16 ms·

There is a lot of evidence beginning to emerge on the value of fasting. This was once encoded in culture as almost every culture had some concept of fasting. We

There is a lot of evidence beginning to emerge on the value of fasting. This was once encoded in culture as almost every culture had some concept of fasting. We lost so much knowledge when we let nutrition "science"[1] completely overwhelm the wisdom of our ancestors. On a personal note, I found fasting became much easier after I changed my diet to be ketogenic. With a metabolism primed for burning fat for energy and not subject to a blood sugar roller coaster, going a couple days without food is more of a mental challenge than physical hunger. 1. We've acted like nutrition can give the same cut and dry answers that physics has, and the health of our population shows how well that has worked. Worse, nutrition seems to be driven by egos and media in a way that is nothing short of frightening.

bane 12y ago
Beware of pseudoscience. In the past, some things worked, something things didn't, but there's no understanding as to why they did or didn't work out of traditional models. Scientific models haven't been all that great either, but science hopefully will eventually self correct as nutritional models become more sophisticated. If there is light at the end of the tunnel it will be because of the eventual understanding that the scientific method provides, not reverting back to traditional models. Traditional models don't self correct and there are plenty of instances of people consuming outright poisons under such systems or people following traditional nutrition models finding themselves surrounded by an abundance of previously rare foods that the modern food supply system easily provides, and practically gorging themselves on it to negative health results.
- ellyagg 12y ago
  We have to make decisions now. Do you think the prescriptions from the current state of nutrition science outperform ancestral eating heuristics in real life? I don't, and whether it's true or not is one of the major points under debate. The debate can't automatically be vetoed by invoking "pseudoscience". As an epistemic issue, I have to use all the evidence available to me. What I've noticed is that human physiology is a dynamic equilibrium of a massive number of variables and the current state of our analytic tools have had immense trouble evaluating it efficiently. Ancestral eating patterns looks like worthwhile evidence under the circumstances. Incidentally, essentially no one is blindly promoting traditional eating. Folks are using it as a guide and together with science to make decisions in the face of limited understanding. One of the most popular ancestral diet proponents is Stephan Guyenet, a Ph.D. neurobiologist who studies the link between the brain and obesity for a living[1]. Everyone is for science and no side on the issue owns it. [1] http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/
  - bane 12y ago
    One of the common problems with diets of any kind is that there's an immediate fallacy of an appeal to authority. I'm sure Dr. Guyenet is very qualified as a neurobiologist, but his PhD is not in anything relevant to nutrition (even if he is studying the neurological aspects of eating) -- his B.S. is. Which means that in theory, any random undergrad in a Biochem major is equally qualified to speak on the subject. This is not to put down Dr. Guyenet's work, it's important as obviously there's a neurological component to many kinds of obesity. But then to extend that work into his advocacy for traditional dietary guidelines is a stretch. If he was just an undergrad student in Biochemistry with a blog telling you to do all of the things exactly opposite Dr. Guyenet, would you follow that instead? Why not? That person would be just as educationally qualified. I suspect the reason has to do more with what diet you've chosen to follow a priori and not with Dr. Guyenet's advocacy. I'm not going to pick apart specific issues with this blog, but a casual perusal of it shows lots of fad diet advice and logical "appeal to tradition" fallacies. "We should eat this way because people used to eat this way". The reason people used to eat that way is because they had nothing else available. That's it. There's no secret "the ancients had figured out nutrition from their folk ways" that we should be parroting. There are lots of ingredients in traditional diets that we understand today to be outright poison (like bracken). And lots of ingredients our ancestors thought were poison but are just fine (like potatoes). Traditionally, people didn't even know what to eat to stop scurvy. A nutritional disease which killed millions and turns out to be trivial to treat. What we know