Todd Allen

Formulated lab chow "high fat diets" are typically 40 to 45% fat and often just as high in carbohydrates. To control content the diets are typically formulated with highly refined ingredients such as soybean oil for fat, sucrose and powdered cellulose for carbohydrate and fiber, and casein for protein. This should be called a "highly processed diet" or a "highly unnatural diet". Lowcarbers call it a high sugar diet. I call it a high inflammation diet as the choices for each macro are just about the worst one might pick for producing an inflammatory response. It's a diet well designed for producing disease and despite being called a high fat diet the percentage of fat is probably not the problem. Imagine housing mice in a natural low stress environment through which they could forage a diet of natural foods such as very fatty nuts, seeds and grubs. They could be eating foods much higher in fat than the HFDs and I'd expect it would result in lean, vigorous mice with excellent health. But raising happy healthy mice is not nearly as interesting as producing sick diseased mice.

Virta Health has been racking up impressive results coaching patients in using a ketogenic diet to get off medications for diabetes, obesity and numerous comorbidities. Enough so that they have been signing contracts with the Veterans Administration, the state of California, Blue Cross Blue Shield and numerous other organizations. They adopted a policy of only taking payment for services less than the savings on their patients previous health care costs. This is fueling rapid growth and within a few years I expect they will have published sufficient data to silence most critics other than those whose livelihoods are threatened by Virta's success. If Virta's stock was publicly traded I'd dump a lot of my other investments to take a major stake.

You look skinny but I'd guess your bodyfat% is about 18% because you have a soft look with little vascularity, muscle definition or prominence of bones such as ribs, hips or collar bones. Get a DEXA scan or hydrostatic weighing to know with better accuracy. Here's a simple calculator using just a tape measure and scale that I think gives a fairly good estimate. http://fitness.bizcalcs.com/Calculator.asp?Calc=Body-Fat-Navy But even if your bodyfat% is a little higher than ideal as the others have said it isn't because you have too much fat but rather too little muscle. I'm decades older with a genetic progressive muscle wasting disease and I don't envy your physique. Best to build up some muscle now, it gets harder as we age.

Tom I often share your skepticism. At least when I have enough understanding of a topic to question expert opinion. But my understanding of sleep was fairly shallow prior to reading Walker's book and without much basis to discount it I find it concerning to have disrupted sleep. I've been tracking things such as body temp, physical performance, pulse, blood pressure, blood sugar, ketones, HRV and subjective measures such as how I feel throughout the day and other than sleep disruption don't have much reason to change course. But now I'm wishing I had a way to track mental performance such as websites or phone apps to measure aspects such as memory, alertness, and cognition speed to better judge sleep deprivation impact.

The Musk video was hilarious. No need to stay healthy and avoid mental degeneration as better linking to AI will come to the rescue. The way he was struggling to verbalize his thoughts it seems this can't come soon enough for him.

Seeking rapid fat loss while hopefully preserving lean mass I'm 5 days into a near fast, averaging about 660 calories/daily ~80g protein, 34g fat and 8g carbs: a late breakfast of whey protein mixed with a couple eggs plus a white and an early dinner of sardines or pickled salmon, heart and liver on salad greens dressed with an almost mayonnaise of a yolk and 1 tbl evoo and plenty of salt. I've never made it past 5 days of water fasting having always succumbed to coldness, fatigue and related low energy symptoms. This time I'm not having any of my typical problems and feel like I could go much longer except poor sleep has me concerned. For the past couple days I've been taking afternoon naps getting roughly an hour but I'm still coming up short by at least an hour if not two from my typical non fasting daily sleep. Haven't noticed much if any adverse impacts from sleep deprivation but the Matthew Walker book has me questioning the trade offs between getting lean and wrecking my sleep. I'm hoping increasing sleep pressure will overcome whatever this approach to fasting is doing to my sleep.

