Overall, I don't see any dramatic changes. Lots of people claim to see a significant difference, usually positive, in energy, strength, mood, sleep, etc. But, I generally think all of those metrics are "about the same" for me. Maybe I'm mildly more energetic because of carrying less weight around. But, I'm also at the age where the effects of aging begin to be noticeable...so, maybe just maintaining levels is progress?

Nonetheless, after several years of research into the topic, and related topics like caloric restriction, a couple of years ago I was convinced that the evidence was compelling enough to make it part of my life and started reducing my eating period each day until I was comfortable with 16 hours of fasting each day (sometimes I'll do 20 or 24, if I'm busy and feel OK). I recommend it to people who ask about it, but not because it's a magical cure for all that ails you. I just think the evidence is strong enough to be worth the minor trade-offs. It isn't a risky decision (with the caveat that it probably isn't appropriate for people with diabetes or hypoglycemia or similar)...none of the science indicates negative results, and nearly all of it indicates positive results to one degree or another. It's pretty much like any other diet decision, e.g. eat more vegetables because you'll probably live longer, not because it'll cure cancer or make you an Olympic athlete.

The thing is we can't clone you multiple times and treat each replica of you differently, so we have no idea if you would be terribly sick or something by now if you had made other choices.

I'm always fascinated by anecdotes about fasting, etc. But it's actually incredibly hard to isolate one dietary factor and draw firm conclusions about cause and effect.

From what I gather, large scale longitudinal studies are our best data for diet in humans and they conclude things like "A handful of nuts a day is good for you."

I've just started doing my own research digging through the literature in PubMed and there's a huge amount of research over the past decade especially that's really advanced our understanding of nutrition and metabolism (that sadly, has yet to get full traction in conventional wisdom/popular science).

Just a few examples from my collection on fasting (at this point I'm tracking hundreds of publications covering a whole range of different aspects of nutritional science, and this is only over the course of a couple weeks of research):

Nørrelund, Helene, K. Sreekumaran Nair, Jens Otto Lunde Jørgensen, Jens Sandahl Christiansen, and Niels Møller. “The Protein-Retaining Effects of Growth Hormone During Fasting Involve Inhibition of Muscle-Protein Breakdown.” Diabetes 50, no. 1 (January 1, 2001): 96–104. https://doi.org/10.2337/diabetes.50.1.96.

Bhutani, Surabhi, Monica C. Klempel, Reed A. Berger, and Krista A. Varady. “Improvements in Coronary Heart Disease Risk Indicators by Alternate-Day Fasting Involve Adipose Tissue Modulations.” Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.) 18, no. 11 (November 2010): 2152–59. https://doi.org/10.1038/oby.2010.54.

Harvie, Michelle N., Mary Pegington, Mark P. Mattson, Jan Frystyk, Bernice Dillon, Gareth Evans, Jack Cuzick, et al. “The Effects of Intermittent or Continuous Energy Restriction on Weight Loss and Metabolic Disease Risk Markers: A Randomised Trial in Young Overweight Women.” International Journal of Obesity (2005) 35, no. 5 (May 2011): 714–27. https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2010.171.

Chaix, Amandine, Amir Zarrinpar, Phuong Miu, and Satchidananda Panda. “Time-Restricted Feeding Is a Preventative and Therapeutic Intervention against Diverse Nutritional Challenges.” Cell Metabolism 20, no. 6 (December 2, 2014): 991–1005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2014.11.001.

Rothschild, Jeff, Kristin K. Hoddy, Pera Jambazian, and Krista A. Varady. “Time-Restricted Feeding and Risk of Metabolic Disease: A Review of Human and Animal Studies.” Nutrition Reviews 72, no. 5 (May 1, 2014): 308–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/nure.12104.

Fontana, Luigi, and Linda Partridge. “Promoting Health and Longevity through Diet: From Model Organisms to Humans.” Cell 161, no. 1 (March 26, 2015): 106–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.02.020.

I should add that the evidence was so strong for certain behaviors that I have changed my diet (VLCHF + 16+:8IF) and n=1 shows immediate improvements in weight, energy, mental clarity, and even skin health. Somewhat unexpected because I wasn't eating that badly according to common wisdom (and have maintained a moderate overweight, but stable weight for the past 3+yrs).

