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/sigh
That's called science: to act on data and knowledge you have, and to refine your theories with more / better data and knowledge you gain over time. And that's true over all fields of science - no one got it right or complete on the first try, we are building on literally thousands of years of experimentation and thinking.
This sort of revisionist/hindsight thinking is, coincidentally, fueling a lot of the antivaxxer/covid denier bullshit: Yes, now we know that decent immunity needs three to four doses of a COVID vaccine, and that it is likely that we need regular refreshers to keep up with evolving variants. But it remains a valid statement that, back two years ago, the available data suggested that one (AZ) or two (BT/Moderna) doses were enough to provide immunity. And people whining that "they should have known better" are charlatans at best and destructive discourse participants at worst, because they do not understand the basic definition of how science works.
For example: it took until the 1980s until it was formally recognized that washing hands is important in healthcare [1].
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...
It also declined to gather other kinds of data altogether (like breakthrough infections). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/health/cdc-coronavirus-in...
Is this how science should work?
I say this as a theoretical hardliner during covid that had to debate against lots of antivax people. There were many bad arguments used against antivaxxers.
I would if I were a judge. a pity that people making it into judges are not self-developed enough that they'd know this.
but in a society of specialists, knowing yourself is not strictly necessary to apply judgement as prescribed in laws.
Under normal circumstances, definitely not. The problem is, the last time scientific data was misinterpreted on that scale and with the ruthlessness that could be seen during COVID was probably back when the Catholic Church fought against heliocentrism.
Scientific discourse requires good faith and a common shared sense of truth, something that COVID deniers and antivaxxers lack to this very date.
> "longer fasts – and thus, presumably, greater hunger"
As anyone who has fasted for probably any reason can tell you, the longer the fast the less hungry you are overall AFTER an initial peak. Meaning, miss a meal and you are hungry, miss two and you become very hungry, but miss X* amount of meals and your hunger actually decreases. At some point you can go for days without any hunger at all.
Similar things happen with OMAD (one meal a day) fasting, which is arguably very similar to the mentioned Ramadan, the body gets used really fast* to the new regime and you stop being hungry outside the normal meal hour(s).
* the time specifics depend on many things, mainly on the type of meals you eat before the fast (e.g. sugars/carbs = worse withdrawals) and multiple other factors, but overall seems to be true this peak hunger happens and then hunger decreases.
Fasting is a common religious practice because it is both a challenge and a discipline. To get good at fasting, you have to work to unlearn habits of instant gratification and learn to consciously lean against the urgings of the body. A fasting practice develops real skills.
It's perfectly plausible to me that Ramadan-observing judges would better at judging while hungry while non-fasters would get worse. So this article's author is doing exactly what he criticizes: assuming his naive model is the only explanation.
I don't know for judges, but I live in a dominantly religious society and I haven't noticed the virtues promised by observing strict religious fasting. In fact, people have been jailed by (probably fasting) judges for eating out of sight [1].
[1] https://www-lepoint-fr.translate.goog/monde/algerie-2-ans-de...
My hunger seems to stabilize at very hungry after about two days.
After adjusting to rare meals I 100% feel better after 8 hours of not eating than when I eat often.
Do you spend physical effort during that time? Eg. exercise, move heavy stuff, intensely walk. (I don't)
Also what do you eat/drink before you fast. If I stop eating without preparing and changing my diet (eg. low carbs) I can get shaky and lightheaded.
However make one exception, and hunger comes back immediately. Hard to get on those diets (hunger only goes away after a week) and stay on those diets (one exception, a loving mum who thinks it's not healthy, christmas, etc, and the diet is dead).
This is based on the experiences that I've seen (as my comment before) derived from reading 10s-100s of people's experiences about fasting on Reddit groups over the years. Not scientific, but also not taken from thin air.
I've never felt "not hungry" during a fast. I think "I don't even feel hungry" is something people just say to cope. More like a mindset than an actual feeling.
I think my normal sense of smell is not great, but when hungry... It's just glorious.
Can you clarify where you beleive trillions were spent as a result of bogus social research?
I’m kind of perplexed at all of these anecdotes from people who tried fasting and assume their experience to be definitive for everyone.
If someone is in a state of metabolic dysfunction, commonly due to unfit mitochondria, they’ll be unable to utilize energy from fat as well as a young, fit person. Their body is adapted to having access to carbs at all times. Some people call the opposite being “fat adapted”. During a fast, after they’ve burned through all their glycogen, fit mitochondria can still dependably access stores of energy from fat, of which we normally have plenty.
I would bet the people who never stop being hungry during a long fast are experiencing the effects of metabolic dysfunction due to a phenotype acquired from living in the high carbohydrate, frequent access to food environment that is modern living in a first world country, especially if America. I would bet money on measuring a different RQ for the two groups, both normally and during a fast.
