This all [i.e. Taubes’ convoluted strawmans] seem rather stupid. The way I understand the mainstream, is that human body is normally very good at absorbing calories from what we eat, and in presence of an excess, storing said excess for future use (trading decreased risk of dying in a famine for increased risk of heart disease in the later years of life). Irrespective of whenever the excess is in form of fats or in form of carbohydrates.
Thus in absence of any other pathology, if you estimate a lower risk of famine, and estimate a longer expected lifespan that would have been typical in the ancestral environment, to eat optimally you will have to ignore natural urges, and instead consume less calories, which I imagine is annoying and uncomfortable. Any circumstances where you stay skinny without having to feel any hunger seem highly suspect. (E.g. I have borderline over-active thyroid and consequently stay skinny no matter what, but it is not normal).
Somewhat orthogonally, for a multitude of reasons you need physical exercise to maintain general health.
If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.
Along come the carb-cutting people. My hypothesis is that the general rationale for this movement was the recognition that the average American diet was made up of some huge % of carbs (>50% of caloric intake) and so the simple math of avoiding carbs, even if you upped your fat intake, would ensure your daily average caloric intake went down.
Over time, even a relatively small difference in daily average caloric intake can make a relatively large difference in your body weight. For example, a 100 cals/day decrease will yield a ~10lb body mass decrease per yer.
Atkins, the flagship of the carb-cutting movement, advocates an extremely significant decrease in carbs, especially at the outset of the diet. It is zero wonder (to me) as to why it “works” for people. If you basically eliminate carbs from your diet, you’ll have to come up with creative way to even find ways to equal your former carb-including diet. You’re gonna lose weight pretty fast if you stick to the diet. (duh)
Cutting curbs does not preclude the logic of the crazy goverment’s advice to avoid fatty foods. Though there may be some physiological benefits to either low-carb or low-fat diets, in terms of overall weight loss, the primary mechanism is the same: calorie control. This isn’t a situation where one is (anything but marginally) better than the other.
We might expect Dr. Atkins, and every other diet-movement guy out there, to try and spin their particular brand of weight loss strategy as something unique and magical. In fact, it seems the existence of the economics of the self-help universe along with the difficult challenge of losing weight (or staying happy or having a good romantic relationship or being successful in your career, etc.) pretty much guarantees that people are gonna keep coming up with new ways of saying the same thing: Eat less calories (or any of the other basic level advice that leads to the other topics of interest often tackled by the self-help universe), and then putting a picture of themselves wearing a big smile and a lab coat on the cover of their book/website, and pretending to have discovered a Revolution in Weight Loss! that turn all the old-fashioned conventional wisdom on its head.
Over time, even a relatively small difference in daily average caloric intake can make a relatively large difference in your body weight. For example, a 100 cals/day decrease will yield a ~10lb body mass decrease per yer.
While that is widely claimed, it is false. Think about it for a minute: do you really think that a decade of such deprivation would kill a light person? The problem is not all the complications of metabolism that people bring up in these posts, but the very basic fact that energy consumption is roughly proportional to body mass. Under that model, a caloric deficit will not lead to linear weight loss nor a surplus to linear weight gain. Instead, the new caloric intake is enough to support a new weight and the difference between the current and new weight decays exponentially. Here is a recent model, with some testing; one of the authors is quoted claiming that a 100 Cal/day deficit will lead to a total loss of 10lb, after about 3 years.
Thanks for this. It is the first substantive comment I’ve seen.
I read the NYT article; the other is above my head. Frankly, I don’t buy this: “Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one.”
I think they are observing (primarily) genetically slow metabolisms.
I’d agree that the 3500 calorie = 1lb of weight loss is not linear because 100 pound people don’t disappear in 10 years. Conventional wisdom says that metabolism will adjust to a 100 cal deficit so that one would need to reduce cals more with time In order to achieve the same result. OR they would need to add exercise, which is also conventional wisdom.
Would you agree that this: “An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one.” is because they are looking at people with genetic abnormalities?
genetic abnormalities implies it’s not a giant fraction of the population. I think it’s very likely that either because of historic population genetics or possibly gut flora biomes that different people simply will gain different amounts of weight from the same food over the course of their lives.
Downvoted. You understood what was meant, yet chose to ‘win the argument’ instead of helping correct the wording to make it easier for others to understand.
Example of proper clarification:
“Over time, consuming fewer calories than you burn can make a relatively large difference in your body weight. For example, consuming 100 cals/day less than you burn will yield a ~10 lb body mass decrease per year.”
And yes, this is quite sufficient to kill most people within ten years.
Why is “per gram” the relevant metric? It should be something more like “per unit ‘satiating power’” (to the extent that such a thing can be defined). If drinking a half-litre bottle of Coke doesn’t make me less hungry than before¹ but eating a cone of ice cream makes me feel full, if I want to reduce my calorie intake it makes more sense to forgo the former even if it weighs several times as much.
Other than due to the water, CO2, and caffeine, which I could also get from a bottle of sparkling water and a shot of espresso.
That makes sense. I think calories per gram is a reasonably good metric, but there are probably much better ones.
I think the principle still holds: low fat or low carb diets work (when they do) because it is a simple way to help a consumer modify their diet using the lowest hanging fruit based on some reasonable logic (i.e. cut fat ‘cuz generally high calories, or cut carbs cuz’ Americans generally eat lots of them). You don’t have to think about it, and once you form the habit, it’s relatively easy to stick to.
If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.
As a historical claim, I believe that this is false. The opposition to consuming fat is primarily about correlation with heart disease. Certainly none of the examples of government advice in this post are about weight loss.
Along come the carb-cutting people. My hypothesis is that the general rationale for this movement was the recognition that the average American diet was made up of some huge % of carbs (>50% of caloric intake) and so the simple math of avoiding carbs, even if you upped your fat intake, would ensure your daily average caloric intake went down.
