As mentioned above, it may not be appropriate for everyone, particularly those who are underweight or very ill
I have an incurable, serious condition. In recent years, I'm fairly regularly too broke to eat adequately. As a consequence, I fast or semi-fast part of most months.
I've slowly gotten healthier. Fasting or semi-fasting is not the only reason by any stretch of the imagination.
Anecdotally, it's gotten easier as I've gotten healthier.
I read once (or heard from someone) that if you cut calories by 80 percent -- a figure not shown in their chart defining their terms -- it triggers the "starvation" response. Your body thinks you are starving, much as if you weren't eating at all.
I have found that semi-fasting -- eating maybe 20 percent of normal calories -- has fasting-like benefits for my condition while being much, much easier to endure as someone with a real serious and incurable medical condition.
This is absolutely not medical advice of any sort for anyone. I am not a doctor. I'm a person with a chronic illness running my mouth on the internet.
Don't worry about not being a doctor - that's a good thing!
Doctors would NOT advise anyone to cut calories by 80% even if, as in your case, it improves your health. Nor would they advise a diabetic to abstain from carbs, and so take away the trigger for their condition. (Ie - you don't have diabetes if you don't eat carbs.) 99.9% of doctors will only prescribe drugs.
The medical industry is not about well - its about maximising illness for profit. And improving diet and eating behaviour is the last thing they will do - there's no money in that!
> Nor would they advise a diabetic to abstain from carbs, and so take away the trigger for their condition. (Ie - you don't have diabetes if you don't eat carbs.) 99.9% of doctors will only prescribe drugs
They don't right now, because the evidence around the long-term effects isn't sufficient. They're clearly coming round to it though. See the section "Dietary advice" in NICE guidance.
Anyone at risk of diabetes or dealing with diabetes should also look at research into the relationship between diabetes and inflammation, which suggests that there may be other factors to consider beyond just diet for how to best prevent and mitigate the condition.
There is also interesting research into how protein (muscle health) impacts insulin resistance:
Thank you for posting your thoughts on the business centric approach of our modern medical system. It makes me feel less crazy sìnce nobody I talk to face to face about even want to hear it. "Our doctors are working hard towards our own good"
Many doctors are good people and entered medicine to help others. But after about 5 min in practice realize you have no idea how to actually help most people, let alone cure them. New drugs get advertised to you even more heavily than to your patients, and so you prescribe.
Systemic approaches to helping your patients are hard and those doctors that try it often don’t take insurance because most insurance companies won’t pay for their trouble. They want to fall back on the hard numbers of a limited set of narrow interventions.
Perhaps if there was more upstream incentive to keep patients healthy things would be different. But at the end of the day, many patients are not compliant and are very resistant to lifestyle changes, and as a doctor, despite knowing more today about the human body than ever in history, deep down you know you’re little better than a charlatan.
I'm alive in part because I was friends for some years with a physician and I was friends for some years with a former Registered Nurse who also studied a variety of other health approaches. Since we were friends, they heard a lot about my situation over a long period of time and this led to them giving me very useful feedback that changed the course of my life.
Our current medical system has some serious problems in the way things get done that interfere with medical personnel being effective. I hope we can find real solutions for that in coming years.
Only if you are so inclined and it's not in the TMI realm or otherwise inadvisable, I'd be interested to hear the tl;dr of what you learned to do or not do.
It's really too much information for a single comment. I do try to blog about it and I do have a reddit called r/HealthWorks where I keep hoping -- someday! -- people will join and talk with me and yadda.
But in a nutshell (and this is very quick and dirty -- I have been doing this nearly twenty years):
1. A comment by my physician friend -- who minored in parasitology -- convinced me that I was correct that my husband had brought a parasitic infection back from Saudi and infected me with it sexually. So that same day, I said to my husband "You are never touching me again without a condom." My condition stabilized about two weeks later (after another round of antibiotics was prescribed) and I began slowly getting better thereafter.
2. He and I later divorced and I have been celibate for more than fifteen years while working on my health. Sex is germy and it was too much of a health risk for me for a long time. This is also part of a more general principle I have followed: If you have a chronic or recurring infection, figure out what the damn source is and resolve that piece. You don't pick up infections randomly from the ether or some nonsense.
3. I took about $300 worth of supplements for a few years to redress a huge backlog of nutritional deficiencies.
4. I got really picky about my diet. Among other things, I looked into fat chemistry and I avoid or limit long chain triglycerides and favor medium chain triglycerides. (Medium chain triglycerides have long been medically prescribed as beneficially for my condition and for other serious gut issues, but limiting long chain triglycerides is not anything I have ever seen recommended and it makes a really huge difference for me.)
5. The standard medical recommendation for my condition is a high fat, high salt, high calorie diet. The result is that the standard advice is to pursue a junk food diet. I do not count calories and I make an effort to get more salt than most people consume, but I got super picky about dietary quality and focused on nutritional density instead of calories per se.
6. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Or several pounds if you have a compromised immune system. I work hard at avoiding exposure to germs, etc. and I currently work from home to help me have control over my environment and limit my exposure to germs, chemicals, etc.
