In Japan, there is a boom in books by and for the elderly - Fifty shades of grey

In Japan, there is a boom in books by and for the elderly - Fifty shades of grey



In Japan, there is a boom in books by and for the elderly

As the market ages, so do the authors and themes


Print edition | Asia

Feb 23rd 2019| TOKYO

Literature reflects life. So in ageing Japan there is a raft of smash-hit books by aged authors. “Age 90: what’s so great about it?” is a humorous essay on the difficulties of the elderly, by Aiko Sato, who is 95 and wrote it with a pen. It sold 1m copies in 2017, making it Japan’s bestselling book that year. In 2018 the Akutagawa literary prize went to Chisako Wakatake, 63 at the time, for her debut novel “Live by Myself” with its 74-year-old protagonist, Momoko.

The books talk about how to live in old age, and it is not all doom and gloom. The widowed Momoko, for example, learns to live on her own. “The Finished Person” by Makiko Uchidate, who is 70, opens with the line “retirement is a living funeral” before going on to depict the adventures of a retired salaryman, including falling for a younger woman and returning to his home town. “Going to Die Soon”, also by Ms Uchidate, features 78-year-old Hana, a vibrant former alcohol-shop owner trying to make the most of her remaining years. The novel has been called a book for shukatsu, or preparing for death, making readers think more deeply about what it means to age.


Japan’s population has the world’s highest proportion of over-65s, at 28%. People are living longer and staying healthier, so many have at least 20-30 years of retirement, for much of which they are sprightly. And although the Japanese have been spending less on books, that is least true for the over-60s. Lawson, a convenience-store chain, recently decided to stock books with the older generation in mind.

But the wrinkly writers’ books are attracting younger readers, too, according to the Research Institute for Publications (rip), a body in Tokyo. Some are preparing for their own old age or want to understand the increasing number of old people they see around them. Others find relevance in the themes explored, such as loneliness, a problem that stretches well beyond the silver-haired. In Hiroyuki Itsuki’s blockbuster self-help book, “Recommendation for Solitude”, the 86-year-old author promotes reminiscing about “the good old days”.

The most notable feature of the new genre is that the vast majority of authors, and main characters, are women. Especially popular, says the rip, are the ara-hun (“around-hundred” years-old) writers like Ms Sato, whose book, readers say, helps them be more positive. It is not just that women have a longer life expectancy. Their popularity, reckons the institute, also reflects support for strong women who are passionate about their work, a phenomenon that is all too rare in Japan today.

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This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Fifty shades of grey"

Quakers - Seeking the Light Within - Compass - ABC Religion & Ethics

Quakers - Seeking the Light Within - Compass - ABC Religion & Ethics

Quakers - Seeking the Light Within

A look at the history and experiences of The Society of Friends - Quakers - in Australia and their disproportionate contribution to education and peace activism.
Broadcast: Sun 28 Sep 2003, 10:00pm
Published: Sun 28 Sep 2003, 10:00pm


Transcript


Intro:

Hello and welcome to Compass. I'm Geraldine Doogue.



In the current climate of international tension the threat of hostilities never quite goes away.

Tonight we profile a religious organisation whose response to the challenge of war is the vigorous pursuit of peace.



It began over three hundred and fifty years ago but most people know little about the organisation called the Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. Throughout history their numbers have been small but their influence considerable.



Tonight we meet a group of people who may not have met but who all call themselves "friends". They're on a shared journey that reflects both their beliefs and their determination that their lives be a testimony to those beliefs.
Peter Jones
Quakerism represents a road that you walk on. It's a search.

Sarah Davies
For me being a Quaker is definitely something that involves a lifestyle

Jo Vallentine
It's like a spiritual well into which I dip for renewal.

John Green
And in Quaker speak we would talk about that of God in every person.

Narrator
In Sydney's leafy north Quakers have gathered for their weekly Meeting for Worship. For Quakers world wide this practice is both integral to their faith and central to their lives. There is no priest or pastor, no sermon, hymns or spoken prayer.

It's a form of worship conducted largely in silence ....broken only when an individual feels called to speak.

-----------

Speaker

Each of us in our relationships with people every day can provide a model for how communities and nations and cultures might and can relate to each other.

Narrator

Quakers believe the experience of a shared active and listening silence brings them closer to their God....and that God is present in each and every individual.

Sheila

When you are really centred in a meeting with a group of people it's a very powerful experience

Pera

I think a sense of oneness it's not just a brotherhood or sisterhood or whatever. It's actually being part of each other. That's my experience.

David

The notion that the spirit is there to be encountered, to be heard, to be listened to is the heart of it.

Narrator

Quakers accept Christ's teaching but not Christian dogma.

Their daily lives are geared to upholding testimonies of Peace, Truth, Integrity, Equality and Simplicity.

Ro Morrow

One of the strongest testimonies for me, and perhaps one of the hardest is the testimony of simplicity.

Narrator

Ro Morrow lives near Katoomba in the Blue Mountains district of NSW where she teaches permaculture.

Searching for something more she abandoned the Anglicanism of her childhood to find a spiritual home in Quaker belief and testimonies.

She tries to live simply with no car, television or refrigerator....It's a way of life she finds rewarding.

Ro Morrow

So to live simply is to live as much as I can from the garden; to live simply is to be a very low low consumer. Like not to consume packaging and be part of the big buying thing.

To live simply is also to consume locally and support local people. To live simply is to try and speak simply and to think more purely.

In fact it's a joy, it's so less cluttered. Your shopping list goes down to about six or eight main things and that's it. Most of your supermarket is in your garden. No life is much much better living simply.

Narrator

Through her work with Quaker World Service Ro Morrow is passing on her horticultural skills to women in third world countries so that they too may become more self sufficient.

Ro

In Cambodia I was involved in a project to teach district women, all women, how to grow food. And when they could grow food they had to go and teach poorer women.

So I basically taught them permaculture. And they had to practice it before they could teach. It's a sort of nutrition that takes people out of chronic persistent hunger into better health. So it's food gardens and fruit.

Poverty is an injustice against the spirit of God or the inner spirit of all those people. And at least if they have food they can rise a little above that terrible gut feeling of being hungry and worse for many people is seeing their children hungry.

Narr

Quakers do not prosyletise. They believe people can't be converted but must discover for themselves whether they are Quakers or not. The great majority are Quakers of conviction who have come to the belief from different beginnings.

This was not the case for Sarah Davies.

Sarah Davies

My mother is a Quaker so it was a natural process for me to become a Quaker. When she went to meeting I just came along. Her father actually was a Quaker. I don't have a process where I went from knowing something else or going to a different church and then becoming a Quaker like a lot of people have. For me it was just a natural process, I was always there.

Narrator

Sarah Davies' grandparents were Quakers. The advent of World War II was to herald very challenging times. The attacks on Britain both tested her Grandfather's Quaker convictions and isolated him when other men were rallying for their country.