They wrote down their reasons and this certainly isn’t any of reasons that Atkins gives.
If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.
Seems to me that this strategy is vulnerable to munchkinism (haha) by the food industry. Which sells “low fat” this and “reduced fat” that. Although fat content used to be a pretty good proxy for unhealthy food, it may be only a proxy.
What’s unhealthy about ice cream (assuming you’re not lactose-intolerant)?
Basically it tastes too good. There is something about foods which taste really good which (for many people) messes up their internal system for eating urges. This is my lay conclusion, resulting from nearly 2 years of informal research into obesity and diet.
If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.
This assumes that the average person can meaningful succeed in his attempt to eat less and beat his hunger. What people eat has a lot to do with the desires of the body for food and if you starve a body of fat that has consequences.
If you look at a modern home you can see that the surface area of heating equipment is important for a warm home. You could run and tell people who want warmer homes to increase that surface area.
In reality a much better advice is to turn the thermostat. You can be right about some parts but still miss the point.
There are multiple ways you can theoretically approach weight loss.
I think that calorie control is a center piece of the mainstream view.
As far as I can see preaching calorie control is not effective.
Gary Taubes focuses on reducing eating carbohydrates that raise insulin.
Another approach would be Seth Roberts set point frame. If you follow it than you give people nose clips and let them drink a bit of oil.
There are people who practice hypnosis who also operate on the set point model.
There are people who tell you that the key is about starting to listen to your body and perceive signals from it that most people ignore.
There seems to be an anti-pattern for certain kinds of problems that involve one’s habits, lifestyle, or emotions. The anti-pattern is that many people who do not experience the problem claim that the problem is easily solvable; whereas many people who do experience the problem claim that it is not easily solved.
People who have previously experienced the problem may fall into either category; whether they do seems to have something to do with how much continuity (or compassion?) they feel between their current self and their problem-having past self; or whether they have retained awareness of the specific transitions involved in solving the problem. (Kinda like some of the difficulties moridinamael recently pointed out regarding programming tutorials. Just because you’ve achieved X does not automatically make you a good guide for others who want to achieve X.)
This seems related to one of the things that folks who use the word “privilege” mean by it sometimes. We can probably come up with some less politically charged word for this specific anti-pattern, though.
Good point. It seems pretty common for people who study social phenomena — even heavily moralized ones, like crime — to have more compassion for the people involved in them than the “conventional wisdom” does.
Dunno if it’s not mainstream enough for you, but FWIW as of now the average rating of The Hacker’s Diet on Goodreads is 3.85 out of 5.
I don’t think that the Hacker”s diet is a mainstream work. It”s not written by a nutrition professor or by a government health agency but by a tech CEO.
the average rating of The Hacker’s Diet on Goodreads is 3.85 out of 5.
I don’t think that says much. The number also happens to be lower than Gary Taubnes Good Calories, Bad Calories.
As far as the Hackers diet itself goes, it preaches to measure weight with moving averages and make decisions based on that measurement.
As far as I know you can’t even buy a scale that does moving averages automatically that’s how non-mainstream the recommendations of the hackers diet happens to be.
I think if you ask most mainstream health folks what they think about moving averages for weight measurements they have no idea what you are talking about.
In a world where studies indicate that people who weight themselves daily lose more weight, a lot of mainstream health advice recommends against daily weighting to avoid negative emotions associated with seeing your weight.
I see nobody funding a study to see whether a scale that measures someone weight and then gives them the moving average performs against a scale that just tells people their weight directly.
Mainstream nutrition researchers focus to much on food to investigate theories like that.
However I don’t see in the page that you linked that Withings can be setup in a way that it never tells you your weight at a particular point in time but only displays the moving average when you step on it.
I would add that once you get rid of the idea that the body scale should display directly what it measures, you can also do things like menstrual cycle controlled weight for woman.
You could also think about simply display the difference between your weight and preset target wait for a particular day. There are plenty of different possibilities to display that information and in a sane world we would compare those difference and run studies to see which way of displaying the information actually encourages humans to make decisions that move them towards their target weight.
That’s an awfully specific use mode you ask for. A common mode of use of these scales, which I think is a better choice, is not to look at the display at all, perhaps even covering it. Collecting data should be a habit separate from analyzing data. And when you do analyze data, you don’t just want the current point estimate, but the graph of history.
Collecting data should be a habit separate from analyzing data.
You might be right or you might be wrong. In a sane world someone would run a study to give us data to answer that question.
But we don’t live in a sane world. Our mainstream nutrition researchers are not interested in answering that question. They rather fund huge studies that gather self reported eating reports and try to interpret those self reported eating reports to tell us that we should eat certain food over other food.
That’s an awfully specific use mode you ask for.
I’m asking a companies who are in the business of scale production to think about optimal data presentation.
I would want a company like Withings to either make the display fully programmable. Furthermore I would want them to run a study about which way of displaying data is best.
Scientific trial setup:
2000 trial Withings. They get sold with a rabate. Each user who gets them agrees to the trial and that the weight data of the trial is allowed to be published afterwards anonymously.
There are 10 different scales modes. In the first two years of using the scale the user will be logged into the scale mode that supposed to be tested.
After a year is up you go and analyse the data. Which information display was best suited for helping people lose weight? You go and publish that information in a good journal.
Then you go and tell newspaper journalists about your new study which shows that measuring weight in a certain way helps people lose weight. Coincidentally the way to have a scale that displays weight that way you have to go out and by a Withings.
That story is good in the sense that newspaper journalists would probably be happy to write about it.
I would even do a bit of the PR work myself when I do the next QS media interview (I have done >10 in the past).
I would add that once you get rid of the idea that the body scale should display directly what it measures, you can also do things like menstrual cycle controlled weight for woman.
(Another idea along those lines I once had was controlling for days of the week, as many people eat more on weekends than on weekdays. But the more parameters the model has the more likely overfitting becomes.)
