Successful and hungry
How businessmen refuse to eat in order to live better
Daria Shipacheva, Forbes, 02.03.2020
The practice of voluntary fasting was not invented today or even yesterday. Christians have fasts that exclude all animal products, Muslims have Ramadan, when it is forbidden to eat and drink during the daytime during the month. And modern businessmen have their own religion – they starve according to protocol 16:8 and practice total hunger strikes for several days, or even weeks. Forbes Life understands why they torture themselves so much.
Starving California
Like (almost) all fashion trends in the field of life extension and biohacking, modern interval fasting as a phenomenon was born in Silicon Valley. Local starving biohackers have created an online community WeFast: there they give advice on how to "enter" a hunger strike, and also invite to their Facebook and Slack groups to communicate and share experiences. The main method of interval fasting of community members is Monk fasting. This is a 36-hour water hunger strike protocol: for a day and a half, you can drink water and any other liquids that do not contain calories, such as coffee or tea without milk and sugar, but you can't eat anything during this period. The point here is this. Our liver can simultaneously contain about 100 g of glycogen – a polysaccharide, which is a form of energy reserve in the body – and it is consumed in about 16-24 hours. What should the body stay on for the remaining 12-20 hours of hunger strike? The answer is ketosis, which many hungry people crave so much: this is a state in which energy is no longer taken from glucose, but from the product of the breakdown of fats – ketone bodies.
Biohackers from WeFast claim that it is in the state of ketosis that the body turns on the process of autophagy – cleaning from cellular "garbage". Autophagy is considered by many fighters for life extension to be the prevention of most age-related diseases. Also during ketosis, according to the founders of WeFast, senescent – "old" cells are destroyed, which have finished their life cycle and stopped dividing, but for some reason did not self-destruct, but remained "wandering" in the body, causing chronic inflammation and bringing the aging of the whole body closer.
Adherents of interval fasting claim that hunger can not only improve health, but also increase productivity – although it seems counterintuitive. From an evolutionary point of view, they say, man is adapted to certain periods of forced hunger – simply because of the lack of food. When the body begins to starve, it mobilizes all its forces to turn on the "hunter mode" and get more satisfying food as soon as possible. We, in our comfortable modern world with access to food 24/7, have forgotten what the "hunter mode" is – and biohacker entrepreneurs offer to turn it on by voluntarily limiting ourselves to food. For those who are not able to stand 36 hours without food, even with the help of dietary supplements, the founders of WeFast offer simpler modes – for example, the most popular method of interval fasting in the scientific community.:8. The idea is simple – eat during an eight-hour "window" during the day, and the rest of the time just drink water or tea/coffee without sugar. In general, this fasting protocol can be considered a creative reinterpretation of the legendary "don't eat after six."
How to survive a prolonged hunger? The creators of WeFast give several recommendations: drink a lot of water so as not to be dehydrated, not to get overcooled – to save energy, and also drink a lot of coffee or tea or nootropics with caffeine. The latter is especially interesting: after all, ketosis itself should make the brain more productive – so why additional stimulants with questionable effectiveness?
Dietary supplements for the hungry
Nothing personal, just business: the WeFast movement itself was born inside the HVMN startup, which offers various supplements to improve cognitive functions. Here's how it turned out: all HVMN employees were hungry on Tuesdays, and on Wednesday they gathered at a local cafe – there they traditionally came out of starvation, had breakfast together and discussed various life hacks. The hunger strike has become part of the corporate culture, a way to increase productivity. The co–founder and CEO of HVMN, Geoff Wu, decided to create a whole movement around this ideology of the same motivated and focused on success people - that's how WeFast appeared, and its participants (what a coincidence!) – became the core of the HVMN target audience. After all, one of the main goals of the hungry is to become more productive at work. Nootropics, which are produced by the Wu company, theoretically can also help in this. Now on the official page wefa.st as one of the recommendations for successful fasting, an energy and focus supplement called Sprint is offered – of course, an HVMN product.
