WIL Weekly 5-Point Review #31
100 days underwater reverses age by 10 years, red meat makes you live longer and more...
This is my free weekly newsletter covering 5 interesting points from the week. Subscribe (if you haven’t already) if you’d like to get it in your inbox each week!
How to get great sleep, why your sleep sucks on a fast, and how to avoid jet lag
You’ve probably heard about the importance of consistent meal times. Meal timing is a significant “zeitgeber,” which is essentially something in the environment that affects your circadian rhythm. This is why Andrew Huberman emphasizes getting bright light first thing in the morning - it’s a zeitgeber that helps set your circadian rhythm, helping you consistently fall asleep at an appropriate time each night. If you’ve done a multi-day fast, you’ve probably noticed that it can really affect your sleep. There are a lot of things going on during a fast, but because mealtime is such a big zeitgeber, the circadian clock is going to be affected when you have no food coming in. This is why I was able to totally avoid jet lag on my flight to Europe but became awfully jet-lagged when I came back to Tokyo. On the way to Europe, I started fasting more than 24 hours before my flight. Despite not sleeping much on the 14 hour plane ride, I was still quite energetic upon arriving in Belgium. Then, I ate finally ate my first meal around 8PM Belgium time and by 10PM I could barely stay awake. I woke up around 6AM the next day and carried on with virtually no jet lag. This has happened to me many times - If I’m fasting, I can blast through sleep deprivation without much effect on my focus, but the moment I eat something, it acts like a supercharged sleeping pill. On the other hand, when I was coming back to Tokyo, I didn’t do any fasting and I was still eating a little bit at my usual (Belgium time) eating times. My circadian rhythm was still getting signals that we were in Belgium and unsurprisingly, I had pretty bad jet lag. I was waking up at 2AM for a couple days after getting back to Tokyo.
Beef and beef tallow diet improves ability to fight cancer?
Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) is a fatty acid naturally produced by grazing animals and is found in meat and dairy. Enzymes in these animals guts convert omega-6 fatty acids in plants into CLA which ends up in meat and milk. There is some evidence that CLA has health benefits like increasing fat loss and strengthening the immune system.
A 2005 rodent study was investigating CLA’s potential for improving cancer outcomes as some evidence indicates it reduces tumor metastasis. The study’s authors note that CLA is more effective when combined with beef tallow. Further, the effectiveness of CLA is reduced when combined with vegetable oils.
“In vivo, CLA seems to be more effective with respect to decreasing metastasis when the diet includes beef tallow. On the other hand, the efficacy of CLA is diminished with increased levels of dietary LA found in several popular vegetable oils.”
Red meat makes you live longer?
Telomeres, the caps at the end of our chromosomes, have gotten a lot of attention as it’s thought that longer telomeres means longer lifespan. A 2016 study looked at people who were eating nine different food types (cereal, fruits, vegetables, dairy, red meat, poultry, fish, sweets and salty snacks) and several beverages. What came as a surprise to the researchers was that only red meat was correlated with longer telomeres. They conclude saying that this finding suggesting that red meat may lengthen lifespan “may undermine some accepted concepts of adverse effects of this diet on the health status and life longevity.”
100 days underwater reverses your age by 10 years?
A Dr. Joseph Dituri of Florida set the world record for living underwater at 100 days. While a cool feat, what was really interesting about this to me was that some articles were claiming that living underwater this long reversed Dituri’s biological age by 10 years.
Dituri did experience some striking benefits. He allegedly achieved:
・Improved sleep. His REM sleep went from 40% to 60-66%.
・20% increase in telomere length. (Telomere length is supposed to decrease with age)
・1000% increase in stem cell count.
・Markers of inflammation cut in half.
One side effect was that he shrunk by about a half inch.
Dituri did seem to experience several remarkable benefits, but I’m not sure which biomarker the “10 years younger” claim is referring to. This article says that this was a claim made by Dituri himself. Dr. Dituri notes that these benefits weren’t too surprising to him as he is well aware of the extensive benefits of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Maybe Bryan Johnson should get himself a hyperbaric oxygen chamber to sleep in.
January 2024 study echoes previous findings that vegan mothers give birth to smaller babies
A study published just 6 days ago in Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica looked at how womens’ following a plant-based diet affected their babies. They conclude that:
The women reporting that they adhered to vegan diets during pregnancy had offspring with lower mean birth weight and higher risk of preeclampsia compared with omnivorous mothers. Low protein intake might be one plausible explanation for the observed association with birth weight.
Hey are you sponsored by the Beef Industry?
The baby can just get bigger later