When I ask this question I am usually referred to GaryTaubes. Also see Wikipedia. I don’t have time to evaluate the evidence, but I’m pretty skeptical of nutrition science in general.
Edit: Eliezer has spent a few years doing the only thing you can do: try a bunch of diets on yourself and measure the results.
Obviously, the reason I tried and am trying multiple diets is that the experimental result is always that nothing actually works. Except that the Shangri-La diet worked for twenty pounds and then mysteriously stopped doing anything (i.e., abrupt cessation of the diet did not result in any significant change in weight trends) and Seth Roberts couldn’t get it working again. Paleo was among the diets tried, and it didn’t result in any weight loss or other detectable differences. Non-US-approved, powerful, dangerous drugs like clenbuterol, which are supposed to cause weight loss on the order of a pound a day, produced standard side effects but no weight loss in me.
I figure that metabolisms vary at least 10% as much as minds, which is a HUGE amount of variance. It actually points up something I may post about at some point, which is that statistical science itself is often a dead end—you can publish paper after paper after paper about effects that show up in 60% of the population—but you don’t know what separates the 60% from the 40% - and still have no real grasp on the phenomenon and no real ability to manipulate it.
It actually points up something I may post about at some point, which is that statistical science itself is often a dead end—you can publish paper after paper after paper about effects that show up in 60% of the population—but you don’t know what separates the 60% from the 40% - and still have no real grasp on the phenomenon and no real ability to manipulate it.
It actually points up something I may post about at some point, which is that statistical science itself is often a dead end—you can publish paper after paper after paper about effects that show up in 60% of the population—but you don’t know what separates the 60% from the 40% - and still have no real grasp on the phenomenon and no real ability to manipulate it.
Have you posted something about this? I think it’s an important point, too little appreciated on LessWrong.
ETA: I see that I asked the same at the time. I guess that means the answer is “no”.
I figure that metabolisms vary at least 10% as much as minds
That may be understating it. Have you come across the book “Biochemical Individuality”? First published in 1956, it catalogues the at times surprisingly large amount of variation among healthy individuals of even such gross physiology as the relative sizes and positioning of the organs. It appears to have been rediscovered in the 90s, but primarily by the less scientific end of the nutrition advice industry. I do not know if there has yet been any reliable work done on the implications of individual uniqueness for, well, just about the whole of medicine, nutrition, and the life and social sciences in general.
Just curious—have you tried drinking cold (around 2 degrees centigrade) water frequently throughout the day (about 500ml per hour)? And drinking about a liter of cold water after waking? Eating you first meal soon after waking may also be advisable.
Your sleep will most likely be disturbed with visits to the toilet, but doing so may increase your resting metabolism. The logic goes that with all that cold water intake, you’ll always be hydrated, and your body must maintain a faster metabolism in order to keep your temperature at equilibrium. The water also makes you feel full more easily, helping to better control desired calorie intake.
statistical science itself is often a dead end—you can publish paper after paper after paper about effects that show up in 60% of the population—but you don’t know what separates the 60% from the 40% - and still have no real grasp on the phenomenon and no real ability to manipulate it.
E.g., the vast majority of heuristics and biases research. Including many of the researchers you cite, Eliezer.
Michael Rae—Aubrey de Grey’s co-author and the most knowledgeable person about matters of nutrition and supplementation that I know—doesn’t have a high pinion of Gary Taubes. Most of his remarks are spread over several messages on the Calorie Restriction Society mailing list; here’s a representative sample:
More Calories cause people to gain weight and develop metabolic disruptions. Nothing Taubes presents meaningfully challenges this. And even if loading up on lard really didn’t cause one to gain weight and doing the same with green veg (or even Wonder Bread) did, that wouldn’t make loading up on lard healthy.
Taubes is very good at picking apart the weaknesses in the epidemiological case against saturated fat (tho’ the recent meta-analyses, particularly in the breakdowns by poly:sat ratio, significantly beat back much of the case there); what he hasn’t done is either make a good case to the contrary, or even propose a credible alternative means of establishing the truth. You can only rely on the evidence you have, not the fifty-year, thousand-subject, randomized
metabolic-ward diet-heart clinical trial on which Taubes wants to insist before he’ll drop the pork rinds.
Well, in my case I’ve found that The Hacker’s Diet pretty much works for me: the number of calories I get seems to be way more important than where I get them from (provided I get them from something reasonable, as opposed to 2000 kcal’s worth of Coke per day or something like that).
