We prepared, portioned, and provided all meals and snacks for the study. Both diets emphasized minimally processed ingredients

I was initially concerned the results could possibly explained simply by calorie restriction. However in the full paper they have a mechanism which does well to address this.

Participants were not instructed to intentionally restrict caloric intake; instead, they were allowed to request additional study foods when they needed, without any limits.

Full paper here

I would have liked to have seen if any participants actually did request more though indicating they understood the option, but I recognize the limits of the study for trying to control this one variable.

I don’t want help with aging. I want to stay young.

Eat processed food and get older faster!

There is a lot of research on aging repairs, I wonder if I might benefit from it in time.

As someone who recently had to restrict to less processed foods and no meat and dairy: comes automatically for a time as your body needs time to adjust to the humongous volume of good you need to hit the same calorie limits. Less dense and less energy rich and takes longer to process results in some weird always hungry and always eating behavior for a few weeks and some humongous toilet plugging logs xD

Normalizes after a few weeks.

Thank you for posting this. I'm on day 12 of a diet to control my reflux symptoms and I feel awful and run down. Was worried I'd never hit that 'increased energy' I had read about.

Normalizes after a few weeks.

I'd have to go back to the paper, but I believe I read that they do two weeks of the restricted diet protocol, then return to their normal diet. So they may not be able to benefit from the many-weeks long acclimation.

I’m on day 12 of a diet to control my reflux symptoms and I feel awful and run down.

I have a family trait of reflux too. I have been able to largely alleviate it not with diet restrictions, but timing of consumption of foods and specific triggers. I like chocolate, which is a very clear trigger. Not being able to eat chocolate again would be a huge challenge for me, but knowing I just can't eat chocolate within 5 hours or going to bed helps immensely.

Was worried I’d never hit that ‘increased energy’ I had read about.

I haven't heard of decreased energy as a consequence of reflux. Or does this mean an "increase energy" from an otherwise more healthy diet you're on which you're doing to address your reflux?

There is a lot of research on aging repairs, I wonder if I might benefit from it in time.

Most of that anti-aging stuff I've seen is close to moonshot type technology and even then with little gains. However, we've certainly found lots of things we like do to in our society that ages us faster that we can cut out. Sadly, some of the main contributors are expensive to avoid, such as stress. Just from my personal observation it doesn't mean living a longer life as a numeric number of years, but instead those decades at the end become much closer in lifestyle to the lifestyle of our youth with regards to mobility, cognitive function, and overall health.

Specifically from the diet I'm trying, so far I've been feeling low energy and nausea. It's a month of more extreme restrictions to try and help alleviate some of the symptoms like sore throat and cough, with the goal then being that I can figure out triggers and how to move forward while keeping the reflux controlled.

I'm sorry to hear that. It sounds like yours is much farther along than mine (but I have older family that matches your current experience). Is the new diet at least addressing the reflux symptoms or even with the new diet is it still occurring?