There's no doubt more, but that's what occurs to me off the top of my head.
Your clarification is several hours too late. My edit window long since expired. And this is not a "mostly tech forum."
Sorry. It's medical information. If it bothers you to know that disease can be transmitted sexually and likely was in this specific instance, I don't know what to tell you.
No problem. The reality is that the medical industry is a sickness industry. Not a wellness industry. There is no incentive for them to make people well, but every incentive to keep people unwell for a prolonged period.
I don't think this is true. This incentive is eliminated by the fact that you can always gauge an industry's success rate. In this case, we gauge how efficient they are at making us well, compared to not following their advice. You can also outsource this gauging to an external entity, which should not have this particular perverse incentive.
This solution does not work if we fall down into the trap of having a few gigantic corporations handle everything for us, which unfortunately seems to be the recent trend.
That solution changes the incentive to them just performing slightly better than doing nothing, instead of the best they could.
My issue is with the GP implying that there are other fields that do have an incentive to make you maximally well, when I contend is impossible when you're paying someone for cures.
> That solution changes the incentive to them just performing slightly better than doing nothing, instead of the best they could.
Does it? You don't simply gauge whether someone is performing better than the baseline, but how much better. This allows you to select the best performer.
Type I diabetes does not go away when you eliminate carbs. (There’s some evidence type II does). These are different diseases, and though they have some similarities - lumping then together as “diabetes” like you did here is mostly harmful.
While doctors do distinguish between different types of diabetes, my anecdotal experience is that they do not in practise distinguish between the two types. They do not tell type II patients that they will not have the condition if they don't eat carbs.
So which is worse or more harmful? Me, some clown on the internet, bringing this to people's attention? Or 1000s of doctors failing to provide full information to their patients, thereby dooming them to a degenerative life experience, taking ever greater drugs?
You. Because despite knowing the difference, you help perpetuate the “no difference” ignorance.
I know people who were scoffed by teachers in school (and by others) “well, you shouldn’t have eaten so much sweets then” for having type 1.
Doctors do differentiate. They do not prescribe metformin for type 1, and approach insulin very differently (if at all) for type 2. They don’t recommed eliminating carb for type 2 because they don’t know it works (for no direct fault of their own... the system is biased against it)
I think ignorance is worse than feigning ignorance when you know better. But maybe that’s just me.
And maybe you would have gotten even better without this forced fasting.
Now you may consider me heartless for this response, and that would be sad because I really feel for you man. But this is why anecdotical evidence, especially first-hand from people affected, does not hold much ground in the scientific method.
In other words, my comment provides neither less nor more evidence than your comment does.
Except the person you are replying to has a very long history, on HN (under this and an older account), and long blog history which are very informative. This specific comment, like any other single one, isn’t much. But her whole body of documentation, anecdotal as it is, is actually extremely useful.
Informative history is great. And the part where she mentions that she ought to get a nobel prize makes me cautious with overall interpretation of said context, since that tends to be a counterindicator. Gives some confirmation of the point i was trying to make though.
With science so utterly serving corporate interests, the only information that has a possibility of being true, IMO, is anecdotal evidence.
This person is applying the scientific method personally, and cautiously. And he is sharing his experience with you. Whereas science only pays lip service to the scientific method. Its only there to make money.
If you are interested in what I'm saying, you want to look into how science is as I say, take a look at the following:
We do know that the OP did NOT apply the scientific method - just look at the estimated timeframes. Estimates are not science. Likewise, N=1 and sharing experience is not "science", particularly for public health issues.
I'm not going to waste my own time arguing why you're wrong, but a TDLR is you are and frankly it's a shame to read.
As an aside, you're correct in that reporting of research methods could be improved and there are issues of replication, but this is for many reasons. One of the less reported issues is money - that's not how research funding works.
You're claiming science is flawed, then link to wiki - is that a joke? Are you a researcher?
Thanks for NOT taking the time to explain to me how I'm wrong. I just am wrong, right? So says the voice of science! (I couldn't have asked for a better example of how science pays lip service to the scientific method only!)
I link to wiki, not because I think it is authoritative, far from it. Like the NYT, CNN, Guardian or BBC which deliver us our daily propaganda messages, wikipedia delivers us the historical narrative we are meant to accept. When they themselves say 70% science studies are unreproducible (ie lies) you know that we're in a world of BS!
Science is busted, but I find that individuals are able to relay the truth more fairly and accurately.
Science is the testing of ideas. The reason N=1 isn’t science is there is no way to isolate what’s going on.
If nothing else time is a factor which is always increasing for such cases and may represent the bodies ability to heal over time. The classic advice of take two Aspirin and call me in the morning is really equivalent to just wait a day, and you could substitute pray for an hour before bed. So, “shockingly”, if the advice is pray for an hour before bed it’s going to seemingly work for most things especially if told to repeat it and just pray harder. Except, again they could have said sing the national anthem before bed and that’s also effective as is doing most non strenuous activities.
This is generally true if what’s being suggested has other effects achievable in other ways. If losing weight is beneficial then fasting will seem really helpful though other options for weight loss exist, those where not tested because again N=1.
