I completely agree with this post. A big issue that I have with it is that Taubes’s (and Atkins) advice really does work for a lot of people. Evidently, Atkins and Taubes discovered something that worked, and tried to justify it with cherry picked science. They are salesmen, not scientists, so it isn’t really surprising that their claims aren’t rigorous. (EDIT: This summary of meta analyses on low carb diets backs up the efficacy of their diets)
I’d like for ChrisHallquist to have investigated why low carb diets work so well for so many people, despite the fact that the evidence isn’t all there.
As for your questions, I’d say that following Taubes’ advice won’t kill you, will very likely result in weight loss, and that his methodology is more-or-less correct but his justification is lacking.
I do plan on writing a series of posts on nutrition, exercise, and general health that are actionable with good recommendations.
This is such a weird, non-LW-type response compared to what I’ve become accustomed to.
It seems irrelevant whether or not Atkins “works” if the reason it works has nothing (or little) to do with the reasons being given.
In my experience, the fitness community is full of noise—people who are sure their fitness plans “work” because “look at the great results!” But their justification is so bad that the advice is essentially meaningless.
Or people will swear that X supplement changed their life because they started taking it and presto! 90 days later they had lost 30 pounds, increased muscle tone, and doubled their energy level! Oh...and by the way, they had also concurrently started eating a clean diet, working out 5 times a week, meditating and sleeping more consistently during that 90 days.
As you said, it is important to figure out why the Atkins diet works (when it does). But simply concluding that it is good to follow Taubes advice since it can’t kill you and it seems to work for some people is akin to saying you should give horoscopes a try because they are kinda fun and strangely accurate (when they are). You haven’t gotten any closer to an accurate map.
I don’t think that’s what he’s saying, I think he’s saying “there really appears to be some sort of effect there, so I’d really appreciate if somebody would try to support it with proper research.”
I agree. falenas108 is completely correct that this is an instrumental vs epistemological rationality thing. Taubes and Atkins are both epistemologically suspect because they’re salesmen, not scientists. Going too far into the specifics on why their arguments are bad seems like a waste of time to me, given that you wouldn’t expect truth seeking out of salesmen in the first place.
I think the issue with bad epistemology in regard to nutrition is, for one, the potential for long term harm. Any principle that is epistemologically sound would account for that. Bad nutrition advice does not need to.
Giving people a pass because they are not scientists is fine to the extent you don’t then apply their ideas to your nutrition and your body. Taubes, or many other pieces of bad nutrition advice might not kill you… at least not right away.
Now, I don’t think Atkins or anything Taubes says is that detrimental to long term health. But I think there are plenty of cases where salesmen and scientists end up promoting bad nutrition ideas that do have negative long-term effects.
Anyway, it is just interesting to me that anyone from LW takes Atkins seriously at all.
From my wiki-research, the 1st phase is two weeks and involves eating up to 1680 calories per day. From my recall, this is about 1000 less than the average American male’s intake.
That is a 14,000 calorie deficit over the course of two weeks, which is a ~4lb loss. Add to that the following considerations:
1680 calories is the target, with only 20 grams coming from carbs. 100 grams comes from fat; 150 grams comes from protein. It can be very challenging to find ways to consume 150 grams of daily protein consistently given the other types of food restrictions that Atkins has. I suspect most people don’t do it, so, as long as they keep to the 20 grams of carbs and 100 grams of fat, consume even fewer that 1680 cals per day.
Many people (as evidenced by the fact the gym will be packed tomorrow) begin an exercise regiment concurrently with their diet.
Of course, given these data, you are gonna see some results! Atkins seems to make it so many people will eat substantially less. And many of those people will start to exercise more, just ’cuz they are trying to be more active along with their diet. And that is great!
What I’m hearing in the discussions on this series is that the Eat Less, Exercise More conventional wisdom of weight loss is too obvious, too simple, not true, & downright offensive for many people on here.
It seems irrelevant whether or not Atkins “works” if the reason it works has nothing (or little) to do with the reasons being given.