Sarah

My grandfather was a conscientious objector during the 2nd World War. And this was due to his being a Quaker. Quakers believe in pacifism, and I know stories about my grandfather. During that time he would be given white feathers by people, such as a symbol of being a coward. But I think often it is the person who says no, and who says this is wrong is the person who is much more courageous.



Narr

Sarah Davies is a media studies graduate but her career path has taken a very different direction from that of her fellow students.

As a consultant with the Geneva based World Council of Churches she spent 2002 working in their peace building and disarmament section.

In 1999 she went to Israel and Palestine as part of a Quaker peace observation team

Sarah

For me to be able to see these people and talk to these people face to face was just an unbelievable experience.

We went as part of a peace observation team, sponsored by Quakers, but not all the people there were Quakers. And people on either side of the fence if you like in Israel and Palestine were told we were coming, were invited to come and talk to us.

And it really really opened my eyes to how the situation was. I think it was a harrowing experience as well to be able to witness what they're going through, and then how easy and wonderful our lives are here.

Narrator

For Sarah Davies being a Quaker determines how she lives her life.

Sarah

There's one famous quote which is from George Fox which says Live Adventurously and that's something I really try and do with my life. Don't stand back, don't hesitate. Live adventurously and let your life speak when you're doing that. Let your life be what you're trying to do or trying to be.

Narrator

The Quaker movement was founded by George Fox, the shoemaker son of Puritan parents in the mid 17th century.

In the midst of a spiritual crisis Fox experienced what he believed to be the voice of God speaking directly to him.

He began expounding the gospel of the inner light which emphasised the immediacy of Christ's teaching within each person. He argued that all human beings had the capacity to know God directly and had no need for consecrated churches and ordained clergy.

Fox and other early Quakers were persecuted and imprisoned for their radical beliefs.

But the movement grew and underwent various name changes.

Peter Jones

Quakers originally called themselves Publishers of the Truth, or Children of the Light. And they are both phrases I really enjoy.

But in 1652 George Fox was on trial before Judge Bennett, and I think he was an Anglican - or you had to be in those days if you were a judge- in Derby in England. And the judge was laughing. He wasn't a very religious Anglican. And Fox turned around to him and said, Thou shouldest quake at the name of the Lord. And Judge Bennett thought this was so funny he called George Fox a Quaker, and the name stuck.

Narrator

Peter Jones has been a Quaker for 30 years. He was born in Britain to peace activist parents. The family were staunch protestants, his father a lay preacher

Peter Jones

Historically Quakers undoubtedly came out of 17th century Christianity. They're one of what we call the three historic peace churches. We're part of the radical reformation if you sort of trace it from the Catholics through the Anglicans and the non conformists, and the Puritans. And then right at the end of this you've got the Society of Friends. And everybody hated the Quakers and that's why so many of them went to gaol.

Narrator

Quakers were denied access to university and the professions.

Instead they turned to business and manufacturing. Cadury's Chocolate was established by Quakers...and great banks like Lloyd's and Barclay's.

The movement spread to America.

In 1862 William Penn founded Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Quaker principles.



In 1832 it came to Australia when two London Quakers were sent to report on conditions in the colony.

Sheila Given

Well of course I consider Tasmania to be the cradle of Quakerism in Australia because this is where it began when the two English missionaries George Washington Walker and James Backhouse came here in 1832. They had the first meeting, Friends Meeting for Worship in Australia here on 12th February 1832.

Narr.

Sheila Given is a former teacher and historian at the Friends School in Hobart. Originally an Irish Anglican it was through teaching at the school that she was drawn to Quakerism 25 years ago at age 50.

Sheila

I have been all my life fascinated by children and education. And I believe and always have that a child is not born in original sin but is an original blessing. Has a core spirituality, magnificent mystery inside them and that you build on that.

And when I came to this school Friends School I found my educational beliefs aligned really well with the beliefs of, the underlying beliefs of this school.

I feel that that of God whatever that God is I'm not sure whether I'd even put a capital G to it ..is in everybody. That's not to say they don't have the reverse, evil or wickedness or wrong. But it is up to the individual to nurture that of God in themselves.

But the mystery of it intrigues me and the seeking after whatever it is that the spirit, the inner light, or whatever one wants to call it, is exciting to me and has been from the start and continues to be.



Narrator

Since retiring Sheila Given has been busy.....A grandmother of five, she gained a Ph.d at 64; a place on the Council for the Ageing;

A column on aged issues for a weekly newspaper; and Presidency of her local University of the Third Age.

Sheila

There are two aspects to being a Quaker. That is 'being' a Quaker and two is 'doing' from that belief...action to do with the community or following through on any of the testimonies. People are often astounded at their commitment and where has that come from. Where does anyone's commitment come from? It comes from their basic beliefs. And I think the Quaker basic beliefs inspire one. They're an inspiration.

Narr

Originally financed by London Quakers, The Friends school was established in Hobart in 1887.

The Cadbury family were ongoing benefactors.

Whilst the school does not aim to produce Quakers, it does aim to inspire students with its Quaker values....and to instil a sense of service.

On the surface it may look like many other schools but what distinguishes the Friends' School is its emphasis on the practice of silence.

John Green

I think this is very distinctively Quaker. And it makes us a Quaker school. We live in a world that very rarely gives a great deal of value to times of quietness and reflection. But I think in those periods it's a time when we become aware that there is something greater than self. And it is a time when we start to realise that fulfilment is more than the narrow pursuit of self interest.

Narrator

John Green is school principal and one of only three Quakers on the staff. But he believes the Quaker principle of the 'light within' shapes the culture of the school.

John Green

In this school it's a commonly held idea that there is something special inside oneself and in others. And that I think has a profound influence on the way relationships develop in a Quaker school. Because if you start to believe that there is something intrinsically good or that of God in someone else you treat them with less arrogance and with more respect. And so if you actually believe there is that of God in someone else then obviously it produces a more egalitarian feel in the whole place.

Peter Jones is also on the staff of the Friends School.

From a young age he took part in anti war demonstrations and at 16 attended his first Quaker meeting.

As a student at Oxford University his commitment to Quaker ideals was cemented and at age 23 he became a full member.

The road he's travelled has led Jones to full time work in the peace movement and has brought him in touch with Quakers around the globe. He's taught in Quaker schools in Yorkshire and Romallah and now teaches comparative religions at the Friends School.

Peter

What's happened is that in the last hundred years there has been a sort of difference amongst Quakers. There's those Quakers that are very Christocentric, equally there are those who are drawn from other faiths. We call them universalist, who wouldn't probably call themselves Christians. And those of us who are everything in the middle. And I'm somewhere in the middle.

Peter

As a teacher of comparative religion I value a lot what I learned from my Jewish friends, my Muslim friends, my Buddhist friends, my Hindu friends. But I have always seen myself as a radical Christian, and I rather accept the idea of God as sort of the top of the mountain. But there are many ways to walk up the mountain, and nobody has a prerogative of the truth.

This inclusivity underpinning Quaker belief is one of the features that attracted overseas aid worker Mark Deasy.

