Day on, day off diet experiment results

[Guest guest]

The main points of the following link:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993668

… are given below, and then I've got a few questions (I think

something like this was briefly mentioned on this forum before, but

this article has more details):

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Previous studies suggested intermittent fasting might also extend

lifespan. But as most rats and mice lose weight on such a diet, it

was not clear if this was really any different from caloric

restriction. So Mattson and his colleagues tried it on a strain of

mice that does not lose weight on a day-on, day-off diet.

From the age of nine weeks, they let one group of mice eat freely,

fed another group 40 per cent less than the eat-all-you-like group

and gave a third group all they wanted one day and nothing the next.

The mice on the reduced calorie diet weighed only about half as much

as those allowed to eat all they wanted. But the intermittently fed

mice did not lose any weight, since they ate almost twice as much on

days when they were allowed food.

Crucially, these mice displayed most of the same physiological

changes as mice on restricted diets. Levels of glucose and insulin in

the blood of fasting mice were even lower than those on a restricted

diet, both factors that may contribute to increased longevity.

Caloric restriction has also been shown to protect against

neurodegenerative diseases and the brain cells of the fasting mice

were better at withstanding exposure to a neurotoxin than those of

mice on a restricted diet.

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I've been practicing cron for about 3 months, and averaging 1500 cals

per day. But in the last couple of weeks (due to this article and

others like it), I've decided to do a compromised fasting

technique ... between 800 and 900 cals one day, and between 2500 and

2600 cals per day the next, and so on, averaging 1700 cals per day.

I've decided to do this because:

- in years to come, I wont be as skinny to the same extreme as if I

was only having 1500 cals/day for the rest of my life (doing so

in " real life " introduces a small amount of risk that doesn't

come

into play in the protected lab animal experiments).

- other articles about the same experiment above have pointed out

that these results indicate that cron may work due to the body

putting itself in a protection type of mode, rather than the free-

radical theory (as the fasting mice ate the same as unrestricted mice

on average). This may explain why the fasting mice had even lower

levels of glucose and insulin than the restricted mice (because

eating nothing for a whole day, every other day, is telling the

body " I'm starving " in a big way). OK ... I didn't want to eat zero

calories every other day, so I compromised, putting it up to about

800 cals/day, but also brought the average down to 1700 cals/day,

which is still a calorie restricted diet. In this way I hope to get

the advantages of fasting and a calorie restricted diet (or perhaps

I'm trying to cover my bets).

What I'd like to know is, what do the others on this group think? ...

a good thing or not?

And do any of you know results from experiments that show how fasting

mice do versus CR mice in terms of average and maximum life span?

(the above experiment didn't actually see which group lived the

longest).