The researcher who discovered the general role a pancreas plays in weight gain back in the 1800s had dogs living normal lives after removing their pancreases. Except no matter how much food they consumed, they continuously lost weight, and eventually died as if they'd starved to death. He discovered their urine was sweet after seeing flies were more attracted to their urine than the normal; without pancreas-created insulin the fat cells wouldn't store the energy, it was leaving the system in the urine. This illustrates the role hormones play in energy storage/release. Everyone's hormone levels are different, and how they respond to different foods varies, it's all very subjective, sex, and age-dependent. So even within those calories accessed via the GI tract, there's hormonal variability in what gets stored vs. used vs. excreted. Calories consumed only sets an upper bound; if you consume less calories than expended, you will lose weight. It's not a symmetric relationship like your statement assumes.

shapefrog 5y ago

Everything make you live longer than the SAD standard american diet.

maskedinvader 5y ago

I switched to eating light lunches and skipping breakfast a couple of years ago, lost 12 pounds, feel fitter and able to keep up with the demands of being a dad of a 11 month old baby along with a full time job. I would highly recommend this diet for folks finding it tough to restrict calories, restrict eating window and don't try to restrict calories as much.

greenail 5y ago

Qualitatively what effect does living longer have on your happiness? I would guess that there is an emotional impact to surviving after all your friends have died. I'd also guess that the quality of your family life has a big impact.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

padobson 5y ago

Diet science is chaos. What we all need is not another fad diet or fasting strategy or super food, but rather a process that looks like a flowchart so an individual can achieve certain goals. I'd be shocked if we ever found a one-size-fits-all diet, but there should be some kind of process to design a good diet specific to an individual, using feedback from measurements like weight, blood sugar, vitamin levels, energy levels and mood. Want to lose weight? Try fasting for a month. Then stop and try calorie restriction for a month. Was one easier? Did one help you lose more weight? Make adjustments to the more effective one and keep going. Want to have more energy? Pick a group of healthy foods eat only them for a week. Then, pick a separate group and do that for a week. Journal every day so you can make comparisons about how you feel and how much energy you have. Wondering what foods are making you feel tired/sick? Pick a handful of vegetables and eat them for a week, then slowly add in the usual suspects that might be sapping your energy. When you find the food that's slowing you down, cut it out of your diet permanently. Want to save money on groceries? Find the foods that are working best for you and swap out cheaper alternatives or buy in bulk. I have no idea what the process should look like, these are just possible examples, but a process is what I want.

Spivak 5y ago
You're just describing how nutritionalists help people. You can of course apply the scientific method yourself without them but the reason you pay them to borrow their knowledge and experience to help you minimize the number of experiments you have to do to find "your" diet.
- cheese_van 5y ago
  What I found interesting about adopting a diet was how it changed my perception of shopping for food. When I now walk into a modern well-stocked supermarket, it's shocking (now) that the vast majority of their inventory is useless and harmful (or at least to me). Vast isles of delicious utter crap. Crap in bags, crap in cans, colorful packaged crap wherever you turn. Food that will kill you given time enough. Is there a solution to this self-induced (the market gives us what we want) madness?

fouc 5y ago

> This suggests that fasting might have negatively affected the health of the mice, to cause less benefit than simple calorie restriction at the same body weight did. This doesn't make sense. He's comparing 28% lifespan increase on calorie-restriction vs 11% on fasted, and then wildly jumping to "fasted is NEGATIVELY healthy" Fasting is a helluva lot easier than calorie-restriction, and I'd take a gain of +11% lifespan increase.

rajup 5y ago
Yeah agreed, that Twitter thread is weird. Sinclair promoting his company does seem like a conflict of interest as far as his tweets are concerned, but the claims in this Twitter thread were equally all over the place.
- fouc 5y ago
  Yeah, good point about that conflict of interest
salmonellaeater 5y ago
In the mouse study, both groups were on calorie-restriction. The difference was whether they fasted or not. "fasted is NEGATIVELY health" is right.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

motohagiography 5y ago

It's hard to reconcile this with personal anecdata, although it probably works because of behavioural side effects and not because of direct metabolic ones. I dropped 35lbs in 6 months using IF/OMAD, but I could easily attribute the ~6 lbs/mo weight loss to just applying any discipline at all to eating habits. It's a bit of a magic feather. I compare IF to religious people tithing a percentage of their income, where that exercise itself creates a habit of fiscal discipline that has a higher overall returns as a near term strategy than simply relying on ones already failed discipline for budgeting or saving would. It's like it's subject to the trade off of knowing results, truth, causality, pick two.