That’s a strange sentiment. There are people who care about losing weight. It might be surprising but those people do exist.
If you give them a working solution they are happy, even if your theoretical underpinnings are off.
There are people who care about going to heaven. It might be surprising but those people do exist. If you give them a “working” solution they are happy, even if your theoretical underpinnings are off.
We assume that something like losing weight exists in the real world.
If we would assume the same thing for going to heaven, I would want to follow heuristics that bring me to heaven. I don’t really care whether given my a beggar a dollar brings me nearer to heaven because it’s me showing compassion or because it’s a sign that I’m not greedy.
The core question is whether giving the person the dollar works as a strategy for raising my chances of going to heaven. Different churches might have huge disagreements about finding the real reason, but I don’t care that much about those reasons.
If you say that you don’t care about whether something is working, that’s declaring faith in the church of mainstream science, where adherence to virtues is more important than utility or consequences of actions. Is that really your position?
I’ve got this idea for a workout plan to increase your muscle mass: Buy these Magic Muscle Beans from me AND workout with weights 4 times per week for 6 months. You will experience tremendous results!
My point is that the Atkins Diet and every other Diet! basically combine common sense, well-established, mainstream health heuristics with magic.
Magic Beans and Heaven and The Perfect Diet! might exist, but my guess is they are superfluous, and used only to line the pockets of those who cite them as real.
It’s very valuable to distinguish between whether something works and whether the theoretical underpinning is correct.
Usually there are years between the one and the other.
Einstein formulated the theory of special relativity decades before it had strong empirical evidence. That’s having theory before empirical confirmation.
Washing hands before operating a person is the other case. Even before you know about bacteria and viruses you should start washing your hands if you see that having clean hands generally reduce the number of complications in operations.
The people who advocate washing hands might tell you some magical theory about how washing hands means that you smell better and that your patients are less likely to develop complications because you smell better.
It’s a lot harder to find out that bacteria cause illnesses than to find out that surgeons who wash their hands achieve better results.
On the same token it’s easy to observe that many people who adopt a low carb diet, do lose weight on the diet.
Whether it’s due to changes in insulin production, ketones-in-the-urine or some other factor is a harder question.
It’s certainly nice is someone is right about the reasons why the diet he advocates works but the person who’s suffering about overweight cares primarily about whether the diet works. A person who’s in the advice business is generally forgiven if his advice works but his theory is off.
Einstein formulated the theory of special relativity decades before it had strong empirical evidence. That’s having theory before empirical confirmation.
ITYM general relativity—the Michelson–Morley experiment had been performed 15 years earlier. (OTOH IIRC Einstein said he didn’t remember whether he was aware of it in 1905.)
As far from what I remember from school Michelson-Morley did show that not all was well with the prevailing physical model. I don’t think it provided enough evidence to validate that Einstein was completely right.
I think that for many people, getting fit (even if they arrived at fitness with incorrect justification) is far more important than spending time analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of fitness. Same thing with going to haven, choosing right cryo-preservation technique, learning to cook or any realm of human activity where we don’t learn theory FOR THE SAKE OF BEING RIGHT, but we learn it FOR THE SAKE OF ACHIEVING X GOALS.
I mean, I concur that having vastly incorrect map can result in problems (injuries during workout, ineffecting training routine, ending up in hell) but after you update a map a bit you hit the point of dimnishing returns, and it is probably better to focus on practical part than to theorize (especially in the realm of physical pursuits).
but after you update a map a bit you hit the point of dimnishing returns, and it is probably better to focus on practical part than to theorize
Um, yep. And that has been position all along on this series of posts. I’ve said why I think Atkins works and why I don’t think it has anything to do with why the Atkins diet is said to work.
Eat Less, Exercise More for weight loss.
Lift More for strength training.
Of course there are lots of exceptions, and plenty of nuance within these heuristics. But you said it best: The diminishing returns happen quickly for most people and most advice.
My point was only that if someone wants to sell you Magic Muscle Beans and a workout plan that says Lift More, don’t buy the beans.
