Agreed. I'm not disputing fasting's effectiveness--only its supposed superiority to low carb.

If we were going to compare fasting to low carb--what is being eaten when the person is not fasting? If somebody is fasting, eating SAD, fasting again, should we just count what happens when they're fasting, and compare it to somebody eating low carb with minimal fasting? Or should we include both the fasting and feeding periods? Certainly fasting is effective, but it doesn't really answer the question of what we should eat when we inevitably do.

I find the mouse studies most convincing for meal timing/smaller eating windows. Human studies have a bit of a problem in that when people are eating, during their smaller eating windows, they're not generally blinded to what they're eating. The mice aren't blinded either, but they're probably not really motivated to do anything but have their natural appetite have its way when food is available. In the case of humans, I could see this restraint actually interfering with the effectiveness of fasting--if somebody tricks themself, restraining their eating rather than just eating slightly less because of an effect of fasting on their appetite, that could make later binges more likely and hurt the effectiveness.

It would be an interesting study to fast people and refeed them on food that's reasonably palatable, but hard to estimate the calories for.