It's always strange to me how certain studies seem to gain so many upvotes on hackernews....a few thoughts:
1. This is a single study published in 2015, what does the wider literature say? Any dieticians or clinicians recommending anything from this?
2. The journal is EBioMedicine, which is not nothing but not exactly pre-eminent either.
3. This seems like just a common sense conclusion: "In Cox proportional hazard models, inflammation predicted all-cause mortality". So...people who die have inflammation? Wouldn't that be expected that people who are dieing are likely experiencing significant inflammation of at least one organ of their body?
4. In short, the conclusion of this paper seems like essentially "people who are dying are likely to die". Am I missing something here?
Certain studies gain so many upvotes on HN because they generate interesting discussion, and may be worth storing in our favorites for sharing and/or future reference.
I almost always upvote articles when there is interesting discussion (or the potential for interesting discussion) related to the article. I very rarely (but do sometimes) upvote articles solely based on the content of the articles themselves.
Or rather, I’m much more interested in a collection of people’s thoughts vs. a single person’s thoughts.
On the other hand, isn't it a peer-reviewed journal? If we have to do the legwork of going around asking what other clinicians think of it, it has failed at its mission as a peer-reviewed journal.
>it has failed at its mission as a peer-reviewed journal
Peer-reviewed just means:
(a) a bunch of guys had a cursory look at the research, which they might or might not be able to follow (even basic math), and left some hasty criticism on low hanging fruits (or the personal pet peeves they always mention) to pretend they thoroughly read it, and accepted it
(b) Some scholar friends accepted this as a favor to other academic friends, who will backrub them when they submit their own research, and help each other pad their paper counts
And meta-analysis means:
(c) Let's take 80 crap papers, study them as if they're relevant, and get some statistical takeways...
Peer review only is the initial smell test, and don’t mean it’s actually true. Fraud for example can often pass peer review just fine. That said, it does catch errors and rejects a lot of junk which is why it’s considered important.
I run across peer reviewed garbage on nih.gov all the time. I report them and quite rarely they are taken down. Others put more effort into this than me. They will publish nonsensical papers to expose the vulnerabilities. I am too lazy for that.
It looks like it is actually a meta-analysis: A study of several other studies, which has good points and pitfalls.
we combined community-based prospective cohorts: Tokyo Oldest Old Survey on Total Health (TOOTH), Tokyo Centenarians Study (TCS) and Japanese Semi-Supercentenarians Study (JSS) comprising 1554 individuals including 684 centenarians and (semi-)supercentenarians, 167 pairs of centenarian offspring and spouses, and 536 community-living very old (85 to 99 years).
One of the good points is that it tends to include data from a great many more people than most studies can include. One of the pitfalls is that it is challenging to combine data from multiple studies because they probably used different methodologies, were measuring different things, etc and this puts a lot of noise in the data and cleaning the data to get something useful and meaningful can be quite hard.
Meta studies can be a case of "garbage in, garbage out." But when they are done well, they can roll up a whole lot of information together to draw conclusions we simply don't have the resources to meaningfully study some other way.
What’s wrong with fasting, isn’t it likely to increase life expectancy. I certainly feel better from this attempt at Ramadan (not religious just interested to try it as flat mate is Syrian). What evidence do you have that fasting -> less inflammation -> better ageing is wrong?
> What evidence do you have that fasting -> less inflammation -> better ageing is wrong?
It’s wrong to frame the question as you did. The evidence should be provided to prove something, not disprove it. Is there enough evidence that fasting ultimately leads to better aging? If so, for which groups of people? Is there any underlying condition that negates the effect? That’s how science work, not the other way around.
>Is there enough evidence that fasting ultimately leads to better aging?
There never is any evidence than anything leads to better aging because longevity studies are notoriously expensive, hard to do, and prone to be inconclusive. like those diet studies that pinhole certain foods like chili peppers which supposedly reduce vascular disease.
"eating chili pepper has an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer and blood-glucose regulating effect"
Similar things have been said for fasting. But just like people who eat chili peppers in these studies, they differ from the normal population, most likely in more ways than just consuming chili peppers. even though there is significant consensus, like this article also affirms, that reducing inflammation might help you live longer.
You could test the theory more conclusively if you had 100.000 people participating in fasting over entire generations but you'd also have to account for changes in their diet as response to such insane study. I bet everyone would think longer and harder over shoving high-sugar foods in their mouths after explicitly consuming nothing for a period of time.
