5 ms·

It is important to note that the fact "Starvation is also a way to live longer." is probably wrong as some scientist have noticed. The problem is that animals

It is important to note that the fact "Starvation is also a way to live longer." is probably wrong as some scientist have noticed. The problem is that animals in laboratories are "coach potatoes". They don't do the exercise they naturally do in their habitat searching for food. They live overcrowded in small cages and overstressed. Most lab animals are already ill from their artificial habitat, they have diabetes and other disorders. Strong social animals are isolated so they don't create problems like fighting each other(what are thy going to do if not?). Imagine you were forced to live in a sofa, or in your bed, all your life, with no sunlight but LED lighting. Most of those animals are overeating for their activity, so making them starve is better than not doing it. But this tells us nothing about real animals in the real world. http://www.vivisectioninformation.com/index.php?p=1_27_Unreproducable-results-from-the-animal-lab http://www.vivisectioninformation.com/index.php?p=1_27_Unrep...

danieltillett 12y ago
This is true, but either fortunately or unfortunately humans seem to be resembling lab animals more than wild animals.
- irremediable 12y ago
  Is your claim as true for people who care about their health? The kind of person who has the dedication to do intermittent fasting probably has the dedication to do a fair amount of exercise.
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    My response was a bit of a throwaway pointing out that humans and lab animinals have rather converged in our lifestyles. What is more of a problem is the observation that human ageing has slowed rather dramatically in an evolutionary short time. The concern is that we have evolved this slower ageing physiology via a few simple adaptions (the low hanging fruit) and these are not reflected in the animal models. The fear is that when we use animal models the interventions we find in them will not apply to humans because we are already utilising these strategies naturally. For example, the level of Uric acid in humans is very high, so high that it tends to precipitate out in the extremities causing gout. One theory of why we have such high levels of Uric acid in our bloodstream is because it is protecting us from age related damage - it is one of the simple 'hacks' that we use to age slowly. Getting to your question there is some concern that calorie restriction won't work in humans for the same reason - we are already using the same pathways activated by calorie restriction in lab animals.
    - irremediable 12y ago
      Thanks for your detailed follow-up! My apologies for only reading it now. I was always a bit sceptical of the fasting experiments being representative of humans, but I'd never looked at the specifics of it.
      - danieltillett 12y ago
        If it means anything I think fasting may help in humans - not by slowing ageing directly, but by improving glucose control. I would expect an increase in average life expectancy from intermittent fasting while having little effect on maximum life expectancy.
  - collyw 12y ago
    I started intermittent fasting around a year ago, and usually I do do reasonable amount of exercise. I had a health review as part of my work three months after I started. I really wanted to stop, because the fasting was difficult (I was doing two days a week). While before I was fairly healthy, my blood pressure has always been a bit high, as with my cholesterol. After fasting they were both gone down to good levels. Anyway I cut down to one day a week, which is far more manageable (I am pretty skinny, and I was struggling to keep my weight up). Now it feels good. I have a feeling it is to do with insulin sensitivity, as I no longer feel hunger pangs, and don't get the sleepy feeling after having a huge lunch. So yes, I consider myself reasonably healthy, but even so I had blood pressure and cholesterol that were bordering between normal and high levels.
    - mrfusion 12y ago
      I'm strongly considering starting this. Any tips? (Feel free to email if you don't want to share publicly.)
      - collyw 12y ago
        First month is tough, getting gradually easier. Probably easier to have a few small snacks to make up your day, followed by a bulky low calorie meal in the evening (I used to go for a small chicken breast in a stir fry with minimal oil - protein feels more satisfying). Now I kind of enjoy it (one day a week). I occasionally stop, i.e. on holiday, and I do notice a bit of lethargy creeping in a time to time. Otherwise, just get a cookbook and go for recipes that are less than 600 calories (that's the total I allow my self on a fast day). Should have the same health test in March, so hopefully one day a week is still doing well (I have a blood pressure monitor to check that and and mine still down, actually it improved when I went from 2 to 1 day a week, maybe because I was eating a lot of crap to try and keep my weight up). Have a google about for BBC's Horizon "Eat fast live longer". I can't find a full length version on youtube just now, but I am sure it is somewhere on the web. That's what inspired me.
        mrfusion 12y ago
  - alextgordon 12y ago
    Exercise and living a sedentary life are not mutually exclusive. Pretty much everybody on HN has to remain still for most of the day -- however much exercise they do.
    - irremediable 12y ago
      Good point. As ever, things are more complicated than they might appear at first...
collyw 12y ago
The ones with diabetes are usually bred that way in order to study the disease. A friend told me about a strain of rats that is literally so prone to obesity they will start eating themselves if no food is available.
- cubano 12y ago
  Sure...makes sense. Humans have very often resorted to cannibalism when faced with death-by-starvation conditions.
  - collyw 12y ago
    I meant that that one rat would literally start eating parts of its own body. Or that's what I understood from her (she was a biologist).
unseraphim 12y ago
Yes, that was one of the arguments against the starvation-increased-lifespan evidence... in the 1970s. I relied upon it myself. Then, better evidence emerged to contradict that notion, such as the demonstrable effect of starvation on the mTOR pathway.
dschiptsov 12y ago
Yeah, the story about lab mouses which came from farms already with diabetes is good one. But it seems that it is one extreme case. Another extreme would be stories about wandering (note that "wandering") Indian ascetics, who had very modest and not regular meals (low calories, not abundant) but display a very good fitness (compared to average consumers). The truth is still out there.)
reasonattlm 12y ago
You mischaracterize calorie restriction with optimal nutrition by calling it starvation, and you mischaracterize the current research situation. The evidence for it to extend healthy, mean, and maximum life span in a wide range of species is very extensive: mice, flies, nematodes, etc, etc, etc. The primate evidence for life span extension is mixed at this time, partially because the two decades-long studies were poorly designed in hindsight, and the expectation is that it doesn't extend life greatly in humans. Nonetheless, it has enormously impressive short term health effects in we primates [1]. If calorie restriction was a pill rather than a lifestyle, you'd beat a path to the manufacturer's door, as it has far greater positive effects on health for basically healthy people than any presently available medical technology. It is true that there is some concern in the research community over the degree to which laboratory mice are not good reflections of what is being studied. This is not unknown, and it is not unacknowledged. A range of rigorous testing programs aim to do something about past less rigorous results - see for example the NIA Interventions Testing Program [2]. Interestingly it is worthy of note that many past research programs were tainted by inadvertent calorie restriction - the things they tested led to led to lab animals eating less. The effects of calorie restriction on health and life span are many times larger than those produced by most other things under testing. To address your subtext of animal abuse, the only thing worse than running animal studies to advance medicine and life science knowledge is to not run those studies. Even the path to the future in which near all studies are carried out in tissue engineered flesh or simulation, causing no harm to creatures capable of suffering, requires present animal studies. Researchers want that future as it is better on all counts. Further, studies of calorie restriction and longevity are about the most benign of animal studies: these animals are healthier and longer-lived as a result of the restriction. If you want to do something about animal suffering, farming is the place to start, not research, as it accounts for 99.9% of the harms you dislike. [1]: http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html [2]: http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-program-itp http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-pr...
- dschiptsov 12y ago
  Is it OK to try to establish a correlation between calorie intake and lifespan without taking into account variety in calorie spending, or a "life style"? It seems that excess of calories have a big negative effect for an "idle/aged" lifestyle, and almost no effect for "hyper-active/young" lifestyle. It seems also related to urban vs. rural populations.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
xaa 12y ago
Calorie restriction still works in mice in cages with wheels (they often run 6 miles per night). I do not know if it has been tried with different numbers of mice per cage or in "enriched" environments. See for a very good review: http://jn.nutrition.org/content/137/4/1078.full http://jn.nutrition.org/content/137/4/1078.full But I do acknowledge your underlying point -- that it is exceedingly difficult to know how well results from mouse studies can be generalized to humans. It is a big problem.

