'I am mine': Alzheimer's at 41 (2018)

It’s actually the idea of eating all day everyday that’s the innovation. We evolved to be hunter-gatherers; we had to chase down and kill animals for sustenance, and there was no reliable way to preserve that food. Which means that we are adapted to eating once or twice during a day, probably during the daytime, when our bodies are meant to be active, and then abstaining from food. It’s the relatively recent innovations that changed the way we handle our metabolic processes, like having food available all day and filling it with sugar, that are responsible for the proliferation of things like obesity and diabetes, which our ancient ancestor just didn’t have to deal with to the extent that we do, because their diets were more “natural” and less maladaptive compared to ours.

All this is to say that when we’re talking about our diets from a normative point of view, we should think of intermittent fasting sort of as the null hypothesis, necessitating a rebuttal before it can be refuted, and our modern way of stuffing our faces all the time as the alternative hypothesis, requiring justification before it can be accepted.

For a healthy adult it’s probably more sensible to consume one’s diet within a reasonable window, say 8 hours per day, than to be constantly digesting the hyper processed, over sugared nonsense we put into our bodies nowadays, to the point where it overlaps with things like our sleep cycle and when we get our exercise in.

Of course, I’m not a physician, so don’t take my word for it. But you should consider the fact that formal research is increasingly coming to understand the benefits of IF; OP’s link is only one example. We don’t understand the full range of benefits that IF provides because modern medicine, in the grand scheme of things, is still pretty much in its infancy; we’ve existed for approximately 200,000 years, but we’ve only had modern antibiotics for less than 100. But it can’t be denied that so far, things are looking pretty good for intermittent fasting, at least when it comes to its suitability for “healthy” adults.

I don't think in the US or Canada there is any way to legally end your life at that point. Maybe nowhere in the world. You would need to end it while still competent. That would be a difficult line to tread because you don't want to forgo good days and with dementia the good days are the ones where you are competent. By the time the days are bad you can no longer competently end your life.

In an ideal world you could specify some kind of ego-distance from yourself where a painless shutdown would be triggered. But of course we are far from having the ability to measure or even formally describe this concept.