Another idea along those lines I once had was controlling for days of the week, as many people eat more on weekends than on weekdays.
If you make 7 day rolling averages you already remove that effect. In any case from the weight charts that I personally looked at that effect doesn’t seem that big. Day to day changes in water content seem to produce more noise.
If one wants to get simplistic, saying “calorie control” is horribly wrong as a first approximation.
It’s calories versus metabolism. That at least recognizes a trade off, instead of picturing calorie control as a single unopposed knob to tune your weight.
If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.
This doesn’t explain why the government put starches at the bottom of the pyramid, thus encouraging people to eat as many of them as possible.
If you follow the food pyramid your combined vegetable and fruits should almost equal your starch consumption. Thats not “as much starch as possible.”
For dinner, a 4 oz steak, 6 asparagus spears, a cup of rice and a beer, with an orange for dessert fits the food pyramid and with the exception of the beer, would probably be something paleo people would also eat.
Ok, replace “as many of them as possible” with “a lot of them”, my point still stands.
A lot is relative- one more serving of starch a day then your combined fruit and vegetable servings. I know paleos that eat enough rice to be (inadvertently) eating the food pyramid recommendations.
If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak
And pointing out that if this were the motivation, they wouldn’t have put starches at the bottom.
Why not? The pyramid says basically “avoid added fats and sugars”, and then suggests a diet thats 4 servings of meat and cheese, 5 servings of fruit and vegetables and six servings of starches.
If their motivation for telling people to avoid fats was simple that fats are highly caloric, one would expect them to not tell people that they should eat a lot of starch, which by the way was up to 11 servings (not just 6 servings).
Well, a large fraction of the grains grown in the US is fed to livestock, so you’d have to be thinking about something more specific than “grain farmers”.
If this were true we would expect hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets to become fat if they have had plenty of food for, say, the last seven years. Yet from what I understand hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets never get fat.
If this were true we would expect hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets to become fat if they have had plenty of food for, say, the last seven years.
I don’t know a lot about hunter gatherers, but it occurs to me that “plenty of food” for a hunter gatherer might be very different from “plenty of food” for your typical Westerner.
In a typical American city, you can walk a a couple hundred feet and buy extremely tasty food equal to half your day’s caloric requirements for an amount of money a typical person could earn in 10 or 15 minutes. So the cost of food, in terms of time, mental and physical exertion, inconvenience, etc., is extremely low for your typical Westerner. Even if you live in the sticks, it costs very little in terms of money and exertion to get in your car and hit the drive-thru window at MacDonalds.
For a hunter-gatherers, I doubt it’s anywhere near that easy to eat—even in times of plenty.
Yet from what I understand hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets never get fat.
Would be awfully hard to check if that’s even true for temperate climates. Furthermore, having to go through the trouble of hunting your food adds a negative feedback (the heavier you are the harder it is to hunt).
edit: also, in what conditions would ancestral populations get fat? Getting fat may look like a disorder, but it is a complicated biological process that is not going to be preserved if it has no use.
edit2: also, there’s a lot of variation between contemporary populations, e.g. between east Europe and US & west Europe. The key thing is that, well, east is poorer, and if you’re gaining weight that means you can save some money on food (yay, good news). Perhaps rather than looking into paleolithic, where there’s not much evidence for much anything, we can just look at contemporary populations.
Would be awfully hard to check if that’s even true for temperate climates.
This is a random link that shows the the extent of study that has gone into the question of hunter-gatherers, a study of the diets of 229 hunter-gatherer societies, none of which had the “diseases of civilization” which basically means obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
Relevant to the current discussion, there were several hunter-gatherer societies without obesity that have nonetheless consumed a large percentage of their calories from carbohydrates. An often noted example is the !Kung who got 67% of their calories from plants, and 50% of that from a single source (the mongongo nut) which is plentiful year-round, and yet they are still not obese (this is in a subtropical climate).
Hayden (3) stated that hunter-gatherers such as the !Kung might live in conditions close to the “ideal” hunting and gathering environment. What do the !Kung eat? Animal foods are estimated to contribute 33% and plant foods 67% of their daily energy intakes (1). Fifty percent (by wt) of their plant-based diet comes from the mongongo nut, which is available throughout the year in massive quantities (1).
Actually, what’s up with this fascination with hunters-gatherers and other such exotics? Look at the epidemiology of obesity . The difference is even more dramatic through the time (if you go back 30 years).
Sorry, this recent problem has absolutely nothing to do with dietary changes thousands years in the past (guess what, I just drank some liquid that would make any of those hunter gatherers puke and have a diarrhoea. I can drink this liquid because enough evolution has happened), and everything to do with changes in the past 30 years. Basically same foods, larger amounts, cultural changes (more acceptance of obesity perhaps).
Theories I consider more plausible: larger portions, more dieting (rebound effect, including in children and grandchildren of female dieters), higher proportion of simple carbs, prescription drugs which cause weight gain, changes in gut bacteria, less sleep.
I’d think at very least people accept themselves being overweight more when there are other people with that condition.
I agree with the theories except the rebound from dieting, while intuitively sensible, seems empirically dubious—there’s been starvation events and/or significant under-eating events (world war 2 related for example), and they didn’t seem to rebound like that. Changes in gut bacteria also seem like they should not be relevant. Can’t comment on less sleep.
I’d think at very least people accept themselves being overweight more when there are other people with that condition.
You’re guessing.
As far as I can tell, there’s more public hatred of fat people than there was forty or fifty years ago—admittedly there’s more public hatred in general.
Worries about being fat are being reported in young children. I don’t have a timeline for that, but I don’t think it used to be that bad.
As far as I can tell, there being more fat people doesn’t lead to more acceptance if practically all of them are blaming themselves for being fat.