about good nutrition (using the power of science) happens to be in pretty broad strokes with pockets of ultra-specificity where we've bothered to do serious research. Science has gotten it pretty wrong as well in the past and probably will for some time as the study of nutrition matures. And you're absolutely right, we can't wait 200 years for nutrition science to mature in the way that Physics has, we have to eat today (and multiple times at that). All I'm saying is that nutrition blogs are a dime a dozen, from people with all kinds of credentials, and lots of them are full of all kinds of advice. "People used to eat this" is just cargo culting dietary advice (and then trying to backfill in justification after the fact) and I would chalk it up to pseudoscience and just make my own decisions based on reasonable advice like "eat in moderation, eat in variety".
thenmar 12y ago
Evidence of fasting having value is interesting, but I wouldn't put much stock in the "wisdom of the ancestors".
- GlickWick 12y ago
  Why not? Don't you want to attach a bunch of leeches to your stomach and bleed away that flu?
  - JamesArgo 12y ago
    And come to think of it, storing dead bodies in the well was very pro-biotic.
  - nkozyra 12y ago
    Well, we still use leeches today in modern medicine, so there's clearly some efficacy on display.
- svasan 12y ago
  Why would one want to ignore beneficial knowledge received in the form of tradition? To be able to re-invent the wheel?
  - WalterSear 12y ago
    Because the past had proportionally more hucksters to scientists than today. And because a lot of that 'ancient wisdom' was invented later, by the aforementioned hucksters: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/10/traditional_chinese_medicine_origins_mao_invented_it_but_didn_t_believe.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Why would one want to ignore beneficial knowledge received in the form of tradition? You want to be skeptical of tradition as a source of factual information because, while there exists beneficial knowledge that may be received in the form of tradition, it is impossible to reliably separate it from harmful false "knowledge" received in the form of tradition, without first turning it into knowledge derived from structured scientific information gathering.
raverbashing 12y ago
While science is advancing and giving a better view of what is needed and what can cause problems, the market is replacing most things in the food without much regard for its consequences Also, science "doesn't know what it doesn't know yet", so we may be missing something that was inconspicuously removed, or suffering from something that was apparently safe One of the interesting things is knowledge that existed and that was rediscovered by science, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
rdmcfee 12y ago
I can second that. Ketosis and fat adaption reduces the need for constant refueling. I have no problem going 24 hours between meals and exercising while fasting. I typically eat ~12 meals per week, 2000 kcal per meal. In addition, the consistent mental acuity achieved in ketosis is fantastic.
- e12e 12y ago
  Sounds like a great way to self-diagnose diabetes. If you go into a coma, you probably have diabetes... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis
  - rdmcfee 12y ago
    Probably easier to just take an insulin sensitivity test or get your Hb A1C tested.
  - TTPrograms 12y ago
    Uh, infrequent meals increase insulin sensitivity. Are you saying he's going to get diabetes? Just because X causes Ketosis doesn't mean Ketosis implies X.
    - e12e 12y ago
      No, I (snarikly) said it (inducing ketosis) was a way to diagnose diabetes, not induce diabetes.
- epa 12y ago
  How do you feel after each of those meals though? Also what time of the day do you eat and does it affect your 1-3 hours after.
DenisM 12y ago
>health of our population shows how well that has worked The average lifespan has gone up considerably in recent decades, and people remain active longer than ever, i.e. people are gaining productive years, not just end-of-life years. In other words, "it" worked fairly well.
- arnorhs 12y ago
  Your reply has the same problem as SoftwareMaven's. Claims about two facts which are both true, does not make a correlation. (the only difference between yours and SoftwareMaven's claim is + vs -) There are way too many factors at hand to be able to say anything about the role/value of nutritional science on the overall lifespan of earthlings.
- themgt 12y ago
  That is almost all due to medical, not nutritional science - antibiotics, better surgeries, pharma, etc. Nutritional science has been an abysmal failure for decades and is barely beginning to relearn many things "nutrional science" itself intentionally threw away in favor of laughably simplistic ideas about how the body works.
