Muscle loss and other "bad effects" of weight loss are discussed here as a
result of abnormally fast weight loss... not as a result of weight loss in
itself..


"Caleb" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Mar 16, 8:57 am, "Doug Freyburger" wrote:
"Caleb" wrote:

This was the first article in Science News this week. Very interesting
article, and it may well be that regular dieting and weight loss is
not such a bad thing -- it might even be better in some ways than
maintaining a stable weight.

With a misrepresentation like your subject line, no wonder you
are called a troll and blown off by many. The permanent lifelong
calorie restriction shown cause longer lifespans in mice and many
other types of animals is absolutely NOT related to your history
of yoyo dieting. It *does* result in a stable weight for the simple
reason that it never ends until the subject animal dies.

You find a way to stay low calorie unendlingly for the rest of your
life without a pattern of yoyoing and you may well accure the same
benefits as the mice.

And just for fun, check out the level of caloric restriction imposed
on those mice. Is it a level that triggers rapid loss or slow loss?
Oh right. It's a level that triggers slow loss.

What I found interesting - If the mice are put on low calorie after
they are adults, it still seems to work.


Doug --

There are many questions that spring from this research. Bottom line
-- we just don't know.

Mark Mattson, PhD, neuroscientist, said that eating every other day
appears to convey to mice and rats a resistance to the effects of head
injuries, alzheimers like events, etc. He is engaged in human studies
now.

These two lines of research suggest that calorie restriction (and
certainly not eating to maintenance multiple times in the course of a
day) may be more healthy than three squareas a day, 5 lighter meals a
day, etc. Further there is something in actually going for longer
periods of time without eating that may be health-inducing.

Overall such research helps remind people that just because some
people "know" certain things, that doesn't make them true.

The article also notes that overweight is a condition that can
accelerate tissue aging. So clearly I dunno the final outcome.

I guess you're quibbling with the word "maybe" in the header of this
post. Seems to me to be a reasonable qualifier for the speculation.

I'm sure not advocating weight fluctuations in people but neither do I
think they are necessarily worse than cancer, etc. And clearly this
current research suggests that there may be some advantages to periods
of losing weight. People on this list have often bemoaned loss of
muscle, increased lassitude, etc., but this is a very interesting
byproduct of this weight loss process.

Within the evolutionary framework, perhaps organisms have been favored
that accomodate intermittent food sources, that would be able to eat a
lot and then shut down their bodies for a while to allow them to
improve aspects of their functioning. Certainly this is compatible
with the findings of Mattson and also the more recent findings I cited
above. Also this is compatible with the real world. 4000 years ago
food was a pretty iffy thing, and it remains so in many portions of
the world today. If stable weight were a requirement for longevity,
the human race would have died out long ago.

Am I claiming that these are strong effects? No, not at all and
certainly not at this point. But they certainly question the basis of
continuous eating.

The above research suggests that this is another reason to lose weight
through calorie restriction (be it lowered calorie, Atkins, Zone,
etc., etc.).

But I think we should remember Hamlet's words to Horatio: "There are
many things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your
philosophy."

Yours,

Caleb