You will be glad to hear that reducing the number of calories consumed really does improve one’s health. According to the study, “Fasting-mimicking diet and markers/risk factors for aging, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease” by USC Professor Valter Longo, long-term calorie restriction, “showed that body mass index, blood pressure, fasting glucose, IGF-1, triglycerides, total and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and C-reactive protein were more beneficially affected in participants at risk for disease than in subjects who were not at risk”. In short, the study concluded that calorie restriction really helps. But, the intake restriction is much higher than one would expect. It included the participants do a 5 day fast for 3 consecutive months. That means for 5 days one month, 5 days the next month, and so on, they had to eat according to a special diet called an FMD (Fast-Mimicking Diet). This diet had them eat only 1,100 calories the first day, and then 700 for each of the next 4 days. This may be crazy for these 5 days, but each of the participants lost at least 2.6 kg (5.7 lbs) of total body fat. And, in retrospect, having a difficult 5 days doesn’t seem so terrible. Although, the researchers stipulated that you couldn’t do a “recovery binge” following the 5 days, as in pigging out after the diet is done. They had to go back to a normal existence after.
You have all heard it before. “Studies show…”, “scientists say”, and “this report says…” before in the daily news or whatever parts of the internet you dwell in. It has given us hilarious headlines like, “Studies show WINE is the key to long life!” and, according to the Washington Post “Good news for chocolate lovers: The more you eat, the lower your risk of heart disease, study suggests”. So you will probably ask why should you trust the results stated above. First of all, this article has been cited and reviewed by 85 other institutions through Google Scholar alone. This matters because published scientific journals are not just taken as fact in academia. They go through a rigorous process of reviewing & critiquing. This also means that the studies that survive this ordeal & become as popular as this one are pretty up to snuff. The same cannot be said for many other studies out there. University of Colorado, Denver professor Jeffrey Beall has compiled a list of 1231 publishers, each with their own compendiums of journals, that are willing to release articles without anything close to a decent vetting process. Ironically titled “Jeffrey’s List”, it documents this phenomenon, titling it “predatory publishing”. As long as the authors can pay the publisher’s fee, they can get their article published.
In the piles of information available on the internet, many of those articles go unnoticed. But, when news channels and clickbait articles want to release headlines that even remotely match what their audience wants to hear, these articles go beyond just being potentially harmful. And this has been known. Institutions like Forbes, Vox, BBC, and the Guardian have documented multiple lists of studies with results that have not been able to be replicated by other academic institutions, even while following the exact same protocols & processes. This is a huge red flag. Such articles are not to be trusted. The scientific community has been troubled by this as well. The publishers have been be vetted & approved have been adding further requirements to ensure higher quality standards. Authors now have to add a concrete listing of their processes, the data used, and the environment that the studies were run under, so that others can make sure the results are credible.
What does this mean for the rest of society? Those of us who aren’t paid or able to perform those kinds of reviews. First of all, we have to make sure we take the headlines and articles we are exposed to with a grain of salt. We no longer live in a world where a scientific study can be taken as fact. Second, we cannot make major life decisions for ourselves, and especially not others. We have heard this story before. Apparently, the entire anti-vaccine movement is based on 1 article published by the now discredited Andrew Wakefield about the supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism. And we all know how much commotion has been caused by that article and the following movement. Unfortunately, many of the overall very negative criticisms of the article did not make as much of a splash in American society as the original article. Hopefully, more people can be informed that you cannot trust articles like this one. If you are going to listen to one, I at least ask you to consult a credentialed expert in the field and also take a look at the published critiques of the same article. Overall, people need to be more literate and aware of the information that they can be exposed to. Hopefully, this is only the first in many articles that can give people at warning.