  - DenisM 12y ago
    I should have made it clearer that I was meaning to refute the claim about [declining] "health of our population", not defending the nutritional science. I don't have much love for the latter.
  - jfoutz 12y ago
    I'm going to go out on a limb and say medicine wasn't very effective pre 1900, and furthermore the vast majority of life expectancy improvements were due to clean water and enough food. Historically, nutrition has saved a ton of lives. But, I'm with you, modern "nutrition science" doesn't really deserve any credit for that.
    - kangax 12y ago
      And ironically, death rates from obesity just crossed those from hunger. The abundance of food (or rather, abysmal diet culture) is now starting to hurt us.
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
> There is a lot of evidence beginning to emerge on the value of fasting. This was once encoded in culture as almost every culture had some concept of fasting. This is a cultural rift between Western Europe and everyone else. I grew up in Eastern Europe (now I live in the US), and fasting was not an extraordinary concept in that culture, by any means. But I keep noticing how controversial it is in the West. I could probably speculate on the influence of material wealth on culture, and so on, but there's probably not much of a point here. > I found fasting became much easier after I changed my diet to be ketogenic. You don't need to go that far. Fasting is easy when you don't do any kind of alimentary excess in general. I think the whole keto concept is just the pendulum swinging all the way to the other side. I guess it will settle in the middle at some point. Eat a bit of everything, nothing in excess, make sure to not miss the greens and the fruits, etc. Self-control and self-limiting are things that we all need to re-train ourselves for - and not just when it comes to food. --- Anyway, I'm far more interested in studies regarding the effects of fasting on the brain. Traditionally, it was used in a spiritual context, by people who, for lack of a better term, were consciousness hackers. Fasting seemed to enable that process, whatever the mechanism. I'm also very curious about the effects of fasting, if any, on neurodegenerative diseases.
- thret 12y ago
  The ordinary results of fasting and meditation are visions and hallucinations. It isn't something that should be taken lightly or to an extreme. I had a Christian friend who tried a 30-day fast, he did indeed speak to God and God told him to kill himself. The note he left was basically gibberish. This is not too surprising.
  - meric 12y ago
    I'm going to give you benefit of the doubt and assume he was a facebook friend, rather than a close one.
dzhiurgis 12y ago
Fasting could be related to food preservation or simply lack of food before new harvest is collected. At least some of the dates do correlate.
Mz 12y ago
SoftwareMaven, I will suggest that one possible explanation is that our gut is filled with microbes (some good, some bad) and food is filled with microbes and, by weight, our poop is 50% microbes of some sort. So when you fast, you clean out bugs from your system, some of which are very not good for you. We seem to have lost this idea that we are organic, living creatures, part of a complex biome and seem to have this fantasy that we are merely ...chemically complex and in need of more building blocks. And life is just way, way more complicated than that. It is much closer to an on-going, multi-front battle. And when you never fast, you never take a break from that battle. It just keeps on going. my 2 cents, fwiw.
Houshalter 12y ago
As if our ancestors were fasting because they knew it was good for their health. As if their poor nutrition didn't cause much worse problems for them like nutrient deficiencies, lower IQ, shorter heights, lower life expectancies. As if most people today eat only according to the best consensus of nutrition science.
TylerJay 12y ago
I think it's important to note that "Ketogenic" might not be the right word for the necessary diet intervention to make it easier to fast for long periods. Ketosis is a state where you eat so little carbohydrate, that your body is forced to create "ketone bodies" to fuel the brain. This typically happens at <50g/day carbohydrate. Most anecdotal evidence (and my own experiences) show that you can get your body into a primarily fat-burning state that makes it easier to fast for long periods without hunger pangs by eating up to somewhere around 100 or 150g/day carbohydrate (assuming you eat a 2000-2500 Kcal/day diet) while providing enough glucose to the brain that your body is not forced to create excess Ketone bodies.