1. Anything that makes a real change will have side effects. Some of those side effects can be negative. For people not familiar with the concept of a healing crisis, this can be a confusing fact. They can end up temporarily feeling worse and conclude this is a bad thing rather than a temporary stage of a process headed in the right direction.

2. Prescribed medicine typically has a long list of provisos and side effects. If you have a serious condition, prescribed medicine trades short term gains for long term costs. Doctors claim credit for the short term gains, then blame the long term costs on your condition or age rather than on long term drug use. You need to be leery of the possibility that you are doing the same sort of thing and crediting any positive changes to this dietary change and dismissing any negative changes as coincidental or due to something else.

3. I've seen people post questions to a discussion forum along the lines of "What are non drug alternatives for treating X issue? I would like to participate in a drug trial and they won't accept patients taking this drug. I need to get off it to qualify." So people doing stuff like that are confounding the results of the trial and will report changes in symptoms and attribute them to the drug being tried rather than attributing them to getting off some other drug and using non drug alternatives.

4. In practice, it's quite hard to isolate one specific dietary factor because dietary changes typically involve at least two factors. If you add some new food to your diet and eat the same calories, it displaces some other food. You can't say for certain if the changes are due to adding the new food or removing what was replaced. If you are experimenting with your own diet, it helps to start with supplements, make one and only one change at a time and track things somehow. This makes it possible to get some idea of what effect X is having.

5. It's a moving target. If you are calcium deficient and add calcium to your diet, this may be exactly what you need to start feeling better. Initially, more calcium may be better. If your mental model boils down to "more calcium is better," you may wind up resolving the deficiency and then enter a situation where you are actually consuming too much calcium. This can lead to problems that you may not attribute to consuming high levels of calcium because you already decided "more calcium is better." You may develop new issues and utterly fail to relate them to consuming high levels of calcium.

6. People have a really hard time mentally modeling the road not taken. It isn't completely impossible, but people tend to be bad at it. If you have a specific diagnosis and you know the usual course of the condition, you can compare your health to the typical outcome and make some inferences, but it isn't absolutely conclusive. This is why twin studies are valued: We can't make two copies of you, but if there are already two people with identical genes, that's the closest we get to that.

7. Life is chemistry and there can be myriad other factors being overlooked. I try hard to track not only diet, but how much I walk, environmental factors, etc. I've done this for years and I still find myself blindsided at times and struggling to pinpoint why X is happening currently.

Most people aren't going to be able to read hundreds of studies. If you can and that gives you a mental model that makes sense to you, awesome. That doesn't actually strike me as a convincing rebuttal. It strikes me as more evidence that it's actually rather challenging to figure out dietary stuff. You won't solve it by reading an article or two.

Also, just because people can't read hundreds of studies doesn't mean that they aren't out there, or that haven't been done (tens of thousands of studies, of all kinds, which taken together do point to much more specific things than "eat some nuts"), or that it's excusable when medical professionals make recommendations that are contradicted by the preponderence of scientific evidence.

I'm very skeptical of people's dieting claims in general.

First, lots of people, more or less unconsciously, omit their previous condition/background.

A typical example of this (that tragically gets always attention on HN) is an obese person making a post about how they made change X and lost Y kgs. When you're obese because of bad habits, any minimal healthy change will lead to weight loss.

Second, every [not seriously into sports] person I ever spoke to who applied a change in his/her nutrition, reported the same symptoms (more energy, better sleep, etc.etc.), independently of how absurd the change was.

Considering also how extremely variable between samples (=people) lifestyle is, the only reasonable way I accept is just to set emphasis on personal metrics and disregard other people's experience (I actually assume the vast majority of them to be inaccurate to the point of being false, for the above reasons).

I also agree that while research can point you towards general guidelines, personal factors will be an issue. For example, from SNP analysis I carry rs1695(A;G) which reacts poorly to supplemental vitamin E, rs1801282(C;G) which may metabolize saturated fats differently, rs1535(A;G) which is associated with decreased ALA->EPA conversion efficiency, etc. (Which isn't even addressing the lifestyle/epigenetic aspects that are even more importantly, but largely unexplored, harder to test for.)