Good calories, bad calories is a good read and it makes a rather compelling argument for limiting carb consumption; however, mainstream nutrition science does not unanimously agree with this view. Hard to say who’s right.
Indeed, it’s sad (from my armchair-observer perspective...) that something as important as nutrition science seems unable to say something conclusive about low-carb vs high-carb diets.
I have no weight problems, but low-carb seemed to correlate somewhat with loosing weight; I can’t say I’m convinced though. I just make sure to excercise so much that I don’t have to worry too much about dietary details. After all, physical excercise is as much a ‘paleo’ thing as the diet.
When I ask this question I am usually referred to Gary Taubes. Also see Wikipedia. I don’t have time to evaluate the evidence, but I’m pretty skeptical of nutrition science in general.
Edit: Eliezer has spent a few years doing the only thing you can do: try a bunch of diets on yourself and measure the results.
Obviously, the reason I tried and am trying multiple diets is that the experimental result is always that nothing actually works. Except that the Shangri-La diet worked for twenty pounds and then mysteriously stopped doing anything (i.e., abrupt cessation of the diet did not result in any significant change in weight trends) and Seth Roberts couldn’t get it working again. Paleo was among the diets tried, and it didn’t result in any weight loss or other detectable differences. Non-US-approved, powerful, dangerous drugs like clenbuterol, which are supposed to cause weight loss on the order of a pound a day, produced standard side effects but no weight loss in me.
I figure that metabolisms vary at least 10% as much as minds, which is a HUGE amount of variance. It actually points up something I may post about at some point, which is that statistical science itself is often a dead end—you can publish paper after paper after paper about effects that show up in 60% of the population—but you don’t know what separates the 60% from the 40% - and still have no real grasp on the phenomenon and no real ability to manipulate it.
I’d be very interested in such a post.
Have any of the diets you’ve tried produced changes (energy level, for example) for the better or the worse even if they haven’t affected your weight?
Not yet.
Have you posted something about this? I think it’s an important point, too little appreciated on LessWrong.
ETA: I see that I asked the same at the time. I guess that means the answer is “no”.
That may be understating it. Have you come across the book “Biochemical Individuality”? First published in 1956, it catalogues the at times surprisingly large amount of variation among healthy individuals of even such gross physiology as the relative sizes and positioning of the organs. It appears to have been rediscovered in the 90s, but primarily by the less scientific end of the nutrition advice industry. I do not know if there has yet been any reliable work done on the implications of individual uniqueness for, well, just about the whole of medicine, nutrition, and the life and social sciences in general.
Just curious—have you tried drinking cold (around 2 degrees centigrade) water frequently throughout the day (about 500ml per hour)? And drinking about a liter of cold water after waking? Eating you first meal soon after waking may also be advisable.
Your sleep will most likely be disturbed with visits to the toilet, but doing so may increase your resting metabolism. The logic goes that with all that cold water intake, you’ll always be hydrated, and your body must maintain a faster metabolism in order to keep your temperature at equilibrium. The water also makes you feel full more easily, helping to better control desired calorie intake.
It only takes 35 kilocalories to warm one litre of water from 2 °C to 37 °C.
Thanks—that’s quite useful.
I don’t think this is necessarily a good thing.
Updated. Thank you!
E.g., the vast majority of heuristics and biases research. Including many of the researchers you cite, Eliezer.
Michael Rae—Aubrey de Grey’s co-author and the most knowledgeable person about matters of nutrition and supplementation that I know—doesn’t have a high pinion of Gary Taubes. Most of his remarks are spread over several messages on the Calorie Restriction Society mailing list; here’s a representative sample:
Well, in my case I’ve found that The Hacker’s Diet pretty much works for me: the number of calories I get seems to be way more important than where I get them from (provided I get them from something reasonable, as opposed to 2000 kcal’s worth of Coke per day or something like that).
Good calories, bad calories is a good read and it makes a rather compelling argument for limiting carb consumption; however, mainstream nutrition science does not unanimously agree with this view. Hard to say who’s right.
Indeed, it’s sad (from my armchair-observer perspective...) that something as important as nutrition science seems unable to say something conclusive about low-carb vs high-carb diets.
I have no weight problems, but low-carb seemed to correlate somewhat with loosing weight; I can’t say I’m convinced though. I just make sure to excercise so much that I don’t have to worry too much about dietary details. After all, physical excercise is as much a ‘paleo’ thing as the diet.