Interesting bias on the bias: the author of this article seems not to have experienced a prolonged fast themselves, otherwise they'd know this is not true at all:
> "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.
Yeah, as somebody who has experimented with fasting, I think it's a huge mistake to think that Ramadan fasters would respond like hungry non-fasters.
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.
> It's perfectly plausible to me that Ramadan-observing judges would better at judging while hungry while non-fasters would get worse.
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].
If the laws says you should fast, it wouldn't be a virtue (edit, to be more precise: it would even be wrong) for a judge to not punish someone for breaking the law, unless the law gives the judges this liberty.
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
That quote is quite interesting.
I went to see if it's any different in other versions is bible, but it's always pretty much the same.
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".
The first part Matthew 6, 1 - 21 has a lot more about doing what we do only with the expectation that God will see it, either it is alms, prayers or fast.
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.
I just attended an Iftar a while back. The amount of gluttonous eating, wastage of food and lack of hygiene in cleaning up the area after the Iftar was astounding.
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.
There is intermittent fasting research that has shown that fasting after a few days can end up decreasing sleep time and increase all-day energy. My own fasting experience shows this increase in energy and reduction in sleep as getting better and showing more energy in arguments. Some say this would be making me angrier but it isn't. It is making me more forceful at the argument.
Don't Ramadan fasters only fast for a few hours a day (e.g. during daylight?) Do they ever reach the point where they've skipped enough meals to no longer be hungry? TBQH skipping meals during the day and eating one big meal after dark doesn't seem terribly unlike the lifestyle of many nerdy bachelors. I'm sure I've done that many times myself without even thinking about it.
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/
My theory for why it might go the other way: to get good at fasting, I had to get better at noticing and leaning against feelings that might throw off my judgement. Hunger was the feeling at issue, but I think it's at least partly transferable to other feelings.
Haven't gone 3-5 days but done more than 1 day, hunger paradoxically goes from high to low/none in 24 hours. I can feel weaker but not hungry the way I feel at first.
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.
At day three I was fine until I told myself I was going to get some food. Then I felt like I got hit by a truck in my stomach and nearly threw up I was shaking and so hungry. So I ended up breaking a three day fast at a Taco Bell instead of the grass fed steak I had waiting at home. Best Chalupa I’ve ever eaten in my life.
Same. I’m over 24 hours into a fast right now. Zero hunger. I guess it’s different for person to person, kind of like just about everything seems to be.
Is it discipline? Or a medical condition? For example, I wouldn’t say someone with anorexia has impressive discipline. I can’t think of any reason rooted in reality why someone would fast for almost 2 weeks straight.
Definitely doable and very common in many old cultures, have a look at the film "The science of fasting" (original German), might be eye opening: https://youtu.be/WgLJ_dfKy1E
I looked it up, and it's "content management company" Little Dot Studios, who seem to make money by claiming things on youtube to steal ad money and extort people.
Last week I fasted for 5 days. Today I ate sugar again.
I cannot speak for OP but my primary reasons were curiosity and becoming more aware of my body and energy levels. The last days I was super active, productive and in a crazy good mood. Today I feel like a slump.
I probably will do it again and 5 days was much easier than expected. You probably need some experience to do it for 12 days, but I am very confident that it is manageable after the second or third time.
It‘s like sport. People say „why would you do it“, but when you experience it by yourself you know intrinsically that it isn’t actually that bad.
I'm confused. You say "same", so you agree with arunix and jraby3? For them their level of hunger increased the longer they fasted. But then you wrote "wasn't particularly hungry", so you agree with franciscop?
I should have been more clear. For me at least, the peak hunger point was approximately 48hrs. It subsided substantially from there. I am fit and train often. But I've had a life long unhealthy relationship with sugar, which I managed to solve some months after I started fasting.
You mean no food for two days? Agree you grow very hungry. But 1 meal a day, after a week or two it becomes a habit and you don't feel hunger, even though you are losing weight.
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).
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.
It does depend on different people, but yeah peak hunger is around 2-5 days in (again depending on multiple things) so doing multiple 3-5 day fasts just seems torture to me when you could've done a longer one and not be so hungry in the process. I have done three 10+ days fasts (trying not to get stuffed just before) and usually at 2-3 days is the peak. Days 4-5 are also hard, and you might get a punctual "hunger pang" much later on depending on what's going on (e.g. walk by a pizzeria), but overall nothing at all compared to day 2-3.