It's not actually an accurate description of my situation because my two adult sons still live with me and one of them has the same diagnosis I have and the other is a carrier. So N=2 or N=3, depending on how you wish to count that.
While I agree with the gist of some of your points, I always cringe when people leave the kinds of comments you have left here, starting with "Don't worry about not being a doctor - that's a good thing!" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25014092
My statement that I'm not a doctor is a statement of fact. It's not an apology. It's not an expression of low self esteem.
I have participated on HN for more than 11 years because the standards for discourse of scientific information here are high and that fact has helped literally save my life, which has made it worth my while to put up with drama swirling around me for a long list of reasons.
Over the years, I've been fortunate to have some folks with PhDs in various fields (including chemistry and biology) answer some of my questions and explain some critical details in layman's terms to help me better understand cell function, among other things. Some of those folks were met via HN.
My gut reaction to people acting like I have self esteem problems and need my ego massaged because the HN crowd is capable of dishing out criticism just makes me go "Please stop helping me" which is an old TV Tropes entry that has since been disambiguated into two separate categories:
I'm glad you agree with the gist of my points. I also absolutely understand that you would cringe at my comments. Whatever, I may say though, is no reflection on you.
If you were to meet me in person I don't think you would cringe if we were to talk. But on a forum, you only have a short amount of time to make an impression, catch people's attention, and try to get them to consider what I think is truth. People are so indoctrinated, they can barely recognise it.
Here, on HN, there are many people who love science - it is their religion. They don't think its a religion, but it is - they believe in it, they don't know it. They don't even know what knowing is. The accept the pronouncements from the priest-scientists, as if they were gospel. A cursory review of some science study is all it takes. But the point of science is that it should be verifiable, not based on belief. No one is verifying anything, and when studies are peer reviewed 70% cannot be replicated. 70%!!
In fact, I love science done properly too, but that is nowhere to be found. I hold to application of the scientific method personally. In all areas of my life.
If I have any ambitions in my interactions on HN, it is that I wish for others to engage their rational thinking, not just when tackling a gnarly coding issue, but also in other parts of their lives. I wish that people would think more individually, rather than just going along with the herd, what they have been taught, etc.
Questions people should be asking include: Why is it so medicine so expensive? Has the 'health' system been captured? When was it captured? Why don't we know what the right food for humans is? Why were we taught the food pyramid? Is food medicine? Is pregnancy an issue that requires medical intervention? Etc. If you really start to find answers to those questions, the reality of this existence takes on an entirely different perspective.
I appreciate that you are looking into this stuff for yourself. I appreciate that you are sharing your understanding and anecdotal results. I'm glad that you clarified that it is not n=1 but n=2 or 3. Given what I understand about science, I genuinely value the anecdotal points you raise highly. I have gained much more useful information anecdotally than from 'science'.
Finally, I would say, that along with fasting, I understand that the Gerson method is excellent more providing you with nutrition and along your body the space to repair itself. And in repairing itself, I understand there will be a healing crisis, where the build up of toxins etc may be expelled and that that can mean that one feels worse than ever. But that this is an essential step on the path to wellness.
> The accept the pronouncements from the priest-scientists, as if they were gospel.
That’s really not how scientists think about science. The respect is for the body of evidence not the interpretation of that evidence. The way the coastlines of South American line up with Africa isn’t some words from on high, you can see it for yourself. People still get wigged out by relativity let alone quantum mechanics weirdness while acknowledging how useful those models are. The innate feelings that models are wrong rather than data isn’t religious any more than a babies understanding that dropped balls fall.
Even before language develops people internalize the idea of cause and effect being linked. That’s the only assumption made by science everything else is observation and math. As such observation can always beat any theory no matter how old. It’s simply accepted that the most well known and perhaps most useful scientific law “F=MA” is wrong. No breakaway groups holding up such a sacred tenet, just a quiet understanding that nope that’s not quite how the universe works.
But on a forum, you only have a short amount of time to make an impression, catch people's attention, and try to get them to consider what I think is truth.
I've been here more than eleven years. I don't think it works that way at all on HN.
it's quite revealing that you have spent so much time trashing science in these threads while not knowing one of the most fundamental ideas behind the importance of the scientific method. Something about "know thy enemy" and the Dunning-Kruger effect comes to mind...
Discussion here is serious discussion. It's not people shooting the breeze. Low value comments are actively discouraged.
HN is not very transparent in some respects. It may not be obvious if someone is new here that a lot of people here have significant expertise in various domains.
So coming here is not like wandering into a coffee shop where random people are shooting the breeze and doing that "armchair politician" thing, though it may seem like it is. It's more like wandering into some academic club at some major university and joining the discussion without having to be enrolled in the university because they have some extreme inclusive policy.
You have more or less told everyone here "Doctors and scientists are all dumb! And furthermore I know better than them!" and then asked "What does N=1 mean?" You are basically attacking and insulting a lot of the people you are addressing and then asking them to explain their field to you after having just dismissed them.