The only problem is I tend to feel drowsy after lunch at work :)

My health has always been, thankfully, very good. I'm not doing intermittent fasting to address any specific problem. Losing weight was a goal, because my pants (the same size I've been wearing since college) weren't fitting comfortably anymore...it worked for that, and all my pants fit again. But, I wasn't trying to reboot my eating in some dramatic way. I did try a low carb high fat/protein thing for a while before beginning intermittent fasting, as a way to lose weight, but it didn't work for me. The restrictions just took the fun out of meals. I love food, I love cooking it, love eating it with friends/family, etc. It's pretty hard to have normal meals on a very restrictive diet. I couldn't imagine living out the rest of my days without bread or rice, and any diet change has to be sustainable for decades or it's going to be part of a cycle of weight gain and loss. Intermittent fasting has been sustainable for me. I don't even think about it most days.

https://valterlongo.com/daily-longevity-diet/

It used to be that there would be days where our ancestors would not be able to bring home any meat so fasting probably was built in as part of our metabolism process.

It was only in the past 100 years that we've seen mass produced sugary food and drinks.

Like the diet difference is painfully obvious when you go to Japan's 7-11. Healthy stuff all around compared to deep fried fast food.

Some days I will only eat 1 meal, and I honestly feel great. The biggest difference being I have way more energy and just feel "light".

These days I've converted to mostly Korean food consisting of rice and veggie side dishes incl kimchi of course. I've lost 4kg within 3 weeks just by changing diet.

Of course can't resist the burger and fries once in a while....but eating primarily Korean food because I'm Korean I realize is the wise choice....our ancestors have been eating the same stuff for millenias so it's probably "right" for my metabolism.

there's a study that showed East-Asian men living in North America have high rate of prostate related issues which has traditionally never been prevalent in East Asia...and also the rise of American fast food chains have collectively made the world a lot less healthier with the increase of diabetes and obesity.

There might be a genetic factor here. The other thing is that the food habits of our ancestors were more thought out than we think. It might be that what they have been eating is not only better because of genetics, but more healthy in general than the terrible foods we can buy everywhere today.

Absolutely. As Michael Pollan points out, our food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the preceding 5000, in both composition and quantity.

There is no way we have adapted that fast.

For example, I heard that samgyupsal is mostly fat that isn't typically consumed for grilling, is really unhealthy as it consists mostly of fat lard with little pork meat. but once you taste it it's hard to put down. Typically, lettuce, garlic, onion, sesame oil and in traditionally green onions shredded with red pepper sprinkled. You take a bit of meat, bathe it in the sesame oil sauce with pepper and salt, wrap it up in lettuce, throw in some fermented bean sauce containing healthy probiotics also found in kimchi, and pop it in your mouth. When you get a bit tired of the grease, you yell "WUN SHUT!" ("one shot") and down what seemingly smells like acetone. There's a euphoria that happens when you combine it with family and friends, it's also a common way to bond with your co-workers and superiors.

Typically a traditional Korean meal consists of rice and banchan, or seasoned side dishes, but most people I know just eat rice and kimchi. Also, Koreans have a huge affinity for Pho and vietnamese cuisine because it feels familiar.

Writing about samgyupsal has gotten me salivating lol....

    "My mind is telling me no, but my body....my body is telling me YES"

     - R. Kelly

Intermittent Fasting folks tend to espouse avoiding caloric intake for long periods of time every day, but they're fine with black coffee/tea (since it doesn't trigger an insulin response). But here Dr. Panda seems to believe that even coffee would compromise the fasting window: https://youtu.be/iywhaz5z0qs?t=1h15m15s

There goes that 7am cup of coffee...

That wouldn’t be so bad. It really just mirrors the advice our lacrosse coaches have been telling us all along. Don’t snack at night.

I’m not sure that video supports your conclusion that coffee/tea breaks the fast, seems to me it’s more of a maybe.

I personally appreciated the acknowledgement of the microbiome. The idea that simply...we don’t know and don’t understand the interactions of the microbiome. The example given was artificial sweetener that most every Keto/paleo/low carb/IF advocate would say is ok...well no,it’s probably not because even with zero calorie and no insulin response the interaction with the microbiome likely breaks the fast and is an over all negative (unhealthy) interaction.

"Breaks a fast" is meaningless without specifying what we mean by that.

If we mean "breaking fast = you eat something with calories" then yes, but then it's a tautology.

If we mean "insulin response", then there would be other criteria for breaking a fast.

Even traditional religious and cleansing fasts allowed lots of different foods (e.g. plants) and were still considered fasts.