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.
Agreed, I am an experienced faster. My longest fast was 5 days (no food mon-friday)
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.
best option is to just assume every psychology/social sciences article is bullshit, pretty much all of the most famous studies have failed to replicate. And many of those studies were used to justify trillions of dollars in federal spending over the past few decades
Indeed, the book The Quick Fix goes over exactly this point. For example, did you know that the Superman pose had no scientific evidence whatsoever? The researcher simply pushed for it because it made her feel good. The grit study by Angela Duckworth is similarly faulty, the cadet training camp she went to had a pass rate of over 90% so the ones who didn't pass weren't in a statistically significant group to show whether their grittiness actually meant anything to them failing or passing.
It's like steroids in baseball. Anybody could do it so in that sense it may be fair, but it's unfair to all the players who aren't utterly reckless and short sighted.
I think the best thing is to do more research to understand more rather than rejecting the scientific method entirely. It has and will continue to get better and better over time, with occasional regressions that may seem meaningful in the short term but are tiny blips when you zoom out. The history of science is one false theory being replaced by another that’s (usually) marginally closer to the truth.
So someone does a single dubious research, and we follow with 3 more dubious researches to justify the first research. For each of these 3 dubious researches we have to do 3 more to ensure their credibility. And the number of researches grows exponentially while the research quality doesn't improve at all.
peer review only really took off in the last few decades and it has been a disaster. Nothing about my post says anything about the scientific method, it's about sham fields that lack rigor and use cartels of influence to push each others pet theories to support their own ideologies.
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
If you look at the replies you'll see the huge variety of responses people have to this, which is absolutely fascinating. I think this might actually be different for different people.
Sure there might be different experiences, but that's what I'm critizising from the article, since it says it IS the same experience for everyone (hunger increases the longer the fast). I do agree I should probably have added an extra "for some/many" or two on my comment though.
If you hook a hose up to someone’s mouth and nose and measure the ratio of O2 absorbed vs Co2 they expel, the so-called respiratory quotient (RQ), you have a measure of the types of metabolic processing they’re doing, anaerobic vs aerobic.
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 suspect it has to do not with being different people but with gut biome (so it can be different for the same person at different points in time, maybe even something we can change by changing our diet or surroundings).
This doesn’t ring true for me. It seems more likely to me that, like with alcohol, we merely become less aware of how impaired we actually are.
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.
+1. And I’ve noticed about myself that the amplitude or my “peak” hunger drops significantly as I sustain more days of intermittent fasting. So the hunger becomes more tolerable, so to speak.
I've done a waterfast before and for me this point was somewhere around the beginning of the third day. I could've kept going really, but I noticed my body had started to break down muscle (day 8.)
Modern humans have modern inventions like zero calorie foods. I’ve talked to many who have fasted where their body probably disagreed with that statement.
Something that may tickle your fancy is considering words as food. Food affects our body in more ways than simply giving us energy. Can words affect the mind in similar fashion?
As a Muslim, I can say there is something definitely different about Ramadan. It’s supposed to help your spiritual development, so it’s not surprising at all that judges would display more mercy at that time. If anything these two conflicting studies could point to the effect of an intentional spiritual focus, rather than hunger itself.
Big agree on this, they just swapped a handful of confounding variables for another one. The finding that the judges became more merciful with every hour of fasting could be made sense of in that they became more aware of their hunger and so were more aware of the reason they were fasting, their religious beliefs and commitment.
Judicial process is different than the process of arresting. Following the culture and norms of the place you’re in is often inscribed in law. The judges have to do with the actual judgement process of crime. Completely orthogonal.
So many comments here claiming to understand the effect of fasting on humans generally through personal experience. Come on, people - your experience is a datum, it's not data, and your entirely subjective conclusions drawn from that datum are not analysis. People's response to fasting varies widely. Hunger is both a physiological and a psychological phenomenon - and like any phenomenon with a psychological component, is highly variable. And our individual ability to release stored glycogen in order to maintain metabolic function without eating also varies widely. There is no single experience of fasting.