bane 12y ago

Beware of pseudoscience. In the past, some things worked, something things didn't, but there's no understanding as to why they did or didn't work out of traditional models. Scientific models haven't been all that great either, but science hopefully will eventually self correct as nutritional models become more sophisticated. If there is light at the end of the tunnel it will be because of the eventual understanding that the scientific method provides, not reverting back to traditional models. Traditional models don't self correct and there are plenty of instances of people consuming outright poisons under such systems or people following traditional nutrition models finding themselves surrounded by an abundance of previously rare foods that the modern food supply system easily provides, and practically gorging themselves on it to negative health results.

ellyagg 12y ago
We have to make decisions now. Do you think the prescriptions from the current state of nutrition science outperform ancestral eating heuristics in real life? I don't, and whether it's true or not is one of the major points under debate. The debate can't automatically be vetoed by invoking "pseudoscience". As an epistemic issue, I have to use all the evidence available to me. What I've noticed is that human physiology is a dynamic equilibrium of a massive number of variables and the current state of our analytic tools have had immense trouble evaluating it efficiently. Ancestral eating patterns looks like worthwhile evidence under the circumstances. Incidentally, essentially no one is blindly promoting traditional eating. Folks are using it as a guide and together with science to make decisions in the face of limited understanding. One of the most popular ancestral diet proponents is Stephan Guyenet, a Ph.D. neurobiologist who studies the link between the brain and obesity for a living[1]. Everyone is for science and no side on the issue owns it. [1] http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/
- bane 12y ago
  One of the common problems with diets of any kind is that there's an immediate fallacy of an appeal to authority. I'm sure Dr. Guyenet is very qualified as a neurobiologist, but his PhD is not in anything relevant to nutrition (even if he is studying the neurological aspects of eating) -- his B.S. is. Which means that in theory, any random undergrad in a Biochem major is equally qualified to speak on the subject. This is not to put down Dr. Guyenet's work, it's important as obviously there's a neurological component to many kinds of obesity. But then to extend that work into his advocacy for traditional dietary guidelines is a stretch. If he was just an undergrad student in Biochemistry with a blog telling you to do all of the things exactly opposite Dr. Guyenet, would you follow that instead? Why not? That person would be just as educationally qualified. I suspect the reason has to do more with what diet you've chosen to follow a priori and not with Dr. Guyenet's advocacy. I'm not going to pick apart specific issues with this blog, but a casual perusal of it shows lots of fad diet advice and logical "appeal to tradition" fallacies. "We should eat this way because people used to eat this way". The reason people used to eat that way is because they had nothing else available. That's it. There's no secret "the ancients had figured out nutrition from their folk ways" that we should be parroting. There are lots of ingredients in traditional diets that we understand today to be outright poison (like bracken). And lots of ingredients our ancestors thought were poison but are just fine (like potatoes). Traditionally, people didn't even know what to eat to stop scurvy. A nutritional disease which killed millions and turns out to be trivial to treat. What we know about good nutrition (using the power of science) happens to be in pretty broad strokes with pockets of ultra-specificity where we've bothered to do serious research. Science has gotten it pretty wrong as well in the past and probably will for some time as the study of nutrition matures. And you're absolutely right, we can't wait 200 years for nutrition science to mature in the way that Physics has, we have to eat today (and multiple times at that). All I'm saying is that nutrition blogs are a dime a dozen, from people with all kinds of credentials, and lots of them are full of all kinds of advice. "People used to eat this" is just cargo culting dietary advice (and then trying to backfill in justification after the fact) and I would chalk it up to pseudoscience and just make my own decisions based on reasonable advice like "eat in moderation, eat in variety".

thenmar 12y ago

Evidence of fasting having value is interesting, but I wouldn't put much stock in the "wisdom of the ancestors".

GlickWick 12y ago
Why not? Don't you want to attach a bunch of leeches to your stomach and bleed away that flu?
- JamesArgo 12y ago
  And come to think of it, storing dead bodies in the well was very pro-biotic.
- nkozyra 12y ago
  Well, we still use leeches today in modern medicine, so there's clearly some efficacy on display.
svasan 12y ago
Why would one want to ignore beneficial knowledge received in the form of tradition? To be able to re-invent the wheel?
- WalterSear 12y ago
  Because the past had proportionally more hucksters to scientists than today. And because a lot of that 'ancient wisdom' was invented later, by the aforementioned hucksters: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/10/traditional_chinese_medicine_origins_mao_invented_it_but_didn_t_believe.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Why would one want to ignore beneficial knowledge received in the form of tradition? You want to be skeptical of tradition as a source of factual information because, while there exists beneficial knowledge that may be received in the form of tradition, it is impossible to reliably separate it from harmful false "knowledge" received in the form of tradition, without first turning it into knowledge derived from structured scientific information gathering.

raverbashing 12y ago

While science is advancing and giving a better view of what is needed and what can cause problems, the market is replacing most things in the food without much regard for its consequences Also, science "doesn't know what it doesn't know yet", so we may be missing something that was inconspicuously removed, or suffering from something that was apparently safe One of the interesting things is knowledge that existed and that was rediscovered by science, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

rdmcfee 12y ago

I can second that. Ketosis and fat adaption reduces the need for constant refueling. I have no problem going 24 hours between meals and exercising while fasting. I typically eat ~12 meals per week, 2000 kcal per meal. In addition, the consistent mental acuity achieved in ketosis is fantastic.

e12e 12y ago
Sounds like a great way to self-diagnose diabetes. If you go into a coma, you probably have diabetes... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis
- rdmcfee 12y ago
  Probably easier to just take an insulin sensitivity test or get your Hb A1C tested.
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  Uh, infrequent meals increase insulin sensitivity. Are you saying he's going to get diabetes? Just because X causes Ketosis doesn't mean Ketosis implies X.
  - e12e 12y ago
    No, I (snarikly) said it (inducing ketosis) was a way to diagnose diabetes, not induce diabetes.
epa 12y ago
How do you feel after each of those meals though? Also what time of the day do you eat and does it affect your 1-3 hours after.