I guess we will see who is right once the studies are done. There is definitely proof that fasting reduces inflammation, if reducing inflammation helps with ageing is being worked on by people like David Sinclair at Harvard and others.
Fasting is good when following recommendations. But people in West are very ignorant about the practice still. It's natural to be sceptical about foreign practices, until they become medicine.
All the things I've listened to regarding health an longevity have a recurring theme - inflammation happens a lot in modern life - and it decreases your lifespan.
I think type 2 diabetes is basically an inflammatory disease. More and more people are "pre-diabetes", which is basically lifestyle moving them towards type 2 diabetes.
You really don't want a section of a nerve to be inflamed because the body is attacking the coating, for example. You do, however, want the skin surrounding the scratch on your leg to have some inflammation to help close the cut.
None of this means you should regularly take an anti-inflammatory drug nor does it mean that an "anti-inflammatory" diet or other preventative measures will help, either. I view some of this as the latest pseudo-science, at least in the hands of most folks.
This is slightly incorrect, because inflammation is not only triggered by "diseases". Inflammation indeed hurts the body. Some of the weapons it deploys, for example Neutrophil extracellular traps (basically, playing Spider Man with webs of DNA) make subsequent cadiovascular disease more likely. Others are just generally bad for the body or uncomfortable (fever, ratches, ulcers).
Chronic systemic inflammation is known to play a role in the development and progression of coronary heart disease and diabetes, and accelerate the transformation of the immune system into an aged state, which makes it more likely to develop immune system disregulations such as autoimmune diseases, and to cause cytokine storms when exposed to agents such a N1H1, Epstein-Barr or Covid.
The immune system consists of many moving parts coordinating each other via the exchange of signalling molecules, which results in a large distributed system with lots of unintuitive emergent behaviors. We are only just starting to understand what effects our everyday behavior has on the immune system, and what happens to it when we age.
Please define "unhealthy". This is a higly ambiguous term, and its definition differs a lot between cultures and across time, therefore it is far from obvious what living an unhealthy lifestyle means.
Most people talk food when inflammation is mentioned. But let's not forget, arguably, an even bigger contributor: stress - mental or physical, say via a chronic illness.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV), a relatively new feature in wearables with optical heart rate monitors, is a good proxy for stress. Some years ago, IBM did a study that found that HRV in newborns served as an early warning system of illness. Athletes have long used this measure to determine when off days are needed.
That might also be something less dramatic. After a year of mostly staying at home, I had the same feeling, but in the end I think it was mostly stank from some of the more extreme diets I had in recent times. Now that the weather allows for full days of ventilation again (combined with baking soda) that smell was pretty quickly gone.
There is nothing wrong with hair loss, it is perfectly natural, even when young and it doesn't mean you are getting old, not even a little bit, it even can look good, OK?
I never said it’s not natural or that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s known to be associated with stress so barring other known factors, if you suddenly start losing your hair then stress could be a cause. In contrast to long term loss, short term loss from stress tends to be reversible if it’s caught early enough.
I skimmed through that review and it mostly references mice and rats, as well as cell models. There is a huge difference between that and “in most people”. In fact, you’d need a lot studies in actual people(not cell models) of different ages and and conditions to say it works.
Inflammation is a basic life process, not a reaction to the food you eat. Inflammation plays an active part in wound-healing. Teething in infants has an inflammatory component. Systemic inflammation is ubiquitous during and following parturition in mammals. There is inflammation everywhere, it's as generic a word as "oxidation" and "metabolism."
"Inflammation is a basic life process, not a reaction to the food you eat. Inflammation plays an active part in wound-healing. Teething in infants has an inflammatory component. Systemic inflammation is ubiquitous during and following parturition in mammals. There is inflammation everywhere, it's as generic a word as "oxidation" and "metabolism.""
Everything you have said is true.
What I think you are missing is that there is both a per-calorie inflammation cost for all food inputs and a minimum inflammatory startup cost just to metabolize at all.
More simply: 1000 calories spread across two meals will generate more inflammation than 1000 calories in a single meal.
There are two analogies that I think are useful when thinking about this:
First, introducing food inputs appears to be an interrupt for most other bodily activities - even very essential ones like sleep and reproduction, etc. You might consider how many hours each day your body spends not digesting. It doesn't take much to increase that by 50% or more...