Data is also overrated. Data is often highly convoluted, with multiple causes in one correlation.
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.
Data is indeed often opaque, but it's the only way you can make a rigorous argument that something is characteristic of the natural world. To borrow a phrase, data driven conclusion on a hypothesis are the worst form of conclusion, except for all the other methods you can name.
No its not, thats exactly my point. You cant make a conclusion like that at all. It just points you that there might be recurring charateristic but not that there actually is one or what it is.
I don't know who is labeling their observations as "analysis" other than you. It's reasonable to question a study's methodology, especially when the judges in question were fasting as a part of Ramadan. And including one's own experience as an addendum is completely reasonable too.
I don't even know what point you're trying to make, but regardless, I think the point the poster you're responding to is making is that there are two places in the scientific method where anecdotes comes into the play: observation and hypothesis. These are the seeds for follow-up inquiry and the basis for the scientific method.
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.
There’s no single experience of thinking yet I can say everyone has thoughts. Thoughts about what? _That_ is what varies. The body is similar, it speaks through signals to the brain. The only way to know your body’s voice is by doing. Dismiss your notion that individual experience has no value.
What I’m saying is that perhaps the “cranky” eater doesn’t even know their body’s voice. Or is angry by simply hearing it.
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.
Yes, it took me a long time to realize that pain, and pangs, and feelings aren't minor inconveniences that I must live with, but my body telling me something was wrong or needed adjustment. I've found that fasting helps us stop ignoring what the body is telling us.
Exactly right. I can go 24 hours without eating with no ill effects, and while I am hungry, I'm not ravenous, and I can certainly keep going just fine. I have a neighbor and friend who can't get through a morning of moderate labor without a snack - not because he can't stand the hunger, but because he simply runs out of energy. He is genuinely ravenous after a 12 hour fast.
I always wondered about the original study whether they controlled for the fact that courts control their case calendars. I can't count the number of times I've had a client's case shuffled to the back of the line because the judge didn't want to deal with it (or wanted to make me or the client wait longer).
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.
No, the original study didn’t—-and that was its fatal flaw.
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!
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.
> 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.
Think of it more like gambling for credibility. Theft is still wrong during Ramadan, but if I know that everyone convicted of petty theft will be pardoned in a month, do I impose the standard sentence? If I do, it's spiteful judge vs. generous executive. If I give a light sentence, I steal the march on the pardon and get to be the benevolent judge.
I'm a daily faster for the past 20 years, so I can attest (anecdotally) to the benefits of working while hungry. Once you adapt, after a couple weeks, instead of being irritable when hungry, you mind feels clear and focused. After all, despite the trappings of modern society, we are a predator species. Hunger gets shit done.
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.
> instead of being irritable when hungry, you mind feels clear and focused.
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.
From my experience, I think clearest when my body is not busy digesting.
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).
> From my experience, I think clearest when my body is not busy digesting.
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.
One thing I found quite astounding while fasting is how keen my sense of smell is. I normally don't smell much at all, but while fasting I can smell every restaurant in a 2 mile radius.
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?
Agreed. When I first started IF so many years ago, it was a shocker how much my sense of smell increased. In the sense of evolutionary biology, it makes sense. If you are hungry, you better be able to find your next food source and maximize every sense you have to get it done.
I can't agree with it being a delusion. Again, my personal experience is just that -- personal.
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.
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.
> Castellano, C.A., Nugent, S., Paquet, N., Tremblay, S., Bocti, C., Lacombe, G., Imbeault, H., Turcotte, E., Fulop, T., & Cunnane, S.C. (2015). Lower brain 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose uptake but normal 11C-acetoacetate metabolism in mild Alzheimer's disease dementia. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 43(4), 1343-1353. doi: 10.3233/JAD-141952
-- 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.
I believe that pushing the body to limits such as fasting, hot/cold baths, intense workout can help us in the longterm. But for when we need our brains to work at its highest potential in the immediate such as software engineering all those things, how is having a hindrance such as hunger anything but a distraction?