Mark

I think the meeting at its best is very inclusive, very accepting. And I think if we go back to that doctrine of the inner light, of recognising there is that of God in every person it becomes much easier to be inclusive.

Narrator

He comes from a long Anglican tradition. His grandfather and father were both clergymen and he grew up happily in a strong parish community. But in adolescence he began to question both his sexuality and his church.

Mark

I think one of the key things though for me was going to an elite church school. And there seemed to be a dissonance between the values that the church officially professed and what was in fact supporting in terms of this elite institution which seemed in some ways to be about the perpetuation of difference, of injustice, of inequality in society that got me asking some serious questions about the church.

Narrator

On the advice of his school house master, at age 16 he attended his first Quaker meeting.

Mark

It was the time I was really coming to terms with my sexuality, recognising that I was gay when I was about 15 or 16. And not being at all satisfied with what was coming through in terms of official church doctrine about that.

It was at that time that Quakers were somewhat in the news because they'd put out in Britain a couple of publications which were the first to come out of any long-standing mainstream church, which was to suggest that homosexual relationships were not intrinsically sinful.

So I went along to a Quaker meeting. And I think the sense that I had there was what a lot of people will describe when they first come to Friends. That it's not a sense of conversion - we never really talk about that. It was a sense of homecoming.

Mark Deasy's spiritual homecoming was to hone his concern for social justice issues and steer his working life.

Much of it has been spent in relief and reconstruction projects in areas of conflict or its aftermath in Asia and the middle east. He's been with Quaker World Service, the Middle East Council of Churches, and for the past decade with the strictly secular Oxfam community Aid Abroad.

But it was his work with Quaker Service Australia that took him to Cambodia when few others had been allowed entry.

Mark

Quakers see themselves as having a mission particularly to work either in areas of conflict or in the aftermath of conflict. And of course in Cambodia this conflict continuing there was also the aftermath of genocide.

Narrator

Deasy's experiences influence his views on the proactive demands of pacifism.

Mark

I think being a pacifist is not about waiting till the conflict happens and then saying, I'm not going to take up arms. It's about in all the stages previously, looking at the sources of injustice, the sources of conflict of exploitation of aggression and giving the rule to work against others. Also working on mediation, working on conflict resolution.

Narrator

Fundamental to Quakerism is the Peace Testimony, a testimony first proclaimed to Charles II in 1660.

It is this principle that most clearly defines Quakers in the public mind.

Jo

Well the peace testimony is very important to me. And I think that's one thing that I was very interested in about the Quakers when I first started going along in 1972. At that stage we were involved in the Vietnam War. I'd been to moratorium marches. I'd seen these people who were marshals and I like the way they were in the marches. They were quiet and dignified and weren't ranting and raving and so on. So that appealed to me.

And that really led me to going along to Meeting for Worship. And so it was the first testimony that I became aware of, and it has given me a framework in which to lodge all of the feelings that I had about non-violence and not wanting to fight and so on, that came from the teachings of the people like Jesus. Because he was a great exponent of non-violence.

Narrator

She was raised a Roman Catholic but thirty years on former Greens Senator Jo Vallentine has become one of Australia's better known Quakers.

It was the issue of nuclear disarmament that first saw her elected to the national Parliament.

A long time activist her passion for peace and social justice issues has twice landed her before the courts and produced short stints in prison.

Jo Vallentine

I think civil disobedience should be taken through to its logical conclusion. For me that's not paying a fine to get out of going to goal. For me it is going to gaol and bearing that witness right in the gaol system. It's also helped me with my AVP work of course.

It has given me a perspective that I would otherwise not have. Of what it's actually like to be locked down, to be deprived of liberty. Not to have any of your own personal things around you. To have to live in very crowded situations.

Narr

Through history Quakers have been no strangers to prison. In the 19th century Quaker Elizabeth Fry wrought wide-sweeping reforms in the prison system thoughout England and Europe.

These days Jo Vallentine works on the "Alternatives to Violence" Project.

Now mainstream, it was initiated 30 years ago when prisoners at a US gaol invited Quakers to devise for them a "non violence" program to help bring about personal change.

Jo

So that's really how it began. And I think from that light within that the Quakers believe is in everybody. No matter where they've been or what they've done, no judgments, out of that a loving atmosphere could be engendered. A spirit of community could be built in a workshop, even in the darkness of prisons. Even with people who had done the most dreadful things.

You see we're all capable of violence, and I believe we all actually do violence in our lives.

Another way must be found to deal with conflicts from the personal to the international. And that's what Quakers really work on very hard.

Quakers are famous for setting up meetings between diplomats of countries that would not normally talk to each other. And they will come to the Quaker house in New York and have these lovely lunches and sit and talk off the record no media no reporting back. They just provide the opportunities for people to get together and know each other. Because then they can really begin to talk about the things that separate them if they've found some common ground first.

Narrator

Quakers believe that all life is sacred and war is not the way to resolve conflict. Whilst their calls for peace may seem idealistic to some, Quakers insist that their peace testimony is not merely about abstaining from violence. Instead it's about seeking a process that can lead to a different way of being in the world.

Jo Vallentine

Sometimes I've been called an armchair pacifist and I guess that's the case for a lot of us if we haven't actually suffered repression at the point of a gun. But I do think that it's important to be a witness.

We're called to be faithful, to be witnesses to what we know is true. We're called to be faithful to be witnesses to what we know is true. We're not necessarily called to be successful. And so we stand out there on street corners week after week saying non violence is the way, let's not go to war. Let's address the underlying causes of terrorism that is in front of everybody's minds at the moment. Let's look at what's behind all of that. Address those issues. We're never going to have peace without justice. So as well as being an idealist and saying well let's not have war, Quakers really put that into practice by looking at the underlying injustices

Peter Jones

Quakers don't deal with the concept of evil very well, and I'm acutely aware of that.

And I think it's something we really have to come to grips with.

I can understand why people turn to war. In many ways it's actually the easy option because it represents a black and white view of the world. I'm good you're bad. But the world isn't like that. It's different shades of grey, and all that war breeds is more hatred and more war. It's not the answer.

I think the problem for Quakers is we can warn about the conditions that create war. That is why we put the emphasis on equality and simplicity and the sharing of right resources and so on.

I think what a lot of Quakers are wrestling with today through groups like Peace Brigades International and the global peace force is trying to find some way of dealing with some of the dictatorships, some of the injustices in the world in a way to say we have got a non violent solution but we certainly don't claim to have an easy answer. War has never worked either.

Narr

Peter Jones believes that much of the conflict in the world today is shaped by a refusal to respect the beliefs of others.

Peter Jones

Probably the greatest evil facing the planet today is fundamentalism. It doesn't matter if it is Jewish fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism or Muslim fundamentalism. It is the position that simply says, I am right and you're all wrong, and I'm going to shove my religion down your throat whether you like it or not, and all the ideas that go with it.

And I teach comparative religion because I want students to understand that that's actually the opposite of what religion stands for.