Sibiriak, thanks for posting Klebnikov's piece. While we fret about longevity perfection debating the uncertainty underlying our beliefs of optimal diet, supplements and lifestyle factors it is good to be reminded that societal, environmental and other factors outside our individual control deserve utmost respect. Living in Chicago I can't help but wonder how much of Russia's suffering was instigated by the celebrated Nobel prize winning free market economists of the University of Chicago. One thing your article didn't mention is that despite so much poverty Russia is the largest nation by land and perhaps wealthiest nation with respect to natural resources but during that period the wealth was increasingly extracted into the pockets of a small elite. The pendulum between public and private wealth and power also swings in the US and it isn't unimaginable we might spiral into an extreme situation not so unlike what Russia has been through. Also concerning is the likelihood in periods of increasing instability the hawks find less resistance to the options of belligerence and war. With so many potential catastrophes such as hundreds of nuclear reactors accumulating decades of nuclear waste all out war could make our pursuit of ideal diet and factors such as cold exposure somewhat irrelevant to our common goal of longevity. Despite the ongoing escalation of demonization of Russia and Putin in our popular media I'm impressed and thankful for Russia's fairly competent handling of the unending series of provocations in places such as the Ukraine and Syria by the US and the lackeys of NATO.

Frederick is 5'2" and 220 lbs! A BMI of 40+ is over weight even if exceptionally muscled. When one's situation is acute pursuing a fantasy of idealized long term health and longevity instead of finding ones best path to short term health and fitness is misguided.

I think food quality is most important, I eat minimally processed, mostly raw or low temp moist cooked foods. I lowered my body fat % by roughly 10% the 1st year and 5% each of the past 2 years. My progress is slowing but I expect in another year or two I'll hit my target range of 10-12%. Most of my carbs ~40 g daily is from plants especially leafy greens. The fats in my diet are near 50/50 plant and animal. Most of my protein ~120 g daily comes from animal sourced foods. Restricting carbohydrates has had profound benefits for me massively reducing hunger making caloric restriction and fasting often near effortless. My biomarkers of health have gone from terrible to excellent. I've gone from borderline diabetic to a very stable blood sugar averaging about 85 mg/dl. I'm a former short term vegan and long term vegetarian and while that might be a great approach for many it worked out miserably for me. I don't believe there has ever been or will be a long term controlled trial in humans testing ratios of plant vs animal sourcing of high quality foods and even then the result would only have statistical significance but would still lack relevance on an individual basis. There is no substitute for learning to track and evaluate what works best for yourself. You'll never know what works best for yourself without testing a range of approaches.

Might need more cholesterol... https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/62/10/1164/568431

39F for 5 hours per day sounds like extreme CE. But most of us haven't pushed our limits of cold adaptation and we don't have a lot of data to know how far people can or should go with it. Wim's feats are an example of what is possible and it is well beyond 39F for 5 hours. I don't think we have clear cut answers to where things such as exercise and caloric restriction transition from beneficial to detrimental and we have less data for CE.

Wim Hof does not agree.

Smells like a winner to me, wait a bit and maybe you'll be able to order it from Dave Asprey - Bomb Proof coffee made with 100% wild caught baby seal brown fat.

I think most consider leaves to be herbs and other strong flavored plant parts to be spices. Curiously though when it comes to tea it seems mostly reversed as true teas made from leaves of tea plants genus Camellia are not considered herbal while tissanes that are mostly spices such as licorice, ginger and cinnamon or flower buds such as chamomile and elderberry or fruit such as rose hips are called herbal teas. Which makes perfect sense in the context of vegetable oils being made from seeds and not vegetables, sweetbreads being neither, sweetmeats being meatless, many vegetables such as squash and green beans actually being fruit while strawberries, blackberries and raspberries are not berries although watermelon, pumpkins and bananas are berries. I don't know enough of other languages to know if confusion is mostly an English thing or if it is a human thing.

I think the size of the gamble depends on ones skill at determining the impacts of an intervention. The success of all interventions, including CR, depend on the degree to which we are able to evaluate the good and bad, balance the tradeoffs and fine tune our regimens. I used to lack confidence in my ability to evaluate what is right for myself and looked to consensus and statistics to guide my choices. Which wasn't working out well. Desperation pushed me to start trying things which seemed risky. Maybe it has been mostly good luck but I've had several gambles pay off big. More of my gambles have been failures but I think I've gotten better at spotting trouble and cutting my losses quickly and I'm increasingly willing to experiment. But I don't like changing too many things at a time and I prioritize testing things based on expected potential risk and reward. At the moment neither metformin or rapamycin look like worthwhile gambles for me but I hope others find them compelling and further our collective knowledge with their experimentation.