It is fairly well known that CR leads to a weaker immune system in terms of white blood cell count.

This was discussed in previous topics , though many people on CR report lower incidents of infections.
One cannot be sure that the lower observed infection rate is not related to lifestyle also, e.g. eating less in restaurants, drinking less, going less to clubs, dating/ kissing fewer people etc.

Generally a weaker immune system may not be bad thing in the absence of infectious diesease.
Hower in the presence of these disease lower weight and therefore CR, may cause problems:

1) Low BMI increases risk for tuberculosis and also for relapse:
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/dyp308
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3792471
www.heartlandntbc.org/products/bmi_card_oct_2008.pdf

I don;t think HIV or poverty is the only reason for this. Even before HIV exhisted, people used to say one needs to eat lots of fat to help cure TB.
Are there other infectious disease also linked to low BMI ??

My own opinion is that BMI doesn't count for much, as it fails to take into account what makes up the mass.

With regards to infection rate, I can't comment on any statistics, and only having recently embarked on CRON I can't give too much of a personal account either.

What I can do though is stress the importance of the ON part of CRON. I supplement to Hell and back, and many of those supplements assist the immune system in some fashion. Also, the foods that I eat are often things that will tend to strengthen the immune system, such as cheese and yoghurt.

That said, my non-CRing partner recently caught a cold, which I did not catch from her, though I am on CRON. She is generally a healthy sort, though her only dietary adjustment is to cut out refined sugar (which I also have done for quite some time).

So if a healthy woman of comparable age catches a cold, and I do not catch it from her despite obvious close contact, that must say something for my immune system regardless of me having been in CRON for a few weeks (ie, not long, but surely long enough for it to affect my physiology).

This post has been edited by David Styles: Jan 1 2010, 07:59 PM

I'm pretty sure there are threads/posts up here that already present the recent evidence showing that CR does not work well in pre-adults and aging adults. That was also my firsthand experience: Reducing calorie intake (via intermittent fasting) simply brought to the forefront several existing weaknesses, including previously subclinical low blood pressure effects and infections. Low blood pressure, for example, is a risk factor for glaucoma (!), which few people realize (since glaucoma is mainly caused by inadequate blood flow to one's optic nerve, which is influenced by one's BP vs. IOP).

So if going on CR, one needs to not only ensure adequate vitamins, minerals, etc., but also that one does not have any hidden immune or metabolic vulnerabilities. Not sure it's worth the risk in an aging adult.

I daresay CR wouldn't be worth it for a non-aging adult

By "aging", I presume you mean "suffering from age-related diseases"?

Just to clarify.

Ha! Yes we're all aging adults.

As I recall from discussion on a previous thread, you have to be a fairly young adult to get the benefits of long-term calorie restriction on life expectancy (i.e., roughly 30% below normal calorie intake). And then you must stay safe, with adequate essential nutrients, and protected from any serious infectious disease, just like the caged mice and rats.

Certainly as one gets beyond age 50 or so (when systems start falling apart due to lack of natural selection on them for millions of years - i.e., very few humans were living that long, as Aubrey de Grey likes to point out), the minor increase in life expectancy that might be gained at that point from CR is probably overwhelmed by the health risks of lowered metabolism and immune response. (And the most effective ways to extend life at that point start to become really clear, like avoiding osteoporosis [hip fractures reduce life expectancy], heart disease, diabetes, etc.)

Right, agreed.

I take this sort of thing seriously enough that I plan for it already. I tailor my diet such that insulin spikes don't occur (no refined sugar, and natural sugars are taken in moderate quantities and generally with something that will slow down the absorption rate) to avoid diabetes and other related problems. I have recently upped my fibre and take supplements that should help keep heart disease away. Because of my CR, I make sure to supplement particularly carefully calcium and and other things that will help avoid osteoporosis or related disorders.

I have an old book entitled "Grannies Remedies" (sic). It is chiefly about folk medicine. Some wonderful dietary and herbal things, mixed in with religious superstitions and the like. Real mix of fact and fantasy. I don't use anything from it without cross-referencing carefully. Anyway, towards the end there is a section on proverbs. One of them, whose advice I take to heart, reads:

Ahh, to be 25 again! Being 50+, it was discouraging to find that it was too late for me to make sense out of CR, but at least its ill-effects showed up quickly, and the damage was limited. btw, this is a great forum to get info on all this stuff. When investigating something new, I always now include a thorough search of this forum. (I hadn't been here in awhile, but was revisiting DHEA, and came back today to make sure I hadn't missed something.)