So far as rebound from dieting is concerned, you’ve got a point about starvation events. On the other hand, a lot of people do report gaining about twenty five pounds after each diet, so there may be something new involved.
Recent research is finding that gut bacteria affect how nutrients are absorbed.
As far as I can tell, there’s more public hatred of fat people than there was forty or fifty years ago—admittedly there’s more public hatred in general.
Yes, but I’ve recently read some comment on some blog stating that in the US, even if you tell people you’re on a diet, people will often pressure you into eating high-cal stuff “just this once” (IME the same applies to southern Italy, where there indeed are plenty of big people), whereas in Japan you’d be told “weren’t you supposed to be on a diet?” and given stern looks by everyone.
So ISTM that in places like southern Italy (and I’d guess the US too, though I’ve never been there) “you should be thinner” is used much like belief as attire and not decompartmentalized, or else people are expecting you to achieve that by magic (or maybe by fasting whenever in private or something).
It’s the first time I’m trying to lose weight and it’s amazing how much energy other people are putting into making it take as much willpower as possible. “Just this once” indeed… For some reason people are also trying to convince me that high calorie foods actually don’t contain many calories.
Fat people are also likely to be harassed if they’re seen exercising. I think the simplest explanation is that people’s beliefs are apt to be incoherent.
people will often pressure you into eating high-cal stuff “just this once” (IME the same applies to southern Italy, where there indeed are plenty of big people
A map comparing regions of italy will not tell you much about how italy compares to other countries. A brief search:
Italy as a whole does (which is another piece of evidence not exactly supporting Taubes, BTW), but some regions in the south have rates of obesity comparable to that of Germany.
(I know, unfair comparison, if you could cherry-pick one region of Germany it’d probably have even more obesity, yadda yadda.)
(Anyway, unless you want to not be obese as a terminal value rather than because of the health effects, comparing the prevalences of CVDs would be more useful than comparing those of obesity. See also the French paradox, which does support Taubes.)
Italy as a whole does (which is another piece of evidence not exactly supporting Taubes, BTW),
Exactly. Really, if you look at this map, the less obese regions almost invariably have lower fat/carbs ratio in their common cuisine. Especially the whole of Asia inclusive of Japan.
As of the success of Taubes’s diet, this works too . The question which diet is the best for not making you want to over-eat or the easiest to stick with has very little to do with the question of which diet is the most healthy. And the answers to the former question are likely to have more to do with culture, sociology, and psychology, than with metabolism.
As of the success of Taubes’s diet, this works too . The question which diet is the best for not making you want to over-eat or the easiest to stick with has very little to do with the question of which diet is the most healthy. And the answers to this question are likely to have more to do with culture, sociology, and psychology, than with metabolism.
In particular, I’d expect the Twinkie diet to work wonders if the main reason you eat a lot is out of boredom or nervousness, rather than actual hunger.
The thing about Taubes, is that he’s writing for the mainstream audience—i.e. people who have no independent knowledge of the topic besides what Taubes chooses to tell them.
It doesn’t seem to me they’ve tried to distinguish different types of carbs—as far as I can tell they didn’t rule out (e.g.) starch being more satiating than fats but fats being more satiating than sugar.
That’s the wrong nitpick, but you shouldn’t dismiss it as just a nitpick. One interpretation is that the issue is fiber, not starch vs sugar. The abstract does mention that glycemic index is a useful axis to consider, but it also generalizes to all carbs, which is silly.
Nah, I was genuinely wondering. I’m not in the US, I don’t know if you guys have had a mainstream opinion that excessive drinking of coca cola is absolutely fine, or some other ridiculous heresy like that. (I suspect not, but then Taubes acts as if yes. I don’t think even regular people ever thought that sugars were totally ok and couldn’t make you fat)
I don’t know if you guys have had a mainstream opinion that excessive drinking of coca cola is absolutely fine, or some other ridiculous heresy like that. (I suspect not, but then Taubes acts as if yes. I don’t think even regular people ever thought that sugars were totally ok and couldn’t make you fat)
Exactly. Really, if you look at this map, the less obese regions almost invariably have lower fat/carbs ratio in their common cuisine. Especially the whole of Asia inclusive of Japan.
I’d be wary of generalizing results across genetically different populations, though—for example, a diet with plenty of dairy and wine seems to be fine for Caucasians but I wouldn’t recommend it to East Asians.
It would be hard to measure how the attitudes changed. In general the more people have a condition, the less having that condition makes you stand out, the less does conformity drive you to avoid that condition. Furthermore it would seem to me that “self blame is bad” is a relatively recent idea, as well as blaming everything on metabolic disorders...
Not that those don’t play a role. Obviously someone with low levels of certain thyroid hormones will have to ignore hunger more than someone with high levels.
Recent research is finding that gut bacteria affect how nutrients are absorbed.
Human digestion is already very efficient… potential gains due to some different bacteria should be insignificant (and would generally be a good thing, i.e. being able to live on less food is good).
So far as rebound from dieting is concerned, you’ve got a point about starvation events. On the other hand, a lot of people do report gaining about twenty five pounds after each diet, so there may be something new involved.
Yeah, I dunno. There’s definitely something wrong about discontinuity in response to a smoothly changing variable.
edit: an observation, traditionally we’d eat a lot of soups—e.g. borscht, etc. Those are low calorie foods that make you feel full. Now, if you go to a fast food place, or even in a restaurant, there’s literally nothing which is low calorie but makes you feel full. Obviously, if you eat the volume of french fries equivalent to the volume of borscht, you’re going to be over-eating. West also used to start eating with a soup.
The point is that energy storage in body fats is normal. Of course in hunter gatherers, there’s a multitude of negative feedback mechanisms (e.g. you can’t hunt when you’re too fat), which presumably can interrupt the weight gain well before it reaches gargantuan proportions (i.e. “obese” BMI).