DenisM 12y ago

>health of our population shows how well that has worked The average lifespan has gone up considerably in recent decades, and people remain active longer than ever, i.e. people are gaining productive years, not just end-of-life years. In other words, "it" worked fairly well.

arnorhs 12y ago
Your reply has the same problem as SoftwareMaven's. Claims about two facts which are both true, does not make a correlation. (the only difference between yours and SoftwareMaven's claim is + vs -) There are way too many factors at hand to be able to say anything about the role/value of nutritional science on the overall lifespan of earthlings.
themgt 12y ago
That is almost all due to medical, not nutritional science - antibiotics, better surgeries, pharma, etc. Nutritional science has been an abysmal failure for decades and is barely beginning to relearn many things "nutrional science" itself intentionally threw away in favor of laughably simplistic ideas about how the body works.
- DenisM 12y ago
  I should have made it clearer that I was meaning to refute the claim about [declining] "health of our population", not defending the nutritional science. I don't have much love for the latter.
- jfoutz 12y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and say medicine wasn't very effective pre 1900, and furthermore the vast majority of life expectancy improvements were due to clean water and enough food. Historically, nutrition has saved a ton of lives. But, I'm with you, modern "nutrition science" doesn't really deserve any credit for that.
  - kangax 12y ago
    And ironically, death rates from obesity just crossed those from hunger. The abundance of food (or rather, abysmal diet culture) is now starting to hurt us.

Florin_Andrei 12y ago

> There is a lot of evidence beginning to emerge on the value of fasting. This was once encoded in culture as almost every culture had some concept of fasting. This is a cultural rift between Western Europe and everyone else. I grew up in Eastern Europe (now I live in the US), and fasting was not an extraordinary concept in that culture, by any means. But I keep noticing how controversial it is in the West. I could probably speculate on the influence of material wealth on culture, and so on, but there's probably not much of a point here. > I found fasting became much easier after I changed my diet to be ketogenic. You don't need to go that far. Fasting is easy when you don't do any kind of alimentary excess in general. I think the whole keto concept is just the pendulum swinging all the way to the other side. I guess it will settle in the middle at some point. Eat a bit of everything, nothing in excess, make sure to not miss the greens and the fruits, etc. Self-control and self-limiting are things that we all need to re-train ourselves for - and not just when it comes to food. --- Anyway, I'm far more interested in studies regarding the effects of fasting on the brain. Traditionally, it was used in a spiritual context, by people who, for lack of a better term, were consciousness hackers. Fasting seemed to enable that process, whatever the mechanism. I'm also very curious about the effects of fasting, if any, on neurodegenerative diseases.

thret 12y ago
The ordinary results of fasting and meditation are visions and hallucinations. It isn't something that should be taken lightly or to an extreme. I had a Christian friend who tried a 30-day fast, he did indeed speak to God and God told him to kill himself. The note he left was basically gibberish. This is not too surprising.
- meric 12y ago
  I'm going to give you benefit of the doubt and assume he was a facebook friend, rather than a close one.

dzhiurgis 12y ago

Fasting could be related to food preservation or simply lack of food before new harvest is collected. At least some of the dates do correlate.

Mz 12y ago

SoftwareMaven, I will suggest that one possible explanation is that our gut is filled with microbes (some good, some bad) and food is filled with microbes and, by weight, our poop is 50% microbes of some sort. So when you fast, you clean out bugs from your system, some of which are very not good for you. We seem to have lost this idea that we are organic, living creatures, part of a complex biome and seem to have this fantasy that we are merely ...chemically complex and in need of more building blocks. And life is just way, way more complicated than that. It is much closer to an on-going, multi-front battle. And when you never fast, you never take a break from that battle. It just keeps on going. my 2 cents, fwiw.

Houshalter 12y ago

As if our ancestors were fasting because they knew it was good for their health. As if their poor nutrition didn't cause much worse problems for them like nutrient deficiencies, lower IQ, shorter heights, lower life expectancies. As if most people today eat only according to the best consensus of nutrition science.

TylerJay 12y ago

I think it's important to note that "Ketogenic" might not be the right word for the necessary diet intervention to make it easier to fast for long periods. Ketosis is a state where you eat so little carbohydrate, that your body is forced to create "ketone bodies" to fuel the brain. This typically happens at <50g/day carbohydrate. Most anecdotal evidence (and my own experiences) show that you can get your body into a primarily fat-burning state that makes it easier to fast for long periods without hunger pangs by eating up to somewhere around 100 or 150g/day carbohydrate (assuming you eat a 2000-2500 Kcal/day diet) while providing enough glucose to the brain that your body is not forced to create excess Ketone bodies.