I mean, we're quickly getting into "somebody once told me" territory here, but: word on the street is coffee triggers / speeds up autophagy, not slow it down?

Oh you know what, maybe you're right. I was basing my comment on this reddit post and the timestamped video it links to: https://www.reddit.com/r/intermittentfasting/comments/788v15... If you rewind that video a bit turns out she's talking about something else, circadian rhythm/time restricted eating, no idea. I happened on this post just the other day, that's why I replied to your comment in the first place. It's funny my wife and I were going to start trying out IF and I've been railing on her about how it's gotta just be water until we eat or we lose all the benefits..haha I gotta loosen up. Too much information out there, easy to get lost in the weeds.

No worries man, I feel you 100% on the low entropy problem of nutritional info out there. It’s a travesty. How anyone without at least a bio minor is supposed to make heads or tails of this is completely beyond me. Not to mention all the actual research is locked up behind paywalls, so if you don’t know about scihub you’re just sorely SOL.

Madness, I tell you.

Good luck and have fun with the intermittent fasting :)

Even if you've studied something like biology or nutrition it's incredibly difficult to judge what is good and what is bad advice, as your average school (and professor) is just as full of dogma that has only the most tenuous basis of evidence.

Far and wide the best ground advice you can give yourself and others is to work out - that'll do good things to you, even if you can do it a little. Other than that, eat a moderately varied set of foods. Anything further than that is usually just something someone came up with in the shower and that other people thought sounded real good.