I've switched over the last 6 months to eating 3 meals and 2 snacks a day of varying size. I climb often (vigorously, 4 times a week if not more) and found that fasting was simply insufficient to provide the energy I needed. IF caused notable performance decreases at the level I work at leading to more injuries due to poorer recovery. Changing my diet in this way fixed most of it. Of course, I try to eat relatively clean (but chips are a weakness). I don't have a 6 pack but I am also not overweight and carry enough muscle for my uses.

This isn't to say I am giving a license to eat what you want. But what you do with your fuel is probably just as important as what that fuel is. The "average person" you mention is a couch potato. Of course these people not only benefit from IF but literally any change in exercise! IF works great for people who are not intensely active. Hence why it has become popular in tech. Proper sleep (whatever that means to your body) and relatively hard exercise are even better predictors of all-cause mortality than any of this. To me, after having done it, IF feels mostly like new age woo-woo "science" and it dances around people saying it flat out cures cancer. In some cases, for example prediabetes and chemotherapy, "deloading" the system has evidence of being effective. For the rest of us, it's a wash.

You're very active! Even so, I wouldn't think the IF itself was the problem, probably you were having trouble eating enough for your level of activity with such a regimen.

About bloodwork, I believe you're mistakingly conflating insulin and blood sugar. Blood sugar may vary in such a way, but it's just a proxy because insulin is so hard to measure.

But more to the point, I wasn't referring to intermittent fasting solely, I believe even longer fasting periods are required. Regardless, even IF is a far cry from what the average person does.

I also disagree that fasting is not a panacea. It's a close to one as we have. I don't think this is a subject I'm likely to convince skeptics in a comment, so I will simply say interested people will find reputable resources on the subject, including striking anecdotes published by fasting clinics (of which, for some reason, Germany has a few that publish material on YouTube).

Autophagy doesn't really kick in until 2-3 days of fasting.

Someone tells me they're fasting, I don't expect they mean 8 non-contiguous waking hours without eating (with sleep in the middle). That's, like... pretty close to a normal day. It's easy to have 16 hour "fasts" just by accident. "I only ate two meals yesterday because I was fasting". LOL WUT? Again, I know, technically true, but not a useful way to refer to it, IMO.

In other words, the question isn't whether autophagy exists. The question is over whether fanatical "one-weird-trick" claims about autophagy are true and, further, what the impact actually is and compared to what.

For example, autophagy is happening all the time, not just during during starvation. And it hasn't been demonstrated that fasting for 3 days to increase autophagy levels has a net benefit versus eating a nutrient-rich diet during that timeframe.

Instead we just get vague but lofty claims in forum posts.

Does my circulatory system need to fully rest so as not to develop dysfunction?

Then consider the arbitrary stress that society puts on us. How you dress should not matter, what you love, how you work, where you work, what you do for fun, etc, but we make people hand wring about it all. We have a cruel society in many ways that stifles unorthodox thought and behavior that doesn't ultimately further someone else's dollar. The daily stress of sitting in traffic or waiting for the bus to finally show up on a hot day definitely triggers stress responses. How about the fact that social media has sapped many peoples attention span? The mind is no longer allowed to be bored or to rest or dwell inwardly if you are constantly using every available second to check a website on your cellphone. You see it in kids an adults everywhere: elevator door shuts and out go the phones along with any chance of serendipitous organic thought that doesn't come from an advertising network.

Experiment with your diet, sure, but don’t neglect the other ills of modern life if you want to be truly heathy in body and mind.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> Our bodies are evolved to require daily physical activity, and consequently exercise does not make our bodies work more so much as it makes them work better. Research from my lab and others has shown that physical activity has little effect on daily energy expenditure (Hadza hunter-gatherers burn the same number of calories every day as sedentary Westerners), which is one reason exercise is a poor tool for weight loss. Instead exercise regulates the way the body spends energy and coordinates vital tasks.

They compare the human need for exercise to the evolution of ram ventilation in sharks. By developing a system based on the assumption of constant movement, you become a more efficient forager. But if you stop moving, you die.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-evolved-to...

This must be an american thing. I've always been told the opposite advice all my life. Interesting.

Pretty sure it's to gain weight. So you're all day eating.

To drop in weight, it's better to eat lowcarb,keto,carnivore. Fat/protein is makes you more full and eat less.