I have been working remotely for 15 years, that’s how I like it. But the two years of pandemic with forceful social distancing were really hard.
In Middle Eastern countries road rage incidents and reckless driving skyrocket during Ramadan. And many countries acknowledge this by all but shutting down after 1500 in the afternoon.
We want to understand the way things work, and correlation can give us hints. But so can individual experience. But "data" is often used as the truth.
So yeah individual experience here is valid. Hunger is not as simple as every hour you eat you get more hungry, and that's valid to deduct from personal experience.
Also, Muslim countries commonly offer amnesty or executive clemency at the Eid to people who have been convicted of crimes, so that's something else to correct for/think about. For example, if I am a judge adjudicating a case for theft and I know that the defendant will be pardoned on the Eid, I might acquit or pronounce a light sentence. This is a different issue than the sibling comments RE spiritual reflection, more like a concession to a larger policy imperative.
Edit to add that state sponsored leniency at the Eid is likely happening in Pakistan but not India.
When I was a kid, I recall the teachers always telling us to have a good meal before a test. Even then I felt that was silly, as a big lunch always gave me brain fog.
Anyway, I'm surprised this article (study?) didn't take into account "meeting fatigue". I know that for myself, after an hour in a meeting, I just want to get out so I can recharge. I know nothing productive will happen until I do so.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(23)00144... https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-prove-that-the-human-bod...
I suspect that such conclusion would apply much too great significance to that study.
I never make appointments for the later afternoon. Last thing you want is someone that’s tired and trying to hurry up and get home. Also avoid Friday afternoons. I’ve heard stories that manufactured things that have serial numbers that say they were built on a Friday afternoon have a far higher warranty claim rate.
They real story here is that a just system would have no relationship between judge hunger and acquittal rate, and both studies show human judges fall far short of that mark.
> The original also found a marked impact of hunger on acquittal rates.
Yes, but the opposite one, and it's been completely discredited. What this article calls out as a clever gotcha is in fact obvious to any subject matter expert: case assignment isn't random. People without lawyers were scheduled for right before lunch, and that's what correlated with worse outcomes.
This is a human system, so it will never be perfect. “just” needs to be relative. This isn’t a framework for wholesale ignoring of problems. Rather, an appeal for a degree of grace in our judgments.
Normally, when people talk about fasting do they literally mean to spend a long period of time not eating, or do they mean reducing the calorie intake, or both?
You can decouple them, right? You can take 12 hours a day to not eat, but make up for it afterwards.
And which one is the interesting one?
You can make up for it afterwards, but usually don't. Most of the people eat way more than they need in general, and thus there is no need to "make up" for a few missed meals. If you've gotten used to it, after a fast - whether 18 hours or 240 hours - you just (slowly) resume regular eating.
You do need to be aware of refeeding syndrome, which may be triggered by jumping back to regular amounts of food after a prolonged fast though; If you haven't eaten for a few days, you shouldn't just resume your regular feeding schedule and food - you need to start with small, easily digestible (preferably, liquid/pouridge) and build up back to normal over a few days.
Meaning, if you see a study, don’t believe it.
At least in any social science.
Impossibly Hungry Judges https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701328
The fact it’s done openly and for all also legitimizes it.
I’d agree it could introduce a bias against those who don’t bring them.
but some anecdotes are more equal /s
I can go an entire day without eating to little ill effect. I knows people who must eat three times a day and if they miss one meal get super cranky.
It’s not dismissing it to point out data vs datum or that people’s bodies vary wildly.
We do know, and individual experience is underrated. If it weren’t for individual experiences we would have no science.
They assumed that cases were randomly ordered and this equally likely to get the same sentence. However, they were actually done in blocks, each containing prisoners from one prison. Judges tried to finish a block before adjourning. Within each block, cases were ordered by attorney and those without an attorney were last.
For many reasons, people representing themselves tend to fare more poorly. Boom, there’s the effect!
PNAS published a commentary pointing this out but naturally it’s been cited 80x less: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1110910108
Another obvious tell that there was a problem is that ordinal rank (1st, 2nd, etc) was associated with severity but wall time was not (once you also include rank). The mechanism presumably isn’t linked to the number of cases heard (swinging the gavel isn’t *that energetically expensive!) but the passage of time since the meal. Thus, you’d expect the exact opposite effect.
IMO making this assumption is inexcusable, and I find it hard to believe it was "accidently overlooked". Asking a single judge for comments on the study before publishing it would have been enough.
Why? Wouldn't that undermine the meaning of Eid?
