[arcticbull]

There's a solid argument to be made that when you eat, and how often you eat, is more important than what you eat.

Specifically, the thesis is that if you eat constantly, you constantly have a high level of insulin, which your body becomes used to, and then has to produce more to actively control your blood sugar. Insulin resistance is a runaway positive feedback process.

Insulin is particularly challenging because it actively causes sugar from your blood to be converted to fats and stored in your adipose tissue -- and blocks the release of fats from your adipose tissue. Eating frequently actively inhibits your ability to lose weight.

By creating long gaps between meals, your body re-establishes what baseline level of insulin should be. Studies are starting to bear this out, more are needed. I can dig up some more papers if you like, but this is a good place to start [1].

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S155041311...

[conistonwater]

I got into it when I read https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2017.156. The thing is that a lot of nutrition research is rather low-quality compared to the rest of science (low n in studies, small effect sizes, low study power, high chance of finding false positives, etc.), and it gets even worse once you start reading sports science papers especially nutrition for sports performance. The best conclusion I found was that a lot of these things like intermittent fasting have small but noticeable effects, meaning that if you can follow IF easily then you may as well do it (like Pascal's wager!), but there is no solid evidence that you actually should do it because the effects are uncertain and small. One pitfall of a lot of these discussions is that people point to papers that show "an effect exists", but forget to ask "how big is the effect?".

I was okay with IF for uncertain small positive brain effects, because my brain is important to me, and it's kind of free, so IF will do. But I think people overstate the effects a bit compared with what's actually known by science.

Take the study you linked to, for instance. I can quite believe that IF would increase insulin resistance based on what I've read, and it's cool that they found lower blood pressure and higher insulin resistance in pre-diabetic men. But the study has 12 people (mid-50's pre-diabetic overweight men) in it, and I don't really know what to make of that? Is this type of study particularly expensive to conduct? Should I find it convincing because I already agree with the result?

My gut reaction to the study is even simpler (not scientific, just personal): Why on Earth would anybody eat dessert for breakfast (Honey Nut Cheerios, waffles with maple syrup, etc, in Figure 1)? If you're already overweight and pre-diabetic, why is the control diet making you eat that? But they get a boiled egg, I'm guessing one?, to, you know, control cholesterol levels or something, two eggs would be crazy. They were probably trying to separate the effect of IF from the effect of eating a normal diet, as compared to the standard American diet, so didn't include a normal diet at all.

[wtetzner]

> There's a solid argument to be made that when you eat, and how often you eat, is more important than what you eat.

Yes, there is good research suggesting that fasting can offset many (most?) of the ill effects of eating poorly.

> By creating long gaps between meals, your body re-establishes what baseline level of insulin should be.

One of the nice things about Keto is that you can get many (if not most) of the benefits of fasting without needing to fast. Some research suggests that some of the benefits of fasting likely come from being in ketosis during the fast.

It's starting to look like ketones do more than deliver fat to your cells. They are also treated sort of like a hormone, which has other beneficial effects on your health.