[edit]: I guess the part about humans evolving with scarcity is not entirely accurate, what we can see for sure is there is some adaptation to surviving without eating; this is not a common trait, other species have much inferior ability to store fat.

I don’t have papers on hand to cite so take it with a grain of salt, but I believe that just eating is enough to increase both synthesis and breakdown. I think this is actually healthier since you have higher turnover this way

Not acknowledging that health is largely a result of lifestyle choices, and that pharmaceuticals are mostly ineffective and often harmful.

And now for the specifics:

- lies/bad science about meat (particularly red meat) being unhealthy

- lies/bad science about cholesterol & saturated fat being unhealthy

- not attacking sugar and processed foods at the highest level; should be treated like smoking if not even more harshly

I say this for experience, until I fell ill I had no idea about either of those things. Like many of my peers, grew up with tons of sugar, and many misconceptions about what is healthy (although thankfully to a lesser extent than what's common nowadays)

I'd also add that these things compound over the generations. We are more sensitive than our parents. It checks out for me, every generation has worsening autoimmune symptoms.

> I say this for experience...

> It checks out for me...

Glad you've managed to avoid the pesky allure of bad science with your anecdotal approach!

Do you ask them to provide you with proof directly linking your pizza eating to hypertension? Would you just ignore their advice for lack of proof?

No one will be able to provide you direct link between 'lifestyle choices' and chronic disease at an individual level.

I wasn't implying I require that for anything. I was just pointing out that someone made broad, speculative claims about the general medical consensus of things like read meat and sugar, and then used an anecdote to support their own claims about those things. Take from that what you will! I just find it funny and worth mentioning.

There's lots of good science and history (! I guess that's just a bunch of anecdotes though) which demonstrates their ill effects.

Sometimes, a fact has been asserted widely enough that we stop requiring sources, even at HN

Nope, I said absolutely nothing to that effect.

Something tells me you don't understand the vast scale of pharmaceuticals, many of which keep people alive. Mostly "ineffective", come on.

>I say this for experience, until I fell ill I had no idea about either of those things.

Your personal experiences and biology cannot be extrapolated onto the world at large.

This may just be a function of increasing pollen overstimulating the immune system. In the last 30 years pollen counts have gone up 20+%[1]. Turns out trees like carbon and warmer air.

Anecdotally both of my kids have seasonal allergies, neither me nor my wife did when we were kids.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/pollen-se...

A rebuttal to the seed oil sophistry that seems to have managed to permeate every diet camp: https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...

Everyone is so desperate to have a counternarrative take on nutrition that they'll believe whatever fad that passes through the internet.

The same goes with saturated fat = healthy broscience and the dismissal of the lipid hypothesis.

There seems to be an animalistic hatred toward a book that really sheds the light on why eating industrial waste is not the healthiest thing in the world.

I also agree health is largely a result of lifestyle choices for most-- it is what we can control.

I can't even begin to contemplating support of many of your other statements. i wish you health and peace of mind.

Re: the cholesterol, check out my other comment.

Thank you, wishing you the same.

Are you saying cholesterol and saturated fats aren't unhealthy? I'm confused.

Bottom line is saturated fat is not implicated whatsoever in any negative health outcomes.

That probably means a whole ton of marketing material touting Omega oils has to be thrown away.

I agree about 'big pharma marketing.' part spreading misinformation that all these can be 'treated' with drugs that even educated fall for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32744412

Your gut bacteria is an expression of the foods that you consume on a daily basis.

One thing that stuck out to me was when he talked about the relationship between people and their environment. How health is not in a vacuum, but in constant negotiation and collaboration with the world around you. He uses this to suggest fermenting things yourself, to engage in this process with the microbes in your environment. It's easy and fun!

Here's a 6 minute video where Katz talks about fermentation, and walks you through a basic process, in a beautiful and rustic kitchen I still dream about getting to cook in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i77hU3zR-fQ

Avoid alcohol, sugar, and processed foods. These things increase bad gut bacteria and decrease the good ones.

I now know plenty of young people IBD, MS, Psoriasis, and even Rheumatoid Arthritis.

These seem to be caused by less obvious things imo (MS although looks linked to epstein-barr), as otherwise general health doesn't seem to be poor.