Ultimately, if you consume a little bit more calories than you spend, you gain weight little by little, and if that goes unchecked, over the years you will get severely overweight, obese, and so on.
edit: albeit maybe the food is to blame as well—it could be that the foods ended up engineered to be enjoyable at lower levels of hunger.
This all [i.e. Taubes’ convoluted strawmans] seem rather stupid. The way I understand the mainstream, is that human body is normally very good at absorbing calories from what we eat, and in presence of an excess, storing said excess for future use (trading decreased risk of dying in a famine for increased risk of heart disease in the later years of life). Irrespective of whenever the excess is in form of fats or in form of carbohydrates.
Thus in absence of any other pathology, if you estimate a lower risk of famine, and estimate a longer expected lifespan that would have been typical in the ancestral environment, to eat optimally you will have to ignore natural urges, and instead consume less calories, which I imagine is annoying and uncomfortable. Any circumstances where you stay skinny without having to feel any hunger seem highly suspect. (E.g. I have borderline over-active thyroid and consequently stay skinny no matter what, but it is not normal).
Somewhat orthogonally, for a multitude of reasons you need physical exercise to maintain general health.
I concur.
Further...
If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.
Along come the carb-cutting people. My hypothesis is that the general rationale for this movement was the recognition that the average American diet was made up of some huge % of carbs (>50% of caloric intake) and so the simple math of avoiding carbs, even if you upped your fat intake, would ensure your daily average caloric intake went down.
Over time, even a relatively small difference in daily average caloric intake can make a relatively large difference in your body weight. For example, a 100 cals/day decrease will yield a ~10lb body mass decrease per yer.
Atkins, the flagship of the carb-cutting movement, advocates an extremely significant decrease in carbs, especially at the outset of the diet. It is zero wonder (to me) as to why it “works” for people. If you basically eliminate carbs from your diet, you’ll have to come up with creative way to even find ways to equal your former carb-including diet. You’re gonna lose weight pretty fast if you stick to the diet. (duh)
Cutting curbs does not preclude the logic of the crazy goverment’s advice to avoid fatty foods. Though there may be some physiological benefits to either low-carb or low-fat diets, in terms of overall weight loss, the primary mechanism is the same: calorie control. This isn’t a situation where one is (anything but marginally) better than the other.
We might expect Dr. Atkins, and every other diet-movement guy out there, to try and spin their particular brand of weight loss strategy as something unique and magical. In fact, it seems the existence of the economics of the self-help universe along with the difficult challenge of losing weight (or staying happy or having a good romantic relationship or being successful in your career, etc.) pretty much guarantees that people are gonna keep coming up with new ways of saying the same thing: Eat less calories (or any of the other basic level advice that leads to the other topics of interest often tackled by the self-help universe), and then putting a picture of themselves wearing a big smile and a lab coat on the cover of their book/website, and pretending to have discovered a Revolution in Weight Loss! that turn all the old-fashioned conventional wisdom on its head.
While that is widely claimed, it is false. Think about it for a minute: do you really think that a decade of such deprivation would kill a light person? The problem is not all the complications of metabolism that people bring up in these posts, but the very basic fact that energy consumption is roughly proportional to body mass. Under that model, a caloric deficit will not lead to linear weight loss nor a surplus to linear weight gain. Instead, the new caloric intake is enough to support a new weight and the difference between the current and new weight decays exponentially. Here is a recent model, with some testing; one of the authors is quoted claiming that a 100 Cal/day deficit will lead to a total loss of 10lb, after about 3 years.
Thanks for this. It is the first substantive comment I’ve seen.
I read the NYT article; the other is above my head. Frankly, I don’t buy this: “Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one.”
I think they are observing (primarily) genetically slow metabolisms.
I’d agree that the 3500 calorie = 1lb of weight loss is not linear because 100 pound people don’t disappear in 10 years. Conventional wisdom says that metabolism will adjust to a 100 cal deficit so that one would need to reduce cals more with time In order to achieve the same result. OR they would need to add exercise, which is also conventional wisdom.
Would you agree that this: “An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one.” is because they are looking at people with genetic abnormalities?
genetic abnormalities implies it’s not a giant fraction of the population. I think it’s very likely that either because of historic population genetics or possibly gut flora biomes that different people simply will gain different amounts of weight from the same food over the course of their lives.
Downvoted. You understood what was meant, yet chose to ‘win the argument’ instead of helping correct the wording to make it easier for others to understand.
Example of proper clarification:
“Over time, consuming fewer calories than you burn can make a relatively large difference in your body weight. For example, consuming 100 cals/day less than you burn will yield a ~10 lb body mass decrease per year.”
And yes, this is quite sufficient to kill most people within ten years.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but:
Why is “per gram” the relevant metric? It should be something more like “per unit ‘satiating power’” (to the extent that such a thing can be defined). If drinking a half-litre bottle of Coke doesn’t make me less hungry than before¹ but eating a cone of ice cream makes me feel full, if I want to reduce my calorie intake it makes more sense to forgo the former even if it weighs several times as much.
Other than due to the water, CO2, and caffeine, which I could also get from a bottle of sparkling water and a shot of espresso.
That makes sense. I think calories per gram is a reasonably good metric, but there are probably much better ones.
I think the principle still holds: low fat or low carb diets work (when they do) because it is a simple way to help a consumer modify their diet using the lowest hanging fruit based on some reasonable logic (i.e. cut fat ‘cuz generally high calories, or cut carbs cuz’ Americans generally eat lots of them). You don’t have to think about it, and once you form the habit, it’s relatively easy to stick to.
As a historical claim, I believe that this is false. The opposition to consuming fat is primarily about correlation with heart disease. Certainly none of the examples of government advice in this post are about weight loss.
They wrote down their reasons and this certainly isn’t any of reasons that Atkins gives.