It's always okay to ask what something means, but a best practice is to google the question first, especially for something simple/basic. (Granted, googling doesn't always turn up a good explanation -- some things are surprisingly hard to google.)
However, sometimes all that does is signal that you don't really know what you are talking about and can't back up your strongly stated position. And that's what's going on here in terms of social dynamics.
nothing wrong with asking, but you might want to consider that your bias is heavily influencing your perspective of science. You make some valid points about the replication bias, profit motives etc. but throwing the baby out with the bath water and then claiming that anecdotes are somehow more reliable shows a lack of nuance in response to a very complex topic.
One way to answer this is to point out that an anecdote always comes with its own replication crisis.
The term "replication crisis" is essentially a generalization of the concept of an anecdote. In other words, if a result can't be reproduced, then it's essentially just an anecdote.
So, your (rightful) mention of the replication crisis gives you a direct explanation for why anecdotal evidence is inherently problematic in the scientific endeavour for knowledge.
N=1 means the sample size within an experiment. Combining several experiments might seem like it’s the same thing as one larger experiment, but biased sampling is a major issue.
Let’s assume some Democrats go to trump rally’s for the experience. If you take say 100 people chosen randomly from a rally you could estimate how common that was. However, if you look at interviews of people at Trump rallies the interviewer may have been more or less likely to include such people. As such what your examining is people the interviewer found interesting who where also at a rally which is a very different group.
The surest way to get sampling bias is to some other criteria after the initial selection that can exclude samples from your examination. This might be as obvious as people who hung up on political polling or it can happen before the selection process. Aka I want 1,000 random Americans very often excludes people living outside America at say embassy’s, the homeless, prisoners, children, etc depending on how people are selected.
For a given experiment you could look at how people where selected, but when combining random interesting examples you have no idea what’s being excluded which is why their considered worthless.
Thanks. But are you doing all that personally? Do you have time?
Probably not - I certainly I'm not polling hundreds of people over each minutaie in my life. So, it is likely that neither of us have done the work personally.
The difference is that I distrust the output of science by default. I understand that it is an industry and I'm deeply suspicious of all its pronouncements. I'm on the lookout for the monetary upside, and what isn't being discussed. I love the scientific method, but it is not the be all and end all. What q
Could a drug company ever say:
"Guys, we've done the testing, and the best thing if you have XXX disease is NOT a drug. No, the best thing is to go on a juice diet and prolonged fasting."?
It could not.
With individuals, I am more open. If you can speak to someone, eg Doreen in this case has offered her perspective, that counts for far more with me. I know most individuals are happy to offer help and their perspective out of natural good will. Mostly individuals are trustworthy.
The system that individuals are forced to engage with however is degenerative, and system/corporate/governmental outputs are propagandistic and in the service of the system itself.
The entire point of clinical trials is to see if a specific drug is a good option and a great many of them fail, which is the drug company saying nope try something else. In specific cases they actually do compare them to other treatments like exercise. It’s mostly a question of what’s the current treatment, if they wanted to sell a post operation drug you can bet they would need to test exercise.
Edit: Now I agree drug companies would not make a big deal about advertising that result, but that’s a different story.
There are any number of studies in the effect of exercise and physical therapy currently uses motion not drugs to help people recover from surgery. Diet and exercise are actually prescribed to manage many health issues, it’s also recognized that people will often ignore such advice. We don’t do gastric bypass surgery etc for people who need to lose 10 pounds, but when people simply don’t follow medical advice there are simply fewer options.
So, a huge body of evidence suggests this deeply held belief of yours is wrong.
PS: there were approximately 210,900 physical therapists employed in the United States Exercise is actually the most commonly prescribed and studied treatment.
> Edit: Now I agree drug companies would not make a big deal about advertising that result, but that’s a different story.
Well, its only a different story for drug companies.
For you and I, as individuals, what value is science, if it will provide you with drug options to imperfectly manage your diabetes, but not tell you how to avoid it completely.
Would you say that science is progressing towards truth and greater knowledge, or towards truth and greater knowledge of how to extract more money from those it is purporting to serve?
Science doesn’t really serve humanity it’s simply a method. Drug companies very much benefit from making products that work, but viagra isn’t curing cancer. On the older side, people don’t study quasar’s because that makes some billionaire richer. It’s easy to argue the first one is less pure, but it’s also more useful to more people.
Commercial science has many issues. It’s probably a net negative for humanity that advertising is using science to sell more stuff, or gaming companies to make more addictive games. In the end science is used for all kinds of things from saving billions of lives to putting those same lives at risk.
Thinking of Science as good or bad is like thinking of Math as good or bad. It’s simply a tool used by humans doing human things, both great and terrible.
PS: As to drugs not curing diseases, that’s kind of a limitation on what drug actually are. I think Vaccines really confuse the issue in people’s minds, but that’s not the drug that’s someone’s immune system at work. Drugs can kill organisms, but they generally can’t cause permanent changes. Your body is constantly recycling material, breaking stuff down, and excreting it for a permanent change to occur they would need to cause long term physical changes even after being removed from the body. Mimic a growth hormone at the right time or kill off some cells and sure that can stick, but that’s about it.
