Tag Archives: Jensen’s Inequality

Health benefits from fasting that was NOT associated with reduction of calories.

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Good news, but people in Medicine are a bit slow in getting the very notion of 2nd order effect /Jensen’s inequality and disentangling mentally the first from the 2nd order effect. Which is why few are getting Antifragile or the more general sensitivity to scale of a distribution.
In the paper, Longo and associates saw health benefits from fasting that was NOT associated with reduction of calories, but solely from the variability (5 day fast compensated by subsequent boost in calories). So it is NOT the caloric deprivation but the convexity of the human body to change (over a specified range) that is the subject under concern. Luckily you can detect that without too many experiments given its mathematical necessity (the link between convexity and benefits of volatility).

This report missed the point. And look at the silly weight loss connotation.

http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/2015/06/24/reverse-signs-aging-safely-5-day-fast-month/

Reverse signs of aging safely with 5-day fast each month
A stunning new study shows that intermittent fasting can slow the aging process, improve cognitive ability, and reduce the incidence of cancer, inflammatory disease, and bone loss.
sciencerecorder.com

Mechanisms that are First-In/First-Out (FIFO)…

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 Mechanisms that are First-In/First-Out (FIFO) (path independent) do not like variability and volatility (i.e., Jensen’s Inequality/Antifragility) as much as ones that are Last-In/First-Out (LIFO) (hence path dependent).
Take diabetes. We are discovering that diabetes is not (as we thought) the result of being overweight, rather the effect of absence of variation, not losing weight, not having periods of starvation (that among other things, clean up the fat deposit in the pancreas that is LIFO). So someone overweight who loses weight can be much better-off than the same person a bit thinner at stable weight.
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There is plenty of research in diabetes hinting at this from many sides but nobody tried to put a systematic mathematical apparatus on it. Though the math is not trivial (because of path dependence), I was able to play with it with Monte Carlo analyses.
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Note that the Russians have known that for over a century.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/magres/research/diabetes/reversal.htm

See also (easier read)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/…/I-reversed-diabetes-just-11-da…

Reversing Type 2 Diabetes – Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre – Newcastle University
Our work has shown that type 2 diabetes is not inevitably progressive and life-long. We have demonstrated that in people who have had type 2 diabetes for 4 years or less, major weight loss returns insulin secretion to normal.

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Socrates used to consider that hunger was the best seasoning…

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Socrates used to consider that hunger was the best seasoning… He understood Jensen’s Inequality (antigragility).
He would be seen pacing outside his house at dinner time, trying to resist going inside. When questioned by his neighbors, his answer was: “I am seasoning my dinner”.
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Note: there are other sources on Socrates than Plato’s, portraying a very pragmatic fellow.

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Tomorrow morning starts the grueling Orthodox lent…

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Tomorrow morning starts the grueling Orthodox lent. No animal product for 40 days. Note that both Ancient Greeks and Levantine Semites never ate meat without some kind of sacrifice to the God(s), something that persists in Kosher-Halal rituals. Meat was limited to festivals (“carnival”).

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I initially thought that the intermittent protein deprivation followed by overcompensation was meant to draw benefits from Jensen’s inequality/antifragility (whether the process is kidney-rest, anti-inflammatory or authophagy for cancer control/hormonal as held by Valter Longo, it doesn’t matter because we know the statistical structure of natural life gave hunters intermittent meat and steady vegetables and we are not supposed to have steady red meat).

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But it can’t be just that. It just hit me that I missed a central point. This relief was also to help … THE ANIMALS, the ecology. Animals too need a break from milk/egg production, etc. And because of nonlinearity their population may need some kind of natural surge (hint: look at Lotka-Volterra predator-prey models).

via Tomorrow morning starts the grueling Orthodox… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.