Hunger could be a distraction perhaps but being fat adapted means your brain is primarily burning ketones for fuel instead of glucose. Ketones burn cleaner in the brain with less reactive byproducts than glucose. Dementia eases when patients are fasted or given exogenous ketones. Being metabolically healthy and in a fasted state also means you're not distracted from dopamine snack cravings which many confuse with real hunger and I think has a worse effect on mood and cognition. In addiction your frontal lobe fights for control over your lizard brain. Addiction means your lizard brain is winning over self control.
Another perspective would be that when your body switches to survival mode due to adverse circumstances (such as cold or hunger), it mobilizes all its physical and cognitive resources. When the body is fighting for survival, it's about everything. This is probably the reason why many people report that they are capable of peak performance in this state. The body usually doesn't give more when it has more, but does the opposite. It saves and conserves its resources for worse times.
With intermittent (as in "eat one meal a day") fasting you can set your intake to align for when you need most brain work done.
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
I feel lethargic after eating. I find it hard to concentrate when hungry. I'm only productive in those 1-2 hours between the brain fog wearing off and the next hunger wave coming on.
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.
I tried multiple times 1-4 days around 25 - 23 years ago and
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.
Not my experience. I eat one meal a day and I don't really get work going before that meal (which is usually around noon).
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...
> Not my experience. I eat one meal a day and I don't really get work going before that meal (which is usually around noon).
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.
I did this in college, and I had super focus during my morning classes, but after my first meal of the day at 11:30 or noon, I needed something like a 2 hour nap, and I definitely didn't recover the initial fasted performance level until the following morning. I don't deny fasting works better for some or many, but it depends what you're optimizing for. I prefer the steady energy of 3 meals a day spaced out 5-7 hours, all 3 macronutrients in each. Also, in trying to put on muscle as a rail thin person, there's no way I can imagine doing any fewer meals per day.
> 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.
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'
You also can't take the Ramadan as a normal fast. This is a religious rite that might actually inspire more forgiving behavior becausenot its religious nature.
Comparing the effect of different fasting duration only across judges who fasted during Ramadan most likely removed the influence of religion-inspired forgiving behavior.
No, it’s the absence of a control because there is no control group. You can’t study whether it’s a religiously affiliated behavior unless you have a non-religious fasting control group. It’s called a confounding variable.
It's not confounding variable because this "variable" is actually constant in the entire group; the comparison is not fasting muslims vs non-fasting non-religious judges, but muslim judges with longer vs shorter fast or fasting at different hours
It ads a lot more variables making it unsuitable, day time is not strongly associated with hunger. For instance its possible that the 5 prayers during the day have effect. And also the feeling of hunger is not constant, it might be stronger around normal eating times etc. There are just too many variables to conclude anything.
The claim of the gp is this study could “remove the influence of religion-inspired forgiving behavior.”
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 might be the dumbest article I've ever read. It ought to be shockingly obvious that "hunger" associated with people who know what to expect and who do it regularly as a practice is going to be miles different from someone who ate that day and is dealing with different levels of e.g. blood sugar and whatnot.
The conclusion I get from both studies is that small influences can have very large effect on judges ability to give out sentences. If Muslim judges are 10 per cent more likely to acquit a defendant for every additional hour of fasting they experienced, and that decision according to the study is more accurate, then Muslims shouldn't be making sentences outside of that effect. For non-Muslim judges there is no difference so no need to apply the same restrictions.
I suspect that such conclusion would apply much too great significance to that study.
I'm very open to the possibility that the original 'hungry judges' study was flawed — many such studies don't stand up to scrutiny, let alone replication, and we should usually not give them a lot of credence. That said, I don't think that the study discussed in this article is close enough to the conditions of that original study to be directly comparable.
I usually go for first appointment of the day or thereabouts. 9am-10AM if possible. Idea being they’re fresh and haven’t been worn down by seeing a lot of people already.
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.
I wouldn't give up on it, the follow up has a massive flaw. They didn't account for why the judges were fasting. They used Ramadan which is a religious observance and the fast is done for religious reasons. That's obviously going to have an impact on the judges' leanings towards mercy.
So to ensure sentences are neither too harsh nor too lenient, all trials need three judges: A Hungry Judge, A Full Judge, and An "I Could Eat" Judge. Or, at least, an emergency Snickers.
