I have a dietary intervention that I am confident is a good first-line treatment for nearly any severe-enough diet-related health problem. That particularly includes obesity and metabolic syndrome, but also most micronutrient deficiencies, and even mysterious undiagnosed problems, which it can solve without even needing to figure out what they are. I also think it’s worth a try for many cases of depression. It has a very sound theoretical basis. It’s never studied directly, but many studies test it, usually with positive results.
It’s very simple. First, you characterize your current diet: write down what foods you’re eating, the patterns of when you eat them, and so on. Then, you do something as different as possible from what you wrote down. I call it the Regression to the Mean Diet.
Regression to the mean is the effect where, if you have something that’s partially random and you reroll it, the reroll will tend to be closer to average than the original value. For example, if you take the bottom scorers on a test and have them retake the test, they’ll do better on average (because the bottom-scorers as a group are disproportionately peopple who were having a bad day when they took the test). Analogously, if your health is very bad on an axis that seems diet-related, and you reroll your entire selection of foods, then this will (on average) be an improvement.
The Regression the Mean diet is, basically, betting on the idea that there’s something wrong with your current diet, and that you can fix it by changing everything, without needing to figure out what the original problem was. That could be a deficiency, or a food sensitivity, or something in the time-dynamics of digestion, or a hundred other things, many of which you won’t have even had as hypotheses.
I do recommend this to people, if it looks like their health sucks in nonspecific ways that are hard to pin down. One of the biggest-change diets is a ketogenic diet (high fat, near-zero carbohydrates), since it’s incompatible with most foods.
But the main reason I think about the Regression to the Mean Diet is that it ruins so many scientific studies.
There are two main kinds of studies, in nutrition science. The first is observational: you send a bunch of people questionnaires about what they eat, and what their health is like, and you data-mine the results. This has a bunch of issues, both subtle and obvious, so the gold standard you want is randomized controlled trials, where people sign up to eat a diet that experimenters choose for them.
The people who sign up for diet RCTs are obese and have metabolic syndrome. They are exactly the sort of people you would expect to benefit from the Regression to the Mean diet. And this model, alone, is sufficient to predict the result of most diet RCTs.
This is really unfortunate if you’re trying to extract gears-level understanding from these studies. Or if you’re trying to optimize past 50th-percentile diet-related health. Or if rerolling has already failed to work for you a couple times.
My understanding is that diet RCTs generally show short-term gains but no long-term gains. Why would that be true, if the Regression to the Mean Diet is the main thing causing these results? I’d have expected something more like ‘all diets work long-term’ rather than ‘no diets work long-term’ from the model here.
I think they may be a negative correlation between short-term and long-term weight change on any given diet, causing them to pick in a way that’s actually worse than random. I’m planning a future post about this. I’m not super confident in this theory, but the core of it is that “small deficit every day, counterbalanced by occasional large surplus” is a pattern that would signal food-insecurity in the EEA. Then some mechanism (though I don’t know what that mechanism would be) by which the body remembers that happened, and responds by targeting a higher weight after return to ad libitum.
I think the obvious caveat here is that many people can’t do this because they have restrictions that have taken them away from the mean. For example, allergies, sensitivities, and ethical or cultural restrictions on what they eat. They can do a limited version of the intervention of course (for example, if only eating plants, eat all the plants you don’t eat now and stop eating the plants you currently eat), although I wonder if that would have similar effects or not because it’s already so constrained.
I have a dietary intervention that I am confident is a good first-line treatment for nearly any severe-enough diet-related health problem. That particularly includes obesity and metabolic syndrome, but also most micronutrient deficiencies, and even mysterious undiagnosed problems, which it can solve without even needing to figure out what they are. I also think it’s worth a try for many cases of depression. It has a very sound theoretical basis. It’s never studied directly, but many studies test it, usually with positive results.
It’s very simple. First, you characterize your current diet: write down what foods you’re eating, the patterns of when you eat them, and so on. Then, you do something as different as possible from what you wrote down. I call it the Regression to the Mean Diet.
Regression to the mean is the effect where, if you have something that’s partially random and you reroll it, the reroll will tend to be closer to average than the original value. For example, if you take the bottom scorers on a test and have them retake the test, they’ll do better on average (because the bottom-scorers as a group are disproportionately peopple who were having a bad day when they took the test). Analogously, if your health is very bad on an axis that seems diet-related, and you reroll your entire selection of foods, then this will (on average) be an improvement.
The Regression the Mean diet is, basically, betting on the idea that there’s something wrong with your current diet, and that you can fix it by changing everything, without needing to figure out what the original problem was. That could be a deficiency, or a food sensitivity, or something in the time-dynamics of digestion, or a hundred other things, many of which you won’t have even had as hypotheses.
I do recommend this to people, if it looks like their health sucks in nonspecific ways that are hard to pin down. One of the biggest-change diets is a ketogenic diet (high fat, near-zero carbohydrates), since it’s incompatible with most foods.
But the main reason I think about the Regression to the Mean Diet is that it ruins so many scientific studies.
There are two main kinds of studies, in nutrition science. The first is observational: you send a bunch of people questionnaires about what they eat, and what their health is like, and you data-mine the results. This has a bunch of issues, both subtle and obvious, so the gold standard you want is randomized controlled trials, where people sign up to eat a diet that experimenters choose for them.
The people who sign up for diet RCTs are obese and have metabolic syndrome. They are exactly the sort of people you would expect to benefit from the Regression to the Mean diet. And this model, alone, is sufficient to predict the result of most diet RCTs.
This is really unfortunate if you’re trying to extract gears-level understanding from these studies. Or if you’re trying to optimize past 50th-percentile diet-related health. Or if rerolling has already failed to work for you a couple times.
(Crossposted on Facebook)
My understanding is that diet RCTs generally show short-term gains but no long-term gains. Why would that be true, if the Regression to the Mean Diet is the main thing causing these results? I’d have expected something more like ‘all diets work long-term’ rather than ‘no diets work long-term’ from the model here.
I think they may be a negative correlation between short-term and long-term weight change on any given diet, causing them to pick in a way that’s actually worse than random. I’m planning a future post about this. I’m not super confident in this theory, but the core of it is that “small deficit every day, counterbalanced by occasional large surplus” is a pattern that would signal food-insecurity in the EEA. Then some mechanism (though I don’t know what that mechanism would be) by which the body remembers that happened, and responds by targeting a higher weight after return to ad libitum.
I think the obvious caveat here is that many people can’t do this because they have restrictions that have taken them away from the mean. For example, allergies, sensitivities, and ethical or cultural restrictions on what they eat. They can do a limited version of the intervention of course (for example, if only eating plants, eat all the plants you don’t eat now and stop eating the plants you currently eat), although I wonder if that would have similar effects or not because it’s already so constrained.