danieltillett 12y ago

This is true, but either fortunately or unfortunately humans seem to be resembling lab animals more than wild animals.

irremediable 12y ago
Is your claim as true for people who care about their health? The kind of person who has the dedication to do intermittent fasting probably has the dedication to do a fair amount of exercise.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  My response was a bit of a throwaway pointing out that humans and lab animinals have rather converged in our lifestyles. What is more of a problem is the observation that human ageing has slowed rather dramatically in an evolutionary short time. The concern is that we have evolved this slower ageing physiology via a few simple adaptions (the low hanging fruit) and these are not reflected in the animal models. The fear is that when we use animal models the interventions we find in them will not apply to humans because we are already utilising these strategies naturally. For example, the level of Uric acid in humans is very high, so high that it tends to precipitate out in the extremities causing gout. One theory of why we have such high levels of Uric acid in our bloodstream is because it is protecting us from age related damage - it is one of the simple 'hacks' that we use to age slowly. Getting to your question there is some concern that calorie restriction won't work in humans for the same reason - we are already using the same pathways activated by calorie restriction in lab animals.
  - irremediable 12y ago
    Thanks for your detailed follow-up! My apologies for only reading it now. I was always a bit sceptical of the fasting experiments being representative of humans, but I'd never looked at the specifics of it.
    - danieltillett 12y ago
      If it means anything I think fasting may help in humans - not by slowing ageing directly, but by improving glucose control. I would expect an increase in average life expectancy from intermittent fasting while having little effect on maximum life expectancy.
- collyw 12y ago
  I started intermittent fasting around a year ago, and usually I do do reasonable amount of exercise. I had a health review as part of my work three months after I started. I really wanted to stop, because the fasting was difficult (I was doing two days a week). While before I was fairly healthy, my blood pressure has always been a bit high, as with my cholesterol. After fasting they were both gone down to good levels. Anyway I cut down to one day a week, which is far more manageable (I am pretty skinny, and I was struggling to keep my weight up). Now it feels good. I have a feeling it is to do with insulin sensitivity, as I no longer feel hunger pangs, and don't get the sleepy feeling after having a huge lunch. So yes, I consider myself reasonably healthy, but even so I had blood pressure and cholesterol that were bordering between normal and high levels.
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    I'm strongly considering starting this. Any tips? (Feel free to email if you don't want to share publicly.)
    - collyw 12y ago
      First month is tough, getting gradually easier. Probably easier to have a few small snacks to make up your day, followed by a bulky low calorie meal in the evening (I used to go for a small chicken breast in a stir fry with minimal oil - protein feels more satisfying). Now I kind of enjoy it (one day a week). I occasionally stop, i.e. on holiday, and I do notice a bit of lethargy creeping in a time to time. Otherwise, just get a cookbook and go for recipes that are less than 600 calories (that's the total I allow my self on a fast day). Should have the same health test in March, so hopefully one day a week is still doing well (I have a blood pressure monitor to check that and and mine still down, actually it improved when I went from 2 to 1 day a week, maybe because I was eating a lot of crap to try and keep my weight up). Have a google about for BBC's Horizon "Eat fast live longer". I can't find a full length version on youtube just now, but I am sure it is somewhere on the web. That's what inspired me.
      - mrfusion 12y ago
- alextgordon 12y ago
  Exercise and living a sedentary life are not mutually exclusive. Pretty much everybody on HN has to remain still for most of the day -- however much exercise they do.
  - irremediable 12y ago
    Good point. As ever, things are more complicated than they might appear at first...