So I take my students to the synagogue, I take them to Muslim prayer. I bring people to come and talk to the school. And we try and celebrate the festivals and Holi is one of the is one of the most fun loving joyous festivals in the Indian calendar because it is the spring festival. So I bought the power back with me from India. We filled the dust bins with water and we throw water over each other like one billion Indians are doing today.



Narr

As Peter Jones' religion class reinvents the Hindu spring festival of Holi, he sees it as just another small step that can build bridges to other faiths and peoples. Quaker numbers have always been small yet their influence considerable. They believe Quaker values lay the groundwork for a wider vision of society... The task of individual Quakers is to communicate their testimony by the way they live their lives.

Peter Jones

If you look through the history of the world, the only things that have made the world a better place are the little people who did little things. There's very few of us are going to be great leaders. But it's all those little cumulative acts.

The first women who demanded the vote, you know. The first trade unionists. The first people who demanded equality for black and white people, or spoke out against slavery. Those are the people who make the world go forward.

Ro Morrow

I think your lives need to speak. I think it's much more powerful than words.

Ends
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Steven Pinker: ‘The way to deal with pollution is not to rail against consumption’ | Science | The Guardian

Steven Pinker: ‘The way to deal with pollution is not to rail against consumption’ | Science | The Guardian



The Observer
Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker: ‘The way to deal with pollution is not to rail against consumption’


The feather-ruffling Harvard psychologist’s new book, a defence of Enlightenment values, may be his most controversial yet

• Read an extract from Enlightenment Now here



Andrew Anthony

Sun 11 Feb 2018 19.00 AEDTLast modified on Thu 22 Mar 2018 10.48 AEDT





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Comments819 Steven Pinker: ‘If scientific beliefs are just mythology, how come we can get to the moon?’ Photograph: Scott Nobles


Say the word “enlightenment” and it tends to conjure images of a certain kind of new-age spiritual “self-improvement”: meditation, candles, chakra lines. Add the definite article and a capital letter and the Enlightenment becomes something quite different: dead white men in wigs.

For many people, particularly in the west, reaching a state of mindful nirvana probably seems more relevant to their wellbeing than the writings of, say, Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. But according to Enlightenment Now, a new book by the celebrated Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, this is precisely where we’re getting our priorities wrong.

For Pinker, the Enlightenment is not some distant era, of interest only to historians and philosophers, but instead the foundation for all the many benefits and advantages to which we scarcely give a second’s thought in the 21st century.
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He lists some of the advancements made by modern societies: “Newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket.”

These were not inevitable developments, Pinker wants us to know, but the fruits of the methods and values that were first popularised in the 18th century.


It’s safe to say that few of us stop and marvel at the extraordinary progress that humankind has made in the past couple of hundred years – a mere blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. Instead we’re more likely to lament the state of the world, deplore the ravenous nature of humanity, rage at the political and financial elites and despair at the empty materialism of consumer society.


What we do to combat poverty: that’s far more important than reducing inequality

But for Pinker, that’s an indulgence we can no longer afford. His book is a sustained, data-packed argument in favour of the principles promoted by the Enlightenment, “The Case,” as its subtitle puts it, “for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”

By virtue of science, I’m able to see and speak to Pinker via Skype, from my office in north London, while he is in his office in Boston. He explores the issue of inequality in some depth in the book, so it’s not an entirely trivial observation to note that his office looks to be about eight times larger than mine. But more on the distribution of wealth later.
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Pinker’s trademark mop of silver curls, more like that of an ageing hard rock guitarist than an Ivy League academic, a pair of twinkling blue eyes and a ready expression of amusement beam out from my screen.

So, I ask, why do the values of the Enlightenment require such staunch and detailed defence (the book is more than 550 pages long, filled with graphs, footnotes and an exhaustive wealth of references) at this particular juncture in time?

“Among other things,” he replies, “they are under threat from authoritarian populism, religious fundamentalism and radicalism of the left and right. The great successes the world has enjoyed over the past decades and centuries are taken for granted, because many of the ideas responsible for them have become part of the establishment and no one is willing to defend them. So anything that is going right is not associated with any movement, any values, and that has left a vacuum that forces of extremism have rushed into.”


On my radar: Steven Pinker’s cultural highlights

Read more

Pinker, however, is willing to defend these established, even establishment, ideas. He is, rather bravely, prepared to be the bearer of good news. I say bravely because it’s not a popular stance. Announce that the world has gone badly wrong, that there are too many people, the Earth has been despoiled, we’ve never been in greater danger of death and destruction, or more adrift in the spiritual void of materialism and you’ll have the nodding attention of the news media and the intellectual classes.

But painstakingly show that, actually, things are on the whole quite a bit better than they have ever been and you’ll meet a torrent of bafflement and denial. Pinker knows this because he’s already been through the process with his previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which persuasively argued – again with graphs and a mountain of research – that humankind was becoming progressively less violent.

It was a message that seemed to run counter to everything we thought we knew or had been told. How, after two world wars, the advent of the nuclear bomb, the proliferation of the arms industry and the brutality and murder we saw on television each night, could we seriously entertain the notion that we are becoming less violent?

But we are, and Pinker showed it with such an abundance of apparently irrefutable data that his detractors were left scrambling to redefine the meaning of violence.

“One of the surprises in presenting data on violence,” he says, “was the lengths to which people would go to deny it. When I presented graphs showing that rates of homicide had fallen by a factor of 50, that rates of death in war had fallen by a factor of more than 20, and rape and domestic violence and child abuse had all fallen, rather than rejoice, many audiences seemed to get increasingly upset. They racked their brains for ways in which things could not possibly be as good as the data suggested, including the entire category of questions that I regularly get: Isn’t X a form of violence? Isn’t advertising a form of violence? Isn’t plastic surgery a form of violence? Isn’t obesity a form of violence?”

Graphic evidence: Steven Pinker's optimism on trial


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This time round, Pinker appears to have written with his doubting audience more firmly in mind. It’s as if he’s thought up every counter-argument before it can be made, and met each one with statistical refutations. It makes for a chewy but, well, enlightening read.

The idea for the book came out of a debate that Pinker had with the cultural critic Leon Wieseltier in the pages of the New Republic back in 2013. Wieseltier accused Pinker of invading the humanities with “scientism” – belief in the all-conquering value of science. Pinker replied that there was a false distinction between the humanities and science, that both were once the domain of educated thinkers, and that they were complementary in reaching a better understanding of the world and our place in it.

The debate, as they say, went viral, and Pinker was soon signing a book contract.

“But,” says Pinker, “ I quickly realised that a spat between a couple of magazine intellectuals was not worthy of a book-length treatment. So I submerged that particular debate in a larger defence of Enlightenment values, of which science is a part.”

The Enlightenment is a period placed by historians largely in the 18th century, and it remains a subject of much scholarly dispute about what it constituted and who were members of it. Even at the time, its adherents wrestled with definitions. In his 1784 essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, Kant said that it amounted to “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity”. He exhorted his readers to “dare to understand”.