With individuals, I am more open. If you can speak to someone, eg Doreen in this case has offered her perspective, that counts for far more with me.
For the record, I don't like being used in this manner to further your agenda. I consider it malicious behavior.
I know most individuals are happy to offer help and their perspective out of natural good will. Mostly individuals are trustworthy.
Most individuals mean well and are stating the truth as they best understand it. That doesn't mean their data is trustworthy or their inferences are trustworthy.
To the degree that people personally malign me, it's bad faith and malicious interaction. But where criticisms of my remarks are motivated by and grounded in genuine skepticism and a desire to seek solid data, those sorts of feedback are entirely welcome by me.
It's just that it's uncommon for people to get that right. It's much more common for people to be snide and dismissive out of hand than to ask genuinely probing questions to ascertain how I came to the conclusions I came to. They assume my conclusions are unfounded rather than wondering what makes me think I am on solid ground.
Over the years, people on HN helping me determine how to find solid ground has been valuable to me. So I do my best to be tolerant of the inevitably messy process involved.
> For the record, I don't like being used in this manner to further your agenda. I consider it malicious behavior.
How am I abusing you or being malicious? It certainly wasn't intended! I'm talking about you in the third person in the comment you quote me from, but then I was replying to someone else. I'm not misrepresenting what you said, or how I feel about it. That is all honest. I'm not sure what to make of you seeing malice there.
We agree that people are well intentioned but that their data and inferences are wrong.
I would describe myself as a hardcore skeptic, I don't accept data or information on trust. I actively distrust corporate/governmental information. From my perspective, when I hear the opinions on hn, many are simply parroting some consensus opinion that they have not verified. This is to say most are living their lives on the basis of unverified beliefs masquerading as knowledge. This is to say, ignorance.
> I know most individuals are happy to offer help and their perspective out of natural good will. Mostly individuals are trustworthy.
Scientiesta are individuals too. Most scientists I know personally are quite trustworthy people with good will and intent. Sure the academic system has some flaws, I myself left it because of the stress of hunting for grants. But the alternative is what are purely anectode based approach leads to: religion. What's the bible if not a collection of anectodes?
The bible is a bunch of stories that people believe in. They listen to the priest, read it for themselves. It has value at an allegorical level though. Believers believe it has the truth.
Science has its articles of faith. They pay lipservice to the scientific method and truth. In reality it is executing mathematics or some defined process. It might find the truth in that process, but this is a siloed truth. It is not true to say it is arriving or will ever arrive at the greater truth, if it does not align with corporate or governmental interests.
You yourself may testify to this, given that you say you were hunting for grants. Did you feel that this was about discovery and understanding the world or something else?
> This is a gross insult to the vast majority of scientists.
Its not an insult. I'm happy to accept that most scientists are acting in good faith. As I'm happy to accept most google, apple, facebook developers do not think they are building the prison technology of the future. They simply don't have the bigger picture. Mind you, their jobs depend on not knowing that picture either.
> Whatever problems scientists have with reproducibility, there can be zero expectation of reproducibility with anecdotes.
Why? That's insane. If someone, in person, testifies to their personal experience, that it had an impact on their life, you would ignore that? Corporations pay billions for people to create any old crap if they think there's a market in it. That individual is offering up some personal information for no gain, just as a simple expression of the truth they have found. And you would ignore it?
With the best intent, you need to take a look in the mirror and question whether you are a part of the problem. If you take the word of 'science' over an individual's open expression, you don't have authority over yourself as an individual. Science has authority over you. And, be honest, you don't even need them to provide evidence for you to accept whatever they state.
> science only pays lip service to the scientific method… I'm happy to accept that most scientists are acting in good faith.
Square these two sentences, because you can't accidentally "only pay lip service to the scientific method". Are you or aren't you claiming that scientists feign their rigor?
> If someone, in person, testifies to their personal experience, that it had an impact on their life, you would ignore that?
I would not ignore that. But what works for someone does not necessarily work for anyone else, or even for that same person but under different circumstances. That's why we need statistics and rigor in methods.
> If you take the word of 'science' over an individual's open expression
I do not. Contrary to what you say, both are often biased, both are often tools used to promote corporate and other agendas — especially anecdotes on social media sites (including HN!) by god-knows-who — and both are often wrong. But unlike your average anecdote-offerer, scientists test whether their results generalize at all, and take many measures to mitigate bias. Anecdotes are important, but at most, the truth they give you is "I did this and my situation improved". Actual research tends to say a lot more than that.
> And, be honest, you don't even need them to provide evidence for you to accept whatever they state.
> Square these two sentences, because you can't accidentally "only pay lip service to the scientific method". Are you or aren't you claiming that scientists feign their rigor?
You can do everything right, follow the scientific method, but be answering the wrong question.
Eg, asking which of these 3 drugs is best for such and such a disease. Ie you are excluding fasting or other alternatives. You will build up a load of data on those 3 drugs perhaps, but fasting might be best of all. You just don't know.