collyw 12y ago

The ones with diabetes are usually bred that way in order to study the disease. A friend told me about a strain of rats that is literally so prone to obesity they will start eating themselves if no food is available.

cubano 12y ago
Sure...makes sense. Humans have very often resorted to cannibalism when faced with death-by-starvation conditions.
- collyw 12y ago
  I meant that that one rat would literally start eating parts of its own body. Or that's what I understood from her (she was a biologist).

unseraphim 12y ago

Yes, that was one of the arguments against the starvation-increased-lifespan evidence... in the 1970s. I relied upon it myself. Then, better evidence emerged to contradict that notion, such as the demonstrable effect of starvation on the mTOR pathway.

dschiptsov 12y ago

Yeah, the story about lab mouses which came from farms already with diabetes is good one. But it seems that it is one extreme case. Another extreme would be stories about wandering (note that "wandering") Indian ascetics, who had very modest and not regular meals (low calories, not abundant) but display a very good fitness (compared to average consumers). The truth is still out there.)

reasonattlm 12y ago

You mischaracterize calorie restriction with optimal nutrition by calling it starvation, and you mischaracterize the current research situation. The evidence for it to extend healthy, mean, and maximum life span in a wide range of species is very extensive: mice, flies, nematodes, etc, etc, etc. The primate evidence for life span extension is mixed at this time, partially because the two decades-long studies were poorly designed in hindsight, and the expectation is that it doesn't extend life greatly in humans. Nonetheless, it has enormously impressive short term health effects in we primates [1]. If calorie restriction was a pill rather than a lifestyle, you'd beat a path to the manufacturer's door, as it has far greater positive effects on health for basically healthy people than any presently available medical technology. It is true that there is some concern in the research community over the degree to which laboratory mice are not good reflections of what is being studied. This is not unknown, and it is not unacknowledged. A range of rigorous testing programs aim to do something about past less rigorous results - see for example the NIA Interventions Testing Program [2]. Interestingly it is worthy of note that many past research programs were tainted by inadvertent calorie restriction - the things they tested led to led to lab animals eating less. The effects of calorie restriction on health and life span are many times larger than those produced by most other things under testing. To address your subtext of animal abuse, the only thing worse than running animal studies to advance medicine and life science knowledge is to not run those studies. Even the path to the future in which near all studies are carried out in tissue engineered flesh or simulation, causing no harm to creatures capable of suffering, requires present animal studies. Researchers want that future as it is better on all counts. Further, studies of calorie restriction and longevity are about the most benign of animal studies: these animals are healthier and longer-lived as a result of the restriction. If you want to do something about animal suffering, farming is the place to start, not research, as it accounts for 99.9% of the harms you dislike. [1]: http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html [2]: http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-program-itp http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-pr...

dschiptsov 12y ago
Is it OK to try to establish a correlation between calorie intake and lifespan without taking into account variety in calorie spending, or a "life style"? It seems that excess of calories have a big negative effect for an "idle/aged" lifestyle, and almost no effect for "hyper-active/young" lifestyle. It seems also related to urban vs. rural populations.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

xaa 12y ago

Calorie restriction still works in mice in cages with wheels (they often run 6 miles per night). I do not know if it has been tried with different numbers of mice per cage or in "enriched" environments. See for a very good review: http://jn.nutrition.org/content/137/4/1078.full http://jn.nutrition.org/content/137/4/1078.full But I do acknowledge your underlying point -- that it is exceedingly difficult to know how well results from mouse studies can be generalized to humans. It is a big problem.