The main problem with Taubes, I think, is that he fails to cleanly separate the two issues in question:
Why people have been getting more obese.
How to lose weight.
These are very different problems.
Why have people been gaining weight, on average? The reasons are complicated and Taubes gives important insights (even though, as OP said, his criticism of mainsteam nutrition is unfair).
How to lose weight, though, is a different matter. Every source I consult seems to agree that the reason the Atkins diet works is mainly because it makes it easier to eat less, by severely restricting the types of foods you can eat and also possibly reducing hunger pangs. I have yet to see any study consistent with the idea that a Atkins-type diet inherently makes you lose more weight than a conventional diet from mainstream nutritionists (if you match the number of consumed calories). I’d love to be proven wrong, but it seems that if Atkins works for you, other types of caloric restriction diets will also work, long-term.
I do plan on writing a series of posts on nutrition, exercise, and general health that are actionable with good recommendations.
Don’t expect it to generate any less controversy. I think it was Dennett who said that everyone thinks they’re experts on consciousness because it’s such a constant part of their lives, which makes it difficult for them to respect an expert philosopher on the topic. Well, everyone’s an expert on moving their bodies and stuffing food in their mouth and gaining or losing weight too. Giving them advice is a violation of their expertise, unless they’re looking for advice.
I think it was Dennett who said that everyone thinks they’re experts on consciousness because it’s such a constant part of their lives, which makes it difficult for them to respect an expert philosopher on the topic.
Gravity is also a part of everyone’s lives. Yet people respect Newton.
Very special conditions have to exist for conversion of time spent into greater correctness. These conditions do exist for physics or physiology, but they do not seem to exist for philosophy of consciousness.
I think respect was a poor choice of words to begin with. Perhaps people here don’t like Dennett, I don’t care much about him either.
If physicists tell laypeople something that contradicts their experience of gravity, like gravity affecting passage of time, some of them will have hard time accepting it. For laypeople, nutrition isn’t about physiology, and if their experience of weight loss for example contradicts expert advice, again they will have difficulty accepting it.
Change philosophy of consciousness to study of consciousness, and people would probably dismiss philosophers as well as neuroscientists if their findings didn’t fit their experience. I think many philosophers of consciousness cite neuroscientists, so their conditions are pretty special too.
I completely agree with this post. A big issue that I have with it is that Taubes’s (and Atkins) advice really does work for a lot of people. Evidently, Atkins and Taubes discovered something that worked, and tried to justify it with cherry picked science. They are salesmen, not scientists, so it isn’t really surprising that their claims aren’t rigorous. (EDIT: This summary of meta analyses on low carb diets backs up the efficacy of their diets)
I’d like for ChrisHallquist to have investigated why low carb diets work so well for so many people, despite the fact that the evidence isn’t all there.
As for your questions, I’d say that following Taubes’ advice won’t kill you, will very likely result in weight loss, and that his methodology is more-or-less correct but his justification is lacking.
I do plan on writing a series of posts on nutrition, exercise, and general health that are actionable with good recommendations.
This is such a weird, non-LW-type response compared to what I’ve become accustomed to.
It seems irrelevant whether or not Atkins “works” if the reason it works has nothing (or little) to do with the reasons being given.
In my experience, the fitness community is full of noise—people who are sure their fitness plans “work” because “look at the great results!” But their justification is so bad that the advice is essentially meaningless.
Or people will swear that X supplement changed their life because they started taking it and presto! 90 days later they had lost 30 pounds, increased muscle tone, and doubled their energy level! Oh...and by the way, they had also concurrently started eating a clean diet, working out 5 times a week, meditating and sleeping more consistently during that 90 days.
As you said, it is important to figure out why the Atkins diet works (when it does). But simply concluding that it is good to follow Taubes advice since it can’t kill you and it seems to work for some people is akin to saying you should give horoscopes a try because they are kinda fun and strangely accurate (when they are). You haven’t gotten any closer to an accurate map.
That’s a question of instrumental vs. epistemological help.
It works → instrumental. Here’s why it works ->epistemological.
