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Truth Seekers: Where Data Meets Reality
Tired of sensational headlines and conflicting health advice? Join Alex Barrett and Bill Morrison as they cut through the noise to uncover what scientific research actually says about the claims flooding your social media feed.
Each week, Alex and Bill tackle a different health, nutrition, or wellness claim that everyone's talking about. From "blue light ruins your sleep" to "seed oils are toxic," they dig into the actual studies, examine the methodologies, and translate the data into plain English.
No agenda. No sponsors to please. No credentials to fake. Just two people committed to finding out what's really true by going straight to the source—the research itself.
Perfect for anyone who's skeptical of influencer health advice but doesn't have time to read every scientific study themselves. New episodes drop regularly, delivering clarity in a world full of clickbait.
Question everything. Verify with data. Find the truth.
Disclaimer: Truth Seekers provides educational content based on published research. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical, financial, or professional advice. Always consult qualified professionals for decisions affecting your health and wellbeing.
**The Fasting Fountain of Youth That Wasn't**
Alex: Right, so apparently intermittent fasting is going to make us all live longer. New research, they say, proves it triggers autophagy and extends human lifespan. This is everywhere—wellness influencers, health blogs, even respectable news outlets.
Bill: I've seen this claim so many times I almost started believing it by osmosis. And the thing is, it sounds scientifically legitimate. They're citing actual published research from Columbia, from Harvard.
Alex: Which is exactly what makes it so convincing, isn't it? It's not some random person making claims—there ARE real studies. People are paying for fasting apps, buying meal timing protocols, organizing their entire lives around eating windows because the science supposedly says it'll help them live longer.
Bill: So here's what I did. I went back to the actual studies everyone's citing. And there's this 2021 paper from Columbia University that got massive attention. Published in Nature, which is a top-tier journal.
Alex: What did they find?
Bill: Fruit flies that followed an intermittent fasting protocol lived 18% longer. Females got 18%, males got 13% extension. The mechanism involved both circadian rhythms and autophagy—basically, the cellular cleanup process we've all been hearing about.
Alex: That sounds... pretty definitive. 18% is substantial.
Bill: It is! For fruit flies. Here's what I need you to sit with for a second—fruit flies live about two months.
Alex: Hang on. Two months?
Bill: Two months. So we're talking about extending the lifespan of an organism that, in the wild, lives maybe three weeks. In the lab, under perfect conditions, they make it to about two or three months.
Alex: And we're supposed to believe that translates directly to humans who live 80 years? That's not just a difference in timeframe—that's a completely different biological situation.
Bill: Exactly. And this is where it gets interesting from a data perspective. Fruit flies have metabolic rates about 10 to 15 times higher than humans relative to body weight. Their biology operates on a fundamentally different timescale. A 20% extension in a two-month organism doesn't mean a 20% extension in an 80-year organism.
Alex: Because the biology isn't just scaled up—it's actually different.
Bill: Right. And here's what the researchers themselves actually said in the paper. I'm reading from their conclusion: "Because both circadian regulation and autophagy are highly conserved processes in human aging, this work highlights the possibility that interventions might provide people with similar health benefits."
Alex: "Might." "Possibility." Those are quite careful words.
Bill: They also said in the press release, and I'm quoting: "Only time will tell if it delays aging and extends lifespan for people the way it does for fruit flies."
Alex: So the actual scientists are saying "we don't know yet," but the headlines are saying "new research proves fasting extends your life."
Bill: That's the gap. And it's not just the fruit fly study. There's a 2017 Harvard study everyone cites—that one was done in C. elegans, which are microscopic worms that live two to three weeks.
Alex: Two to three weeks. Brilliant. So we're basing human longevity claims on organisms that live less time than it takes me to finish a Netflix series.
Bill: And to be clear, the mechanisms they found are real. Autophagy does increase during fasting. Mitochondrial networks do change. These are legitimate biological discoveries. But having the mechanism present doesn't mean it produces the same outcome across completely different organisms.
Alex: This is reminding me of when I was working in journalism and we'd get press releases from universities. The research would be on mice, but by the time it hit the news cycle, it was "new breakthrough could help humans." The actual paper would have all these caveats, but the headline would make it sound like a done deal.
Bill: And here's what really gets me—I went looking for human longevity studies on intermittent fasting. Randomized controlled trials showing that people who fast live longer than people who don't.
Alex: And?
Bill: There aren't any. Zero published studies demonstrating that intermittent fasting extends human lifespan. What we have are short-term studies—12 weeks, maybe a year—looking at weight loss and metabolic markers.
Alex: Wait, so after all this coverage, all these claims, all these apps and protocols people are paying for—there's no actual evidence it makes humans live longer?
Bill: None. And the studies we do have on humans? The benefits are mostly explained by calorie restriction. If you're eating in an eight-hour window, you're probably eating less overall. It's not clear the timing itself is doing anything special.
Alex: So the fasting part might not even matter—it's just that people are eating less food.
Bill: That's what the data suggests. And then there's this wild twist from earlier this year. March 2024, there's this study presented at an American Heart Association conference claiming that people who eat within an eight-hour window have a 91% increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
Alex: Hold on, 91%? That's claiming fasting kills you, not extends your life. That's the complete opposite.
