Fast or not to fast, that is the question?

Fasting as the deliberate abstention from food or drink is not a hype or new trend. It has been a practice embedded in human history across diverse cultures, so widespread I suspect there is no big civilization that has not include it into diateary patterns, rituals, tradition or religion.

It wouldn’t be surprising for me that fasting were as old as human civilization, basically because food availability fluctuations. As a “practice”, there is some evidence of its practice dating back thousands of years, for example in ancient Egypt, where fasting held profound significance within in terms of religious and cultural customs. Hieroglyphic inscriptions and archaeological findings suggest that fasting was intricately woven into purification rituals, symbolizing spiritual cleansing and renewal. As early as 2500 BCE, during the era of the Old Kingdom, fasting was observed as a means of preparing individuals for religious ceremonies and rites of passage. The ancient Egyptians believed that abstaining from food and drink facilitated communion with the divine and facilitated the purification of both body and soul.

Similarly, fasting held a prominent place in the religious and philosophical landscape of ancient Greece. In the birthplace of democracy and Western civilization, fasting was revered for its purported ability to purify the body and elevate the mind. The ancient Greeks, renowned for their reverence of the human form and pursuit of wisdom, incorporated fasting into various religious ceremonies and festivals dedicated to the gods. From the solemn observance of the Eleusinian Mysteries to the festivities honoring Dionysus, fasting served as a ritualistic practice aimed at attaining spiritual enlightenment and divine favor.

In the same way, many of the world’s curent major religions incorporate fasting into their spiritual practices, viewing it as a means of deepening one’s connection to the divine and fostering spiritual growth.

In Judaism, fasting holds a central place in religious observance, particularly on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur, also known as the Day of Atonement, is marked by a solemn 25-hour fast, during which devout Jews abstain from food and drink as a demonstration of repentance and spiritual purification. This fast is considered a sacred obligation, offering believers the opportunity to seek forgiveness for their transgressions and reconcile with God.

For Christianity, fasting is most observed during Lent (althoug traditional Orthodox calendar has many events of fasting during the year), the forty-day period of preparation leading up to Easter, the most significant celebration in the Christian liturgical calendar. Lent is characterized by acts of self-denial, penance, and reflection, with fasting serving as a tangible expression of one’s commitment to spiritual renewal and repentance. While the specific practices of fasting may vary among different Christian denominations, the underlying purpose remains consistent: to emulate Jesus’s forty-day fast in the wilderness and prepare for the commemoration of his resurrection.

The Islam also hold fasting as one of the Five Pillars of it. During the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims around the world observe a rigorous fast from dawn until sunset, abstaining from food, drink, smoking, and other physical needs. Ramadan is a time of spiritual reflection, self-discipline, and communal solidarity, with fasting seen as a means of purifying the soul, cultivating empathy for the less fortunate, and strengthening one’s relationship with Allah.

In the Mexicayotl (the reconstructed way of Mexicas), there are multiple fasting events during the year being the most important the Nemotemis or the 5 days “out of time” just before new year.

For these reason fasting could be considered Lindy due to its inherent longevity and enduring practice across cultures and time periods. Lindy’s Law posits that the future lifespan of certain phenomena increases with their age, and fasting exemplifies this principle in several ways.

The Lindy Effect, popularized by Taleb’s books, also known as Lindy’s Law (for a more tehcnical descripction see this paper) , is a concept rooted in the observation that the future lifespan of certain entities tends to increase with their age, contrary to the common perception of aging. Originating from an observation made by Albert Goldman in 1964 at Lindy’s Deli in New York, where comedians met to discuss the longevity of running shows, Lindy’s Law posits that the expected future lifespan of a phenomenon, such as a running show, is proportional to its current age. This means that the longer a show has been running, the longer it is expected to continue running into the future. A quintessential example illustrating Lindy’s Law is Agatha Christie’s murder mystery play, “The Mousetrap,” which has been continuously performed in London’s West End since 1952.

The Lindy Effect challenges the conventional notion of aging, which typically implies an increase in the likelihood of failure or decline with age, as observed in physical objects and biological systems. While aging applies to physical entities in the real world, the Lindy Effect applies to abstract entities in the realms of human invention and imagination, such as technology, literature, music, and institutions. The Lindy Effect suggests that the longer something has been around, the more likely it is to continue to endure.

The term “Lindy Effect” was used by Benoit Mandelbrot in his seminal work on fractal geometry, where he referenced Lindy’s Law as an example of longevity in complex systems. Nassim Taleb further explored the concept in his book on antifragility, highlighting the implications of Lindy’s Law in understanding the way systems respond over time.

Moreover, Lindy’s Law is closely related to Pareto’s Law and Zipf’s Law, which manifest power-law statistics in various domains ranging from economics to linguistics. Pareto’s Law, which describes the distribution of wealth and income, implies Lindy’s Law when considering the survival function of phenomena. Similarly, Zipf’s Law, which characterizes the distribution of sizes in ranked datasets, exhibits patterns consistent with Lindy’s Law.

So it was a surprise to see this note

Although as well pointed out by Sean McClure, even the authors were much more cautioness about implications, Taleb himself show some convincing probabilistic raw argument about how those calim were not enough to rethink the validity of fasting.

Nevertheless I see this small (all ready solved) controversy as agood chance to highlight that #antifragility is a contextual concept built by the triplet {system, perturbation, payoff function}, and as a contextual entity a system is antifragile with respect of a well defined payoff function under a concrete perturbation AND under a particular context that may change the definition of the system, the perturbation, or the payoff function.

I suspect that if these results are true, at least part of the effect could be due dose-response variability among individuals in terms of health status, diets, etc. So, interminent modern fasting could be both risky and beneficial… we may just talking about different systems (populations) or at presence of hidden contextuals such as genetic factors or lifestyle (extra perturbations).

Another part of the effect most probably comes from perturbation: duration of fast, frecuency of fasting, presence of other stressors such as drinking alchohol, smoke, bad sleepings, work stress… etc.

Considring all other factor is ok, then we most also remember that traditional Lindy fasting is not meant for following every single day (see our food pile criticality hypothesys)

Perhaps a well-done RCT could fis this, but even then path dependence (individual health and fitness hiatory) could be problematic of control. Both a trasnversal and Longitudinal design could be necessary.

A good lesson is to remember that even medicine is not medicine for everyone all the time.

This lesson is also valueble for evaluate the use and validity of non standarized medicines such as narual herbals ones made following ancestral recepies and methods. There we have many others hidden contextuals such as soil properties from which the hernbs are grown up, time and conditions of it harvest, conditions and methosd of preservations, and so on.

So instead of trying to give arguments or build a finall response to the initial question of this short essey, I think the most important is to keep in mind the importance of contextuality when dealing with complex systems.