Both are useful, and both are important for LW.
I don’t think that’s what he’s saying, I think he’s saying “there really appears to be some sort of effect there, so I’d really appreciate if somebody would try to support it with proper research.”
I agree. falenas108 is completely correct that this is an instrumental vs epistemological rationality thing. Taubes and Atkins are both epistemologically suspect because they’re salesmen, not scientists. Going too far into the specifics on why their arguments are bad seems like a waste of time to me, given that you wouldn’t expect truth seeking out of salesmen in the first place.
This is fascinating to me.
I think the issue with bad epistemology in regard to nutrition is, for one, the potential for long term harm. Any principle that is epistemologically sound would account for that. Bad nutrition advice does not need to.
Giving people a pass because they are not scientists is fine to the extent you don’t then apply their ideas to your nutrition and your body. Taubes, or many other pieces of bad nutrition advice might not kill you… at least not right away.
Now, I don’t think Atkins or anything Taubes says is that detrimental to long term health. But I think there are plenty of cases where salesmen and scientists end up promoting bad nutrition ideas that do have negative long-term effects.
Anyway, it is just interesting to me that anyone from LW takes Atkins seriously at all.
From my wiki-research, the 1st phase is two weeks and involves eating up to 1680 calories per day. From my recall, this is about 1000 less than the average American male’s intake.
That is a 14,000 calorie deficit over the course of two weeks, which is a ~4lb loss. Add to that the following considerations:
1680 calories is the target, with only 20 grams coming from carbs. 100 grams comes from fat; 150 grams comes from protein. It can be very challenging to find ways to consume 150 grams of daily protein consistently given the other types of food restrictions that Atkins has. I suspect most people don’t do it, so, as long as they keep to the 20 grams of carbs and 100 grams of fat, consume even fewer that 1680 cals per day.
Many people (as evidenced by the fact the gym will be packed tomorrow) begin an exercise regiment concurrently with their diet.
Of course, given these data, you are gonna see some results! Atkins seems to make it so many people will eat substantially less. And many of those people will start to exercise more, just ’cuz they are trying to be more active along with their diet. And that is great!
What I’m hearing in the discussions on this series is that the Eat Less, Exercise More conventional wisdom of weight loss is too obvious, too simple, not true, & downright offensive for many people on here.
It leaves me a bit confused.
Postcyincism FTW!
That’s a strange sentiment. There are people who care about losing weight. It might be surprising but those people do exist. If you give them a working solution they are happy, even if your theoretical underpinnings are off.
There are people who care about going to heaven. It might be surprising but those people do exist. If you give them a “working” solution they are happy, even if your theoretical underpinnings are off.
We assume that something like losing weight exists in the real world.
If we would assume the same thing for going to heaven, I would want to follow heuristics that bring me to heaven. I don’t really care whether given my a beggar a dollar brings me nearer to heaven because it’s me showing compassion or because it’s a sign that I’m not greedy.
The core question is whether giving the person the dollar works as a strategy for raising my chances of going to heaven. Different churches might have huge disagreements about finding the real reason, but I don’t care that much about those reasons.
If you say that you don’t care about whether something is working, that’s declaring faith in the church of mainstream science, where adherence to virtues is more important than utility or consequences of actions. Is that really your position?
I care about whether or not something is working.
I’ve got this idea for a workout plan to increase your muscle mass: Buy these Magic Muscle Beans from me AND workout with weights 4 times per week for 6 months. You will experience tremendous results!
My point is that the Atkins Diet and every other Diet! basically combine common sense, well-established, mainstream health heuristics with magic.
Magic Beans and Heaven and The Perfect Diet! might exist, but my guess is they are superfluous, and used only to line the pockets of those who cite them as real.
Then don’t say that it’s irrelevant.
It’s very valuable to distinguish between whether something works and whether the theoretical underpinning is correct.
Usually there are years between the one and the other.
Einstein formulated the theory of special relativity decades before it had strong empirical evidence. That’s having theory before empirical confirmation.