Seems to me that this strategy is vulnerable to munchkinism (haha) by the food industry. Which sells “low fat” this and “reduced fat” that. Although fat content used to be a pretty good proxy for unhealthy food, it may be only a proxy.
“Although fat content used to be a pretty good proxy for unhealthy food” examples? Do you mean used to as in the 1980s or used to as in the 1880s?
Doughnuts, french fries, ice cream
1980s
What’s unhealthy about ice cream (assuming you’re not lactose-intolerant)?
The fat, which is debatable, the sugar, which may also debated, and the ability to eat quart of it without being hungry.
Basically it tastes too good. There is something about foods which taste really good which (for many people) messes up their internal system for eating urges. This is my lay conclusion, resulting from nearly 2 years of informal research into obesity and diet.
This assumes that the average person can meaningful succeed in his attempt to eat less and beat his hunger. What people eat has a lot to do with the desires of the body for food and if you starve a body of fat that has consequences.
Such as? And if you just lower the fat intake?
Hunger. Jojo dieting is a huge failure mode.
The German word “jo-jo” corresponds to the English word “yo-yo.”
Thanks. Those words that sound the same way but are spelled differently lend themselves to mistakes.
This is the crux of it: If you wanna weigh less, you gotta eat less.
Tell a person who”s 1.60 meter tall and who wants to be taller: If you want to be taller you need to grow more.
But there are adults who’ve lost a sizeable fraction of their body weight without any surgery, whereas hardly anybody grows taller.
Oh my god.
As I’ve said, losing weight is much more complex than just eating less… but the center of the issue is calorie control.
This is an issue where I think LW has collectively lost its mind.
Mainstream health advice with is centered around that maxim has failed to provide people who want to lose weight with a way that performs well.
What kind of evidence makes you think that a nutrition strategy should be centered around that maxim?
You’ll have to restate this.
If you look at a modern home you can see that the surface area of heating equipment is important for a warm home. You could run and tell people who want warmer homes to increase that surface area.
In reality a much better advice is to turn the thermostat. You can be right about some parts but still miss the point.
There are multiple ways you can theoretically approach weight loss.
I think that calorie control is a center piece of the mainstream view.
As far as I can see preaching calorie control is not effective.
Gary Taubes focuses on reducing eating carbohydrates that raise insulin.
Another approach would be Seth Roberts set point frame. If you follow it than you give people nose clips and let them drink a bit of oil.
There are people who practice hypnosis who also operate on the set point model.
There are people who tell you that the key is about starting to listen to your body and perceive signals from it that most people ignore.
There seems to be an anti-pattern for certain kinds of problems that involve one’s habits, lifestyle, or emotions. The anti-pattern is that many people who do not experience the problem claim that the problem is easily solvable; whereas many people who do experience the problem claim that it is not easily solved.
People who have previously experienced the problem may fall into either category; whether they do seems to have something to do with how much continuity (or compassion?) they feel between their current self and their problem-having past self; or whether they have retained awareness of the specific transitions involved in solving the problem. (Kinda like some of the difficulties moridinamael recently pointed out regarding programming tutorials. Just because you’ve achieved X does not automatically make you a good guide for others who want to achieve X.)
This seems related to one of the things that folks who use the word “privilege” mean by it sometimes. We can probably come up with some less politically charged word for this specific anti-pattern, though.
I don’t think that personal experience with the problem of wanting to lose weight is the only factor.
This is also a tribal conflict of academia vs. internet wisdom.
Stop eating so much carbohydrates isn’t much more complex than, saying eat less calories.
Good point. It seems pretty common for people who study social phenomena — even heavily moralized ones, like crime — to have more compassion for the people involved in them than the “conventional wisdom” does.
Dunno if it’s not mainstream enough for you, but FWIW as of now the average rating of The Hacker’s Diet on Goodreads is 3.85 out of 5.
I don’t think that the Hacker”s diet is a mainstream work. It”s not written by a nutrition professor or by a government health agency but by a tech CEO.
I don’t think that says much. The number also happens to be lower than Gary Taubnes Good Calories, Bad Calories.
As far as the Hackers diet itself goes, it preaches to measure weight with moving averages and make decisions based on that measurement.
As far as I know you can’t even buy a scale that does moving averages automatically that’s how non-mainstream the recommendations of the hackers diet happens to be.
I think if you ask most mainstream health folks what they think about moving averages for weight measurements they have no idea what you are talking about.
In a world where studies indicate that people who weight themselves daily lose more weight, a lot of mainstream health advice recommends against daily weighting to avoid negative emotions associated with seeing your weight.
I see nobody funding a study to see whether a scale that measures someone weight and then gives them the moving average performs against a scale that just tells people their weight directly.
Mainstream nutrition researchers focus to much on food to investigate theories like that.
I don’t own one, so I can’t be certain.
However I don’t see in the page that you linked that Withings can be setup in a way that it never tells you your weight at a particular point in time but only displays the moving average when you step on it.
I would add that once you get rid of the idea that the body scale should display directly what it measures, you can also do things like menstrual cycle controlled weight for woman.
You could also think about simply display the difference between your weight and preset target wait for a particular day. There are plenty of different possibilities to display that information and in a sane world we would compare those difference and run studies to see which way of displaying the information actually encourages humans to make decisions that move them towards their target weight.
That’s an awfully specific use mode you ask for. A common mode of use of these scales, which I think is a better choice, is not to look at the display at all, perhaps even covering it. Collecting data should be a habit separate from analyzing data. And when you do analyze data, you don’t just want the current point estimate, but the graph of history.
You might be right or you might be wrong. In a sane world someone would run a study to give us data to answer that question.
But we don’t live in a sane world. Our mainstream nutrition researchers are not interested in answering that question. They rather fund huge studies that gather self reported eating reports and try to interpret those self reported eating reports to tell us that we should eat certain food over other food.
I’m asking a companies who are in the business of scale production to think about optimal data presentation.
