New report on the cellular effects of a calorie-restricted diet in rats

I feel like both can be true – the motivation here is likely to both solve a real problem (aging and all that's associated with it) and to make some profit as a result.

This is ultimately a product like any other. Like a SaaS product making any hard process easy, you wouldn't expect the solution to be wholly free. People would still have the option to take a different route (caloric restriction) to accomplish the same, but it's clear many people struggle with that.

Because eating healthy is not a full solution to aging, and we can do much better.

Would you rather we don't have medication for (type II) diabetes and instead just went around telling people to eat better?

Totally agree. Each diet may affect different pathways; we probably want to engage in all of them to a degree.

Recently I have been pondering how we should eat if higher protein increases all-cause mortality and higher carb diets increase all-cause mortality, so I've come up with my seasonality hypothesis: basically we would experience periods of lower carb or lower protein diets historically, which would engage each of these various beneficial pathways we have.

For instance, and this is my hypothesis: we wouldn't eat wooly mammoth for breakfast lunch and dinner every day, we would eat nothing but it for three days, once a month. Dense carbs would come sporadically ("yay, we found a bee hive" twice a year) and fruits (carbs) would blossom in either only spring or fall.

Coming from a fasting fanatic, eating often but less can work for some people, but I don't think it works well for people who need to lose weight, whom make up a significant portion of the population. If you eat a small amount but eat often, you're less likely to put yourself into autophagy where your body will actually be using an appreciable amount of body fat to power itself. In order for a "grazing" diet to work for weight loss, people have to burn excess calories through exercising or eat very minimally. The average person won't keep up exercising for very long, especially when they aren't eating food that will give them the explosive energy that they need, and eating lots of low calorie food ends up making people miserable and causes yo-yo dieting.

There's nothing destructive about fasting, as long as the person isn't starving. A lot of people confuse fasting with starvation, but they're not the same thing. Body fat is food. As long as you have fat to burn, you're not starving. Few people are going to starve doing even 72 hour long fasts. The human body just doesn't require that many nutrients on an hourly basis. You won't die or get hurt by not eating kale for a few days.

It was common wisdom that skipping a meal was destructive, but it's becoming more accepted that it simply isn't true. It doesn't really make sense that we require the sheer amounts of food that we're eating on a regular basis. Most omnivores and carnivores aren't eating the equivalent of 3 meals a day, and are effectively practicing some form of fasting. If we're supposed to not skip breakfast, then all our ancestors must have been pretty unhealthy, yet fossil evidence doesn't really demonstrate this.

A grazing type diet can be perfectly fine for someone at a healthy weight, but they're not really benefiting from it in any way besides the enjoyment of eating. Even so, it depends on what the person is eating in the first place. If someone eats toast with jelly for breakfast, it's highly questionable whether they're getting any long term health benefit from that at all.

There's a plethora of information about this subject, and I don't have the time to cite it all here. I encourage you to update your knowledge here. Most general practitioners aren't well educated in nutrition, nor are they versed in the latest research, so your doctor may be operating on old wisdom that hasn't panned out.

Note: that advice is countered by modern nutrition that sees insulin spikes and serum insulin as a bad thing.