But a scientist will say that there is no evidence to support fasting. So the scientific method has studiously ignored inconvenient (unmarketable) options.
So is the scientist giving the best information here? Are his/her answers biased?
> > And, be honest, you don't even need them to provide evidence for you to accept whatever they state.
> I suggest that you stop such insinuation.
If you skim articles, watch TV, and don't do research to satisfy yourself, you don't have evidence. You don't know. You may think you know. And thinking you know, when you don't, is dangerous. This is a point worth considering - in my opinion it covers 99.99% of what passes for knowledge.
You may find that you have lots of belief and very little actual knowledge just a compound and rigid set of mutually reinforcing beliefs. (This is akin to religion in fact). Which is at least an honest assessment of what most 'scientists' are practising! They believe that there is a body of evidence that supports what they think, and can take that for granted. No one is checking that the foundations are as solid as they believe!
> So is the scientist giving the best information here?
Whatever the case, the scientist is not "only paying lip service to the scientific method" in such a scenario. The scientist set out to answer a question, and they answered it. If you draw other conclusions from their work, it might be their fault, but only if they claimed that they were answering more than they actually did answer. And in practice, scientists do evaluate fasting and such, because they're not just in it for the money. I mean, the very article corresponding to this comment section says:
> There has been over 100 years of research looking at the role of calorie restriction in relation to the possibility of prolonging life.
But of course, you can come up with other examples of scientists thinking up false dichotomies, so that's neither here nor there. All I want to say is that it's really obvious that scientists don't evaluate all the options, that they're often biased, and that they often commit errors of logic. But concluding from this that "the only information that has a possibility of being true, IMO, is anecdotal evidence" is downright insane.
> No one is checking that the foundations are as solid as they believe!
You act like you're an expert on the scientific process and how scientists spend their time, but I very much doubt you do. Anyway, I'm done here, talking to you isn't exactly fun or eye-opening.
If I know something about the scientific process its because I try to use it in my personal life. This is to say, I try to be aware of my assumptions, to be clear about the distinction over what I know and what I believe. For myself, I am trying to uncover the truth of our experience in this life.
I think we will probably agree that there are all sorts of problems with science and the scientific process. And that's fine. If should be about putting the best hypothesis forward, trying to edge closer to the truth.
But, the system we have cannot do that. It is funded by corporate interests, that cannot in good faith to their shareholders, present information that may be to the benefit of mankind, if its not in their financial interests. I think that's pretty clear.
Given all that, it does rile me that there are so man science fan boys, that scoff at religion, while acting as if science has the answers. As if they aren't in a state of religious belief! And that they feel they dismiss a piece of anecdotal experience from a real individual, as it wasn't proper science!
Anyway, I'm sorry this wasn't fun, nor eye-opening for you. But at least it was real!
You are confusing science with some aspects of academic culture. "Science" is not more after money than "music" or "sunshine" are. Science is the process of applying the scientific method to gain understanding. That would work in a money-less society just as much as they could enjoy music or sunshine.
There is rightful critisism at how academia works, especially the areas where results are so directly applicable that real money is made depending on the outcome. There is a lot of money in pharmaceuticals, in fossil fuels and even economic theories. But the majority of scientific endeavor is being done in quiet corners of academic buildings, or have you ever heard about multi-billion dollar grants for research project in mathematical proof theory, ancient western roman history or butterfly species in rural kasachstan.
This view of what "science" is similar to when people think that "sports" is just "football, baseball, soccer and basketball". Yes, there is a lot of money in those, but sports is much more than that.
a woman of superior social position, especially one of noble birth.
My maternal grandmother may have been a lady in that she was born into a low level German noble family that sold the title when they fell on hard times. I, however, am a dirt poor American woman who spent years homeless and not a woman of superior social position, especially one of noble birth.
So I'm laughing about that framing, especially given how you have dogged me elsewhere in this discussion.
But more to the point, there are plenty of comments here in this very discussion where people refer to me as "she." So it's not necessary to correct anyone in particular in order for people here to get the memo that I happen to have girl bits between my legs, not boy bits.
As a general FYI to anyone who happens to be reading, I don't think it is a best practice to nitpick specific comments in this way. In fact if you care about gender equality, I think it is actively counterproductive.
I mean if the goal is to virtue signal while actively undermining equality, hey, it's probably a Best Practice in that case. But if that's not the goal, here is some food for thought:
Sorry if you felt attacked by the term "lady". I'm not a native speaker and intended to express the gender by using the colloquial meaning of "lady". If you had preferred me writing "DoreenMichele is female" then so be it, I can completely accept that. I'm a bit less positive about you pulling this into being a gender issue overall. I corrected the previous poster's use of pronoun "he" when referring to you, and I did it in a "P.S." so it was not the main point of my post. If that's a problem and you'd rather like people calling you "he" stay uncorrected, so be it. But please don't insinuate anything about my thoughts about gender equality, or that correcting the use of "he" instead of "she" has anything to do with gender equality or virtue signaling, for that matter.