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In Pinker’s conception, although the Enlightenment featured many different creeds, there was a unifying rejection of the constraints of religious faith and tribal loyalties, and in their place a belief in human universalism, the power of reason and the progressive role of science. For him it’s no coincidence that slavery and cruel punishments (such as being hanged, drawn and quartered) were outlawed in the wake of the Enlightenment. Nor that health, wealth and life expectancy began to rapidly improve.

Right from its inception, the Enlightenment had to do battle with the counter-Enlightenment – formed from the massed ranks of traditionalists, the religiously orthodox, and Romantics who recoiled from the unblinking gaze with which the Enlightenment thinkers felt emboldened to observe the world.

The struggle has continued ever since, with the Enlightenment being blamed for racism, imperialism and Nazi eugenics by critics from the left, and by the right for the moral void of atheism and materialism that found its murderous apogee in the Soviet Union and communist China. More recently, postmodernists have looked upon the Enlightenment as yet another false grand narrative, in which humanism, science and reason are just more belief systems, no more nor less valid than any others.
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Pinker rejects all three positions. Far from sanctioning racism or nazism, he says, the Enlightenment laid the philosophical groundwork for universalism, the belief in equal rights for all, which ultimately triumphed over fascism and imperialism. Pinker argues that the inspiration for Nazi ideology should be more appropriately traced to Friedrich Nietzsche, who attacked the Enlightenment’s dependence on reason and argued for a “will to power” and the idea of “übermensch”, or superman. Nietzsche’s supporters won’t take that lying down.

And Marxism, he maintains, was not a legacy of the Enlightenment, but instead a pseudoscience that has more to do with German Romanticism. We can also expect Marxists to revolt.

As for postmodernism, Pinker is scathing.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Steven Pinker in 1994, the year he published The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Photograph: Boston Globe/Getty Images

“If scientific beliefs are just a particular culture’s mythology, how come we can cure smallpox and get to the moon, and traditional cultures can’t? And if truth is just socially constructed, would you say that climate change is a myth? It’s the same with moral values. If moral values are nothing but cultural customs, would you agree that our disapproval of slavery or racial discrimination or the oppression of women is just a western fancy?”
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No doubt Pinker will be admonished for mischaracterising the views of his opponents. But while there are certainly some polemical flourishes, Enlightenment Now is a careful and deeply researched piece of work. That is more than can be said of the accusations directed at him by some of his critics. A few weeks ago the biologist and blogger PZ Myers launched an attack on Pinker by putting out an edited clip of the Harvard professor in a public debate. The edited version seemed to suggest Pinker’s approval of supporters of the “alt-right”.

In fact, as the New York Times was quick to note, the unedited video showed Pinker was denouncing far-right ideas, and arguing that the left needs to make better arguments against them. It was a vivid example of how easy it can be, in the age of fake news and social media, to tarnish reputations with doctored evidence.

There have been several examples in recent years in which careers, including those of academics, have been brought to an ignominious end after social media campaigns based on disputed testimonies. Does this overheated climate of denunciation make Pinker more inhibited with his opinions?

“In my case, no,” he says. “But I think in the broader community that is a real danger. I think I have the reputation and the social capital to withstand distortions like that, but for younger and less established people, they might think twice about saying something that could be taken out of context, doctored, and go viral. So I do think it has a pernicious effect on the quality of intellectual discourse.”

Canadian-born, Pinker has done the faculty rounds of MIT, Stanford and Harvard, where he has built a formidable reputation as a multidisciplined thinker. But it is his books that have elevated him to the coveted position of public intellectual.

He wrote a series of well-received books about linguistics and psychology before publishing The Blank Slate in 2002, which argued that human behaviour was not simply or even largely a matter of environmental influence but instead shaped mostly by evolutionary adaptations. The book had its critics, but it became a bestseller. Ever since, Pinker’s audience has only grown in number – as have his critics.

It’s likely that Enlightenment Now will prove his most controversial book to date. His targets are many and he pulls few punches. For example, he takes the green movement to task for a “misanthropic environmentalism” that views modern humans as “vile despoilers of a pristine planet”.

Underpinning the belief that humans are destroying the Earth is the assumption that progress is not sustainable. Pinker disagrees, or at least argues that such doomsday conclusions have a long and fallible history. A fundamental tenet of the Enlightenment was that all problems, if studied long and hard enough, could be understood, and therefore at some point solved. And environmental problems, writes Pinker, are no exception.
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He argues that progress is not only sustainable, but essential for attaining the knowledge that will enable us to find the cleanest and most efficient use of energy. In other words, scientific progress is what will make economic progress work. The book is a kind of rallying call to replace moral posturing with clear-eyed realism. Pinker’s message is that if we are not going to return to hunter-gathering – and we’re not – we had better face up to the task at hand.

That probably means using more nuclear reactors in the immediate future, something that, as with GM crops and shale gas, the green movement has responded to with apocalyptic protestations. And we may also have to acknowledge that to cut down on carbon emissions, the developing world first needs to attain a level of material wealth, by burning more energy, at which point it can turn its attention to the environment.

But perhaps he will be most in need of a tin hat for his unapologetic dismissal of the kind of anti-capitalists who see globalism as an international conspiracy bent on impoverishing the world for the enrichment of a tiny elite. A rave review by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who called Enlightenment Now “My new favourite book of all time” (his previous favourite was The Better Angels of Our Nature), is unlikely to improve Pinker’s credentials in radical circles. Although he emphasises the need for strict regulation of capitalism, Pinker points to the data that shows that history has never seen such a massive movement out of poverty as that witnessed by the late 20th-century capitalist revolutions in China and India. It’s for this reason that he believes the dangers of inequality have been overstated.


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FacebookTwitterPinterest Violence in retreat: Steven Pinker reveals the better angels of our nature.

“If wealth consisted of a finite pot that was divided in a zero-sum fashion,” he says, “then maybe poverty and inequality would be the same issue. But we know that isn’t true, that prosperity has increased maybe a hundred-fold since the Industrial Revolution. A second point that gets omitted from discussions on inequality: although it’s true that inequality within many rich western countries, especially the Anglosphere, UK, US and Canada, has grown, globally, inequality has fallen because the poor are getting richer faster than the rich are getting richer. China and India and Africa and Latin America are getting richer and that has reduced the global indices of poverty.”
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Pinker accepts that, to a degree, the decreased inequality between the developing world and the west has come at the expense of increased inequality within the west, as manufacturing jobs that once benefited the lower middle class in America and Europe now benefit the lower middle class in China and India.

“If we were to step back and look at the progress of the world’s poor, we’d have to say this is a marvellous development. If you’re a British or American politician, of course it’s much harder to make that argument. More generally, the political issue that should engage us is how well off the people at the bottom of the ladder are. What we do to combat poverty: that’s far more important than reducing inequality.”

But what of the argument that this ever-expanding cycle of production and commercialisation is turning us into mindless consumers, who can only see value in disposable commodities?