Sources:
- Paper by USC Professor Valter Longo about the effects of Calorie Reduction https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28202779
- Medium Article About the Most Popular Scientific Journals of 2017 https://endpoints.elysiumhealth.com/best-scientific-papers-of-2017-e88d65e79097
- UK article about the benefits of drinking red wine https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/841108/Health-news-drinking-wine-daily-slash-risk-early-death-study
- Good news for chocolate lovers: The more you eat, the lower your risk of heart disease, study suggests https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/06/15/good-news-for-chocolate-lovers-study-suggests-the-more-you-eat-the-lower-your-risk-of-heart-disease/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3cd02a36c6dc
- Pew Research Center article on Misinformation http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/10/19/the-future-of-truth-and-misinformation-online/
- Jeffrey Beall’s List https://beallslist.weebly.com/
Science & the Public Intellectual 
This is really interesting. It definitely makes sense that eating 1200 calories a day or less for a brief period of time would result in fat loss. But there are many other dieting theories out there that claim this isn’t a wise choice. That post-restricting binge phase you write about is what apparently sets people back. I remember watching an episode of Explained about dieting myths that discussed how after a period of intense dieting, most people end up gaining back all the weight they lost because they can’t maintain their meal plan. There’s another theory that dieting in general will cause your metabolism to slow down, since the body begins to store fats when chronically underfed. This is called “starvation mode” where the brain holds on to calories consumed b/c it’s being conditioned to believe that it won’t get more food any time soon. This supposedly goes back to when we were cavemen who hunted for meat; cavemen never knew when they’d have their next meal, because hunting’s a total crapshoot. In regards to losing weight via caloric restriction, The International Journal of Obesity says that if you lose merely 10 percent of your body weight, your basal metabolic rate will drop by 20-25% — meaning you’d burn way less calories throughout the day. (https://www.womenshealthmag.com/weight-loss/a19998301/what-is-starvation-mode/) So people who restrict may lose weight initially, but it becomes very easy to gain it all back quickly. On another note, some of my friends who are really into fitness/nutrition told me recently that “intermittent fasting” is really beneficial for weight loss and doesn’t cause any long-term metabolic damage. On that note, I’m gonna go have a cookie.
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Interesting thoughts Jessica and I 100% agree. I also think people confuse fat loss with weight loss and weightless can be water weight or muscle loss. I’ve also read a lot about genes affecting physical fitness and it is fascinating how little we can actually change from diet and exercise when stress, genetics, and sleep prove to be stronger factors.
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Surely I am no expert on healthy living. However, I like to think I have amassed a respectable amount of dietary knowledge, through years of relatively healthy living. Or as healthy as I would like to imagine. I believe the most influential factor is the type of food the calories are coming from, rather than there numbers. There is a lot of very exciting data being extracted from studies, which show the beneficial effects of regular fasting. There are significant differences between dieting and fasting. You are right about the issues of people cherrypicking information from studies. Unfortunately, the only way to combat this spread of misinformation is by getting people to read further into all the information for themselves.
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Such a great post, I really enjoyed it! I was interested to hear that the article actually said calorie restriction leads to weightless because nowadays SO many articles try to prove other ways around weightless that refrain from a decrease in calorie intake. Every article I see in the news is about some pill or shake or something that will help fat loss. But wow, 700 calories in a day?? Not sure if that would be possible for many people. I also loved that you mentioned all of the crazy headlines for articles that say chocolate or something is good for you. I’ve actually looked into the chocolate one and only 1 ounce per day of dark chocolate can benefit your health so not exactly your Hershey’s bars. But in reality, we DO need to filter news articles to the ones that actually have the research to back it up or the ones that really are just trying to sell us something.
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Truly a great read, I thoroughly enjoyed your debunking of these ridiculous diets (although I love to start a strict diet of merely wine and chocolate). I read from Nutrition Studies that 20% of weight loss depends on your exercise, while 80 percent depends simply on nutrition and what you put inside your body. There are a plethora of influencers, bloggers, and “fitness gurus” that argue otherwise. Additionally, I appreciate your trustworthy results and advice, this is important especially in today’s world. The headlines of news channels and clickbait articles are extremely harmful to their audiences. I was recently speaking to my dad about how one news site referred to a harsh winter in New York City as a “polar vortex.” In some cases it’s quite laughable, however in other cases, it intensely misleads readers and becomes extremely problematic.
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