So when it comes to this area that we've just mentioned around fasting, is there any particular examples that you could maybe give people? Or for you, what are some of those examples of the most common types of ways some maybe causal language is smuggled into those conclusions or abstract that doesn't actually fit with data even within those studies?

Yeah.

I probably have a bunch of these on the tip of my tongue, 'cause they're the things that I'm telling our undergraduates all the time, "Look out for this.

Here's the hallmark." So the one right off the bat that you've just alluded to then is causal language.

So if you're not seeing a study with randomization, and that's not always clear, right? So sometimes it's quite obvious this is a cross-sectional study, but other times it looks like it's two groups and, but it's just not, it's not immediately apparent even from the abstract, sometimes even from reading the full paper, whether a study was actually randomized.

Did participants get randomly allocated into groups? It's probably too complex to go into all the details of it, but I think that would be the first point of call is just say, are people randomly allocated to groups? Because if you're not randomly allocating, you really are not expecting to see any justified causal language.

Anything like results in, effect of, increased, impacted, those words should not be there.

What are we measuring? What is it actually important for? Why it's important to understand what we are measuring in terms of how we're gonna interpret that?

And all of those get you into the fasted state, which you talked about before as being sort of the, the definition?

As defined there, they do.

Some of the issue I have with some of the research that's out there is there will be a paper that is ostensibly labeled as a study into alternate day fasting or five two fasting.

But often to allow a diet to be practical, the authors of the study will then say, "Well, of course you're allowed to have six hundred calories on your fasting days or the parts of the day when you're fasting." But if the whole rationale for this diet was based on physiology that says you will be in a fasted state and that small amount of food has interrupted you getting into that state, then why would we expect any special fasting related benefit if the person technically didn't fast? The benefits we're trying to go for with a fasting based diet is kind of asymmetrical, that it takes a long time to build them up.

So if you've managed to go most of a day without fasting, the thing you can pat yourself on the back about is that some of the mechanisms, which I, I'm sure we'll talk about like ketosis and autophagy, these things take a long time to gradually come up with your fast and you can ruin that in a second by eating something.

So while I completely accept the practicality of saying to someone, "Well, you can have a hundred calories or so several times throughout the day," while it doesn't feel you've broken your fast to a large extent, your physiology has then interrupted that gradual process.

So you're kind of offsetting, um, the gains with that.

Could you help us to understand this?