Pinker laughs. “The intellectual and cultural critics who make that argument never seem to include trips to the continent or fine food and wine as a sign of soulless materialistic consumption. It’s always consumption by the other guy that they think of as morally compromising. There’s an issue with the effects on the environment: it really is not good to pollute the environment, particularly when it comes to carbon emissions, but the way to deal with that is not to rail against consumption. There are a lot of aspects of consumption, like being able to travel, see the world, be warm in the winter, cool in the summer, that are human goods. The challenge is: how do we get the most human benefit with the least environmental damage?”

Even Pinker’s fiercest enemies would acknowledge that, however it may have been distributed, there has been scientific and material progress since the advent of the Enlightenment. But many, perhaps most notably the philosopher John Gray, argue that it has not been – and cannot be – accompanied by moral progress.

Pinker disagrees. He thinks that the Enlightenment has been misunderstood as a doomed project aimed at perfecting humanity by repressing emotion. But that was never the intention, says Pinker, because humans are inescapably emotional beings, made from what Kant famously called the “crooked timber of humanity”.

Those unpredictable impulses that lead to strife, violence and war will always be with us. What’s at issue is how we govern those impulses – through religious dogma, tribal lore and superstition, or by reason, debate, the rule of law? Pinker suggests that latter approach has delivered undeniable moral advancement.

“Slavery used to be practised by every single civilisation,” he says. “Now it is illegal everywhere on Earth. The concept of equal rights for women wasn’t a concept until a couple of hundred years ago. Now it is part of the explicit belief of all world bodies and most countries. The rights of children not to be exploited for their labour, racial equality, religious tolerance, freedom of speech… it’s very difficult to find clear statements of these values before the Enlightenment. There were some statements in ancient Greece, but they certainly didn’t carry the day then. In almost everything that you could take as an index of moral progress, the data show that we have been making it.”

It’s just the kind of speech that will be pilloried as “Panglossian”, after Voltaire’s relentlessly optimistic Professor Pangloss in Candide. But as Pinker correctly notes, Pangloss was a satire on theodicy, the belief that God had created the best of all possible worlds. Professor Pinker, by contrast, believes the world is inherently unstable and nothing is guaranteed. His concern is to make things better. And you can only do that if you first acknowledge the improvements that have been made. Enlightenment Now has made it extremely difficult to ignore them, even if you’d much prefer a spot of crystal healing and a Deepak Chopra tape. Namaste.

• Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker is published by Allen Lane (£13.99). To order a copy for £11.89 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99


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Alternate day fasting (AFD) diet and fasting health implications

Alternate day fasting (AFD) diet and fasting health implications

Diet health centre

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Is alternate day fasting good for your health?

By Siobhan Harris
WebMD Feature

Medically Reviewed by Dr Rob Hicks

Fasting doesn't seem like fun. It conjures up images of supermodels who exist on salad and diet drinks just to keep their size zero figures or maybe those drastic dieters who leave it to the last minute and need to lose half a stone before a wedding in a week's time!

It seems pretty extreme and there's always the concern you'll just put the weight back on when you stop, that's if you have the will-power to start in the first place!

The recent buzz has been alternate day fasting or intermittent fasting. There's some evidence that short periods of fasting could not only be a way to lose weight but also be potentially good for your health.

Do you lose weight fasting?

The simple answer is yes. It may not be the most practical - or safest - diet, though. Some people also use fasting as a way to cleanse the body of toxins, although experts say our bodies are perfectly equipped with organs that already do the job.

When you fast, your body is forced to dip into energy stores to get the fuel it needs to keep going, so you will definitely lose weight.

The big question is how long you will keep that weight off. Because food was often scarce for our ancestors, our bodies have been genetically programmed to combat the effects of fasting.

When you eat less food, your metabolism slows down to conserve energy. Then, when you go back to your usual diet, your lowered metabolism may cause you to store more energy, meaning that you will probably gain back the weight you lost and possibly even put on more weight when eating the same calories you did before the fast.

As you fast, your body will adjust by reducing your appetite, so you will initially feel less hungry. However, once you have stopped fasting your appetite hormones will return full force and you may actually feel hungrier and be more likely tobinge.

Alternative day fasting

Alternative day fasting (ADF) is a bit different. It involves eating what you want one day, then a very restricted diet (fewer than 600 calories for men 500 for women) the next, and most surprisingly, it does not seem to matter that much what you eat on non-fast days.

Dr Krista Varady of the University of Illinois at Chicago carried out a 10-week trial comparing two groups of overweight patients on ADF.

Her findings concluded that ADF is a viable diet option to help obese people lose weight and to decrease their coronary artery disease risk.

"If you were sticking to your fast days, then in terms of cardiovascular disease risk, it didn't seem to matter if you were eating a high-fat or low-fat diet on your feed (non-fast) days," she said.

Dr Michael Mosley, who looked into the science, couldn't manage alternate day fasting but did a five:two ratio, five days normal eating and two days of under 600 calories.

He stuck to this diet for five weeks, during which time he lost nearly a stone and his blood markers, like IGF-1, glucose and cholesterol, improved.

He said: "If I can sustain that, it will greatly reduce my risk of contracting age-related diseases like cancer and diabetes."

(continued)

Alternative day fasting continued...

"Alternate day fasting is another way of reducing the overall amount of calories eaten to help with weight loss," according to Emer Delaney from theBritish Dietetic Association.

"There has been some debate recently that this 'new' way of eating can offer major health benefits, however there simply isn't the evidence to back this up."

He says unsurprisingly, reducing the overall intake of calories, whether it's every day or on alternate days, will result in weight loss.

"Whilst it may work for some people, they need to ensure their diet on 'non-fast' days is packed with fruit and vegetables, wholegrains, lean protein rich foods such as chicken, fish, turkey and low fat dairy products."

Do you live longer fasting?

Studies of fasting in both rodents and humans appear to indicate a connection between calorie restriction and longevity. In one study of overweight men and women, a calorie-restricted diet improved markers of ageing such as insulin level and body temperature.

Fasting might also improve longevity by delaying the onset of age-related diseases including Alzheimer's, heart disease and diabetes.

One study showed that missing meals once a month, as members of the Mormon religious group do, reduces the risk of clogged arteries (the build-up of plaque that can lead to heart attacks and strokes). However, it is not clear from this research whether fasting alone or the Mormons' generally healthier lifestyle (they also abstain from coffee, alcohol and smoking) is responsible for the improved hearthealth.

A study which examined 100 overweight women from Greater Manchester found that women who followed a strict 650 calories-a-day diet for just two days a week (and ate what they wanted on the other days) lowered their risk of breast cancerby 40%. Researchers found the calorie-controlled regime almost halved cancer-causing hormones in women at high risk of the disease.

Researchers do not yet know whether the effects of fasting translate into an actual increase in lifespan, because they have not followed people for long enough periods of time.

Registered dietitian and food coach Sasha Watkins says: "Caloric restriction does seem to have some link with living longer. The population of Okinawa in Japan eat 20% less than the Japanese national average and have many more centenarians in their midst. However, the research is not conclusive. A recent study found that monkeys eating 30% less calories did not live any longer than the control monkeys but they did have lower cholesterol levels."