I would want a company like Withings to either make the display fully programmable. Furthermore I would want them to run a study about which way of displaying data is best.
Scientific trial setup:
2000 trial Withings. They get sold with a rabate. Each user who gets them agrees to the trial and that the weight data of the trial is allowed to be published afterwards anonymously.
There are 10 different scales modes. In the first two years of using the scale the user will be logged into the scale mode that supposed to be tested.
After a year is up you go and analyse the data. Which information display was best suited for helping people lose weight? You go and publish that information in a good journal.
Then you go and tell newspaper journalists about your new study which shows that measuring weight in a certain way helps people lose weight. Coincidentally the way to have a scale that displays weight that way you have to go out and by a Withings.
That story is good in the sense that newspaper journalists would probably be happy to write about it.
I would even do a bit of the PR work myself when I do the next QS media interview (I have done >10 in the past).
(Another idea along those lines I once had was controlling for days of the week, as many people eat more on weekends than on weekdays. But the more parameters the model has the more likely overfitting becomes.)
If you make 7 day rolling averages you already remove that effect. In any case from the weight charts that I personally looked at that effect doesn’t seem that big. Day to day changes in water content seem to produce more noise.
If one wants to get simplistic, saying “calorie control” is horribly wrong as a first approximation.
It’s calories versus metabolism. That at least recognizes a trade off, instead of picturing calorie control as a single unopposed knob to tune your weight.
And yet there are people who can eat a lot without gaining weight.
This doesn’t explain why the government put starches at the bottom of the pyramid, thus encouraging people to eat as many of them as possible.
If you follow the food pyramid your combined vegetable and fruits should almost equal your starch consumption. Thats not “as much starch as possible.”
For dinner, a 4 oz steak, 6 asparagus spears, a cup of rice and a beer, with an orange for dessert fits the food pyramid and with the exception of the beer, would probably be something paleo people would also eat.
Ok, replace “as many of them as possible” with “a lot of them”, my point still stands.
A lot is relative- one more serving of starch a day then your combined fruit and vegetable servings. I know paleos that eat enough rice to be (inadvertently) eating the food pyramid recommendations.
I was responding to Brillyant’s claim:
And pointing out that if this were the motivation, they wouldn’t have put starches at the bottom.
Why not? The pyramid says basically “avoid added fats and sugars”, and then suggests a diet thats 4 servings of meat and cheese, 5 servings of fruit and vegetables and six servings of starches.
I don’t see how this contradicts Brillyant.
If their motivation for telling people to avoid fats was simple that fats are highly caloric, one would expect them to not tell people that they should eat a lot of starch, which by the way was up to 11 servings (not just 6 servings).
Do you have a particular explanation in mind for why they did?
Well, one explanation I’ve heard blames the farm lobby.
It does look like they are quite powerful, but OTOH it’s not obvious to me why people eating grains benefit farmers more than people eating meat.
The farm lobby might not include all farmers equally—grain farmers might have more of an edge.
Well, a large fraction of the grains grown in the US is fed to livestock, so you’d have to be thinking about something more specific than “grain farmers”.
If this were true we would expect hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets to become fat if they have had plenty of food for, say, the last seven years. Yet from what I understand hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets never get fat.
I don’t know a lot about hunter gatherers, but it occurs to me that “plenty of food” for a hunter gatherer might be very different from “plenty of food” for your typical Westerner.
In a typical American city, you can walk a a couple hundred feet and buy extremely tasty food equal to half your day’s caloric requirements for an amount of money a typical person could earn in 10 or 15 minutes. So the cost of food, in terms of time, mental and physical exertion, inconvenience, etc., is extremely low for your typical Westerner. Even if you live in the sticks, it costs very little in terms of money and exertion to get in your car and hit the drive-thru window at MacDonalds.
For a hunter-gatherers, I doubt it’s anywhere near that easy to eat—even in times of plenty.
Would be awfully hard to check if that’s even true for temperate climates. Furthermore, having to go through the trouble of hunting your food adds a negative feedback (the heavier you are the harder it is to hunt).
edit: also, in what conditions would ancestral populations get fat? Getting fat may look like a disorder, but it is a complicated biological process that is not going to be preserved if it has no use.
edit2: also, there’s a lot of variation between contemporary populations, e.g. between east Europe and US & west Europe. The key thing is that, well, east is poorer, and if you’re gaining weight that means you can save some money on food (yay, good news). Perhaps rather than looking into paleolithic, where there’s not much evidence for much anything, we can just look at contemporary populations.
This is a random link that shows the the extent of study that has gone into the question of hunter-gatherers, a study of the diets of 229 hunter-gatherer societies, none of which had the “diseases of civilization” which basically means obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
Relevant to the current discussion, there were several hunter-gatherer societies without obesity that have nonetheless consumed a large percentage of their calories from carbohydrates. An often noted example is the !Kung who got 67% of their calories from plants, and 50% of that from a single source (the mongongo nut) which is plentiful year-round, and yet they are still not obese (this is in a subtropical climate).
Actually, what’s up with this fascination with hunters-gatherers and other such exotics? Look at the epidemiology of obesity . The difference is even more dramatic through the time (if you go back 30 years).
Sorry, this recent problem has absolutely nothing to do with dietary changes thousands years in the past (guess what, I just drank some liquid that would make any of those hunter gatherers puke and have a diarrhoea. I can drink this liquid because enough evolution has happened), and everything to do with changes in the past 30 years. Basically same foods, larger amounts, cultural changes (more acceptance of obesity perhaps).
I’m sure there isn’t more acceptance of obesity.
Theories I consider more plausible: larger portions, more dieting (rebound effect, including in children and grandchildren of female dieters), higher proportion of simple carbs, prescription drugs which cause weight gain, changes in gut bacteria, less sleep.
I’d think at very least people accept themselves being overweight more when there are other people with that condition.
