I was watching an episode of Bizarre Foods w/ Andrew Zimmern yesterday, and in the episode, set in Japan, the host met with renowned Japanese inventor Dr. “NakaMats”. As the host spoke with the Dr., he learned that the good Doc, in pursuit of extreme longevity, eats one 700 calorie meal a day. It was also shown that the doctor engages in physical excercise and is not in any way inactive. Big big thought was, how can anyone survive on 700 calories a day and remain even slightly overweight, as the Doctor was shown to be. I am an avid weightlifter and excerciser and I would wither away to nothing on 700 calories a day. Is there some sort of misinformation here? Is this caloric intake possible? I’m sure there is more to this than was presented on the show, so anyone who has knowledge of Dr. NakaMats, please enlighten me.
The razor tells me… the Dr. is lying! What do I win?
Just as preposterous is his claim that he will live to be 144 years old (Smithsonian recently had an article on him). It is also ironic that he says that foods like milk are “bad for the brain” (and so is tap water - maybe because of the fluoride? :rolleyes:), yet he eats dairy products as part of his meal (which is an unappetizing-sounding mix of eggs, cheese, yogurt, various meats, and seaweed - all blended together, sort of like the Matrix goop that people are always talking about as an ideal food replacement). Or that more than six hours of sleep a day is bad.
Occam’s Shaving Cream.
After a weight loss, resting metabolism can and does become more efficient, but I think that tops out at 20% or so. So if the guy originally needed 3000 calories a day he may reduce his needs to 2400. But I don’t see how he could drop to 700, that is about 4 calories per pound per day assuming he weighs about 175. I don’t know how that is realistic.
Dr. NakaMats is an amateur compared to the Breatharians.
I think you would have been better to say, “anyone who has knowledge of Dr. NakaMats, please weigh in”.
The caloric restriction thing is real; evidence has already shown, not only that if someone starves in their teens doe they have longevity, we now suspect (if male) it gets passed along in his sperm. That means what happens to ur father when he’s a teen, long b4 ur born, affex u!. Welcome o the freaky world of Epigenetics. Anyway, studies of I believe Swedish families in times of famine showed that the kids of famine victims (obviously those who survived) suffered markedly lower ravages of aging, like heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s etc. Anecdotally, my father survived the Holocaust (and was starving), and he lived to 85, ancient in his family tree. Interestingly, his older cousin, enduring then same fate at the same time, lived to 92. We don’t know for sure why, but starving apparently kix off the body’s switch to stop the normal aging process.
Here’s where it gets murkier: resveratrol has been shown to mimic the starvation effect, in high enough doses. The famous French Paradox shows that drinking red wine is good for you, of which resveratrol is an important ingredient. I take a pill made by a company which claims its resveratrol is so pure, it specifically stimulates the SIR-1 sirulin gene receptor, the 1 suspected to command the aging process to stop. in other words, think of it like a deadman’s switch: normal default is to age normally, get sick, etc. Starving while young or maybe resveratrol mimix the effect.
This article suggests that the effects are due to a smaller body size (caloric restriction in youth stunts growth), which in turn is highly correlated with longevity; larger animals across virtually all species (but not between different species, where it is generally the opposite) generally have shorter lifespans. It even goes so far as to link the male/female difference in life expectancy to the fact that men are generally larger (one study mentioned showed that men and women of the same height lived just as long), and the increase in chronic diseases over the past century to an increase in average height.
You don’t need to do daily starvation, intermittent fasting accomplishes the same thing to your health. If a person can’t maintain only eating 60-70% of maintenance calories a day every day (far higher than the 20% the guy in the OP claims to eat, I still have no idea how someone could live off of 700 calories every day), you can eat maintenance one day, then 20-30% of maintenance the next. That is supposedly just as effective and easier to stick with (I had trouble, I can’t limit myself to 1200 calories which is about 30% of maintenace for me). I wonder if doing maintenance one day, then 60-70% the next would work. That would be even easier to stick with long term.
The mechanism by which is works may be because starving reduces how much NAD+ is reduced back into NADH. The ratio of NADH/NAD+ influences activity and expression of the SIR2 gene.