Washing hands before operating a person is the other case. Even before you know about bacteria and viruses you should start washing your hands if you see that having clean hands generally reduce the number of complications in operations.
The people who advocate washing hands might tell you some magical theory about how washing hands means that you smell better and that your patients are less likely to develop complications because you smell better.
It’s a lot harder to find out that bacteria cause illnesses than to find out that surgeons who wash their hands achieve better results.
On the same token it’s easy to observe that many people who adopt a low carb diet, do lose weight on the diet. Whether it’s due to changes in insulin production, ketones-in-the-urine or some other factor is a harder question.
It’s certainly nice is someone is right about the reasons why the diet he advocates works but the person who’s suffering about overweight cares primarily about whether the diet works. A person who’s in the advice business is generally forgiven if his advice works but his theory is off.
As far from what I remember from school Michelson-Morley did show that not all was well with the prevailing physical model. I don’t think it provided enough evidence to validate that Einstein was completely right.
I think that for many people, getting fit (even if they arrived at fitness with incorrect justification) is far more important than spending time analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of fitness. Same thing with going to haven, choosing right cryo-preservation technique, learning to cook or any realm of human activity where we don’t learn theory
FOR THE SAKE OF BEING RIGHT, but we learn itFOR THE SAKE OF ACHIEVING X GOALS.I mean, I concur that having vastly incorrect map can result in problems (injuries during workout, ineffecting training routine, ending up in hell) but after you update a map a bit you hit the point of dimnishing returns, and it is probably better to focus on practical part than to theorize (especially in the realm of physical pursuits).
Um, yep. And that has been position all along on this series of posts. I’ve said why I think Atkins works and why I don’t think it has anything to do with why the Atkins diet is said to work.
Eat Less, Exercise More for weight loss.
Lift More for strength training.
Of course there are lots of exceptions, and plenty of nuance within these heuristics. But you said it best: The diminishing returns happen quickly for most people and most advice.
My point was only that if someone wants to sell you Magic Muscle Beans and a workout plan that says Lift More, don’t buy the beans.
The main problem with Taubes, I think, is that he fails to cleanly separate the two issues in question:
Why people have been getting more obese.
How to lose weight.
These are very different problems.
Why have people been gaining weight, on average? The reasons are complicated and Taubes gives important insights (even though, as OP said, his criticism of mainsteam nutrition is unfair).
How to lose weight, though, is a different matter. Every source I consult seems to agree that the reason the Atkins diet works is mainly because it makes it easier to eat less, by severely restricting the types of foods you can eat and also possibly reducing hunger pangs. I have yet to see any study consistent with the idea that a Atkins-type diet inherently makes you lose more weight than a conventional diet from mainstream nutritionists (if you match the number of consumed calories). I’d love to be proven wrong, but it seems that if Atkins works for you, other types of caloric restriction diets will also work, long-term.
Don’t expect it to generate any less controversy. I think it was Dennett who said that everyone thinks they’re experts on consciousness because it’s such a constant part of their lives, which makes it difficult for them to respect an expert philosopher on the topic. Well, everyone’s an expert on moving their bodies and stuffing food in their mouth and gaining or losing weight too. Giving them advice is a violation of their expertise, unless they’re looking for advice.
Gravity is also a part of everyone’s lives. Yet people respect Newton.
Very special conditions have to exist for conversion of time spent into greater correctness. These conditions do exist for physics or physiology, but they do not seem to exist for philosophy of consciousness.
I think respect was a poor choice of words to begin with. Perhaps people here don’t like Dennett, I don’t care much about him either.
If physicists tell laypeople something that contradicts their experience of gravity, like gravity affecting passage of time, some of them will have hard time accepting it. For laypeople, nutrition isn’t about physiology, and if their experience of weight loss for example contradicts expert advice, again they will have difficulty accepting it.
Change philosophy of consciousness to study of consciousness, and people would probably dismiss philosophers as well as neuroscientists if their findings didn’t fit their experience. I think many philosophers of consciousness cite neuroscientists, so their conditions are pretty special too.