She says more studies are definitely needed in this area to understand if and how fasting may be good for our health.

Current medical advice

As it stands medical opinion at the moment is that the benefits of fasting are unproven and until there are more human studies it's better to eat around 2000 calories a day.

If you really want to fast then you should do it in a proper clinic or under medical supervision, because there are many people, such as pregnant women or diabetics on medication, for whom it could be dangerous.

The British Dietetic Association says that rapid weight loss occurs when fasting or severely restricting dietary intake, but this weight loss is mainly water, glycogen (the body's carbohydrate stores) and muscle, rather than body fat.

"Routine fasting is practised successfully by many cultures for religious purposes and may have some health benefits, says BDA spokesperson Rick Miller, "However, the clinical evidence for fasting as a treatment in healthcare is not clear.

"Fasting could potentially be unsafe in some individuals without medical supervision or lead to the development of poor eating patterns. Dietitians would always recommend a well-planned, healthy diet in the first instance for health andlongevity."

Dietitian Sian Porter says: "A lot of people have a five days and two days eating pattern.

"Make sure you eat foods that make you feel full and keep your fluid intake up."

Intermittent Fasting - Weight Loss Resources

Intermittent Fasting

Alternate day fasting, the latest diet by James Johnson, has hit the weight loss world, but can intermittent fasting really help you to shift those pounds - and keep them off? Dietitian Juliette Kellow BSc RD investigates

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Alternate Day Fasting Diet

By Dietitian, Juliette Kellow BSc RD

 

When it comes to losing weight, the idea of dieting only every other day may seem like an attractive one. After all, knowing we can indulge in our favourites ‘tomorrow’ may make dieting seem more bearable.

But as is always the case with anything that sounds too good to be true, there’s a downside – and in this case, it’s eating very little on the days in between. Nevertheless, some scientists believe that alternate day fasting doesn’t just help us lose weight. It may also make us healthier, reducing our risk of health problems such as heart disease and cancer, and easing the symptoms of conditions such as asthma. Supporters of this fasting diet even say it can help us live longer.

One of the most popular diet books based on the idea of intermittent feasting and fasting is The Alternate-Day Diet, written by plastic surgeon Dr James Johnson. Here’s the lowdown…

What is The Alternate-Day Diet?

In a nutshell, this diet involves alternate day fasting, eating very little on one day followed by eating what you’d normally have the next day.

Isn’t that just another way to reduce calories overall?

It certainly is. But some experts believe that eating like this will make you healthier and help you live longer – as well as shifting those pounds.

What’s the theory of intermittent fasting?

The idea that restricting our calories makes us healthier and increases our life expectancy has been around for decades and forms the basis for a book called The Longevity Diet by Brian Delaney and Lisa Walford. As far back as the 1930’s, an American scientist found that drastically reducing the calories fed to mice helped them to live longer and be healthier. In more recent times, the same thing has been shown in a variety of life forms including fruit flies, roundworms and monkeys.

The idea of severely restricting calories every other day – rather than every day – to improve health and life expectancy came in 2003 following laboratory research carried out at the ¹National Institute on Ageing in America.

After 20 weeks, mice who were allowed to eat as much as they wanted on one day but not fed the next day, lived longer and had lower levels of glucose and insulin and improved insulin sensitivity compared to mice that were allowed to eat freely all of the time. But more importantly, these levels matched or were even better than those of mice who ate 40 percent fewer calories than normal every day. The scientists involved in the study concluded that alternate day fasting was just as likely to improve health and life expectancy as a daily calorie restriction.

Is there any evidence that the same thing happens in humans?

To date, most research has been carried out in laboratories with animals. There aren’t many human studies that have looked at the link between restricting calories and life expectancy – and even fewer that specifically look at the impact of alternate day fasting on health and longevity. Those human studies that have been carried out have generally had several limitations – namely that they include only a few participants and have only been carried out over a short period of time. It’s an area that needs a lot more research before any definite conclusions can be drawn.

So what’s the link with weight loss?

Unsurprisingly, restricting calories – whether it’s all of the time or fasting every other day – usually results in weight loss. The concept of an eating pattern that alternates between periods of fasting followed by periods of eating is sometimes known as Intermittent Fasting. When this pattern follows a 24-hour fast followed by a 24-hour feast, it’s sometimes called Alternate Day Fasting.

One small human study published in the ²American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has shown how alternate day fasting can aid weight loss. In this study, 16 normal weight adults followed an alternate day fasting regime for three weeks. On fasting days they had nothing but calorie-free drinks whilst on feasting days they were allowed to eat whatever they wanted. At the end of the study, the adults had:

• Lost an average of 2.5 percent of their initial body weight
• Lost four percent of their fat mass

This indicates that they didn’t consume two days worth of calories on feasting days to make up for the lack of calories on the day of fasting.

However, most participants felt extremely hungry throughout the study and said they couldn’t sustain this type of eating pattern for long. The scientists behind the study suggested that allowing one small meal on a fasting day might make the diet more acceptable. And that’s exactly what the Alternate-Day Diet is based on. Rather than totally fasting on alternate days, the idea is to severely restrict calories to 20 percent – or just one fifth – of your normal calorie intake.

So how do I follow the Alternate Day Fasting diet?

On the first day of the diet, you have just one fifth of you normal calorie intake that keeps your weight steady. As a guideline, women need around 2,000 calories a day, and men 2,500 calories a day  for weight maintenance. This means on a ‘fasting’ day – when you are allowed just one fifth of this – women should have 400 calories and men, 500 calories. However, the heavier you are, the more calories you need just to keep your weight steady.

You can get a more accurate picture of how many calories you need for weight maintenance by entering your weight, height and sex into the personal information on Weight Loss Resources database. Then divide this figure by five to calculate the amount of calories you should have on a ‘fasting’ day.

To make it easier to stick to such a low calorie intake on fasting days, the Alternate-Day Diet recommends sipping ready-made meal replacement shakes that add up to your ‘fasting’ daily calorie allowance. These have the advantage of being fortified with nutrients and help to remove the temptation to overeat. On the second day of the diet, you simply eat what you would normally eat. Then on day three, you do the same as on day one – and so on.

After two weeks on this regime, you should start eating food rather than meal replacement products on ‘fasting’ days. Ideally, you should stick to 20 percent of your usual calorie intake. However, if you find this too restrictive it’s acceptable to increase to 25-35 percent of your usual intake. For women that’s around 500-700 calories a day (based on a usual intake of 2,000 calories); for men it’s 625-875 calories a day (based on a usual intake of 2,500 calories).

How much weight loss can I expect?

The author of the Alternate-Day Diet lost 35lb in 11 weeks – an average of around 3lb a week. However, on average, you can expect to lose around 1-2lb a week, with perhaps a few extra pounds in the first week as your body adapts. This is highlighted by a small study of 12 obese women and four obese men, who, after following a similar intermittent fasting diet, showed:

• An average weight loss of 12lb after eight weeks, equating to 1.5lb a week
• A drop in body fat from 45 to 42 percent in participants
• A reduction in blood pressure, total cholesterol and LDL (or ‘bad’) cholesterol.

