Found some more on the the response to the research above:
Apparently the research has not been published yet!
This topic contains 991 replies, has 70 voices, and was last updated by Cinque 2 years, 3 months ago.
I am glad someone in the scientific community has realised that I am not a rat. The abstract that we can see is a little short on hard data and doesn’t seem to be meeting with great enthusiasm from the remarks quoted. The field is one in which there is some really good quality science and some that does not deserve to be called science. Unfortunately it tends to be the latter which makes it onto the TV and into the glossy magazines. Had you read that the latest hidden killer is the eating of pulses?.
Hi Cornish-jane. I went to Google Scholar. In the search engine typed in Ana Bonassa University of San Paulo effects of fasting on health. The following abstract came up published by bioscientifica at http://www.endocrine-abstracts.org A brief overview of the research carried out including the following comment… Quote “However there is still no consensus about the effects of Intermittent Fasting, a fad diet widespread by the media and adopted by individuals seeking a rapid weight loss” Unquote.
So, Dr Longo, Jason Fung, Michael Mattson, Prof Roy Taylor (Newcastle University) and his dieting which can eliminate diabetes et al may well have it all wrong!!!!!!
Thanks all! Whats interesting is the different approaches people use to 5:2 – some are water fasting, some are feast-and-fasting, some are keto-fasting, etc. Not all are following the standard 5:2 plus mediterranean diet recommended by Dr M. I suppose what i am saying is that perhaps not all types of fasting are that effective or good for your health. So it would be good to see lots more research so we know which approaches are safer/healthier. I would put alternate day water fasting (which the rats in the above study followed) as on the riskier end on the scale!
For those of you interested in fat percentage as well as BMI, I found this:
https://www.freedieting.com/body-fat-calculator
It tracks very similar to BMI for me (169cm woman) but differs quite a bit for my much taller husband, whose BMI shows him fatter than he is in reality.
Cinque. A blood test earlier this year showed a Vitamin B12 deficiency. B12 is necessary for proper blood formation, so I researched supplements. It seems that if I take pills which are advertised as giving me my daily need my body can only absorb about 10% of them. I can either get B12 from dietary sources or a series of injections. The only source of vitamin B12 is apparently animal, so the largely veg based diet I have been following has been less than perfect.
Hi bigbooty. I’m none of those things, I will eat anything. It is just that having had colon cancer a couple of years ago I was reducing my red meat consumption, especially processed meats. Rather to my surprise I found that I like the green stuff and I guess I took it too far. Old age is also a factor, as we get older we process B12 less well. As ever, a balanced diet is, I suppose, the answer. To achieve balance I will shortly throw a steak on the barbie.
Personally I don’t think a little bit of meat is a bad thing. I eat some meat but not a lot. Try upping your cruciferous veggies, lots of fibre. If your BMI doesn’t reflect you situation well then I think a better measure is height to waist ratio. You want you waist to be less than half your height. Measure around your bellybutton.
In Canada they have compared modern wheat to wheat grown from varieties used over 100 years ago and found no nutritional differences. I saw this on a youtube documentary I watch but I don’t remember which one, I think it was about the gluten free movement.
The real problem with the GMOs is that it greatly increases the costs of seeds. Sometimes farmers are even prevented from growing their own seed because of contamination by cross pollination. It is impossible to keep the modified genes from showing up where they aren’t wanted. In the USA the government enforces patents that allow companies to pay fees on seed they grew them selves even if they never used the GMO seed in the first place. Of coarse there are also concerns related too the pesticides showing up in the food too, although that even happens with organic crops.
Interesting. Was that wheat old stuff from store or old varieties grown alongside the new? I have seen studies which suggest that the nutritional value of a whole range of basic foods is not what it was. One of the suggested reasons is that the soil is less fertile than it was and that the fertilisers used don’t replace the whole range of ingredients. The residual anti-biotic and other drug levels in non-organic meat is way too high, which is why Europe won’t import American meat. The other question is “who funded that study?”
