Intermittent fasting from dawn to sunset induces anticancer response

I don't see any predominantly Muslim country listed high up here- https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer... . Which is kinda surprising to me. My father never smoked and still got cancer. I am from a Muslim-majority country and I know of a bunch of other friends/family who suffered or perished from cancer.

The islamic 40 day fasting is exactly like that and it’s fun to entertain the idea of fasting close to the poles. The fasting dates are determined by the moon calendar so it moves between extremely easy and extremely hard.

Do you know if the muslims are actually going through it on hardcore level or have some kind of rationalisation for not doing it or a cheating method like sleeping all day?

> I guarantee you would fail a blind test on which one is which, or if the cups of coffee are even different.

Oddly enough, I've actually done a blind taste test on multiple coffee systems systems: drip, aeropress, chemex (pour over), italian percolator, french press, keurig, manual espresso machine, and real espresso machine. We controlled for water temperature and mass, steep time, coffee type, coffee grind (with exceptions for specialized filters), coffee mass, packing pressure (similar pressures for similar types of brew methods).

There were ten of us in the test. We each did three tastings of each brew, with a 10 minute break between each round of tasting. Each round we wrote down guesses at brew methods, how much we enjoyed the taste, how much we enjoyed the smell, and the coffee's were shuffled between each round.

Analyzing the results was interesting, and gave some insights into similarity categories between them. For example, everyone identified the espresso brews correctly, but some people misidentified the percolator brew as being an espresso brew during the first tasting, then correctly identified the espresso during their second or third. The aeropress was also misidentified as both the manual espresso and the percolator.

There were a few more interesting conclusions, but the total average accuracy was something like 70%.

This is essentially the protocol for Ramadan no?

> If your social and/or work life heavily depends on eating together it might be part of the "problem" of why you need to lose weight in the first place.

This! My last boss used to be a "bon-vivant" guy, meaning he would particularly enjoy a nice meal with the occasional wine to go with it (please note this is pretty common in France) [0].

Two years after joining his team, I had gained quite some weight. I figured I had to eat less somehow, but I never had the impression that I was overeating. I also didn't want to skip to those meals with him. So I tried a few things:

* Pace myself with the wine. We would usually split a bottle among us. I actually enjoy wine, but don't particularly enjoy being tipsy, especially when I have to work. So win-win-win (see below)

* If there was some fruit available have that instead of cake, or skip desert altogether. Drinking the wine slowly leaves me with "something to do" while the others have desert, so they don't feel any pressure to hurry up.

* Go for more "filling" meals, meaning I looked for dishes with a bunch of vegetables. This would keep me full longer and I'd be less hungry in the evening, so also eating less. Another bonus is that I'd feel /really/ full and actually not want desert.

What I've found is that even though in the beginning the others would comment on my not having desert, they actually stopped having it themselves after a little while. The wine never actually went away, but we would occasionally only have a glass instead of a whole bottle.

The point is that I think people may feel there's a certain expectation to have a lunch a certain way. And it may be true in the sense that "it's common, so people expect it". But if you don't fully conform to it there doesn't seem to be any issue, pretty much no one seems to care [1] (except maybe if you think that you have to adhere to the expectation).

All this being said, I do appreciate that for people who enjoy nice meals it can be difficult to choose those "restrictions", especially when they're right in front of you.

[0] There never was any pressure to go along, especially since he was the kind to actively avoid talking shop at lunch. But, as the team would go out with him, I would have missed out on getting to know them. I should note that I'm not particularly outgoing and rather focused on my job, so random chats during the day wasn't exactly something I'd spontaneously do.