The composition of Sprint, by the way, is absolutely not outstanding – it is caffeine, L-thianine (an amino acid from tea) and ginseng extract. The supplement is sold for $ 22.46 – a pack is enough for a month. It cannot be said that the dietary supplement is not working at all. Caffeine really helps to maintain concentration and reaction speed – and this is important when you haven't eaten anything and you only want to think about a hearty lunch. But caffeine does not provide any additional energy – on the contrary, it forces the body to work hard: it blocks the receptors of the neurotransmitter adenosine in the brain, which should just tell you that you are tired and your energy reserves are running out. Blocking gives a temporary surge of strength, but this is a big self-deception: if there is no real energy (which should come from food), the body begins to spend ATP molecules on brain activity, and these are our internal cellular energy reserves that are needed to maintain the basic biological functions of the body. Thus, it is very easy to bring your body to complete exhaustion. In the best case, the body will detect a trick, turn on the "fuse" – and caffeine will simply cease to act on you.
The second ingredient of the dietary supplement, L-thianine, helps to improve concentration, as well as reduce stress – this can be useful when the body is stressed from starvation. Ginseng can also be effective as a stimulant to increase the reaction rate. In general, Sprint may increase productivity – but temporarily and on credit, simultaneously depleting the body.
Is it true that interval fasting prolongs life?
Where did the trend for interval fasting come from? The WeFast group was formed in 2015, and in 2016 the Japanese Yoshinori Osumi received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for studying the mechanism of autophagy. His research has shown that if autophagy is effective, the body ages more slowly, but if failures occur during autophagy, then cells are updated worse – this can provoke many diseases.
Biohackers and popularizers of science for some reason immediately linked Osumi's work with starvation – and began to promote temporary refusal of food as a way to spur autophagy. It got to the point that in early January of this year, Yoshinori Osumi was invited to speak in Moscow and called his report "Autophagy and features of life-prolonging fasting", and the scientist himself was presented as "the author of the method of interval fasting". This greatly angered the guests of the event, who understand science, and they had to apologize to the researcher for the actions of the organizers. Osumi himself stated: "I have never claimed that fasting – in the sense of diet – contributes to the process of autophagy. Apparently, something went wrong." In addition, I would like to remind you: Osumi studied the autophagy genes not of humans, but of yeast.
Nevertheless, the growth of interest in interval fasting, apparently, can no longer be stopped, at least until more accurate data confirming or refuting its benefits appear. So far, there is very little data – the effects of fasting have been studied only on small samples and for a short period of time, little is known about its long-term consequences.
Harvard Medical School has released a brochure dedicated to interval fasting. The only benefit they recognize is weight loss. This is easily explained from the point of view of biology: if you do not eat for a long time, the level of insulin will drop low enough – and the body's fat cells will begin to consume the glucose stored in them as an energy source, which helps to reduce fat mass. There is also evidence that interval fasting can improve insulin sensitivity and, accordingly, serve as a prevention of type 2 diabetes mellitus – however, the research results contradict each other. Most of the evidence that fasting can prolong life is based on experiments on animals or very small groups of people – so this effect of fasting has not yet been proven either.
Harvard scientists believe that it is not necessary to torment yourself with interval fasting – it is enough to adhere to the so-called Mediterranean diet: there are a lot of fresh vegetables, fish and seafood, olive oil. And, of course, do not overeat. You can even slightly limit the caloric content of the diet compared to your norm – then you can get about the same effects as from interval fasting.
Walter Longo, a gerontologist from the University of California, Davis, author of the book "Longevita: A Revolutionary Diet of Longevity" agrees with this. This Italian–born scientist adapted the Mediterranean diet in such a way that it could simulate starvation - and that the person adhering to it would not suffer from hunger. "Taking a break from eating for more than 12 hours is too extreme. There are, for example, people who skip breakfast and thus starve for 16-17 hours in a row – and they only increase their tendency to obesity and diabetes. Constantly severely limit calories – below the individual physiological norm – is also not worth it. And a total hunger strike is definitely not an option: you will suffer without getting enough nutrients, and you will remain hungry," Longo believes.
Instead, he suggests periodic "pseudo-starvation": a fasting diet, when for 5 days you need to consume daily from 750 to 1100 kcal of vegetables, nuts, complex carbohydrates and healthy fats. Walter Longo recommends monthly carrying out such "unloading" for those who have diabetes and prediabetes, obesity, hypertension, autoimmune diseases and chronic inflammation – and it is enough for healthy people to do it three or four times a year. Longo's experiments have shown that his "pseudo–starvation" improves biochemical parameters: blood sugar, cholesterol, triglycerides, markers of inflammation - in the same way as interval fasting does. At the same time, such a diet is more gentle – and it is less likely that a person will break down and abandon the whole thing.
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