Bigbooty, cruciferous veg historically had a taste that many didn’t like. The new varieties have been developed to reduce that flavour, and as a result have reduced nutritional value. Fortunately if you grow your own veg, in UK it is possible to find the traditional varieties of seed. I make my own bread, which has lots of fibre. To be truly difficult, that height – weight ratio doesn’t work for me. Even at my heaviest I passed that test – my fat wasn’t round my middle.
Cinque. Thank you. Unfortunately my neighbour turned up and distracted me at the crucial time, so the steak is best described as “well done” ie not quite burned.
Research sites keep and grow seed of many varieties. I’m sure they are careful with the soil conditions.
Now for actual farming it is possible that soil conditions vary a lot and it would make lot of sense that if the general practices had changed that the condition of the soil could be different.
When I was a kid, most of the time a field would be used one year and be fellow the next, but that was mostly to build up water and allow the stubble to decompose. We didn’t have that much rain. With winter wheat there could also be a wide variation in the final protein content and wheat is routinely tested for how much protein is present as it effects the price of the wheat. Even rain at the wrong time can reduce the protein content. In fact this is one of the reasons I feel calorie counting is rather bogus as there is so much variation in actual nutrition of crops. The accepted values used are just estimates sometimes that have been used for over a 100 years.
There are many different strategies and possible crop rotations. I think those have changed a lot in the last 40 years. For example I understand that in Canada now lentils are often rotated with winter wheat and leaving the ground fallow isn’t as common. However I’m really out of touch and all the people in my family that have been farming are retired.
Another big difference is the ingredients in store bought food and how food is made. In the testing labs they make food the same and probably similar to how people would make food at home. However in a modern food factory a lot of corn byproducts are used in the food. These range from oils to HFCS. That has been a huge change as things like HFCS didn’t even exist when I was young. I’m sure there are many other differences too.
I’m not any kind of expert here, but there just a lot more variables than people seem to consider beside the variety of the wheat being grown.
Thought I would ask tho question on this site. I often read online articles about fasting and I have read that fasting more than 48 hours has no benefit. In any case, I have been doing fasts that are no more than 48 hours to make sure my metabolism doesn’t slow down. I prefer to jig things up and confuse my metabolism. Wonder what others have heard!
There are quite a few of us who have fasted, water only, for several days. Three days is my normal duration, but I have gone longer. There are those who measure lipids and ketones and the like and they are believers in the longer fast. I don’t measure anything except my weight, but generally I start to feel really good by day two and very active and sharp by day three. The metabolism takes longer than that to slow down. Whilst I don’t measure, my GP’s surgery does and over the years I have been at the 5:2 all of my health indicators have improved. Have a look at the longevity thread, where longer fasts are discussed – Valter Longo reckons that if you do them every few months and eat sparingly in between, you will live longer.
@ccco there is a lot of misconceptions about fasting and muscle. After around 24 hours of fasting if you are already in ketosis the body does start converting amino acids into glucose, basically breaking down protein. Often this is somehow equated to the body breaking down muscle. That is somewhat enforced because as you fast you lose glycogen and water in the muscles to they appear to shrink. However it is also mostly nonsense as there is lots of protein being recycled all the time in the body. Sure we end up losing some protein but it is actually pretty insignificant as long as you have enough body fat. Over a period of 3 to 4 days the body switches over to also burning ketones and the amount of glucose required drops and then protein is preserved. That continues until there isn’t enough fat. At that point true starvation starts and protein consumption will result in death in a manner of weeks.
As for metabolism, fasting causes metabolism to increase initially, for some people at must as 14% increase was measured at 4 days of fasting. If you water fast for weeks, there is a point where metabolism starts slowing down. The point of where that starts probably varies by person but for most people it probably starts in the second week of fasting. At 42 days of fasting old studies showed up to 25% reduction in metabolism. However, there are big questions about this as for often these studies like the Minnesota starvation study weren’t really water fasting buy actually very low calorie diets. There is a tendency to group the two things together even though they aren’t the same thing.
So the only real problem with fasting past 48 hours is that it is hard on your fat. That isn’t good if you are trying to stay fat.
