Mice fed a time-restricted, high-fat diet show reduced metabolic disease (2012)

I&#x27;m getting some mileage from this.<p>Never been a morning person - assumed blood sugar must be low.<p>Did the glucose testing strip thing - found that was completely wrong!<p>Now cut carbohydrate intake until after daily brisk swim around 15:00.<p>Suddenly I&#x27;ve shed eight pounds and brain fog problem is much improved.<p>Hypothesis: problem was impaired blood flow to the brain not low blood sugar.

This almost answers a question I&#x27;ve often wondered.<p>Whenever I see research on calorie restriction, I wonder whether it&#x27;s directly caused by eating fewer calories, or indirectly caused by eating fewer bad things. For example, methionine, an essential amino acid, is linked to cancer growth. In other words, maybe we don&#x27;t need to eat less calories, but less of specific nutrients.<p>Anyways, this study seems focused on metabolic diseases and doesn&#x27;t touch on cancer or longevity in general. So, if anyone has any thoughts, I&#x27;d like to know. It&#x27;s been bugging me for a while.

I know that mice have been used very successfully to study many diseases and conditions that can also affect people. But are mice a good human analogue when it comes to diet?<p>I don&#x27;t have time to find citations at the moment, but I seem to recall that the original studies linking consumption of saturated fat with...bad things (high cholesterol, etc.) were originally done with mice and more recent studies involving actual humans have failed to find a connection between consumption of saturated fat and the aforementioned bad things.

I don&#x27;t know if they specifically apply to this study, but Stephan Guyenet has pointed out some of the potential problems with what are typically called &quot;high-fat&quot; diets for mice.*<p>For example one research diet that is called high-fat, D12492 - is extremely high in fat (60%) - does not contain what are generally considered to be particularly healthy forms of fat - is extremely processed overall - is typically used with genetically obesogenic mice - typically causes obsesity and neuron damage (and often diabetes) at a young age.<p>I would think there are quite a few studies on Intermittent Fasting (IF) that more easily generalize to humans.<p>* <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wholehealthsource.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;high-fat-diets-obesity-and-brain-damage.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wholehealthsource.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;high-fat-diets...</a><p>ADDENDUM: Here is the diet used in the actual study. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.labdiet.com&#x2F;cs&#x2F;groups&#x2F;lolweb&#x2F;@labdiet&#x2F;documents&#x2F;web_content&#x2F;mdrf&#x2F;mdi4&#x2F;~edisp&#x2F;ducm04_028003.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.labdiet.com&#x2F;cs&#x2F;groups&#x2F;lolweb&#x2F;@labdiet&#x2F;documents&#x2F;w...</a> Some of the top ingredients are soy products (which in high enough doses will render most animal species infertile).

There&#x27;s a theory called the protein leverage hypothesis: as the percentage of food protein decreases, hunger is increased to the point that you eat more calories of food that have a higher fat % + carbohydrates %, to compensate for the need to accumulate the remainder of your daily protein. This tweet explains it w&#x2F; a graphic from a study: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tednaiman&#x2F;status&#x2F;868597859037216768" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tednaiman&#x2F;status&#x2F;868597859037216768</a>

Intermittent fasting has been quite popular in the fitness and lifestyle worlds in the last years. I myself have been practicing it for more than a year now. A good point to start (which I used myself) is this article from James Clear: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesclear.com&#x2F;the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesclear.com&#x2F;the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fa...</a>

Read The Obesity Code by Jason Fung. A real doctor using real medical studies but with a different view to explain in common language why diets fail and why old practices work.

From personal experience (IANAD), cutting carbs to below 50g&#x2F;day has greatly improved my life. This &quot;diet&quot; naturally leads to increased fat and protein intake, and for me resulted in weight loss, better concentration and reduction of inflammation (mild psoriasis improvement).<p>Also, I recently got a pack of (urine) testing sticks which confirm a high level of ketones, and plan to experiment with increasing the daily carb limit.

What&#x27;s depressing about all of this is that it&#x27;s not really that interesting.<p><i>We know</i> that exercise and activity improve all metabolic measures, increase happiness, longevity and outputs.<p>But very few people pursue that strategy. You can barely get post-injury patients to do their rehab exercises.<p>Similarly, we seem to have very good evidence of the benefits of fasting&#x2F;restriction&#x2F;etc. <i>in addition to</i> the very good historical evidence of these behaviors being so well preserved by culture and religion, across the world.<p>But people aren&#x27;t going to do it. It&#x27;s not going to change anything for (almost everyone).

Humanity is going to argue over what is the best diet (regular not reducing) until the end of time.

&quot;In order to adapt to the daily cycles of nutrient availability, energy metabolism in animals has evolved to be cyclical.&quot;<p>That sentence makes claims about history and about causality. I wonder if they really have the evidence needed to back them up.

You can probably use mice to validate and invalidate any diet.

Jesus, the debate is long over. All that are left are people who can&#x27;t seem to reset their brains to realize the food pyramid was wrong all along.<p>This is like some slow moving comedic parade of ignorance or something. Do your research people and move on, the debate is over, fat doesn&#x27;t make you fat and all the truly controlled scientific studies show the way forward.<p>It&#x27;s been painful over the years watching the big brains here snail their way slowly slowly slowly crawling towards what is long proven reality on the subject.

I suspect a lot of HN probably listens to Sam Harris&#x27; podcast, but just in case ... there was a relevant episode last month where he and Gary Taubes discuss the whole &quot;good calories vs bad calories&quot; idea and popular fat&#x2F;protein misunderstandings over the last few decades.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.samharris.org&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;item&#x2F;what-should-we-eat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.samharris.org&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;item&#x2F;what-should-we-eat</a>

This is from 2012