Fast is not some one-size-fits-all word that means "absolutely no calories" during it.

Yes...that is how definitions work. Consuming calories triggers a metabolic response and breaks a fast. That is the generally accepted definition of breaking a fast.

There are types of fasts dry fast, water fast, intermittent fast. But the fast part is consistent and means no calories/no metabolic response.

The idea some religion somewhere ate plants only a called it a fast, doesn’t make it a fast. If I consume nothing but sugar and went around calling it a sugar fast, that doesn’t change the definition of fast. Similarly if you have a diet that doesn’t trigger insulin, that is a Dietary ketosis. If you are fasting you will also enter ketosis but since it’s induced through fasting not diet we call it fasting ketosis.

Actually it does.

It might not make it "a period of no food consumption at all", but it does make it a fast.

It's not the etymology or scholarly definition of words that dictates their meaning, but how they are actually used by the people speaking a language.

The word fast (and it's analogous in different languages) has been in use for centuries/millennia longer than people actually knowing what a "metabolic response" is -- so such a concern couldn't be part of how they used the term unless until very recently.

As Wikipedia puts it: "Fasting is the willing abstinence or reduction from some or all food, drink, or both, for a period of time".

Notice the "some or all food"?

Here's how the fast period is defined for catholics for example:

"For Roman Catholics, fasting, taken as a technical term, is the reduction of one's intake of food to one full meal (which may not contain meat on Ash Wednesday and Fridays throughout Lent) and two small meals (known liturgically as collations, taken in the morning and the evening), both of which together should not equal the large meal. Eating solid food between meals is not permitted. Fasting is required of the faithful between the ages of 18 and 59 on specified days. Complete abstinence of meat for the day is required of those 14 and older. Partial abstinence prescribes that meat be taken only once during the course of the day. Meat is understood not to include fish or cold-blooded animals."

Yes, it absolutely does, and sometimes comes along with abstaining from food entirely for short times. Not only that, but there are usually exceptions for children, the sick, and the elderly. Medical fasting sometimes means "nothing" and sometimes means "clear liquids" or a combination. It all depends on context.

I was raised Eastern Orthodox. Wednesdays and Fridays were supposed to be meat-free days, but fish, eggs, dairy, and oil were fine for most. For 6 weeks before easter, no meat. For a portion of that, you weren't supposed to eat dairy, eggs, or oil either. On Sundays, you were supposed to fast before communion at church - this meant liquids only, no food.

On the other hand, some Muslims fast entirely for a month between sunrise and sunset. No food, no liquids, with exceptions for health, elderly, and children.

Common medical procedures require fasting, but it is different depending on the procedure. Need blood tests? you might be able to have water and black coffee, but other times you wont have coffee. Operation? quit food at a certain time and no liquids at a different time, and the timing varies.

Fasting means different things depending on the context it is used in.

I have been non-fasting and fasting with an even split of 12 hours / 12 hours per day, so this will be an adjustment.

Or you can ignore their advice (others advice otherwise anyway), and still drink coffee as part of your fasting...

It's not like any of this is particularly scientific...

major bummer. I almost entirely rely on caffeine while I'm fasting and it inhibits my appetite.

I was very skinny, but somehow still had fat. Sometimes I bought pants from the women's section or I would take pants to my mom to sew the waist tighter, because I was so thin I couldn't find clothes that fit me (I have some pictures of me wearing my 108lb girlfriend's pants stashed somewhere). I exercised a bit but seeing me without a shirt you could tell I had manboobs and a tiny-lil bit of a potbelly and no abs at all, not even the skinny ones.

At some point I developed fainting on sight of blood. I would brush my teeth, and if I scratched my gum and blood came out -- I had to run to the bed asap before passing out. To this day I don't know if I was just afraid of blood (blood doesn't affect me anymore), or I had gotten so weak I was actually nearing total collapse. Blood tests were surprisingly fine I just had low iron.

Looking at that period back, I 'm trying to see if the advertised benefits applied to me. I didn't get sick much, but I don't get sick in general. Aging... well what can you say to an 18-22 year old about aging. My libido was low which makes sense I guess. Energy, regular levels. I don't know, I was just a very thin dude, fasting or not, no major epiphanies or amazement. I suppose it's amazing that one can survive fine, no suffering, going for so long without food, but it wasn't better than eating.