@ccco. Dykask covered it pretty well. Really depends what youre trying to achieve with your fasting. Just weight loss or some other benefit? I initially used to fast for 60 hours when I was attempting to lose weight. I now fast for only 36 hours once per week for the other benefits. I no longer want to lose any more weight. It takes me about 20-22 hours to enter ketosis but I am no longer overweight and have been doing this for over 3 years now. My glycogen stores are never fully topped up and my liver has been trained and is quite efficient at converting over to ketones. I do this for health reasons. I firmly believe it helps your immune system. I have not had a cold in three years. The whole family has just gone through their usual winter colds. I have now escaped this for three years. I put this down to my fasting but of course I have no hard evidence, just anecdotal.
@elphaba how does a doctor that is actually reversing T2D not have any credibility? Dr. Fung has a great deal of experience with fasting and has spent a lot of time going through studies. There is very little disagreement between many of the fasting experts.
Hi Elphaba:
I think Dr. Fung helped by taking two long known methods of reversing Type 2 – water fasting and the keto diet – and combining them to make a more user friendly program to combat the disease – and then popularizing the fact Type 2 can be reverse through dietary changes. Other alternatives are now coming forward. Dr. Taylor’s work is now being popularized, and Dr. Longo has human clinical studies starting on the effects of his Longevity Diet on Type 2.
I also think Fung’s initial series of lectures he posted on YouTube helped show why the low fat diet was so dangerous.
But when he got into weight loss, in my opinion he ‘lost it’. He has a habit of taking a very tangential finding in a study and expanding it to a universal truth. Eyes tend to roll when that happens. And while he rails against calorie restricted diets, he takes intermittent fasting, which is a pure calorie restricted diet, and elevates it to some kind of magical force, even going so far as saying IF ‘tricks’ the body into thinking it is not experiencing calorie restriction. In my opinion, these are just a couple of the reasons he is not taken very seriously in the academic world.
Anyway, here is a two year human clinical study on pure calorie restriction without otherwise changing the participants’ diets. Seems some good things happen when on a calorie restricted diet, in addition to weight loss. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4717266/
Simco: Exactly! And part of why I don’t come here often, but stick around the MyFitnessPal forums for support, is because of all the woo that Fung promotes and so many seem to be so into – you can eat as many calories as you want as long as you don’t eat carbs, you can’t lose weight if you eat bread or sugar etc etc. I’ve watched you try and argue against this only to be shot down, so I just stay out of it. But I’m silently cheering you on.
IF works because it restricts your calories. Plain and simple. I like it because it is easier to restrict a lot (well, completely) on two days, and on the other days not have to restrict as much as if I was “dieting” every day.
@simcoeluv – You should read the study you found a bit more carefully as it completely agrees with Dr. Fung’s claims. However the impacts on IGF-1 are quite interesting.
As for the weight loss it was below what CICO predicts. The CR group had a net restriction of 279.5 kcal / day. By CICO that translates into a 13.2kg loss in one year but in fact the loss was only 8.4kg. Good but short as even adjusting for a lower RMR the loss should have been at least 9.5kg. The second year the net calorie restriction was 216.3 kcal per day the CR group *GAINED* 0.9kg. In other words they were living with a lower metabolism, a bit lower than would be expected considering that 71% of the weight loss was attributed to fat loss.
There is also a bunch of caveats as these people were young (20 – 50), and barely overweight as a group at a BMI of 25.2. Additionally as a group they were eating modest levels of calories to begin with at 2126.3 kcal/day. As I’ve pointed out many times I didn’t have any problems with CR until I was over 50. For some the problems can occur earlier, some later and for a lucky few never. CICO is just a model that approximates what happens but there isn’t any calorie counting or sensing that happens in the body, it is all nutrition and the many metabolic pathways contributing to a final result.
Once I hit the point where CR didn’t work even approximately for myself, I spent 2 horrible and miserable years trying to make it work and all I did was lose lean body mass and gain fat. For me the cure was cutting out refined sugar and fasting promoted other healthy benefits. When I was using CICO I was consuming less than 12000 kcal/week, sometimes a lot less. Now I typically consume over 15000 kcal/week and I’m over 15kg lighter than I ever got to with CR. CICO doesn’t explain that but the hormonal theories do account for that. Different foods have different impacts on the body, it isn’t just calories. Fasting actually allows me to eat more on a weekly basis than I did before, except for when I do more than two 36 hour fasts a week. There is a lot more to IF than calorie restriction.