From my experience, it's a delusion. The focus is there for some while, but the actual abilities decline very fast without you even realizing it because of this supposed clearness. It might be even that the clearness comes exactly because of your mind limiting itself to a shorter attention and horizon, removing all the complex and complicated things. It's basically being in the zone, but the zone itself is so limited that you might not do good work if you need to have a "big zone". Though, it depends on your type of work if this can be beneficial. But as a knowledge worker, I consider it harmful for my work.
> When I was a kid, I recall the teachers always telling us to have a good meal before a test. Even then I felt that was silly, as a big lunch always gave me brain fog.
Depend on the type of food, size of meal and how long before the test you were eating.
Just as you say my experience is a delusion I can suggest that perhaps your feeling of expanded attention and horizon could be a fallacy caused by your attention in fact becoming more limited as your body diverts blood (and so oxygen) from your brain to your stomach and gut for food processing (which takes hours, so if you eat 3 meals this is basically your entire day).
Ketones are associated with fasted states and/or restricted carbohydrates. The average person holds about 400-500g of glucose (1600-2000 calories) in their bodies. Once that is depleted, through fasting or carb restriction, you will switch to ketogenesis to provide fuel. There are numerous studies that show a positive correlation with ketone production and cognitive performance.
Few examples: > https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25404320/ > https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27528626/
If I am doing serious deep work, I can go 8 to 10 or so hours without even thinking about food. However, once I do eat, I'm done with any serious work for a few hours. Keep in mind, I'm operating from a 20 year experience of intermittent fasting (before it was cool).
To reiterate, I don't think it's a delusion. We evolved in a feast or famine state. Dense carbohydrate sources and constant satiation were rare when our base metabolic pathways evolved.
You say this, implying that you got some objective outside measurement to confirm you were being deluded - what was it?
It's not even that I feel particularly hungry (unless I ate less than usual yesterday), peak of hunger is usually somewhere before I go asleep, I just feel a bit lethargic.
I only get "brain fog" some time after eating a lot of sweet or otherwise easily accessible sugars
> Anyway, I'm surprised this article (study?) didn't take into account "meeting fatigue". I know that for myself, after an hour in a meeting, I just want to get out so I can recharge. I know nothing productive will happen until I do so.
I swear I feel way more drained after a day of meetings than a day of brain work...
Of course, you do what is best for you. But I recommend you do some research in the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems and how these systems relate to fasting and energy expenditure/utilization based on the diurnal cycle.
For my IF schedule, I aim to maximize the efficiency of both. This results in my having only an evening meal. I.e. active and responsive during the day (fasting), relaxed and digesting during the evening (meal time) before sleep.
Insufficient direction from the teachers there, I think. A good meal in this context doesn't mean a big meal, usually. You'd want to eat like you were planning to do some strenuous exercise shortly afterward. If you eat big and then go running, that's no good; if you have a roughly typical diet, you want a mix of carbs, fat, and protein, as those provide energy on different timescales. If you keep a diet which avoids one of those things, you do you, but you still want the same goal of energy available over time, not eating too much that digestion needs overwhelm everything else, nor not little that hunger distracts.
Hunger gets something done. Not necessarily the right thing. I see what you mean though
> always telling us to have a good meal before a test
I wonder how many of these are 'outdated memes' from times where kids were more neglected and/or didn't have supervision then went to school however and 'eat a good meal before a test' actually means 'try to eat something before coming to school one time this week'
If I skip food after (early) dinner and don't think about it more I can easily skip breakfast the next day and then I can easily skip lunch, dinner and supper the following day.
If I start to think about or expect food however I think I can easily get in trouble.
Disclaimer: I have only done this for 4 or so days.
Since the non-fasting hours include a night of sleep, that schedule sounds pretty rigorous to me. Americans typically have an eating window of 12-15 hours, eating 5 times per day: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8705992/
HN loves to critique psych research without understanding that once you're above chemistry in the complexity hierarchy, these problems are everywhere.
It's of course no surprise then that most Muslim cities see the maximum amount of food wastage, and most Muslims the maximum weight gains during the month of Ramadan. Not to mention how overworking the ladies of the house in preparing the Iftar , while the men laze around, seems to be a common theme transcending across cultures. And I say these as a Muslim.
In my opinion, water fasts make more sense than silly daylight fasting. My stomach seems to agree with that too - Ramadan always seems to exacerbate my auto-immune condition.
Exactly. Digesting is also kind of a burden to your focus, which is why one should not work directly after eating, especially if it was a heavy meal. But digesting ends at some point, after which you do have excessive energy available. So the point is to know roughly how long each meal will burden your body, and plan accordingly when you will reach a performance-high.
I guess it's mostly my brain filtering out "irrelevant data" (the location of food becomes relevant when you're hungry!)
