NZRusty: Glad I could help.

If you are now vegan I would recommend making sure that you your B12 checked once every couple of years to make sure you aren’t getting deficient. Both my wife and I became deficient after about five years of being vegan. We now take a weekly supplement now and levels are fine. One of the symptoms is a general fatigue, which I think sometimes people actually ironically put down to lack of protein.

You’ll be happy to know that a big study of diet in Britian has just shown (again) that eating lots of fruit and particularly vegetables has strong pro-heart and anti-cancer benefits. The general statement is that the more you eat per day the better it is for your long-term health:

http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2014/03/03/jech-2013-203500.full

Is animal protein going to kill you: the evidence?

Please check article related to the research above which asks us to use our basic
common sense which should dictate our desire to find cause and effect.

This study is about mice (not humans) so we are drawing a long bow here from lab results to human application.

further extracts from critical analysis,,,

While the statistical model indicates that the risk of dying from cancer or diabetes is approximately four times higher for those who eat a high protein diet, it predicts these deaths to occur well beyond expected life span. The model predicts that a 50 year old who is expected to die at 82 years of age would die of cancer at 105 or diabetes at 107 years of age.

….this analyse has not been replicated.,,, even if it was ….
an association would be supported but not causation.
,,,,,why should clinicians, patients or policy-makers care about statistics showing a risk of dying at an age that is beyond anyone’s expectation of reaching? The burden of common sense must be met before any action could be recommended based on these analyses.
http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/comments/S1550-4131(14)00062-X

J Sancker Bernstein: statistical model is only valid with common sense

I am so pleased to have found this thread!

Have been fasting roughly since 1 April 2014. Have lost 9 kg so far, so am well on my way to my goal of 25 kg! I have not had any tests run but an over-all improvement in my energy, basic health (no flus or anything), sleep (a full 8 hours) and weight-loss since starting are enough to keep me going! 😉 Oh, and my general mood has improved! (A big PRO for someone who’s battled depression for years.)

I have had breaks from 5:2 a few times though, before recognising all the benefits it brought me, where I would eat LCHF/Paleo (as advised by my nutrition-freak sister and her partner who are both super fit). I gained weight consistently, even with full fasts in between. (The fact that I felt rubbish while doing LCHF was also a deciding factor in going back to 5:2 100%)

More on the matter, I have now become vegetarian as it is not in my nature to eat meat (nor does it sit well with my conscience) – AND a recent Guardian article opened my eyes to the environmental damage we are doing by eating meat and that it’s worse than all fuel-powered vehicles combined. (I’ll post the link if anyone’s interested)

Environmental damage and worse than poor animal welfare are both enough to keep me off the meat, but the studies and results you are all discussing just give me more incentive to keep doing it! 🙂 NZRusty, your results are beyond amazing – I will definitely phase out fish and the odd egg I still eat much quicker than I originally intended (I don’t do dairy – except butter for frying)!

What was intended to be a brief comment of admiration and thanks has turned slightly hefty – I apologise! Haha.

Hope you are all doing well with your fasting and are all happy.

Alex X

Someone asked about testing for insulin resistance (Lizy?) and one way to do it is to have a three hour glucose tolerance test with insulin levels taken at the same time as the blood glucose level is taken. It is not usually done unless you have a high fasting blood glucose level first. If you are eating a low carb diet that is not going to happen usually.

You do have to push to get the insulin level included in the glucose tolerance test, a lot of doctors don’t get the relevance yet…it is how I got definite about my own insulin levels being really high and really fluctuating.

A few days prior to having a glucose tolerance test (three hours is better than 2) you have to eat a lot of carbs which is a pain but it is a one off and gets you the data you need to know what is happenning with your levels and eat accordingly.

Gaswoman:

There are no 5:2 studies I am aware of showing that 5:2 reduces IGF levels.

The Harvie research on ADF shows total IGF levels falling slightly over six months, but IGF BP1 and BP2 levels increasing a statistically significant amount. The results were similar for both the ADF and continuous energy restricted (normal diet) groups: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3017674/ table 5

Radiant:

These large studies can be interpreted in many ways. Interesting findings in the study include:

“Fruit consumption was not significantly associated with deaths from cancer or from CVD.”

but

“The portions of frozen/canned fruit also showed a significant association, with those eating more frozen/canned fruit having significantly higher risk of all-cause mortality.”

One way of looking at these findings is that cutting sugar out of the diet (by eating more veggies, in this study) is beneficial. Fruit has sugar, and eating fresh/dried fruit showed no benefit (‘not significantly associated’) when it came to cancer and heart disease, but eating frozen/canned fruit (i.e. added sugar) showed a ‘significantly higher risk of all-cause mortality’.

Speaking broadly and non-scientifically, protein is well known to cause illness – if you eat a diet that averages over 35% protein for a period of time you don’t have to worry about getting cancer, you will just get sick until you stop.

The problem some are having now is that they have been told not to eat fat for decades, and now they are being told not to eat refined carbs. Protein and fruits and veggies are all that is left, and so people are now starting to eat higher protein/fruit & veggie diets. Higher protein might work for the .001% of people that are weight lifters and trying to build massive amounts of muscle, but not for the rest of us.

What the review did not study is what the results would be if people replaced a lot of their caloric needs with fat calories instead of calories from fruits and veggies. Would the results have been similar? The problem is there are few remaining people with high fat diets, so studying them is harder.

There is sort of a basic truth with humans and diet. The human body will die if it is totally deprived of dietary fat. It will also die if it is totally deprived of dietary protein. Fat and protein are so necessary for life that the body stores them in the form of fat and muscle so that if there is no food it can draw on the fat and muscle to survive until food is found. The body does not need dietary or other carbs to survive, so the body does not store them (aside from a small about in the blood and liver to handle short term energy needs for a period of a day or two). The guy that ate no calories of any kind whatsoever for over 54 weeks proved the point – he survived on his fat and muscle protein and did not suffer one bit for lack of carbs (and lost over 270 pounds).

There is nothing wrong with eating raw fruits and veggies, especially if you are using their calories to replace calories from sugar and other processed carbs. But I would hesitate before waging war on protein, something vital to human life, and simply say include a moderate amount of it in your diet. And I would add that fat calories, especially saturated fat from animals, are necessary for human life and should not be ignored.

If I remember “Eat, Fast and Live Longer” correctly, Michael’s IGF1 was lowered after a period of 5:2 as much as it was after the initial 4-day-fast.

Thanks Dummerchen, you are right. I looked back at the Hoirzon programme ending. Dr Mosley himself hoped that more research would be done into the effects of intermittent fasting on IGF. Perhaps as the obesity pandemic takes hold more research will be done to back up this amazing diet.