Science in the News

Critiques of caloric restriction (CR) studies include issues with control groups in animal research where these groups might eat more than usual complicating comparisons. Also, CR's benefits could vary based on eating habits and may not apply to everyone. There's a concern that extreme CR can weaken the immune system among other issues like bone density loss etc. The overall impact of CR on health and longevity clearly needs more research to be understood.

While its undeniable that some of the strains of mice and fruit flies did live longer, extrapolating that to humans and associating that with "health fasting" is questionable at best. If this becomes a viable technique for human health and life extension it ought to be undertaken in a supervised and managed way with the assistance of health professionals. Not sold as a magic treat-yourself cure for all ailments on the internet.

All in all CRL outside of an academic and scientific setting is almost certainly just going to spread dangerous misconceptions about health and our bodies.

> "Well fasting is hardly a consumerist conspiracy, as that would be a contradiction."

No fasting clearly isnt but most of these "health fasting" diet types also shill other dangerous "health" advice from juice "detoxes" to radioactive "aura cleansers"

About that "CALERIE" trial: "many of them had BMIs that fall in the overweight category at the start of the trial. This means that any health benefits observed cannot be fully decoupled from…

Just to be clear, he was talking to High School students, so perhaps sacrificed a little accuracy for the sake of making a point.

I still think the general idea is sound, even if you don't take it literally on implementation

Just to address that for the sake of that dude, I didn't want it to come across the wrong way.

To address some things further down:

I do remember a specific detail, and I don't know how accurate it is, however, he did explain that (and also prefaced how theoretical it is, even at that time more so I imagine):

- If you wanted to do this right, what you would want to do is desalinate the water and pump it to existing surface basins/reservoirs first (e.g., the Colorado River Basin), and taking great care to match that water to the ecology (e.g., mineral, PH level etc) of the water you are replenishing This way you aren't forcing an entire set of infrastructure to be obsolete, but rather working with existing delivery modes to get the water where it needs to be

- In cases where this isn't feasible, your best bet would be to run some sort of infrastructure (likely pipes) to those in need. In some cases, you might even be able to simply create new reservoirs to feed population centers to create efficient delivery mechanisms. The other thing I remember him mentioning specifically is there are many delivery mechanisms (e.g natural) ones that were no longer in productive service that could be revived also (I wish I had an example for this, but I…

>This is exactly the kind of absurd, completely surreal type of argumentation I’m talking about. You’re literally comparing a smartphone to one of the most dangerous and addictive opioids available, responsible for 15 000 overdose deaths annually in the US alone.

You've missed the whole point. I'm answering the crap argument "Phones have value. That’s why people use them." - showing that people use things that don't have value (and can even be hamrful) all the time.

It's not about the relative danger of phone vs heroin. It's about "people use it, thus it has value" is a crap argument.

In fact, I also included fast food (which people don't overdose from), on my counter-argument, which you conveniently ignored.

>And in case you perhaps didn’t actually read my comment, I pointed out the fact that I was one of those people who visited grocery stores in the 90s, which is why I know that doing it today is easier than it was back then. That’s the whole point.

No, the whole point is that it's only marginally easier, to the point of hardly being worth it just for those kind of conveniences, while creating its own problems, which can have a much worse impact in one's life than "I missed the grocery store open times"...

http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171130090041.htm

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352853217300159

I’m wholeheartedly against facial recognition in legal systems. The fact is that they don’t work well, and they specifically have a bad tendency to identify the wrong black person much more often than they misidentify white people. From [3] below:

> Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities, according to the study, which found that systems varied widely in their accuracy.

One. Hundred. Times. The camera may say it recorded John Smith breaking into a house, but it’s incredibly likely that it was actually Ron Jones. Who’s the jury going to believe, though: John Smith who was at home with his girlfriend at the time, or the hugely expensive video system that the city just bought?

Facial recognition doesn’t work. It’s bullshit tech, and we should stop using it until we make it deliver on its promises AND decide how to deal with its ramifications.

[1] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-faces-equally/

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal-study-confirms-racial-bias-many-facial-recognition-systems-casts-doubt-their-expanding-use/

"or, till satiety"

That is the key.

You can eat vegetables until satiety and also not gain weight.

Banting seems to be about non-processed whole foods. So guess I'm doing that.

My point was more, there is a group that goes 'zero carb' and eat really unhealthily. They take it as a license to pile on the ribs. Not that 'zero carb' by itself is unhealthy.

You'll probably say cholesterol is also ok. But plaque buildup does lead to hearth attack's.

"Unfortunately, emerging research shows that a ketogenic diet actually increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. In a young, fit population of CrossFit athletes, following a keto diet for 12 weeks led to an average weight loss of 6 pounds but increased “bad cholesterol” (LDL-C) by a whopping 35%.

Typically, you would expect to see LDL-C levels drop when you lose weight. LDL-C has long been associated with cardiovascular risk because it forms arterial plaques (a cholesterol build-up in the inner lining of arteries), and emerging research that followed people for 12 years has now directly linked long-term ketogenic"

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2023/keto-its-probably-not-right-for-you/#:~:text=Unfortunately%2C%20emerging%20research%20shows%20that,)%20by%20a%20whopping%2035%25.

It's a great article, loaded with information, and very insightful.

But I'm left disappointed that there's no actual estimate of maximum information content. Just this:

> *[Note from Tony Zador: The length of the genome, which in humans is around 3 billion letters, represents an upper bound on the Kolmogorov complexity. Only a fraction of that carries functional information, however, so the upper KC value may be quite a bit lower than that].

That must be 3 x 10^9 base pairs, in the haploid genome. Wikipedia tells me that's 800MB.[0] However, only 1%-2% of that codes for proteins.[1] Which is basically what Zador's note says.

So what's possible for the rest? While 800MB doesn't seem that much, maybe it's enough for basic "firmware" and "software". Including instinctual behaviors.

But even all that is clearly not enough for a full blueprint and assembly instructions. That, as TFA explains, must flow from interactions during development.

0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome

1) http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2012/issue127a/