aviancrane 5y ago
There's a slippery slope us STEM people fall into sometimes, where we step-out a level of abstraction and say that all instances of that abstraction were actually just the abstraction itself. I can step-out of any diet or behavior change and just say that if CaloriesIn < CaloriesOut, you win. But there are context-specific benefits to different implementations. I'm not saying you're wrong; you're right; but you don't want to end up stuck in a loop of depression thinking: Everything is The Same and Nothing Matters because everything possible can just be represented by Objects (or No Objects) with Relations (or No Relations) creating a graph on which everything else is generated (graphs concatenated with graphs).
- motohagiography 5y ago
  Hah, your depression is my manic.:) This objects and morphisms analogy (the ur-analogy, really) is just a fast path for analysis, but artifacts in-and-of analysis are definitely a thing, sample bias in methods, etc. Depression thinking to me is described by Sapolsky's "aggression turned inward," whereas if you wanted to change your own behaviour (like eating) into something goal oriented like weight loss, having a magic feather isn't a bad thing. Magic feather militancy is its own problem, but I think it's generally true that we're wired to believe whatever preserves the idea of self, and whether our beliefs are real or not has no bearing on our attachment to them. That said, thinking about how to manage eating is alien to my personality, so the OMAD habit is a way to eat for pleasure while cultivating one less comorbidity.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I'm glad there are controlled studies that are documented so that we can have this discussion meaningfully and attempt to sequester the quacks. There's a reason why we have chi-squared and T-tests, and an entire branch of math dedicated to statistical analysis for empirical studies. (And please don't quote Mark Twain, someone always does...) That being said, I think the meta-analysis of decades of research is showing diet science is complicated a/f. It would not surprise me of we ultimately can create bespoke diets since we all are complex machines and different environments. For anyone who's never heard, Michal Pollan has 7 great rules, but there's one golden rule: "Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants." Here are the more "controversial" 7. 1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says. 2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce. 3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad. 4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says. 5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'" 6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks. 7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

pkroll 5y ago
Twinkies are baked goods that have a shelf life of 25 days. The "never go bad" thing is a Simpsons' joke, not a reality.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I think you are being overly pedantic. Do you not understand the message, or should Pollan be less whimsical? If it is going to turn people off the message, perhaps he should be a little more serious.

armchairhacker 5y ago

I'm really interested in how time-restricted eating and extended fasting affects people who are very fit or don't have much weight to lose. Many people say "low-calorie diets" extend lifespan, but I highly doubt, because once you reach a low enough bodyfat you actually experience lots of negative effects (which are actually similar to a high bodyfat). Maybe it's correlation, because the people who eat lower-calories have a lower natural metabolism which makes them age slower? But fasting isn't the same as low-calorie. Anecdotally in my experience fasting really does help short-term: I have more energy and better mood and feel "lighter". Maybe because my body doesn't have to spend energy digesting food. But if I fast too long or often I start to "crash". And once I start eating I usually also "crash". The latter is probably because I usually eat a big meal, but if I don't eat a big meal I would continue dropping too much weight and cause the former. Fasting also screws up my digestion, because when my digestive system restarts it starts slow and gets backed up more easily - the same meal breaking a fast leaves me bloated and lethargic, which I handle fine after a while of eating regularly.

capitainenemo 5y ago

https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/10.1056/NEJMra1905136 https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/10.1056/NEJMra1905136 A review of the research covering a fair number of human and animal studies and proposed mechanisms. I feel like the twitter thread above is missing a bit of context, this isn't just a couple of studies.

ve55 5y ago

Would like to add a few things to these tweets myself: - It's moderately well-accepted that fasting for short periods such as 8-23 hours in humans is not at all metabolically equivalent to fasting for longer periods such as 1-7+ days in humans. I'd personally believe you could get some interesting (potentially beneficial!) effects by fasting for a week here and there due to mTOR, but we're obviously lacking the level of evidence we'd want to confidently make this claim. Regardless, intermittent fasting can help in other areas, so it doesn't mean it is useless. - As is always the case, there's some other studies to consider: for example this one a few days ago that showed (in mice!) that fasting periods specifically were what drove lifespan increases, and that caloric restriction without any change in diet schedule did not improve lifespan: https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450121276270514181 https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450121276270514181 (many studies 'accidentally' combine both of them and end up with a partially confounded result. there's also some literature contrary to this, but it's an additional data point). - As far as fat loss goes, there's some papers that show that intermittent fasting (that is, alternate-day fasting in this case) is worse than eating daily(a recent summary of one from Peter Attia: https://peterattiamd.com/is-alternate-day-fasting-superior-to-calorie-restriction-for-fat-loss-in-lean-adults/ https://peterattiamd.com/is-alternate-day-fasting-superior-t...). This study precisely manages calories in participants, so one reason this could not apply to an individual is that eating patterns obviously influence how much you eat and of what. - One of the best points from this thread is that translating results from mice to humans is hard and nontrivial, and there's many reasons for this that go beyond the obvious fact that, well, they're very different organisms. Similar to how translating the proper dose of a supplement may be difficult, translating the time period(s) of various effects and interventions is also difficult! My takeaway as usual is that science is pretty hard, so exercising healthy skepticism is generally the right option, especially in areas that involve nutrition/diet/biology, since this is even harder than many other areas of science.