5 ms·

Just adding a bit about the subject at hand: I am convinced the cancer epidemic is due to us grossly misusing our biological equipment: we are meant to feast &

Just adding a bit about the subject at hand: I am convinced the cancer epidemic is due to us grossly misusing our biological equipment: we are meant to feast & fast, and not have insulin's anabolic effects constantly activated. Fasting is crucial for "system maintenance", via autophagy (self-eating of damaged cells). Average person constantly stimulates insulin with following the advice of eating small meals often, without even going into the content of those meals.

candiddevmike 4y ago
Autophagy keeps getting brought up with such pseudoscientific bullshit explanations that I can't help but see it as snake oil. Furthermore, depending on who is describing it, the window for autophagy to kick in is anywhere from 8-48+ hours.
- godshatter 4y ago
  There is a lot of "bro-science" out there concerning autophagy for sure, but it is definitely a thing. Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2016 for "his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy" (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/summary/).
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    Ohsumi's research into the mechanics of autophagy doesn't seem to have much to do with the broscience around autophagy. In other words, the question isn't whether autophagy exists. The question is over whether fanatical "one-weird-trick" claims about autophagy are true and, further, what the impact actually is and compared to what. For example, autophagy is happening all the time, not just during during starvation. And it hasn't been demonstrated that fasting for 3 days to increase autophagy levels has a net benefit versus eating a nutrient-rich diet during that timeframe. Instead we just get vague but lofty claims in forum posts.
- lambdaba 4y ago
  I don't know what science you need to understand a system that is constantly active and is never fully allowed to rest will develop dysfunction. Anyway, as the sibling reply says, there is plenty of reputable research available to satisfy your curiosity if you wish.
  - dbsights 4y ago
    Explain heartbeats?
    - techbio 4y ago
      Relatively very frequent rest and activation, I think is a charitably agreeable analogy. A heart muscle that never released would not be healthy.
  - verall 4y ago
    This is not necessarily a given, depending on the nature of the system, it absolutely requires evidence. Does my circulatory system need to fully rest so as not to develop dysfunction?
turkeygizzard 4y ago
This is interesting. Does elevated insulin / anabolic rates mean there’s no breakdown though? At least with muscles, most increases in synthesis rates are accompanied by a proportional increase in breakdown too. I don’t have papers on hand to cite so take it with a grain of salt, but I believe that just eating is enough to increase both synthesis and breakdown. I think this is actually healthier since you have higher turnover this way
naillo 4y ago
> following the advice of eating small meals often This must be an american thing. I've always been told the opposite advice all my life. Interesting.
- Test0129 4y ago
  Eating small meals often is a way people control urge and hunger. I don't think it's American only. For a LONG time bodybuilding touted the 6 meals a day to lose weight strategy.
  - naillo 4y ago
    I get that people do it, it's just that I've never gotten the advice to do it (non body building contexts, just normal life). To "småäta" in sweden is a widely talked about thing to avoid (i.e. adviced against).
  - ddorian43 4y ago
    > For a LONG time bodybuilding touted the 6 meals a day to lose weight strategy. Pretty sure it's to gain weight. So you're all day eating. To drop in weight, it's better to eat lowcarb,keto,carnivore. Fat/protein is makes you more full and eat less.
vibrio 4y ago
Interesting, what are your thoughts on the anti-CD47 investigational therapeutics being tested for cancer indications? How do you think that antagonizing CD47 will impact this 'system maintenance'. Do you think that modulating autophagy is part of the problem of enhanced autoimmunity, since its clear that is involved in immune surveillance? There is a lot of science out there around this area.
Test0129 4y ago
I've done fasting for a while. It's not the panacea that it's touted as. I was a pretty religious (figuratively) 16 hour fast person. I have several years of bloodwork to show marginal if any changes to baseline. In some cases, for example with blood sugar, there's a small window where insulin actually spikes during a fast. I had several unusual blood sugar readings if I took them around the 15 hour mark along with other numbers that were raised temporarily with no other cause. I've switched over the last 6 months to eating 3 meals and 2 snacks a day of varying size. I climb often (vigorously, 4 times a week if not more) and found that fasting was simply insufficient to provide the energy I needed. IF caused notable performance decreases at the level I work at leading to more injuries due to poorer recovery. Changing my diet in this way fixed most of it. Of course, I try to eat relatively clean (but chips are a weakness). I don't have a 6 pack but I am also not overweight and carry enough muscle for my uses. This isn't to say I am giving a license to eat what you want. But what you do with your fuel is probably just as important as what that fuel is. The "average person" you mention is a couch potato. Of course these people not only benefit from IF but literally any change in exercise! IF works great for people who are not intensely active. Hence why it has become popular in tech. Proper sleep (whatever that means to your body) and relatively hard exercise are even better predictors of all-cause mortality than any of this. To me, after having done it, IF feels mostly like new age woo-woo "science" and it dances around people saying it flat out cures cancer. In some cases, for example prediabetes and chemotherapy, "deloading" the system has evidence of being effective. For the rest of us, it's a wash.