Second, electric motors like pumps and fans have failures ("deaths") that are much more accurately predicted by number of start-stop cycles than by the number of hours run. Startup is expensive for these devices and I suspect that startup is expensive for our food metabolism as well.
Yes, also we know cell machinery operates in a different mode when the body is without fuel, it’s moves in a repair/conserve mode that includes preferential autophagy of damaged cells. It makes sense, eating used to be extremely dangerous so the body mounts an immune response including inflammation every time.
We've made strong progress in food security in the last 100-200 years, not sure about before that. I suspect hunter/gatherers had it actually better than farmers. What time spans are you talking about?
I would assume (from ignorance) than knowledge about food security is older than us as a species. And by food security I mean "don't eat plant A", or "don't eat plant B raw, put it first on the fire or it will make you sick" etc.
I’m not even talking about the food, more the bacteria from the environment on the food, in some places still today even the water isn’t safe to drink. You can easily have food in a developing country that makes you sick. These simply aren’t past problems and it makes sense the body mounts defences just in case!
That's like saying cell division is a basic life process and nothing can stop this process from going haywire, but what about cancer. It is widely believed that inflammation levels spike for certain foods and the overall effect on the body is not optimal to say the least.
Ok, this is dumb, I meant to say there is connection between insulin and inflammatory processes (hence it is definitely connected to metabolism), insulin itself has anti-inflammatory effect, but insulin resistance and chronic inflammation are also linked. And I managed to say something completely opposite. Sorry.
First, if this is as well documented as you say then you should provide such documentation as you seem to think it should be at the finger tips of others.
Second, your comment doesn't actually counter the main point of what you are responding to. The point is that what "inflammation" means is too general. Even if it is true that you enter a "heightened inflammation" state when eating, that doesn't discredit the idea that inflammation as a category is being overloaded.
Same here. It's the closest thing to an actual wonder drug i have ever come across.
My skin clears up, brainfog disappears, the white in my eyes get brighter, etc.
After reading a bit i have come to the same conclusion - if your diet is already extremely clean / bland, maybe you won't get the same effect, but for most people that eats lots of different foods, processed stuff, fast food, alcohol, harsh additives, fried/burned food etc. on occasion then i think you really need to give yourself a break at least once a month. For a minimum of 48 hours.
Come on, don't use the word clean with regards to diet. It's a bs and meaningless word that specifies nothing. Is it no sugar, no salt, no meat, no gc organisms, no alcohol no processed, low carb, high carb? Clean is a word that suggests Instagram influencers. Clean does not mean bland or not bland, whole foods or not. It's a meaningless word like good, healthy, natural.
That's definately not true, also what's up with the hostile tone?
"Clean" is pretty well understood as what's left after you finish an elimination diet.
As i just described it can be different for different people but in general, super high fat, super high carbohydrate, meals that are too large or too frequent, too much alcohol, lots of additives, lots of candy or cake, too many heavy metals from fish, too much fried food, too much low quality processed foods including cheap oils that has gone semi rancid, corn syrup, various carcinogens are all agreed upon across various a large spectrum of diets from Vegan to Paleo including nutrition research.
It probably also depends on ones own gut flora.
Pausing eating or just eating a pretty bland diet without above "luxuries" and you definitely get less of these things, that's partly why fasting works for a lot of people.
I mean, they did qualify it in the same sentence with "different foods, processed stuff, fast food, alcohol, harsh additives, fried/burned food etc. on occasion".
Although I don't know any diet that would be "clean" compared with a water fast...
> It's a bs and meaningless word that specifies nothing
It's neither bs nor meaningless. It intuitively describes a good diet if you have a basic knowledge of food and diet. It basically means "what is good for you". What would you describe as "clean", deep fried butter or broccoli sprouts? See how it's intuitive?
"what is good for you" is a completely tautological way of defining "a good diet". How can you say you are not just reinforcing your own presuppositions?
The only intuitive difference I see in those scenarios is that one has less calories and less fat (which are obviously both essential components of any diet).
what does clean mean to you then? Everything we consume has been modified from the original. Apples, wheat, tomatoes, corn - everything we eat has been significantly modified from what it was 10,000 years ago. Early farmers modified potatoes and everything else to grow more calories by genetic manipulation - like planting the ones that grow faster or bigger. Nothing and I mean nothing is like it was before mankind started eating it. We put selective breeding pressure on cows by breeding the ones we grow. I can make up a definition of clean but everyone has a sense of it themselves. Whole foods that are not significantly modified seems reasonable. But modified from what?