From the bit you've said above, you may be interested in some of what I've figured out (and wish I was 25 or so to implement more effectively!). A big thing is to take more measurements than what others may lead you to believe is necessary. The idea is to actually see the degradation as it is occurring so that you can tweak things to change their trajectory (which accelerates after about age 40-50). For example, sounds like you're aware of the general principles involved in reducing insulin and glucose spikes, but aren't actually measuring the key values. Insulin itself is expensive to measure, but blood glucose meters are cheap (thanks to all those diabetics). And measuring post-meal blood glucose peaks gives you the critical info needed to control insulin and glucose levels. Keeping such peaks below 120-130 mg/dl will eliminate nearly all of the additional risk that others take on via excessive glucose oxidation. Such peaks typically occur between 30 and 60 minutes after starting a meal, and just a few measurements will confirm that your response to a particular meal is within the desired range. Of course, you've probably got so little insulin resistance, and are eating so little per meal, that your BG hardly moves in most cases, but you may at least find it interesting even at this point to see what happens when you break your routine with a high-carb/glycemic meal or dessert. Seeing the numbers (vs. having a theory about how things generally work) made a big difference, for example, in keeping me away from the worst foods, and in pointing me toward healthier choices (either low glycemic, or low carb).

Anyway, there's lots of stuff like that I could talk about if you're interested. It's a big, complex, multi-dimensional puzzle to solve with lots of interconnecting and overlapping pieces.

Please do a research on Beta 1,3->D / 1,6 glucans. It should be a staple for CR enthusiasts.

What other factors were just overseen? Nobody said that because one is thin that he/she is automatically healthy. A lot of heavy smokers are thin. There are so many other reasons to be thin and unhealthy; obsessional types or persons with addictions. And why not genetic? In the end, can we be clearer on the intent of your thread? Are you suggesting that a low % of fat is the potential CAUSE of developing infections more easily? Yes or no. If yes, that's a stretch not supported by any of the links above (2 out of 3, 3rd doesn't work). If no, why bother?

This post has been edited by Saintor: Jan 2 2010, 01:23 PM

Hmm, this seems like a good idea. I look after a number of people at work with type two diabetes, and measure their blood glucose levels before breakfast and then two hours after each meal meal for a total of four readings a day. Unless extra tests are performed, which we do if someone looks like they're going hypo- or hyper-glycaemic. Our monitors give readings in mmol/l, with around 5.0 mmol/l being ideal, <4.0 being too low, the lowest I've seen being 1.1mmol/l, and highs reaching the early twenties. This is controlled with insulin at regular intervals and sugary things to bring up the glucose levels when low. I have my reservations regarding the prescribed manner of dealing with diabetes, but since I am an industry professional I do my job as trained.



Hopefully!



Right.



Did something more come to your mind as likely useful to me?

This post has been edited by David Styles: Jan 2 2010, 02:20 PM

The conversion factor is 18, so your 5.0 = 90, 4.0 = 72, 20 = 360 mg/dl. You're dealing with a set of patients who have let things get way out of control, so their results aren't directly applicable to you. Also, you don't want to have to take insulin to control BG (blood glucose), since insulin itself is a risk factor. Okay, so what is it that a non-diabetic subject like yourself should expect with regard to BGs? (This will tell you what to look for if you borrow their meters and measure your own BG.)

There are 3 numbers of interest from which you can model your daily BG from meter measurements: fasting BG, protein BG, and postprandial (post-meal) BG. The fasting BG is the value obtained after an overnight fast, and is typically 80 to 90 (4.4 to 5 mmol/l) in young adults (mine is about 95 (5.3)) without insulin resistance (technically, you don't need to do an overnight fast to reach this number, but simply stop eating long enough to ensure that all food is out of your GI tract, and that enough time has elapsed for BG to drop to baseline - but an overnight fast is simplest way to achieve this). The protein BG is the level achieved while digesting protein alone (such as meat in stomach a few hours after a meal), and is caused by the conversion of amino acids from protein to glucose by your liver (gluconeogenesis). As you become more diabetic, this value rises (in fact, this is why diabetics eventually lose their ability to control BG with carb restriction - the protein they must consume is enough to raise their BGs too high). The protein BG is the BG at which you'll spend most of your day, since one usually has enough protein in meals to keep BG elevated between meals. The protein BG can be measured after the bulk of carbs have been digested, typically about 2 hours or more after a meal is started, and (like fasting BG) will be characteristic of how diabetic you are (mine is about 105 (5.8)). Finally, the post-meal BG peak due to carbs usually occurs between 30 and 60 minutes after a meal is started, and is determined by both the amount of carbs consumed, their rate of digestion, and your diabetic status. For pure T1 diabetics, each gram of carbs produces about a 5 mg/dl rise in BG (0.3 mmol/l), whereas for young adults w/o insulin resistance, the rise is less than 1 mg/dl (<0.05 mmol/l) (mine rises about 2-2.5 mg/dl, so I'm about "half diabetic").