I agree with the theories except the rebound from dieting, while intuitively sensible, seems empirically dubious—there’s been starvation events and/or significant under-eating events (world war 2 related for example), and they didn’t seem to rebound like that. Changes in gut bacteria also seem like they should not be relevant. Can’t comment on less sleep.
You’re guessing.
As far as I can tell, there’s more public hatred of fat people than there was forty or fifty years ago—admittedly there’s more public hatred in general.
Worries about being fat are being reported in young children. I don’t have a timeline for that, but I don’t think it used to be that bad.
As far as I can tell, there being more fat people doesn’t lead to more acceptance if practically all of them are blaming themselves for being fat.
So far as rebound from dieting is concerned, you’ve got a point about starvation events. On the other hand, a lot of people do report gaining about twenty five pounds after each diet, so there may be something new involved.
Recent research is finding that gut bacteria affect how nutrients are absorbed.
Yes, but I’ve recently read some comment on some blog stating that in the US, even if you tell people you’re on a diet, people will often pressure you into eating high-cal stuff “just this once” (IME the same applies to southern Italy, where there indeed are plenty of big people), whereas in Japan you’d be told “weren’t you supposed to be on a diet?” and given stern looks by everyone.
So ISTM that in places like southern Italy (and I’d guess the US too, though I’ve never been there) “you should be thinner” is used much like belief as attire and not decompartmentalized, or else people are expecting you to achieve that by magic (or maybe by fasting whenever in private or something).
It’s the first time I’m trying to lose weight and it’s amazing how much energy other people are putting into making it take as much willpower as possible. “Just this once” indeed… For some reason people are also trying to convince me that high calorie foods actually don’t contain many calories.
Fat people are also likely to be harassed if they’re seen exercising. I think the simplest explanation is that people’s beliefs are apt to be incoherent.
A map comparing regions of italy will not tell you much about how italy compares to other countries. A brief search:
http://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/Files/Maps/Global_Obesity_BothSexes_2008.png
… shows that Italy seems to have less obesity than most Western nations.
… am I trippin’, or is Israel missing from that map? There’s a scrap of color to the south and a dot near Tel Aviv.
Italy as a whole does (which is another piece of evidence not exactly supporting Taubes, BTW), but some regions in the south have rates of obesity comparable to that of Germany.
(I know, unfair comparison, if you could cherry-pick one region of Germany it’d probably have even more obesity, yadda yadda.)
(Anyway, unless you want to not be obese as a terminal value rather than because of the health effects, comparing the prevalences of CVDs would be more useful than comparing those of obesity. See also the French paradox, which does support Taubes.)
Exactly. Really, if you look at this map, the less obese regions almost invariably have lower fat/carbs ratio in their common cuisine. Especially the whole of Asia inclusive of Japan.
As of the success of Taubes’s diet, this works too . The question which diet is the best for not making you want to over-eat or the easiest to stick with has very little to do with the question of which diet is the most healthy. And the answers to the former question are likely to have more to do with culture, sociology, and psychology, than with metabolism.
In particular, I’d expect the Twinkie diet to work wonders if the main reason you eat a lot is out of boredom or nervousness, rather than actual hunger.
Or simply because carbohydrates are generally more satiating than fats .
The thing about Taubes, is that he’s writing for the mainstream audience—i.e. people who have no independent knowledge of the topic besides what Taubes chooses to tell them.
That’s the wrong nitpick, but you shouldn’t dismiss it as just a nitpick. One interpretation is that the issue is fiber, not starch vs sugar. The abstract does mention that glycemic index is a useful axis to consider, but it also generalizes to all carbs, which is silly.
Well, it’s part of the mainstream that you shouldn’t be getting significant fraction of your dietary intake from sugar, right?
I was just nitpicking, not defending Taubes. I’m editing the grandparent to make it clearer.
Nah, I was genuinely wondering. I’m not in the US, I don’t know if you guys have had a mainstream opinion that excessive drinking of coca cola is absolutely fine, or some other ridiculous heresy like that. (I suspect not, but then Taubes acts as if yes. I don’t think even regular people ever thought that sugars were totally ok and couldn’t make you fat)
Neither am I.
The OP asked the same question here.
I’d be wary of generalizing results across genetically different populations, though—for example, a diet with plenty of dairy and wine seems to be fine for Caucasians but I wouldn’t recommend it to East Asians.
It would be hard to measure how the attitudes changed. In general the more people have a condition, the less having that condition makes you stand out, the less does conformity drive you to avoid that condition. Furthermore it would seem to me that “self blame is bad” is a relatively recent idea, as well as blaming everything on metabolic disorders...
Not that those don’t play a role. Obviously someone with low levels of certain thyroid hormones will have to ignore hunger more than someone with high levels.
Human digestion is already very efficient… potential gains due to some different bacteria should be insignificant (and would generally be a good thing, i.e. being able to live on less food is good).
Yeah, I dunno. There’s definitely something wrong about discontinuity in response to a smoothly changing variable.
edit: an observation, traditionally we’d eat a lot of soups—e.g. borscht, etc. Those are low calorie foods that make you feel full. Now, if you go to a fast food place, or even in a restaurant, there’s literally nothing which is low calorie but makes you feel full. Obviously, if you eat the volume of french fries equivalent to the volume of borscht, you’re going to be over-eating. West also used to start eating with a soup.
The point is that energy storage in body fats is normal. Of course in hunter gatherers, there’s a multitude of negative feedback mechanisms (e.g. you can’t hunt when you’re too fat), which presumably can interrupt the weight gain well before it reaches gargantuan proportions (i.e. “obese” BMI).
Ultimately, if you consume a little bit more calories than you spend, you gain weight little by little, and if that goes unchecked, over the years you will get severely overweight, obese, and so on.
edit: albeit maybe the food is to blame as well—it could be that the foods ended up engineered to be enjoyable at lower levels of hunger.