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How often should I weigh myself?

Only weigh yourself at 6 or 8-day intervals, preferably in the morning after a fast day. This is because you can see a variation of as much as 3-4lb between a feast and fast day.

So is weight loss purely down to an overall calorie reduction?

According to the author of the Alternate-Day Diet this isn’t the case. Certainly, atotal calorie reduction through fasting aids weight loss. However, this approach is based on the idea that fasting every other day also activates a ‘skinny’ gene called SIRT1 that helps to boost weight loss further and adds to the health benefits of such a diet.

What else can you tell me about this skinny gene?

The way SIRT1 works is complicated. The theory goes that when cells are restricted of energy – as is the case when we have a very low calorie intake – they become ‘stressed’ and start to die. This is thought to trigger a chain of events that activates SIRT1, which in turn sets off a process that stops cells from dying.

This skinny gene is thought to help make our metabolism more efficient so that we burn fat more effectively and also helps to inhibit fat storage. Plus, SIRT1 has been shown to inhibit substances in our bodies that can cause inflammation. This is important because inflammation is thought to be at the root of many health problems including:

• heart diseases
• cancer
• premature ageing
• asthma
• arthritis
• Alzheimer’s disease

It’s thought this may be the reason why animal research shows that restricting calories improves health.

Can anyone follow this diet?

It’s always worth checking with your doctor before starting a new diet. However, very low calorie intakes on alternate days may not be suitable for some people, for example, people with diabetes. Eating very little on certain days may also not be suitable if you take certain medications. To be sure, it’s best to see your doctor and discuss the diet.

What are the pros of Alternate Day Fasting?

Ultimately, this intermittent fasting plan can reduce your overall calorie content to help you lose weight. You may also feel less deprived on a plan like this as you’re dealing with ‘dieting chunks’ that last for just 24 hours at a time. It also enables you to eat normally at social occasions, taking away the worry about trying to choose low calorie options.

This type of eating pattern may also help to prevent metabolism  from slowing down, which inevitably occurs when calories are restricted. Your body doesn’t perceive it’s starving – which is what happens with a constant low calorie intake – so the mechanism that kicks in to slow down your metabolism in order to save calories doesn’t get switched on. This type of eating pattern is simply a far more extreme version of what nutritionists and dietitians often recommend – compensating for a day of overindulging with a day of being strict.

And the cons of Alternate Day Fasting?

There’s always the possibility you may end up bingeing on the ‘feast’ days, as you’re so hungry after a fasting day. Research with mice found that alternate day fasting didn’t result in weight loss as the rodents simply gorged themselves on the days when they were able to eat, easily compensating for all the calories they had saved by fasting ever other day.

This is easier to do than you might think, too. For example, with this diet, a woman who normally needs 2,000 calories a day to maintain her weight would alternate between having 400 calories on one day and 2,000 calories the next – giving a total of 2,400 calories over the two days instead of the normal 4,000 calories.

However, having a chicken korma with pilau rice, a naan bread, a couple of poppadoms with chutney and two large glasses of wine alone contains around2,300 calories. Add this to a normal 400-calorie breakfast, a normal 600-calorie lunch, 300 calories worth of snacks plus 400 calories on a ‘fasting’ day and your calorie intake over the two days is 4,000 calories – the same as you’d normally eat, therefore totally undoing the calorie savings of a fasting day.

You’re also likely to come unstuck if your ‘normal’ diet isn’t that healthy and you continue with this type of eating on non-fasting days. And there’s the potential for us to end up with an unhealthy diet that’s lacking in nutrients, particularly if you don’t follow the principles of healthy eating on the days when we can eat. Finally, there’s the very real problem of dealing with extreme hunger on fasting days.

Juliette’s verdict

The idea of eating what you want every other day certainly sounds attractive – but of course it comes with payback – and that’s practically starving yourself on the alternate days! Nevertheless, this type of eating pattern may work for some. Effectively, it’s simply a new way to help you take in potentially fewer calories than you burn up so that you use up your fat stores and lose weight as a result.

However, for the plan to really work, it’s crucial that on the days when you do eat, you don’t go mad and gorge yourself. Spend these days eating biscuits, cakes, fried food, sugary drinks, crisps and chocolate and you won’t get the benefits of the fasting days. It’s also important to make sure that the foods you do eat are packed with nutrients to help top up intakes of protein, vitamins , minerals and fibre – the downside of eating roughly half as much as normal means you’re likely to miss out on half the nutrients you’d normally get.

This means ‘feasting’ days should consist of plenty of fruit, veg, wholegrains, pulses,lower-fat dairy products and lower-fat protein-rich foods such as lean red meat, poultry, fish and eggs. Knowing you need to be less rigid in what you eat the next day may help to avoid feelings of deprivation, which tend to be more common when following a restricted diet for weeks on end. This can help to keep you motivated.

Whether or not alternate day fasting really does offer major health benefits and increase life expectancy remains a matter of debate. There’s simply not been enough well-designed, long-term studies in humans to reach the conclusion that restricting calories helps us to live longer. Indeed, it’s a big jump to suggest that what we see in mice will also be seen in men!

What we do know though, without a shadow of doubt, is that losing weight is one of the most important things we can do to improve our health and life expectancy. A recent analysis of 57 long-term studies found that obesity seriously reduces our life span – people who are very obese can expect to knock 10 years of their life. That’s similar to someone who has spent a lifetime smoking. Huge amounts of research have proven that being overweight increases our risk of many health problemsincluding heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, certain cancers, type 2 diabetes and, in turn, many of these conditions are known to reduce the number of years we are expected to live.

Bottom line: if you want to live longer and stay healthy, losing weight, if necessary, will help. The key is to find an eating plan   that suits you and your lifestyle – and if you like the sound of the Alternate-Day Diet then it might be worth giving it a go to kick start a longer-term healthy eating plan.

Typical Fast Day (529 calories)

Breakfast

1 slice wholegrain toast with 1tbsp peanut butter

Lunch

Bowl of Asian chicken noodle soup made from chicken broth, courgette, peppers, spring onions, a little cooked chicken breast, a small amount of noodles and hot pepper sauce.

Dinner

Turkey chilli made from a little minced turkey, garlic, pepper, chilli, canned tomatoes, white beans e.g. cannellini, spices and herbs.

References

¹ National Institute of Aging - RM Anson, Z Guo, R de Cabo, T Iyun, M Rios, A Hagepanos, DK Ingram, MA Lane, MP Mattson, "Intermittent fasting dissociates beneficial effects of dietary restriction on glucose metabolism and neuronal resistance to injury from caloric intake," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition the week of April 28, 2003

2 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition - Leonie K Heilbronn, Steven R Smith, Corby K Martin, Stephen D Anton, and Eric Ravussin "Alternate-day fasting in nonobese subjects: effects on body weight, body composition, and energy metabolism1,2" © 2005 American Society for Clinical Nutrition

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