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Comment by kawfey | Hacker News Reader

In “The Oldest Cure In The World” (by Steve Hendricks) I’m reading about researchers who discovered that mice lived to be the human equivalent of 120+ years old just by fasting them.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/fasting...

The book really likes to crap on big pharma and conventional medicine for largely ignoring fasting as a medical treatment for a litany of diseases, since it’s not very profitable to tell your patient to just stop eating for a while.

While I think the discoveries are cool, I can’t help but wonder if the ultimate goal is to encapsulate anti-aging in a profitable pill form that might have the same effect as a dietary fast.

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> I can’t help but wonder

I’m more in the thoroughly convinced category.

“Who profits?” is a great heuristic.

Yoshinori Ohsumi won a Nobel Prize for his work on autophagy, which is triggered by fasting and has anti-aging properties. And yet it seems you have to go seek out low-carb/fasting sources in order to hear about it. As if people who care about anti-aging directly wouldn’t care about it. (Well, maybe I’m wrong and autophagy is more well-known than I have the impression of.)

I would caution against using “Qui bono” as a heuristic; you will end up believing in a lot of BS using that as a tool. It can only ever be a piece of evidence alongside others. I benefit immensely from sunlight, but that doesn’t mean I am implicated in the rotation of the earth.

In this particular case, there are many natural experiments we can conceive of that demonstrate why fasting alone is highly unlikely to significantly impede “normal” aging in humans in the lab. That’s before we get to how effective it could actually be as a treatment.

And while we’re following the money, there are many powerful entities that would love a “free” aging cure to juice their demographics…so why don’t they use it?

> It can only ever be a piece of evidence alongside others.

A heuristic is not evidence, as you should know.

Yeah exactly, I’m saying it’s dangerous to use “who benefits?” as a heuristic, because it will be wrong far more often than it will be right.

> Yeah exactly,

I say that it is a heuristic, you conflate it with evidence, and then you say that’s exactly the point (that it’s not evidence)? You’re not saying anything that I haven’t said originally.

Your supposed counter-example is beyond facile. Who-benefits presupposes that the agent has the means to affect some outcome. But no human could have arranged the rotation of the Earth.

Fasting can have huge positive or huge negative effects. That's why we can't recommend it for everybody. More research is needed in the field.

There are plenty of people on earth that don't eat that much and yet it is extremely rare to see people reaching the old age of 120.

"Don't eat much" is quite different from "don't eat at all for a period of time", both conceptually and in how they impact the body.

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