Since disease risk from elevated BG rises exponentially (i.e., 100->150 is not as bad as 150->200), both the average BG (often dominated by protein digestion) and the peak BG after meals are important, both of which you can quickly determine from a few BG measurements, and with the latter largely under your control by diet. So I guess the idea would be to get a bunch of these measurements and form a model of your BG response to foods, which you can then refer to again as time passes, and which may even cause you to modify some parts of your existing diet (or at least be aware of where the greatest risks were). btw, with respect to the measurements made by doctors: A1C tells you something about average BGs, but not the peaks (and, of course, is of no help idenitifying specific food issues); fasting BGs are often unreliable, due to lab errors, single measurements, and irreproducible conditions; and glucose tolerance tests tell you too little about real-life condions, nor anything about your response to protein, which can dominate your intraday BGs.

As mentioned in previous post, bottomline would be to at least get a few post-meal BGs, with goal being to keep them as low as possible, with knowledge that young adults w/o insulin resistance rarely exceed about 120 mg/dl (6.7 mmol/l). This would let you see pre-diabetes and diabetes coming long before they became an issue, and would eliminate one of the most preventable (and significant) causes of accelerated aging. (All w/o help of clunky medical profession!)

(btw, the "5.0" (90 mg/dl) being "ideal" is probably because they're worried about going too low in the context of giving insulin. What's often going on, however, is that they're feeding people too many carbs, making their need for insulin greater, which greatly increases risk of error, making them fearful of going hypo. Fewer carbs would lower insulin needs, reduce ill effects of insulin itself, and make it safer to achieve more normal BG levels.)



There are probably about 20 major issues to deal with, of which I'm only aware of about 10!
Calcium is a big one (that you mentioned). What exactly are you doing about that?

"Are you suggesting that a low % of fat is the potential CAUSE of developing infections more easily? Yes or no. If yes, that's a stretch not supported by any of the links above (2 out of 3, 3rd doesn't work). If no, why bother? "

Not low fat, but low weight:

http://www.imminst.org/forum/Side-Effects-of-Caloric-Restriction-CR-t31673.html ://http://www.imminst.org/forum/Side-E...CR-t31673.html

There was also a study that showed that rats that were on a diet ( hours/ day, cant' remember) had a higher intestinal permeability and it resulted in greater infection when eating contaminated food than rats that were well fed throughout. Will try and find this study later. Maybe more against Eat every other day than CR, but possibly both.

I am sayign that CR may work , but if you get exposed to lots of infectios diesease or do things that compromise your immune system further--e.g.
. living in the jungle, live , are on holiday in a developing country, like to party, work in a hospital, have children (in case you don;t know they get sick about once a month), CR may place you at a higher risk .

A single person saying my gf got sick but I did not does not count.. there are so many people that are not CR that claim the same and again the healthier lifestyle, regular sleep, excersice, less exxcess alcohol may be causing this not CR.

I was all for CR, but am getting second thoughts! My grand uncle practices CR and died at the age of 100 and was harldy ever sick , but he was a farmer and lived a very conservative and quiet live in a cold climate... I am sayign CR may not work if one is exposed to many disease ..

the animal data doesn't support the claim i see in here that CR "doesn't work" till a 30% cut at which point it magically "works", or whatever. What I've seen in the data are steadily increasing benefits from CRON diets of about 1% increase in avg lifespan per 1% reduction in calorie intake, up to almost 70% at which point malnutrition starts to bend the curve back down. The questions about how sheltered a life one needs to lead with the reduced immune cells are interesting though. I'm playing it safe by leading a very sheltered life myself.

Jonesey, so great to see you here again

There are interesting research findings concerning the immune response and CR-like dietry conditions:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/...00120131153.htm

They do not examine the blood cell based immune system, but the initial barrier at the tissue surfaces, so at the skin, lung surface etc. The result is, that the release of antimicrobial peptides, which destroy bacteria (but not viruses(?)) before they get a chance to enter the body, is significantly increased.

According to Wikipedia antimicrobial peptides are quite efficient and act as a kind of body intern antibioticum (though I am suprised to not have heard of them before):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_peptides


So it's nice to know that CR does also potentially has positive effects on the immune system, while the blood based imflammation response seems to be somewhat supressed. Also note that this discovery does not explicietly support anectodal evidence about not getting common colds, as these are not caused by bacteria.

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