Asking somebody to clarify what they mean who is using a vague phrase is useful.
Telling them to stop using a phrase that you personally don’t understand is not useful.
Think of it this way, there may not be a nailed down definition of “clean” or healthy” eating. However, it gets you in a “range of uncertainty”
Is McDonalds clean? No.
Is Pizza clean? Nope.
Is brown rice clean? Maybe.
I should ask what they mean by their usage of clean.
Have I made my point a little bitter? I view usage of vague terms like that not as useless, but as “gets you close to the target without getting lost in the weeds.”
Yes, exactly how long probably depends on a lot of factors, but the benefits really starts for me after 30+ hours.
Drinking water with potassium + magnesium + salt also helps a lot, to replenish electrolytes, but some people can manage without. Some people can continue workouts, others continue for 7+ days. It's all about experimentation.
Atm. i start each week fasting and just fast for as long as it feels ok. Often 1-3 days.
I would recommend 2 fasts per month 36-48 hours, and with electrolyte water for newcomers.
Off course starting weight, activity level etc. is also important factors, i'm personally trying to lose some "corona weight" atm.
I really appreciate some of the detailed comments here, but I will caution people that if you have a serious medical condition you may find fasting is a lot harder on you than the above suggests it will be.
If it benefits you, it may get easier over time. I have a serious medical condition. I used to routinely throw up when I was even just underfed for one day.
It now takes longer than one day for me to start having strong reactions. Fasting and semi-fasting have been beneficial for my condition, but it was amazingly hard on me for a really long time and is still not easy.
I tend to semi-fast for somewhere between one and two days (often around 36 hours) most months. I've done longer -- up to a week -- but two per month for a newcomer sounds like a lot to me and I assume that's because of how hard it is on me.
If I could make it past the first 24 hours of fasting I could probably go further, but I get really bad headaches when fasting and usually give up somewhere close to 24 hours. I hear that if I were to push through for a few more hours that the headache would clear up, but haven't been able to do that yet.
The headaches could be due to electrolyte imbalance. Are you taking 4g potassium-citrate and 300mg magnesium-citrate a day when you fast? If not that could solve your headaches.
This doesn't tell us anything, and drinking water alone isn't enough. How much and how often did you drink water, and consume salt or rehydration salts. The latter is just as important as the former in keeping your body functioning. If you experience significant salt loss, you will get a headache as your body tries to maintain homeostasis. This is exactly one of the reasons for the headache part of a hangover, and if you adequately replenish your water and electrolytes, you will be vastly less likely to get one.
Sjogrens sounds horrendous! I’m glad you found some way to managing the symptoms, even if quite extreme. Has it been well managed since a return to a more normal diet, have you considered OMAD instead?
In general The longer I can hold off eating the better I do during the day.
At least until I collapse.
If I have regular food I feel flushed and feverish. Often triggering migraines. Basically my ability to function is near zero.
Non trigger foods, ie. sweet potatoes allow me to avoid such problems.
As to well managed.
No, not really.
I was physically doing much better when taking proper meds, (plaqunial)
Not the first time I read about sweet potatoes on HN. Could you describe a little more on that front, eg what was your breakfast/lunch/dinner like during that month?
Sure it could. You can't just isolate some portion of a highly complex system and claim that the isolated portion will be beneficial in any similar system.
Just for an extreme example to make the point - say some diet included a poisonous component as well as the antidote. Those eating the diet may well be just fine. However if somebody else simply looked at the poisonous part and copied only that, they would not do so well.
I'm not saying sweet potatoes are bad. And I'm sure this was a somewhat flippant statement, but this is the kind of thinking we're very prone to and I think it's important to recognize when it actually tries to lead us down the wrong path.
It was a flippant statement, but it’s still more right than your righteous reply.
I have experience here, literally with isolation diets for immune issues on starches, common for immunologists to run, see AIP which can start extreme down to one thing. I had a friend who had to do a super intense version, luckily, mine was quick.
There’s no problem with flippant statements, just bad faith replies that try and pick fights over nothing.
Also didn’t claim benefit. It’s potato. If there were some significant problem we’d have known by now.
I was specifically taking umbrage with the reasoning provided - X does a lot of Y in their complex thing and gets good results, so lots of Y can't be bad - and tried to be clear about that.