That made me wonder if my other senses might be sharper while hungry too. As hunters, I imagine our ability to plan might also benefit.
Has any research been done on the effects of hunger on cognitive performance?
But I get the same - go without food for a while and my sense of smell increases until I eat and become satiated.
Now whether it’s related to certain allergens that I eat or the body/senses becoming less sharp I do not know.
Probably worth investigating a bit more, I never really dug deeper into this.
Do you have a source? Your second link measures cognitive performance in rats, not humans.
-- This study found that the brain's uptake of ketones was preserved in patients with mild Alzheimer's disease, and that higher levels of ketone metabolism were associated with better cognitive performance.
> Krikorian, R., Shidler, M.D., Dangelo, K., Couch, S.C., Benoit, S.C., & Clegg, D.J. (2012). Dietary ketosis enhances memory in mild cognitive impairment. Neurobiology of Aging, 33(2), 425.e19-27. doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2010.10.006
-- This study found that a ketogenic diet improved cognitive function in patients with mild cognitive impairment.
> Taylor, M.K., Sullivan, D.K., Mahnken, J.D., Burns, J.M., & Swerdlow, R.H. (2018). Feasibility and efficacy data from a ketogenic diet intervention in Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 4, 28-36. doi: 10.1016/j.trci.2017.11.002
-- This study found that a ketogenic diet was safe and feasible for patients with Alzheimer's disease, and that it improved cognitive function in some patients.
Granted, these are studies for people with existing cognitive impairments. However, given how new the science is, I can see why it hasn't been done with healthy individuals, yet.
Another way of putting it: you say you have tried but are you even sure that others have tried? People will say they have experienced but in reality have not.
I accidentally go all day without food. They must carry snacks.
The real trick of this is realizing people do the same “imagining” with their own body and their own selves. They do not know.
Moreover, it's completely reasonable to be skeptical of the methodology of a study, especially when one of the subject groups is as specific as a religious group doing a fast as part of a religious observance.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2017/06/tuni...
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0de064b1-c214...
It seems in a lot of Muslim countries you can go to jail for just eating normally during Ramadan.
Now I am not saying I agree with this law, I am Christian and according to how I and those I live with practice it, fasting is strictly individual, something I personally would even try to hide according to Jesus words in Matthew 6. 16, 17 and particularly 18:
> «that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.» Matthew 6:18 KJV https://bible.com/bible/1/mat.6.18.KJV
Maybe expressing that you're fasting could be seen as bad. As if you're trying to boast about it, how you're better then others.
Which made me that, if people that eat a vegan diet (or similar) kept it to themselves and not force it onto others, then perhaps there wouldn't exist the culture of "I ate a steak in front of vegans" or "I don't mind if you're vegan, but please let me eat in peace".
Each of these might have value on their own, but God will only reward us if we do it for him instead of doing it to seek the glory of men.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8840718/ "The Implication of Physiological Ketosis on The Cognitive Brain: A Narrative Review"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33103819/ "A ketogenic drink improves cognition in mild cognitive impairment: Results of a 6-month RCT"
Also, at least from my own experience, after some time you just get used to that and are hungry later and not as hard. When I eat around noon I only start getting hungry in the evening
If you adapt to a 18:6 or even 20:4 schedule, you don’t feel hunger.
It’s like being mildly dehydrated or sleep deprived, yes you can still function but no it’s not optimal.
I tried the meat diet for a few days (yes, I know that's too short! I couldn't get through the "keto flu") and I was blown away by how stable my mood and energy level was after having steak for breakfast. I wouldn't get hungry at all for the next 8-10 hours.
1. I didn't feel hunger and I don't think everyone needs to feel it
2. I focused a lot better,
I would probably do it a lot of I lived alone.
In practice I often end up with some kind of intermittent fasting: skip meals between 1700 and 1200 (lunch next day) and even then I happily minimize my lunch.
It helps me.
but looking at the criticism and history sections of the wikipedia page will cover it in more detail. It basically promotes gatekeeping and group think, as seen with the Alzheimer's research issue which wasted billions of dollars and slowed progress by decades via effectively an academic cartel. Funding becoming tied to publication which relies on peer review made things worse
This is on same level of single use clothes
Tbh it’s me who’s ignoring mine by not eating
In order to isolate religious belief, they would need to include a control group of judges who fasted for a month but without any religious affiliation. I don’t see that they’ve done that.
This is some spartan discipline.
I hope LDS burns in hell, whoever they are.
Many studies have proven that:
1. Driving ability is impaired by alcohol consumption (or lack of sleep, incidentally)
2. People are very bad at estimating how severely impaired they are (wrt being drunk or kust tired)
Are there any similar studies around ability to mentally focus / perform physical activities while fasting?
Impressive if you did training while fasting btw!