I am very surprised at how people swear by it. Maybe life is much worse when you eat 3 meals per day? I don't know, nowadays (early 30s) I eat 2 meals and exercise a lot and I 'm pretty content. I think for me, exercise did the trick that elevated both my mood and my energy levels.

Would I do the crazy 5-day 4 year fast again? If I was young and "hungry" sure, but it's definitely miserable. Food can be a great social thing to do with friends, and a cool experience especially when trying new dishes and restaurants. The huge food diversity in SF spoiled me.

Edit: back then I was very ashamed of my fasting and try to hide it from friends etc. A few weeks ago I was shocked when a coworker told me he was doing a 7 day water-only fast. We 've come a long way!

I am not trying to claim that fasting doesn't work, just noting my personal experience. For me it certainly worked in the sense that I saw the fakeness of "if you don't eat for X days you get super hungry or weak/sick/you die", I was perfectly ok.. but not amazing.

That would be great news to the lower 1-2 billions in the developing world.

Even if you have to survive on little money, I don't understand why you would go that long without food and not at least have some ultra cheap foods like rice and beans in your fridge.

""" Fasting of mice for 48 h (which causes ∼20% weight loss) or starvation of human volunteers for up to 4 d (which causes <2% weight loss) """

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28059587

"Emerging findings from studies of animal models and human subjects suggest that intermittent energy restriction periods of as little as 16 h can improve health indicators and counteract disease processes. The mechanisms involve a metabolic shift to fat metabolism and ketone production, and stimulation of adaptive cellular stress responses that prevent and repair molecular damage."

Here is the link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4250148/

Also here are patterns of daily and weekly food consumption from this research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4250148/figure/...

For me, the main side effect is I feel a lot more alert, and I waste less time during the day, as preparing and eating food takes up less of it. You know that sleepy feeling you get after a huge breakfast or lunch that makes you reach for an extra cup of coffee? It is no longer a problem. Hunger pangs were an issue for the first two days I did this, and haven't been since then. Oh yeah, and I also feel REALLY FULL when I've eaten too much. Keeping your gut empty from time to time helps you to self regulate.

I think I won the genetic lottery as far as aging goes, and I exercise and try to not eat too much junk food, but "so far so good."

Intermittent fasting’s benefits for me are primarily the lack of distraction and fluctuations in my blood glucose level. I found that consuming protein or fats in the morning does not affect the latter benefit. It seems to me that it’s more about a diet that’s easy to stick to than dramatically altering one’s metabolism.

Lately, I’ve become more serious about strength training and have given up on it because my caloric needs have skyrocketed (I found myself losing weight at over 3000 calories a day.) and I need to eat frequently to recover.

However, I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who isn’t an athlete, and to the latter I’d still suggest experimenting.

For example let's say you eat dinner at 6-7pm and then goto bed at 11pm. After that you wake up around 7am and then maybe eat breakfast an hour or 2 later.

At this point you've gone from about 7pm to 8am or 9am without eating (~13-14 hours) but it fits pretty well into a schedule.

Wouldn't you have to really go out of your way to deviate from that? Of course you would adjust the numbers based on how late you goto bed and rise in the morning, but the ratios would be about the same -- maybe even more fasting if you sleep longer than 8 hours.

Depends on the country and culture. In these here parts we still go to work at 8am or 9am, but we dine at 10pm or later (going to a restaurant at 11pm is very common, and similarly for eating at home).

That sounds like an unreasonably long day if you have to be in work by 8am but you're still at a restaurant at 11pm.

I'm from the US btw. I happen to do freelance work but most people I know work from about 9am to 5pm where they leave the house around 8:30am and are home by 5:30pm or 6pm at the latest.

Eating breakfast at 8am and dinner at 7pm is normal for them, or sometimes they skip breakfast at home and eat something small at work.

Depends on the job. Office jobs are nominally 9-5 but it's easy for employees to stay until 7pm or so in some places. Retail shops (anything from butchers and grocery places to supermarkets and shoe shops and electronics shops) close at 8-8:30pm (they usually open around 9am or a little later) -- but those have shifts too (e.g. those working there don't stay all day from 9am to 8:30pm, unless they're the owners).

Some places (usually the self-run ones) also close around 2:30/3:00pm and open again at 5:30pm or so.