I'm not sure where you feel I dogged you. I was presenting my view on what science is and is not. I did mention that you seem to think that you ought to get a nobel prize, and that this kind of statement tends to make me cautious, but both were merely a statement of fact. If you don't want anybody to quote you on that, don't say such things in the first place. And again, that has nothing to do with gender.
When you are too broke to buy food, will power has nothing to do with it.
In my case, when I say it has "gotten easier," I mean that, for example, it takes a much longer time and a much more significant restriction on calories to provoke vomiting.
There is a long history of me vomiting in reaction to doing things that are beneficial to my condition. Some years ago, I used to throw up all day about three days out of the month for up to sixteen hours.
The last time fasting caused significant vomiting for me was around December 31st of last year. It was after two days of more extreme circumstances than usual in terms of being underfed and was on the heels of a longer period of having trouble getting enough to eat.
It was incredibly miserable and took a month to recover from, but as is typical for such incidents it also permanently improved my baseline functioning.
Years ago, I asked around and was able to determine that part of what I vomit up is likely bile. I end up bringing up a great deal of foul-tasting fluid. I sometimes throw up after lunch and sometimes my lunch stays down. It is common for me to only vomit foul fluids. (Edit: What I mean is that sometimes immediately after eating, I throw up foul fluids and the food I just ate stays down.)
The incident at the end of last December did not involve foul fluids. Instead, I threw up large quantities of thick gunk. It was torture and if I wasn't absolutely certain that this was going to resolve soon and would lead to me being permanently improved because of it, I would have done my damnedest to kill myself that day because it was just so awful.
When I was too exhausted to stand up any longer and too dehydrated to keep throwing up, etc. I ran a bath. Laying in the bath helped take the edge off my misery enough for me to fall asleep for a while in the bath.
Since then, I mostly don't throw up in reaction to being underfed for just a day. I used to routinely throw up at lunch time on semi-fasting days, which means after maybe half a day of mostly not eating. It now tends to take two days or longer before vomiting commences.
I am not trained doctor and I don't have knowledge of your specific condition.
My advice, I can assume, applies only to healthy adult people who are also not pregnant and not far from normal build, are not working hard and are of material situation that allows to choose whatever diet they want (which I assume is most of western world).
>Anecdotally, it's gotten easier as I've gotten healthier.
Hunger is a weird thing in how it affects different people. I've done the "master cleanse" without really being bothered, while my significant other can barely last half a day without needing something to eat. Being as how she's one of the toughest (and fit) people I know, it can't be chalked up to willpower.
It's also very variable on the individual level and you have to know your body. For example if I eat even a little in the morning it's impossible for me to fast and I'll be hungry mad by midday. But if I only drink coffee and have a lot of work to do the day can pass smoothly without feeling hungry. Also dependent on the type of food for me, food dense in proteins and fats can feed me for the day, while with carbs I'll be hungry a few hours after.
My condition significantly interferes with the way my body metabolizes dietary fats. This causes most people with it to be deficient in all fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) and to typically have far too little body fat.
Ironically, although I have shrunk as my edema has improved, I probably have more subcutaneous fat, making it possible to go into ketogenesis. I probably had no (or too little) fat reserves to draw upon previously, making fasting particularly hard on me.
A post hoc analysis of subjects from both FMD arms showed that body mass index, blood pressure, fasting glucose, IGF-1, triglycerides, total and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and C-reactive protein were more beneficially affected in participants at risk for disease than in subjects who were not at risk.
In today's world, with food available so easily, I find it admirable of people who can eat with modesty. If you think about it, humans were not always able to sleep with a full belly, sometimes they had to starve a little while trying to find food. And I think it's acceptable to those who do a lot of intensive physical work to eat more. But for someone like me, who spends most of the time sitting on a chair, doing the extraneous work of typing and clicking, less caloric food is probably fine. However, I think that quality food that's beneficial for the brain is essential for intellectual workers like me, but not sugary foods - that's energetic cheating
My n=1 experience is that once I started making sure I’m not missing anything important (which I did by supplementing iron, K2, magnesium, zinc, and a catch-all multivitamin), the impulse to eat/munch something outside of meals virtually disappeared, where it was often there before (whether I acted on it or not).
It’s possible that the problem with today’s food is not that it is plentiful, but rather that it is so unbalanced in nutrition content that we keep unconsciously searching for the missing stuff.
Was in Google for a brief while; the pull of free and great food wore off very quickly when I had a realization that I actually should be eating 30-40% of what I consume any given day. And to rustle up something for that 15-20% is no big deal (rest 15-20% one can easily figure out from healthy/ok restaurants without it making any noticeable dent in your pocket or health).
Or bike to work. Or go for a run, a swim, play soccer or volleyball with some friends, or pick up any other hobby that's more physical than sitting at a desk.
Restricting eating is just very hard. It’s very hard to not eat when you’re hungry.
I would say, be physically active and have a diet filled with foods that have high fiber, high protein and have a low calorie density.
I have a very active lifestyle and used to count my calories everyday and had to restrict the amount I ate. Since a few years ago I’ve been switching my foods to high fiber or low fat versions and increasing the amount of vegetables in my meals. It’s honestly been such a positive change. I end up full every meal, don’t snack, I don’t have to cut anything out of my diet and I don’t remember the last time I had to count my calories.
