Intermittent Fasting for Dummies
Janet Bond Brill, ©2021, 306 pages
A short Book Report by Ron Housley (1.12.2023)
We’ve all read one or more of the “for Dummies” books that Wiley has been publishing forever. But ordinarily we use it as a reference work, checking out a page here or a chapter there.
This was the first “for Dummies” book that I read from start to finish.
I came to the subject after a shallow dive into some of the research currently being published about aging, longevity, and rejuvenation. It seems that there’s a current flurry of popular interest in rejuvenation, not merely an interest in tactics to extend lifespan.
There are the articles in the journals, medical and otherwise, peer reviewed and otherwise, but often with the imprimatur of special interests percolating behind the scenes. And since I wasn’t going to enroll myself in a graduate program doing lab research in some obscure aspect of the subject, I found myself reaching out to the “for Dummies” overview. In a way, it felt like turning to Consumer Reports to decide on buying a car: probably not the best resource.
I had a modest background in basic biochemistry; I was almost a chemistry major in college; and I had read dozens of books about nutrition and diet, dating back to Emanuel Cheraskin in school days; I had even been on strict Atkins regime for slightly over a year back a couple decades ago, as my way to control mild hyperlipidemia without drugs (until I could no longer stand avoiding the mashed potatoes).
My own problem with Intermittent Fasting was that I didn’t know how to judge the varieties of fasting periods when ketosis, and supposedly autophagy, would be activated in my individual case. I didn’t know whether I’d have to do actual ongoing monitoring of my blood chemistries to know if I were actually attaining the result I was aiming for.
Could an individual, by doing the 20:4 (20 hours fasting + 4 hours eating) “warrior fasting” regimen just 3 or 4 days a week achieve enough autophagy to make it a worthwhile effort from the standpoint of enhancing health, of tweaking mental acuity, or of realistically enhancing the quality of life as the most senior of years was approaching?
None of the official journal articles I looked at offered up a good answer to my question(s); so off to the “for Dummies” series I went.
David Sinclair, the genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, insists that “adversity mimetics” is one of the keys to lifespan enhancement. My mission was to shed light on his contentions, to explore the sense in which fasting is an instance of adversity mimetics, and to find out whether “continuous glucose monitoring” (and ketone monitoring) would have to be an embraced before one could attain successful Intermittent Fasting for health improvement.
True confessions: I did not read through the recipes in the book’s waning pages. Prior to those pages I found a largely superficial description of the so-called intricacies of intermittent fasting. The primary take-away from this “for Dummies” book is the validation that intermittent fasting is itself mainstream enough to warrant such a book.
But for those who need detailed information on how to monitor one’s own ketones, or who want information about continuous monitoring of factors other than glucose, or who want guidance on modifications tailoring the fasting period to one’s individual health goals, this is going to be a pretty superficial general summary.