Over the past few days, I’ve mostly stuck to a low-carbohydrate diet. I've had protein bread and peanut butter for breakfast, lots of nuts during the day and a vaguely keto dinner at night. I've gone without chocolate, sweets or ice cream, and I’ve dropped the sugar that used to sweeten my espresso after lunch. It’s been a strange experience.
After reading about fasting and vitamin C (and also watching the Arte documentary that my friend had in mind when he recommended fasting late last year), the thing that remained was finding out about the fasting mimicking diet that was shown to act synergistically with vitamin C. It’s not that fasting is an unbearable burden, but if the same end can be achieved with less drastic means, I’d probably go for it.
I had great hopes in the read, but A periodic diet that mimics fasting promotes multi-system regeneration, enhanced cognitive performance, and healthspan is a dubious paper, to say the very least. There are some fasting yeast, old mice that might live longer and navigate a maze slightly better than their well-fed companions, and a small number of humans that might have been fasting. Their blood sugar and insulin levels indicate so. The consequences are unclear. There is no data.
The paper would be only half as pointless if it managed to explain the diet that mimics fasting (and made it into the title of the paper). It doesn’t. It’s not just short of detail, it’s free of any useful information. Empty waffle, such as plant-based, calorie-restricted, low sugar, low protein, and high-fat, is presented as if it were informaion. What does any of this mean? Where are the numbers? Where are the recipes or at least meal plans? What did the volunteers who were not quite fasting do?
There are some numbers. During fasting cycles, the volunteers restricted their caloric intake by between 46% and 66%. Their diet was around 10% proteins, 50% fat and 40% carbohydrates. That seems like an awful lot of carbohydrates. And how do you get 50% from plants? An avocado is 60% fat, but how many can you really eat over a three day period? What did the volunteers eat?
The paper mentions “proprietary vegetable-based soups, energy bars, energy drinks, chip snacks, chamomile flower tea, and a vegetable supplement formula tablet”. What is a chip snack? Where do the vegetable supplement formula tablets come from? Chamomile flower tea? Are these guys just taking the piss? It seems they are. They refer to Table S4 as if it meant something, while all it contains are the same meaningless numbers that were already mentioned in the text.
Do you need a table for this?
How you get something with such shitty methods published is beyond me. Who reviewed this paper? It’s effectively impossible to replicate the experiments. It’s as if I reported a crystal structure and wrote that the protein was crystallized in chemicals. The authors dare to write that “the components and levels of micro- and macro-nutrients in the human FMD were selected based on their ability to reduce IGF-1”, but are silent on what these levels or indeed the nutrients are. This is not science, it’s bogus. And what are “proprietary vegetable-based soups”? Where do they come from? Does Fasting mimicking diet® have its own webstore? Is this a scam?
It’s hard to tell. Valter Longo, the senior author of this paper and many others on the beneficial effects of fasting, including the most recent connection to vitamin C, has written a book about what he calls the Longevity diet and put together a website to promote it. You can even find some recipes there. They don’t look particularly special, though. How is eating these meals like fasting? What has been removed from a normal diet besides a few calories?
This fiasco with FMD made me question what I’m doing. I will for sure stick to my rigorous fasting regime where I understand the biochemical reasons for its beneficial effects. On Monday, I’m starting another 80 hours. But I have given up on the low-carbohydrate diet. It made me feel sluggish and weak, almost as if I were still fasting. If you can mimic fasting on 40% of carbohydrates, I shouldn’t deprive myself of them when I’m refeeding. Apart from the sugar, I’m now back to normal with my diet, and I feel much better already.
0 comments:
Post a Comment