My fave quote is this:

Nourishment is one of life’s greatest pleasures, as well as one of its most basic necessities. Advising people to live their lives obsessed with counting calories and restrained eating, where the pleasures of eating are replaced by punitive dietary regimens and chronic hunger, and where avoiding death becomes the main preoccupation of living, takes on more of a religious ideology, than sound science.

Here’s my thinking on this at present. There’s *something* to proper caloric intake – and maybe slightly less than proper – that has beneficial properties, if done here or there. Our evolution didn’t not count on regular eating – 3 squares a day. It was no doubt, a rather haphazard affair, and certainly unbalanced.

Perhaps this comes down to us in rituals of fasting, or of proscribed foods. Maybe mixing it up and eating in a constantly varying haphazard method is somehow better for our health.

I think chronically starving yourself is an awful way to go through life. But might there be some benefit to the occasional fast? This happens naturally in small children. A 3-year-old going through a ‘picky-eater’ phase might seem to subsist on air alone, freaking out the parents – but this phenomena has been observed for ages.

As always, I don’t have any answers here – just a lot of questions – and the question I’m interested in is: might there be some benefit to erratic eating?

Thanks for posting,

LCC

“The long-awaited research on the effects of calorie restriction on aging in rhesus monkeys from the University of Wisconsin and Wisconsin National Primate Research Center have just been released. It found no statistically significant difference in the number of deaths among the monkeys who’ve been eating a calorie-restrictive diet for more than 20 years compared to the monkeys who’ve been allowed to eat ad lib all day as much as 20% over their normal calories.”