>That sounds like an unreasonably long day if you have to be in work by 8am but you're still at a restaurant at 11pm.

Not "still at the restaurant at 11pm" - it's first sitting down at the restaurant at 11pm (they'd leave at 12:30 - 1am or so). They I guess you sleep for 6-7 hours or so and wake at 7 or 8.

I don't know if that was just because of caloric deficit or long gaps in between. I have seen the 5-6 evenly spaced out meals in a day work the best for me if I want to maintain/put on muscle mass.

So it's the calories after all. Regardless, if any technique (well, almost any) helps you cut calories without having to 'count' them, then that's still a win!

Whose genes have been altered.

And who show no adherence to a circadian rhythm.

Not exactly relatable, is it?

https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/changes-breakfast-and-dinner-t...

I'm personally better off eating very lightly early in the day and eating a large meal at dinnertime. I feel satisfied being full then and don't miss the food early in the day. When I try to eat a full breakfast or lunch regularly, I'm actually more hungry the rest of the day and still want the full dinner. I'm also a night owl, but I do not know if this is related. This holds true no matter what waking schedule I'm on, however.

I personally eat a very light breakfast (a piece of bread with some cheese, for example), a light snack if I'm hungry during the day, and a full dinner. Only dinner is a warm meal, mostly vegetarian save for fish once a week.

My mother, on the other hand, has done the opposite, She's likely to eat a decent breakfast (instead of a piece of bread with cheese), a lunch, and a light dinner. Her weight loss wasn't as drastic as mine, but she didn't weigh as much either.

The thing is that us humans aren't all wired the same way. Even things like insulin response can vary from human to human. I'm guessing there is a genetic component or something to it, but that is an uneducated guess.

Through an evolution lense we evolved to not be eating huge meals in the middle of the night. When the liver doesn’t have to work on digestion it can better focus on the myriad of other tasks it’s responsible for.

As for mayurasana, I doubt any pharma company is going to drop 500 Gs to perform a double blind random controlled study with >1000 participants , but just try it for a month: http://www.hathayogamysore.com/asanas/mayurasana-the-peacock “”” Benefits of The Peacock (Mayurasana) 1. Because of the pressure on the abdomen,the blood is directed towards the digestive organs.as the intra-abdominal pressure is increased,the abdominal viscera is toned 2. Liver,pancreas,stomach and spleen are invigorated.The nerves and muscles connected with the kidneys and intestines are revitalised. 3. Sluggishness of the liver or hepatic torpidity disappears. “””

It’s dangerous for women because the intense pressure and slight inversion can mess up their menstrual process during the height of it (3day span usually). Sadly no pharma studies are available on this (what company would drop money on studying that !)

And about the woman stuff? I don't buy it. Of course they would drop money on it - at the same rate they drop money on menstral studies, anyway (it isn't as much as some other things, but they do study such things). Part of the menstral process is contributed by muscle cramps and gravity. Lying down in general will sometimes make things slow down, especially on the last day or two. Once the person is upright, the person might simply have a heavier flow those days. Without studies, this sort of advice is simply founded in superstition.

>After a drug is confirmed as safe and efficacious in preclinical studies, it is tested in healthy human volunteers for first in man trials. In 2006, a phase I clinical study was conducted for a CD28 superagonist antibody TGN1412 in six human volunteers. After very first infusion of a dose 500 times smaller than that found safe in animal studies, all six human volunteers faced life-threatening conditions involving multiorgan failure for which they were moved to intensive care unit

Source[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvJHq2FJPDM

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964774/

These time restricted feeding studies have been done in humans with effects in the same direction.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S155041311...

It’s the reverse that’s then useful. If you can find an animal model that replicates a known human result then you can investigate the mechanics more easily. Ex: Scurvy

This one seems a little more legitimate and a target for further research.

Animal models are a start, but you shouldn't use them to give definitive advice or conclusions. The headline is " Eating in 10-hour window can override disease-causing genetic defects" and it is a deception. You are not a mouse, health advice for mice and health advice for humans surely overlaps but there are certainly very many differences.

You solve this by doing a human study. It is a lot harder.

Then again they have a few other tricks up in their sleeves: they eat lots of quality plants grown in their island, they have minimal work related stress (or, for that matter, minimal work in general), leave close to calming nature (including sea), have good community ties, and are legendary for not giving a fuck...