Is intermittent fasting popular because it’s hard??

I’ve written a fair amount about intermittent fasting in the past.  Short version: the evidence for its efficacy is not great, but it works really well for my to help maintain weight and spend a lot less time thinking about food.  In other words, I do it because it’s pretty easy for me.  So, I couldn’t let this article by Yasmin Tayag go by without comment:

Intermittent fasting has become far more than just a fad, like the Atkins and grapefruit diets before it. The diet remains popular more than a decade later: By one count, 12 percent of Americans practiced it last year. Intermittent fasting has piqued the interest of Silicon Valley bros, college kids, and older people alike, and for reasons that go beyond weight loss: The diet is used to help control blood sugar and is held up as a productivity hack because of its purported effects on cognitive performance, energy levels, and mood.

But it still isn’t clear whether intermittent fasting leads to lasting weight loss, let alone any of the other supposed benefits. What sets apart intermittent fasting from other diets is not the evidence, but its grueling nature—requiring people to forgo eating for many hours. Fasting “seems so extreme that it’s got to work,” Janet Chrzan, a nutritional anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets, told me. Perhaps the regime persists not in spite of its difficulty, but because of it. [emphases mine]

Intermittent fasting comes in lots of different forms, which vary in their intensity. The “5:2” version popularized by Mosley involves eating normally for five days a week and consuming only about 600 calories for two. Another popular regime called “16/8” restricts eating to an eight-hour window each day. One of the most extreme is a form of alternate-day fasting that entails full abstinence every other day. Regardless of its specific flavor, intermittent fasting has some clear upsides compared with other fad diets, such as Atkins, Keto, and Whole 30. Rather than a byzantine set of instructions—eat these foods; avoid those—it comes with few rules, and sometimes just one: Don’t eat at this time. Diets can be expensive, yet intermittent fasting costs nothing and requires no special foods or supplements…

Incomplete evidence is typical for dieting fads, which tend to come and go pretty quickly in a way that intermittent fasting hasn’t. (Does anyone remember the Special K and Zone diets? Exactly.) What really sets the practice apart is how hard it is. Skipping meals can send a person into a tailspin; willfully avoiding food for hours or even days on end can feel like torture. The gnawing hunger, crankiness, and reduced concentration associated with fasting usually takes at least a month to dissipate.

Am I nuts or is this just insane hyperbole?  Having dinner before 8pm and waiting to eat again till lunch the next day is not exactly grueling?  Now the idea of going 2 full days each week without eating anything does sound really tough, so I don’t do it.  Nor do all that many other people, to my knowledge.  But simply going 16 hours without food is not some brain-numbing, tortuous experience.  Maybe I’m not particularly susceptible to low blood sugar and feeling “hangry” but I think Tayag needs to consider that she’s particularly sensitive before drawing broad generalizations about why this diet is popular.  I suspect it’s popular because a lot of people have experiences similar to me because the rules are so simple and it’s really not hard to just skip breakfast (or dinner, if that’s your preferred approach). 

College ROI

FREOPP has updated their return on investment analysis for thousands of college majors.  You can check out their tool, here. And here’s their key takeaways on undergraduate degrees:

Key Points

• This report estimates return on investment (ROI) — how much college increases lifetime earnings, minus the costs of college — for 53,000 different degree and certificate programs.
• Bachelor’s degree programs have a median ROI of $160,000, but the payoff varies by field of study. Engineering, computer science, nursing, and economics degrees have the highest ROI.
• Associate degree and certificate programs have variable ROI, depending on the field of study. Two-year degrees in liberal arts have no ROI, while certificates in the technical trades have a higher payoff than the typical bachelor’s degree.
• Nearly half of master’s degree programs leave students financially worse off. However, professional degrees in law, medicine, and dentistry are extremely lucrative.
• Around a third of federal Pell Grant and student loan funding pays for programs that do not provide students with a return on investment.

Executive Summary

In recent years, young Americans have expressed more skepticism about the financial value of higher education. While prospective students often ask themselves if college is worth it, this report shows the more important question is when college is worth it.

This report presents estimates of return on investment (ROI) for 53,000 degree and certificate programs ranging from trade schools to medical schools and everything in between. I define ROI as the increase in lifetime earnings that a student can expect when they enroll in a certain degree program, minus the costs of tuition and fees, books and supplies, and lost earnings while enrolled. My preferred measure of ROI accounts for the risk that some students will not finish their programs.

This report updates FREOPP’s previous research on ROI, utilizing new data from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard.

The findings show that college is worth it more often than not, but there are key exceptions. ROI for the median bachelor’s degree is $160,000, but that median belies a wide range of outcomes for individual programs. Bachelor’s degrees in engineering, computer science, nursing, and economics tend to have a payoff of $500,000 or more. Other majors, including fine arts, education, English, and psychology, usually have a smaller payoff — or none at all.

Alternatives to the traditional four-year degree produce varied results. Undergraduate certificates in the technical trades tend to have a stronger ROI than the median bachelor’s degree. However, many other subbaccalaureate credentials — including associate degrees in liberal arts or general education — have no payoff at all. Field of study is the paramount consideration at both the baccalaureate and subbaccalaureate levels.

Unsurprisingly, STEM and Engineering kick butt, but check out political science here:

I did not read the whole methodology as carefully as I could have, but what I do think it largely ignores is selection bias into different majors and universities.  I’m also very curious how gender might be affecting these calculations.  E.g., a Computer Science major is likely to be a man who takes off little time from the workplace and maximizes earnings, whereas a Psychology or English major is much more likely to be a woman and therefore more likely to let career and earnings take a backseat to family for considerable portions of an adult lifespan.  

Anyway, as my 18-year old son will be starting Engineering at NC State in the Fall, I was pretty damn curious about this.  I sorted all NCSU bachelor’s degrees on earnings 10 years out from degree.  

I think he’s going to do alright.  His top interests are Chemical, Industrial, Biomedical, and Nuclear (the last one does not show up– too few majors?– but based on other schools, right in that mix). 

Meanwhile, you can also just sort by state, so I did all degrees in North Carolina.  The lesson here, I think, is that it is good to go do Duke and if not, Computers.  

Anyway, not perfect, but a pretty damn interesting tool.  And if the stock market crashes, my son can look after me in my retirement :-).