Bill: Right? So now we've got headlines saying fasting makes you live longer and headlines saying fasting increases your death risk by 91%. They can't both be true.
Alex: What's actually going on with that study?
Bill: So I looked at the abstract—and that's important, it's just an abstract, not even a published paper yet. It's based on data from 20,000 people followed for up to 17 years.
Alex: That sounds like a decent sample size.
Bill: Here's the problem. They determined people's eating patterns based on two days of dietary recall. Two days. Then they followed them for up to 17 years and attributed cardiovascular deaths to those eating patterns.
Alex: That's absurd. You're telling me they asked people what they ate on two random days, then blamed their heart attacks years later on whether they ate breakfast?
Bill: And they didn't control for what people were eating. Just when. So someone eating donuts in an eight-hour window gets categorized the same as someone eating vegetables in an eight-hour window. They didn't control for shift work, medications, why people started fasting in the first place.
Alex: Could be that people who are already sick are trying fasting as a last resort, and then we're blaming the fasting for the outcome.
Bill: That's called reverse causality, and yes, that's absolutely a possibility here. The study's own authors said, and I'm quoting: "This does not mean that time-restricted eating caused cardiovascular death."
Alex: So even the researchers are saying don't interpret this as causal, but the headlines are screaming that fasting will kill you.
Bill: And here's what frustrates me as someone who used to work with data. This isn't good science being misrepresented—this is weak observational research being presented as definitive. You can't prove causation from two days of dietary recall.
Alex: What's striking to me is that we've got this complete absence of actual human evidence in the middle. On one side, animal studies that can't be extrapolated. On the other side, this flawed observational study that can't prove anything. And in between? Nothing solid.
Bill: Multiple systematic reviews have confirmed this. The phrase that keeps appearing in the literature is "although there are no human studies on this topic, studies in rats have shown..." It's everywhere once you start looking for it.
Alex: So what do we actually know? Because people listening to this might be doing intermittent fasting right now, and I don't want to just tell them they're wasting their time without being fair about what the evidence does show.
Bill: Fair point. What we know is that intermittent fasting can help some people lose weight, about as effectively as regular calorie restriction. Some studies show improvements in blood glucose and cholesterol markers, but the results are really variable—it works for some people, not for others.
Alex: So it's a tool that might help with weight loss, not a longevity miracle.
Bill: Exactly. And if someone's using it and it's working for them, there's no evidence it's harmful—that 2024 study doesn't prove harm any more than the animal studies prove benefit.
Alex: But we need to be honest that the longevity claim specifically is not supported by human evidence. The fruit fly lived longer. The worm lived longer. We have no idea if the human lives longer.
Bill: And we won't know for decades, because you can't run a 40-year randomized controlled trial on human lifespan. It's not practical.
Alex: Which is why this kind of claim is so problematic. It's selling people certainty about something we fundamentally cannot know yet.
Bill: When I was working in tech, we'd have this thing where someone would show a demo that worked under perfect controlled conditions, and everyone would assume it would work in production with real users. It almost never did. This feels similar.
Alex: The gap between the controlled lab environment and messy human reality.
Bill: Fruit flies in a lab don't deal with stress, variable sleep, different food quality, medications, all the things that affect human health outcomes. Even if the mechanism is the same, the outcome might be completely different.
Alex: So what should people take away from this? Because I think a lot of folks have genuinely reorganized their eating around this idea that it's going to extend their life.
Bill: If you're doing intermittent fasting and it's helping you maintain a healthy weight, and you feel good doing it, there's no reason to stop. But you should know you're doing it for weight management, not because there's proven science showing it'll help you live to 100.
Alex: And if you're forcing yourself into an eating pattern that makes you miserable because you think it's the key to longevity—the evidence doesn't support that trade-off.
Bill: The fundamentals still matter more. Diet quality, physical activity, not smoking, managing stress. Those have decades of human evidence behind them.
Alex: This is what gets me about health media. We had perfectly good advice—eat well, move your body, don't smoke. But that's boring, so instead we get "this one weird fasting trick extends your life," based on fruit flies.
Bill: And when the actual human data is decades away, if ever, people make decisions now based on extrapolations that may not hold up.
Alex: The researchers did their jobs properly. They studied flies, they found interesting mechanisms, they said "this might apply to humans." That's good science. It's the translation to "this definitely works in humans" where everything goes sideways.
Bill: That's the gap we keep coming back to. Model organisms are the first step. They're not the final answer.
Alex: And two days of dietary recall followed by 17 years of assumptions isn't an answer either. It's noise.
Bill: So we're left with the honest answer: we don't know if intermittent fasting extends human lifespan. We have interesting animal data. We have some short-term metabolic benefits in humans. We don't have the longevity proof.
Alex: Which should be the headline, but never is. "Scientists still figuring it out" doesn't sell fasting apps.
Bill: Or generate clicks. But it's the truth.
Alex: And that's what we're here for. If you're going to reorganize your entire eating schedule, you should at least know what the evidence actually says—and what it doesn't.