- rngname22 4y ago
  I don't really agree with the parent's assessment that lack of fasting-induced autophagy is the reason for the increase in cancer, but your anecdote about 16 hour fasts is sorta irrelevant. Autophagy doesn't really kick in until 2-3 days of fasting.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    There are some military studies that showed autophagy didn't kick in until they dropped below 6% body fat. But that was with 600kcal and no change in duties. So it's not necessarily relevant. I do IF but I'm a couch potato. If I really stick to 20hrs, it seems to work very well. If I slip to even 19 I have to skip food for a day or even two to get back to feeling good (clear head functioning gut etc.). I am overweight still, but not obese. I lose about 2lbs a week when I stick with it. I am nervous about resuming excercise. I hope I can still recover well. I just do strength training 3 days a week for an hour, or two once I'm back to needing more warmup sets.
kjkjadksj 4y ago
Honestly the behavioral lifestyle of modern humans is so far off from what we developed that diet is probably a drop in the bucket relative to many other factors. Consider how much movement a persistent hunter in a tribe still engaging in these practices does compared to the modern human, who sits for 95% of the day. The elders in these tribes look lean and still might engage in hunts. The elders in our tribes frequently can hardly walk or access the second floor of their house without difficulty. We went from a species that has to go out and forage or hunt for resources, into one that basically sits in a cave all day and poof there is a couple thousand calories in front of them that they didn’t have to get; no species operates like this. The things that made us humans and improved our fitness to allow us to survive and colonize the globe, our intelligence and endurance or strength, are no longer being selected for in modern life. Then consider the arbitrary stress that society puts on us. How you dress should not matter, what you love, how you work, where you work, what you do for fun, etc, but we make people hand wring about it all. We have a cruel society in many ways that stifles unorthodox thought and behavior that doesn't ultimately further someone else's dollar. The daily stress of sitting in traffic or waiting for the bus to finally show up on a hot day definitely triggers stress responses. How about the fact that social media has sapped many peoples attention span? The mind is no longer allowed to be bored or to rest or dwell inwardly if you are constantly using every available second to check a website on your cellphone. You see it in kids an adults everywhere: elevator door shuts and out go the phones along with any chance of serendipitous organic thought that doesn't come from an advertising network. Experiment with your diet, sure, but don’t neglect the other ills of modern life if you want to be truly heathy in body and mind.
- bwi4 4y ago
  Western lifestyles differ markedly from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and these differences in diet and activity level are often implicated in the global obesity pandemic. However, few physiological data for hunter-gatherer populations are available to test these models of obesity. In this study, we used the doubly-labeled water method to measure total daily energy expenditure (kCal/day) in Hadza hunter-gatherers to test whether foragers expend more energy each day than their Western counterparts. As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners. Nonetheless, average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
doliveira 4y ago
I'm convinced that it's a mistake to be convinced that there's one simple single cause for a society-level issue.
lambdaba 4y ago
I just want to add a thought about how human biology evolved: australophitecus already was hunting, and subsequent evolution selected for the best hunters. Humans became such successful hunters that we hunted megafauna to extinction. Obviously that environment doesn't exist anymore but biologically speaking, we have simply not evolved for abundance. On the contrary, we are able to go for very long without eating. Even people at their ideal weight have about 100k calories stored. That's 30 days of high energetic expenditure. Interestingly, anyone who has done a long (3-5+ days) fast knows one drops in a mental and physical state that feels very much tailored to better hunting. Reduced need for sleep, antidepressive and procognitive effects, etc. [edit]: I guess the part about humans evolving with scarcity is not entirely accurate, what we can see for sure is there is some adaptation to surviving without eating; this is not a common trait, other species have much inferior ability to store fat.

