The FastDay Forum

"Researchers have investigated what the popular 5:2 diet, also known the feast-or-famine diet, is doing to our bodies, and the results are looking pretty good for devotees. But, oddly enough, when they added antioxidant supplements to the mix, the benefits gained from the diet appeared to be counteracted."
http://www.sciencealert.com/doing-the-5-2-diet-avoid-antioxidants-new-research-suggests

The research was not 5:2, but it was alternate day intermittent fasting. The sample size was very small and over a very short time period. So interesting, but definitely not conclusive. More research needed.

[carorees]

Trials of antioxidant supplements had to be stopped because of increased death rates in the group receiving antioxidants. So why did they add them in this study? To see if fasting helped?

I wonder what the dose of C and E were. I'll look for the original article when I get to work.

There are quite a few large, long, well-crafted epidemiological studies that have demonstrated an increased mortality among those who take supplemental antioxidant vitamin C & E. Recently I saw another good quality study that found that too much resveratrol also had a negative effect on a mouse model.

There are good scientific reasons why this would happen. Oxidation plays an important part in the signaling within the cell. Too much antioxidants silence signals that should make cells self-destruct when something is wrong with them. When those cells persist they can become diseased.

Stick to eating real food. It is REALLY tough to overdose on antioxidants when you are eating reasonable servings of fruits and veg.

I wonder what the dose of C and E were. I'll look for the original article when I get to work.

"... We evaluated the effects of a combination of vitamin C (1000 mg/day) and vitamin E (400 IU/day) on insulin sensitivity as measured by glucose infusion rates (GIR) during a hyperinsulinemic, euglycemic clamp in previously untrained (n = 19) and pretrained (n = 20) healthy young men. ... "

From the full text here:

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/21/8665.full


Note that the original article combines two different studies, one of antioxidents and exercise (above), the other of an IF variant with and without antioxidant supplementation. Here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25546413

Should I not be taking vitamin C at all then?
:0.

Thanks for posting this. Not sure what to make of it to be honest. Think I will stick to my food although I do take resveratrol.

I got a bit distracted when reading about this on PubMed and I had not appreciated that the CALERIE Study was now in phase two and they are testing the effects of fasting over a two year period on non overweight individuals. Unfortunately they are all relatively young (below 50 in men and 47 for women). However I am very interested to see the results coming through and they seem to have alot in the pipeline. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3525758/
http://calerie.dcri.duke.edu/
http://calerie.dcri.duke.edu/about/List ... cripts.pdf

I think the issue with Vitamin C is to use it in the kinds of doses that would be found in food. The problem come when people add the supplemental Vitamin C to a diet that already contains sufficient Vitamin C.

The other problem with some of these antioxidants is that the chemical form in the bottle is not the form used in your body. This is a problem with many supplements. There are L- and R- forms of these organic molecules and they don't function the same way but they are the same chemical and can be labeled that way. This is a known problem with Vitamin E and, if I remember correctly, CLA.

@RawKaren, Isn't that study you flagged studying daily 25% calorie restriction, along the lines of what the Life Extension poeple suggest? And given that well over 90% of the people screened didn't qualify for the study, you have to wonder how applicable their findings will be for the 90% of us who aren't utterly perfect subjects.

My dad ate that way and lived to be very od, but he became very bad tempered as he aged. Very bad tempered