> claim that the isolated portion will be beneficial
> gets good results
You claim I said it’s “good”, but I said “can’t be bad” in relation to a short term allergy diet. Your super pedantic bone you picked is based on exaggerating what I said twice and generalizing it out of context, which is funny coming from a pedant.
Not the OP, but I'm going to guess that it's because sweet potatoes have pretty high nutritional content such that you can survive by only eating them for some time without developing deficiencies.
It’s because it was literally the only food I knew that didn’t bother me.
Look at AIP diet for a better plan. But this was something I could follow when I was barely able to get out of bed.
Ramadan is not really about fasting in the way science is studying it. During Ramadan people really eat a lot when it is allowed. It may be considered intermittent fasting...
My experience with a 3 day fast was that for the first day it was no problem. I can generally ignore hunger pretty easily. But days 2 and 3 were just a brutal lack of energy. I have never felt so depleted as when I was finishing my 3-day fast. Other than that, I didn't really experience any positive benefits.
I cut antidepressant but I know how brain chemistry feels now. While I was doing the "one meal a day thing", whenever I felt hunger, a few minutes after my brain felt a bit like when I used pills. It's a very shallow anecdata but I can't help but to think about importance of the gut-brain axis.
Fasting also has a significant impact on the immune system, causing it to downregulate certain immune cells and responses, and to upregulate others.
The results you feel might not be from the lack of inflammation from food, but from a change in immune responses, some of which can reduce inflammation and other bad feelings.
What's more, it seems that it is possible to reset the epigenetic of cells to their youthful state and reverse actual the biological age of those cells. They don't just "measure younger", they function as they did when they were younger.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4
I don't understand what people mean by statements like this. Per the Wiki page, they found something that on average is highly correlated to chronological age.
But in individual cases, it may be off a little or a lot. What tells you this is meaningful information and not random noise? What is the reference point for the "real" age that is not chronological age?
interesting, what are your thoughts on modifying our epigenetics via crisper to pulse Yamanaka factors? also what ever happened to that CEO who gave her immune system a boost with stem cells?
I found this interview very germane to the subject of extra inflammation from the diet and the newly discovered cellular mechanisms for turning it off. Some of the latest research from a few years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXm28_2ctpU
"23 Years in the Zone: Journalist and Author Gary Taubes Interviews Dr. Barry Sears"
I'm just a regular programmer. I think if the NSA wanted to figure out who any of us are they can hack into hacker news and find out what IP address we have and look at our contact info and find me easily. Make sure you're using tor or something.
It is rapidly becoming clear that inflammation drives many processes of disease and ageing. Many people are turning to anti-inflammatory diets rich in fruits like blueberries, fish with Omega Acids and turmeric. For example, there are many yoga practitioners in India who have extreme old age and great health that people worldwide can all benefit from listening to, like Baba Ramdev.
If there's one thing that has become apparent during COVID, it's that there is great reason to be skeptical of "official government guidelines" of in situations like COVID (acutely emerging and constantly changing scenario.)
They simply can't process information fast enough to make well informed statements.
Now I don't have an opinion on ayurvedic medicine and it's legitimacy but something being "banned by the government" alone means nothing today.
Not necessarily. You just need to be aware of personal boundaries and how deep you are willing to go into it. At some point, a tradition need people to develop and keeping it alive vs benefits of participating in it. Awareness that no relationship last, is key.
If you get injured, the inflammation around the wound is signaling your body to bring white blood cells to that location.
Unless you have some sort of imbalance in your body, like a genetic issue, it's usually better to target controlling the source of the inflammation rather than the inflammation itself.
Inflammation can be more mental than physical in many cases, as your body is going to react to your environment and the way you perceive it and raise and lower your cortisol levels accordingly.
This likely doesn't answer your question fully, but just some items to consider.
1. This is a single study published in 2015, what does the wider literature say? Any dieticians or clinicians recommending anything from this?
2. The journal is EBioMedicine, which is not nothing but not exactly pre-eminent either.
3. This seems like just a common sense conclusion: "In Cox proportional hazard models, inflammation predicted all-cause mortality". So...people who die have inflammation? Wouldn't that be expected that people who are dieing are likely experiencing significant inflammation of at least one organ of their body?
4. In short, the conclusion of this paper seems like essentially "people who are dying are likely to die". Am I missing something here?