candiddevmike 4y ago

Autophagy keeps getting brought up with such pseudoscientific bullshit explanations that I can't help but see it as snake oil. Furthermore, depending on who is describing it, the window for autophagy to kick in is anywhere from 8-48+ hours.

godshatter 4y ago
There is a lot of "bro-science" out there concerning autophagy for sure, but it is definitely a thing. Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2016 for "his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy" (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/summary/).
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Ohsumi's research into the mechanics of autophagy doesn't seem to have much to do with the broscience around autophagy. In other words, the question isn't whether autophagy exists. The question is over whether fanatical "one-weird-trick" claims about autophagy are true and, further, what the impact actually is and compared to what. For example, autophagy is happening all the time, not just during during starvation. And it hasn't been demonstrated that fasting for 3 days to increase autophagy levels has a net benefit versus eating a nutrient-rich diet during that timeframe. Instead we just get vague but lofty claims in forum posts.
lambdaba 4y ago
I don't know what science you need to understand a system that is constantly active and is never fully allowed to rest will develop dysfunction. Anyway, as the sibling reply says, there is plenty of reputable research available to satisfy your curiosity if you wish.
- dbsights 4y ago
  Explain heartbeats?
  - techbio 4y ago
    Relatively very frequent rest and activation, I think is a charitably agreeable analogy. A heart muscle that never released would not be healthy.
- verall 4y ago
  This is not necessarily a given, depending on the nature of the system, it absolutely requires evidence. Does my circulatory system need to fully rest so as not to develop dysfunction?

turkeygizzard 4y ago

This is interesting. Does elevated insulin / anabolic rates mean there’s no breakdown though? At least with muscles, most increases in synthesis rates are accompanied by a proportional increase in breakdown too. I don’t have papers on hand to cite so take it with a grain of salt, but I believe that just eating is enough to increase both synthesis and breakdown. I think this is actually healthier since you have higher turnover this way

naillo 4y ago

> following the advice of eating small meals often This must be an american thing. I've always been told the opposite advice all my life. Interesting.

Test0129 4y ago
Eating small meals often is a way people control urge and hunger. I don't think it's American only. For a LONG time bodybuilding touted the 6 meals a day to lose weight strategy.
- naillo 4y ago
  I get that people do it, it's just that I've never gotten the advice to do it (non body building contexts, just normal life). To "småäta" in sweden is a widely talked about thing to avoid (i.e. adviced against).
- ddorian43 4y ago
  > For a LONG time bodybuilding touted the 6 meals a day to lose weight strategy. Pretty sure it's to gain weight. So you're all day eating. To drop in weight, it's better to eat lowcarb,keto,carnivore. Fat/protein is makes you more full and eat less.

vibrio 4y ago

Interesting, what are your thoughts on the anti-CD47 investigational therapeutics being tested for cancer indications? How do you think that antagonizing CD47 will impact this 'system maintenance'. Do you think that modulating autophagy is part of the problem of enhanced autoimmunity, since its clear that is involved in immune surveillance? There is a lot of science out there around this area.

Test0129 4y ago

I've done fasting for a while. It's not the panacea that it's touted as. I was a pretty religious (figuratively) 16 hour fast person. I have several years of bloodwork to show marginal if any changes to baseline. In some cases, for example with blood sugar, there's a small window where insulin actually spikes during a fast. I had several unusual blood sugar readings if I took them around the 15 hour mark along with other numbers that were raised temporarily with no other cause. I've switched over the last 6 months to eating 3 meals and 2 snacks a day of varying size. I climb often (vigorously, 4 times a week if not more) and found that fasting was simply insufficient to provide the energy I needed. IF caused notable performance decreases at the level I work at leading to more injuries due to poorer recovery. Changing my diet in this way fixed most of it. Of course, I try to eat relatively clean (but chips are a weakness). I don't have a 6 pack but I am also not overweight and carry enough muscle for my uses. This isn't to say I am giving a license to eat what you want. But what you do with your fuel is probably just as important as what that fuel is. The "average person" you mention is a couch potato. Of course these people not only benefit from IF but literally any change in exercise! IF works great for people who are not intensely active. Hence why it has become popular in tech. Proper sleep (whatever that means to your body) and relatively hard exercise are even better predictors of all-cause mortality than any of this. To me, after having done it, IF feels mostly like new age woo-woo "science" and it dances around people saying it flat out cures cancer. In some cases, for example prediabetes and chemotherapy, "deloading" the system has evidence of being effective. For the rest of us, it's a wash.

