RH Clark

I never claimed Huberman was a fasting expert. I presented the video because he reviews several peer reviewed studies much more controlled and IMHO accurate than the garbage subject study.

MoAlpha

Post some links and we'll get into those studies. I already know none of them has 20,000 participants or a follow-up period of 8-17 years, and none of them is a prospective human trial of intermittent fasting with long-term clinical outcomes.

When and if this one comes out a form where we can see what they actually did in terms of sampling and statistics, we can critique it too.

john m flores 

Very good point.

There used to be a wall between editorial and advertising to make sure that content was not influence by advertising. I know a guy that worked at BusinessWeek many moons ago for an editor that would chase ad sales reps out of the editorial offices. This editor would even frown upon relationships between editorial staff and ad sales staff.

Dr. Huberman may be very bright and very well intentioned but if he does not have that kind of separation between his content and his sponsors/advertising, I'd keep that in mind when listening to him.

MinnMan

I guess the same could be said for nearly all studies linking diet to long-term health outcomes. How many servings of salmon do you have each week? Do you follow the Mediterranean diet? As PeteHski notes, few of us follow consistent dietary patterns sustained over decades. Possibly this wasn't so much of a problem in the past, where people's diets were well correlated with how they lived and their social class, but the more cosmopolitan we become, the more our diets shift with changes in offerings, with changes in our personal choices and lifestyle as we age, etc.

RH Clark

What's your take from the study? Are you convinced that only eating for 8 hours a day increases risk of heart attack by 91%? Who funded the study? The processed food industry to convince you to eat 24 hours a day? This particular study is ridiculous. How can any correlation be attained without even knowing what foods were consumed during the feeding window?

Why is it that the time period they ate in caused heart disease, rather than the food they ate in that time period? Increased by 91% compared to what group, the general population? Possibly the average population had a healthier diet than this group. Too many questions unanswered for this study to have any value beyond click bate considering how popular IM fasting is becoming.

MoAlpha

It's not just what, but how much people eat. Most of what we know comes from industrial societies where almost everyone is in positive energy balance. This factor is a huge risk in itself and it undoubtedly determines with how people metabolize macronutrients to a large extent. I suspect, for instance, that sugars aren't nearly as toxic in people who aren't in energy overload.

RH Clark

I don't know exactly what you mean by energy overload. It is also possible that sugars aren't harmful unless they are habitually consumed, sort of like how a couple alcoholic drinks a week probably won't damage your liver but drinking all day every day will.

MinnMan

I'm repeating myself, but all such studies have *limited* value, and going directly to "no value beyond clickbait" heads us to a situation in which all epidemiological work becomes the subject of partisan rancor, rather than an incremental step towards better understanding. To be frank, I don't want to live in the world you are encouraging, whether you know it or not.

MinnMan

He means that people are gaining weight.

Carbonfiberboy 

I found the PDF of this article here:
https://sa1s3.patientpop.com/assets/docs/151222.pdf

I might mention that the fastest rider of about my age whom I knew took long vacations in India. There, it is a norm to fast one day a week. Back here and back to riding, he tried to continue that practice, but quickly found that he simply couldn't go like he used to, even though he was back to his usual riding and dietary practices the other 6 days. I advised him to quit the fasting, he did, and bam he was back. That seemed to me to be quite an outsized effect for a seemingly minor intervention. I know, not the 18/6 IF, but still . . .

goose70

I call dibs on your bike collection.

RChung

Yep. At least in my field, posters are often not so much for answering a question as for raising one; in those cases, a good goal is to get others to work on the same question and to see if they can replicate.

Have you looked at the poster? The intriguing thing is the trend in both all-cause and CV mortality risk ratios with narrower TRE.

MoAlpha

Haven't seen the actual poster. I'll look for it.

Yeah, the trend is present in the whole group and the subsamples, and in the whole group there might even be a dose effect of narrowness of time window for all-cause mortality. Go know, as they say.

I'm still not seeing the reference mortality rates.

fishboat

Like most fad diets..they're a trendy 8x10 glossy (with no lack of acolytes) ..until they aren't. It's an opportunity for some to cash in while they wait for the next shiny object to come along.

MinnMan

(sigh). Really? Show us an example of somebody marketing a product or a service based on promoting IF.

It's not like, say, a low carb diet, which allows people to market or promote food products marked "lo carb!".

IMHO, generic cynicism is intellectually lazy and inherently biased towards preventing us from learning anything new.

RChung

Yeah, they didn't provide them -- you can calc the raw ratios but not the rates -- but these are proportional hazard models and the amazing feature of them is that you don't need to know the underlying rates in order to get the relative risk ratios. David Cox was a pretty smart guy. He passed a year or so ago, just short of his 100th birthday. Probably didn't do IF.

MoAlpha

Please don't make me find any more!

RChung

Damn. Well, I'm convinced.

MinnMan

OK, point made. I admit that probably every corner of the nutrition world has grifters attached. Whether or not the practice is valid.

Still doesn't mean that that's the origin, justification, or efficacy of the practice.

john m flores 

Be careful what you wish for. They're mostly half-completed project bikes.

MoAlpha

So time to occurrence, rather than number of occurrence over time? Is that what they did here?

fishboat

sigh..
I spent my life in research and have been awarded many patents. I'm old enough to recognize steak...and sizzle. If you think good money hasn't been made in/off of IF you haven't looked hard enough. I remember the "juice fasting" fad of 45 years ago..junk science...and the beat rolls on..

You have your opinion, I have mine
bye

MinnMan

Excellent. What's an example in the world of nutrition science of something you recognize as steak?

RChung

Close. Ordered rank to occurrence (in this case, to death). Proportional hazards is, um, proportional, and Cox realized that proportionality is a strong enough restriction that you can get the risk ratios even without needing the underlying absolute risk. I *think* I might be one of the few professors who forces students to sit through a lecture where I do a proportional hazards estimation with two covariates on the blackboard by hand. Like most survival analysis techniques, it handles censored observations pretty well.

MoAlpha