This new paper finds 10% higher likelihood to acquit per hour of fasting. That’s huge. Imagine you’re in the criminal’s shoes. The original also found a marked impact of hunger on acquittal rates.
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 new paper found that practicing muslim judges were more lenient on a major religious holiday involving fasting. I wish the study looked at whether the results generalized to other religious holidays without fasting.
> 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.
In it's judgement, not in it's scheduling. Scheduling when cases are viewed based on the probability that they will be difficult doesn't break that promise. But if there is a correlation whereby simpler cases tend to be dismissed while more complicated cases tend to stick, that means you end up with a correlation (not causation) between time of day and case outcome, but that doesn't mean it's biased or affected by hunger.
the sooner we admit that 'justice' can never be impartial and blind because humans are not impartial and blind - the sooner we can admit the ways in which this plays out. And ironically, in the end, the closer we come to impartiality.
May I ask to the people talking about fasting on this thread:
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.
Unfortunately, "fasting" is not specific enough. For some people, it means not eating for 6 hours or so ("breakfast" breaks the fast even if you've eaten late last night). For some people, it means >24 hours. Some people add the qualifier "intermittent" to signify that it is less than 24 hours (but done repeatedly).
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.
It’s interesting to know the effect isn’t as obvious as it originally appeared. But obviously fasting vs fed meal timing have nothing to do with each other in terms of hunger. Fasted ketosis is much different physiologically than serum glucose swings from fed meal timings.
This is the sort of thing that, if more research is done into this, has the potential to lead to pretty wide ranging challenges to previous decisions. Many courts would rightly rule that such an arbitrary decision making process is unconstitutional. Though I have a feeling such challenges would ultimately fail as those bringing the challenge would likely be required to prove that their particular adverse decision was affected by the factors talked about in this article. I would think that would be virtually impossible in most cases.
The article was pretty light on this but I think one major factor they didn’t mention was that Ramadan is a huge month of leniency and forgiveness with respect to crimes. In many Muslim majority countries, sentences are commuted and pardons are given, so I think this would be an important factor to consider.
Only tangentially related, but I can’t seem to access archive.ph (to view this article) when using Cloudflare DNS. Wikipedia says their dispute ended in May 2022 and that it should work again. But that seems to be based purely on a community forum post from what I can tell.
Did anyone consider who schedules trials? "Lets get the obvious ones out the way first" and "lets not start with an intense case first" so the worst outcomes would likely be around midmorning before lunch?
Ah bribery... Hmm, somewhat interesting how we as society have come to accept it in situation like these. I wonder if more research will lead to banning it and punishing people from even attempting. Then again people deciding on punishments are ones that benefit from the bribery so very likely not.
I think this and bribery are different, albeit subtly. Bringing in donuts, which have little material value, to ensure the audience is attuned to your presentation and not distracted by hunger is different than paying someone, for instance.
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.
This supposedly also happens to become a Submariner at the final counsel vote after a few weeks of being dragged through the mud. Dragged through the water?
Having spent time around the LawTwitter community, I’m aware of many judges who are biased against prosecution. I would not be surprised if this logic could be applied in reverse.
I feel like the entire field of psychology is no more valid than homeopathy. Just people coming up with theories why something happens, patting themselves on the back, then the whole thing gets inevitably disproven few years/decades later. And it doesn't have the hallmarks of actual science, where people go ok, our theory was slightly wrong, let's refine it - no, it turns out the entire approaches and assumptions are completely wrong, from top to bottom. How many generations of psychologists have been trained on theories of Freud but now if you suggested any of what he said as true you'd be laughed out of the room?
> How many generations of psychologists have been trained on theories of Freud but now if you suggested any of what he said as true you'd be laughed out of the room?
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].
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.
How would scientists get and publish the data if they don't know it exists? Or, if they intellectually think it probably exists, that's different from actually seeing that it exists. I think the CDC is totally wrong, what they did/are doing has a massive impact on the quality of "the science" (as in normal science where the scientists can actually talk about what they did).
First of all that NG article and links in it are thought provoking, and second I disagree with the details of your facts on many levels. What is not explicitly said in that article though is that using science for political gain goes both ways. It is too easy to categorize every idea as antivaxxer just because it fits your narrative.
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.
https://archive.ph/T9Y7b