@elphaba – I was hated at MyFitnessPal when I claimed that cutting out sugar fixed my hunger and ability to lose weight. It is really the most narrow minded forum I every ran into. Just because CICO works well for you doesn’t mean it works for everyone.
Calories are just a measurement of energy, nothing more. Grass has calories but we can’t live off it. Paper has lots of calories but we can’t live off that either. Much of the food we consume is used for energy but there are also many other uses for food in the body. It isn’t as simple as CICO.
Just a “Heads Up” for all you carb lovers out there. On Wednesday, 6th June the BBC is to air a programme, “The truth about carbs”. Did you know that by freezing a loaf of sliced bread it turns some of the easily digested starch into resistant starch? Then toasting it straight from the freezer means your body gets fewer calories from the bread feeding your gut bacteria not you. Amazing, mind you not eating the bread means even fewer carbs!!!
Enjoy.
Couscous. That I did not know and am happy to learn. I make my own bread in large batches, freeze it, bring it out at short notice and reheat it in the oven to de-frost/crisp it. It takes us two or three days to eat a large loaf, so much of it gets toasted. I know there are calories in it, but I like good bread and compensate elsewhere. Making it myself means I know exactly what is in it.
@ couscous. There is very rarely a free ride. Yes freezing does convert SOME starch into resistant starch in a process called retrogradation. About 3-5%, so the vast majority of the starch remains as digestible starch. At least your gut bacteria will love you as they like feeding on it. This is a good thing. You don’t get a free pass regards calories though. The by product of the bacteria digesting the resistant starch is free fatty acids which are absorbed by your large intestines and used as fuel. If you must eat simple carbs like bread and potatoes etc then its well worth doing.
Well I must, or rather I choose to. I grow the potatoes and I make the bread, with varying ratios of strong white, wholemeal wheat and rye, usually sourdough. I read the research carefully and take from it what I find believable. Longo is interesting and I have no problem with periodic long water fasts. However, the research I find most compelling is Prof Tim Spectres so I try for thirty different kinds of vegetable every week. That isn’t easy – finding that variety requires effort, even if you grow lots of your own.
Chilling carbs (not just bread) to increase resistant starch combined with eating some carbs to deliberately fill up so as not to eat other more unhealthy foods has got to be a good thing.
When I first heard about it, my initial thought was to cook even more roast potatoes for sunday lunch so as to have a large stash of cold roasties for a few days – not a good snack to have on hand every time the fridge door is opened 🙂
Will definitely watch the BBC programme on the telly.
Hi bigbooty, I agree with your comments. I think that programmes such as this BBC one are good for information and knowledge. It enables people such as myself to broaden my knowledge of various ways of eating and the effects different foods have on our bodies. What we do with that knowledge is up to ourselves.
Good luck to you all out there.
A recent article about insulin being possibly connected to the causes of Alzheimers is causing some interest. http://www.theconversation.com/alzheimers-disease-why-insulin-is-a-new-suspect. “Researchers have found that in diabetes, insulin becomes less effective at controlling blood sugar levels. But insulin does a lot more than just control blood sugar,it is a growth factor. Neurons (brain cells) are very dependant on growth factors and if they don’t get enough, they die. Looking at brain tissue taken from deceased Alzheimers patients, researchers found that insulin lost its effectiveness as a growth factor. This suggests that diabetes drugs might be an effective treatment for Alzheimers”.
Couscous. I have just seen that carbs programme. Interesting and it added to my knowledge. Small sample sizes are not the best science but TV programme makers don’t have a lot of choice. Even so, the results were impressive, Thanks for drawing our attention to it.
Next year I may plant celariac instead of potatoes.
Hi penguin. Like you I have just watched the programme. I agree with your comments re the programme but what I also think is a positive is the fact that it was done in such a way that it shows that low or reduced carb foods are nutritious, easily accessible and recognisable to most of us. In fact as you posted I was browsing the BBCGOODFOOD website about low carb recipes. I am not a fully fledged convert but it has improved my knowledge base and who knows, Cauliflower rice may soon be on the menu.
Good luck out there.
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