In my experience, intermittent fasting works much better in this regard than generic caloric restriction with smaller portions but same amount of meals per day.
Feelings of hunger tend to go away after a few days.
I’m not talking about caloric restriction or smaller portion though.
If anything bigger portions. Just food with less calories per gram, more fiber and more protein. All 3 make a given portion of a certain amount of calories way more satiating. Keeping you more full, for longer and harder to overeat.
In my experience, it is easy to eat just the necessary as long as you restrict carbohydrates. Low fat is high sugar, which completely makes me feel like crap. I prefer pork belly.
Calorie restriction might be a way to prevent cancer, but involuntary calorie restriction is something many cancer patients have to deal with and it certainly does not cure cancer. My grandma managed to live quite a while with advanced pancreatic cancer which caused severe caloric restriction, but in the end the cancer won.
I had the same issue with my father, and I've often wondered ; was this a response by the body, which knew that eating was "feeding the enemy"?
My father literally could not eat. Tried, but simply could not. I found this utterly bizarre, and yet, it is mirrored by so many others with cancer.
It is not a lack of appetite, for I can eat when bored yet not actively hungry. It is instead, not just a negation of appetite, but an active repulsion of food intake. And something I've not heard of for other diseases.
That would mean you would need to make the study participants be unable to tell whether they are in the treatment group or in the control group. So either you design food that looks, smells and tastes like normal food but had only 10% of the calories. But that's what the diet industry is trying already and they are not really succeeding. Or you make everybody think they are fasting but give the control group all the nuitrition via IV while the treatment group only gets water with a bit of salt. Or a mix of these two. But then this will only give you actual calorie intake as parameter you are investigating. That's quite different from actual fasting though, i.e., empty intestines could play a role, no matter calorie intake. Or the type of food you are ingesting, i.e., when fasting you don't ingest "bad" food, but maybe you'd get the same effet by just avoiding the "bad" food. In other words, this is really hard.
But then, why does it matter? If it works, why do you care if it's placebo effect or not? As long as you can't (believably) fake it, you could not exploit just the placebo effect anyway.
In other words, the harder a double blind study is, the less useful is the knowledge about whether something is placebo effect or not. Those two effects are different consequences of the same phenomenon.
> That would mean you would need to make the study
> participants be unable to tell whether they are
> in the treatment group or in the control group.
Not necessarily. The eaters / non-eaters know what they are doing. But the scientist recording their progress (weight, height, other factors) would not know if this subject had eaten or not eaten. Then, another scientist, also not knowing, would compile the gathered data into conclusions about the subjects.
That's not how human medical research works though. Single-blinded studies blind the patient. Double-blinded studies blind the patient as well as the researcher applying the treatment.
If you make a trial for a new migraine pill, you want to know whether it actually works or whether the mere act of taking something and believing in it is what works. So you give half the patients the medicine and half the patients just sugar. They can't tell, so the mere act of taking a pill won't make a difference. If you also can't tell (double blind) then they can't (not even subconsciously) deduce from your actions whether they just the control group. If you would not give the control group a sugar pill, they could be stressed out about not getting treatment and just that fact would distort your result.
For the most part, animal research works similarly, btw.
If it's really just placebo effect, I can't help but linking it to various cults who claim they can cure this and that, and their claims might be right due to placebo effect.
TLDR;
> Comparing the research between CR and fasting, fasting seems to provide more dramatic results and protection of healthy cells, without the risk of weight loss or immune suppression. Both CR and fasting are the subject of ongoing research, and definitive conclusions await the results of those studies. As mentioned above, it may not be appropriate for everyone, particularly those who are underweight or very ill, and should never be attempted without the supervision of qualified practitioners.
> For general cancer prevention, it may be beneficial to add intermittent or short-term fasts in combination with a plant-based cancer prevention diet, as described in detail in the Dietary Approaches section of this website.
It certainly has limitations, as stomach and esophageal cancers, which painfully force calorie reduction, remain amongst the lower 5-year survival rate cancers.
Regardless of the veracity of anyone's claims in this thread, this could be a textbook example on how to run a viral sales scheme via social media. Seems quite polished by the looks of it.
I have an incurable, serious condition. In recent years, I'm fairly regularly too broke to eat adequately. As a consequence, I fast or semi-fast part of most months.
I've slowly gotten healthier. Fasting or semi-fasting is not the only reason by any stretch of the imagination.
Anecdotally, it's gotten easier as I've gotten healthier.
I read once (or heard from someone) that if you cut calories by 80 percent -- a figure not shown in their chart defining their terms -- it triggers the "starvation" response. Your body thinks you are starving, much as if you weren't eating at all.
I have found that semi-fasting -- eating maybe 20 percent of normal calories -- has fasting-like benefits for my condition while being much, much easier to endure as someone with a real serious and incurable medical condition.
This is absolutely not medical advice of any sort for anyone. I am not a doctor. I'm a person with a chronic illness running my mouth on the internet.