rngname22 4y ago
I don't really agree with the parent's assessment that lack of fasting-induced autophagy is the reason for the increase in cancer, but your anecdote about 16 hour fasts is sorta irrelevant. Autophagy doesn't really kick in until 2-3 days of fasting.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  There are some military studies that showed autophagy didn't kick in until they dropped below 6% body fat. But that was with 600kcal and no change in duties. So it's not necessarily relevant. I do IF but I'm a couch potato. If I really stick to 20hrs, it seems to work very well. If I slip to even 19 I have to skip food for a day or even two to get back to feeling good (clear head functioning gut etc.). I am overweight still, but not obese. I lose about 2lbs a week when I stick with it. I am nervous about resuming excercise. I hope I can still recover well. I just do strength training 3 days a week for an hour, or two once I'm back to needing more warmup sets.

kjkjadksj 4y ago

Honestly the behavioral lifestyle of modern humans is so far off from what we developed that diet is probably a drop in the bucket relative to many other factors. Consider how much movement a persistent hunter in a tribe still engaging in these practices does compared to the modern human, who sits for 95% of the day. The elders in these tribes look lean and still might engage in hunts. The elders in our tribes frequently can hardly walk or access the second floor of their house without difficulty. We went from a species that has to go out and forage or hunt for resources, into one that basically sits in a cave all day and poof there is a couple thousand calories in front of them that they didn’t have to get; no species operates like this. The things that made us humans and improved our fitness to allow us to survive and colonize the globe, our intelligence and endurance or strength, are no longer being selected for in modern life. Then consider the arbitrary stress that society puts on us. How you dress should not matter, what you love, how you work, where you work, what you do for fun, etc, but we make people hand wring about it all. We have a cruel society in many ways that stifles unorthodox thought and behavior that doesn't ultimately further someone else's dollar. The daily stress of sitting in traffic or waiting for the bus to finally show up on a hot day definitely triggers stress responses. How about the fact that social media has sapped many peoples attention span? The mind is no longer allowed to be bored or to rest or dwell inwardly if you are constantly using every available second to check a website on your cellphone. You see it in kids an adults everywhere: elevator door shuts and out go the phones along with any chance of serendipitous organic thought that doesn't come from an advertising network. Experiment with your diet, sure, but don’t neglect the other ills of modern life if you want to be truly heathy in body and mind.

bwi4 4y ago
Western lifestyles differ markedly from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and these differences in diet and activity level are often implicated in the global obesity pandemic. However, few physiological data for hunter-gatherer populations are available to test these models of obesity. In this study, we used the doubly-labeled water method to measure total daily energy expenditure (kCal/day) in Hadza hunter-gatherers to test whether foragers expend more energy each day than their Western counterparts. As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners. Nonetheless, average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040503 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

doliveira 4y ago

I'm convinced that it's a mistake to be convinced that there's one simple single cause for a society-level issue.

lambdaba 4y ago

I just want to add a thought about how human biology evolved: australophitecus already was hunting, and subsequent evolution selected for the best hunters. Humans became such successful hunters that we hunted megafauna to extinction. Obviously that environment doesn't exist anymore but biologically speaking, we have simply not evolved for abundance. On the contrary, we are able to go for very long without eating. Even people at their ideal weight have about 100k calories stored. That's 30 days of high energetic expenditure. Interestingly, anyone who has done a long (3-5+ days) fast knows one drops in a mental and physical state that feels very much tailored to better hunting. Reduced need for sleep, antidepressive and procognitive effects, etc. [edit]: I guess the part about humans evolving with scarcity is not entirely accurate, what we can see for sure is there is some adaptation to surviving without eating; this is not a common trait, other species have much inferior ability to store fat.