I notice that I am confused. By the Na:K ratio hypothesis, in particular; I’m not disputing your individual results, which are interesting, so I’ve subscribed for updates.
The obesity epidemic is a relatively recent phenomenon, but I expect that diets before the era of refrigeration (which is before the epidemic) were even higher in salt (used as a preservative), so I don’t think an increase in sodium consumption can explain it.
Anecdote, but when I was intermittent fasting to lose weight, I’d often drink cacao in milk (no sugar), which seemed to help control my appetite. I thought it was the theobromine, but maybe it was the electrolytes.
My model of the past (for example talking with my grandparents) is different to yours. Before refrigeration I don’t feel people ate more salted (that was salted meats on a boat), people ate roots and tubers in winter (as those can keep a long time in the cold, in winter you have natural refrigeration) and fresh veggies in the summer when there was no refrigeration.
As for meat, you would slaughter it “just in time” most of the time (except on a boat).
And pickles (as in pickled vegetables, ketchups, chutneys, etc) are more vinegar than salt.
If you do find a source saying people of old ate more salt than now though, I would find super interesting.
Ya. I have the same feeling with cacao, one cup cuts my appetite for 2-3 hours usually.
Pickles—as in the original food where pickling is a preservation method—are extremely high in salt. The vinegar comes from fermentation. The reason the fermentation becomes something that does not spoil is the high salt content. Source: I make my own, and if the salt is too low, they spoil, it is the one thing all recipes stress.
Especially in the European Nordics, people ate huge amounts of salted fish, cured meats (which often involve copious salt), and vegetables prepped in brine, on a baseline of grains, which tended to be baked with a lot of salt. They often slaughtered most of their animals in fall, so they wouldn’t have to feed them through the winter, and then preserved them so they could live on them through winter. They also tended to have massive catches if e.g. migrating fish, which then had to be collectively preserved, as they couldn’t be eaten all at once. A lot of historic preservation methods specifically indicate the mass catch thing, e.g. when the storage container used was a massive animal carcass. As well as massive vegetable harvests, hence huge barrels of sauerkraut. From other cuisines I have encountered, salt also plays a massive historic use in preservation; e.g. fish sauce is a fermented sauce that is super salty, and a staple in Asian cuisine.
Acid is a preservative, but my understanding was that traditional pickle fermentation mainly produced lactic acid, rather than acetic acid, which is instead fermented from alcohol. Vinegar can be used to jump-start the process by lowering the pH, which favors the non-toxic acidophiles, but many pickle recipes don’t require it. Sauerkraut, for example, is traditionally made with just cabbage and salt.
Yes, preservation via fermentation is typically achieved by putting your thing-to-be-preserved into salt in an oxygen restricted environment, which leads to selective bacterial activity dropping the ph and hence further restricting undesired bacterial activity, while boosting beneficial bacteria, breaking down anti-nutrients, and having all sorts of beneficial health effects. Which is why I rejected the idea “pickles are more vinegar than salt”, insofar as your sole necessary starting base is salt, with the acidity a later result, and vinegar generally only the end-stage product that is often not even reached, and hence often not characteristic—sauerkraut is indeed made out of cabbage, salt, and water only, and the only acid in there is one produced by bacteria, and the predominant acid we target is lactic acid. Hence high salt consumption. - The idea that pickles are just “vegetable plus vinegar” is basically a modern invention—because most pickles you get in stores aren’t actually pickles, they weren’t fermented, they aren’t probiotics, their antinutrients are untouched, and they needed to be sterilised (vitamin loss) or had preservatives added (bad for microbiome) to remain stable—they are just supposed to taste a bit of actual pickles due to the vinegar, and are hence easier, faster and more reliable to make. Actual pickles are basically vegetable plus salt plus time.
Which acids you get depends on a number of factors, like the temperature you keep it at, whether you are working with mixed bacteria, fungi, or combinations thereof (sourdough, kombucha...), and what your starting ingredients are, and how long you ferment without adding more raw material. E.g. my sourdough will alternate between being dominated by lactic acid, and dominated by acetic acid, depending on how cold I keep it (fridge or outside) and how much I feed it (daily or less often), which leads to dominance of different groups of bacteria or fungi, and also has them either metabolising raw material (starch) or existing byproducts of fermentation when they run out of raw material (starch can be metabolised into alcohol which can then be metabolised further into vinegar), which leads to different rising and taste results. A starved sourdough will shift in composition to deal with the remaining nutrients, and get to the point where it is so vinegary that this interferes with some of the microbiome you do want, so you need to feed it and warm it for a while before the balance shifts back and it gets properly active to rise a bread again. If you leave a ferment unattended, it will tend to progress to vinegar as it metabolises not just anything it can get its hands on, but its own metabolic products, but we often want to eat them en route already before they get that far.
Thanks. That changed my mind about pickles and vinegar.
The original reason of talking about that was the person who brought it up thought old diets had a higher Na:K than modern diets, I’m highly unconvinced by this still, I think it is the opposite. You seem to know a lot, what is your take on the original point @Portia ?
“About 1000 years ago, salt intake in the Western world had risen to about 5 g per day. It continued to rise until the 19th century when, in Europe, it was about 18 g per day. In the 16th century in Sweden, when there was a high consumption of salted fish, it has been calculated that the daily salt intake rose to 100 g per day. A worldwide reduction of salt intake to an average of 10 g per day during the 20th century was probably due to the introduction of refrigeration.”
If you were right, that Swedish community eating 100 g per day (Jesus Christ) would have been obese, which would have been very remarkable at the time, and yet was not remarked upon.
Furthermore, if you were right, obesity would have been absent prehistorically (hunter gatherers), then rose (agriculture), then peaked in the 19th century (world-wide trading of salt makes is highly accessible), then faded away to low levels again (refrigeration makes high salt for preservation unnecessary). Yet instead, in the 20th century, they began their rise.
If you were right, we would also expect historic seaside communities (which had cheap salt access, had to excessively salt fish, and consumed algae) to be obese, while landlocked communities (which were comparatively deprived of salt) would be skinny. Yet I have never heard that observed.
And disregarding history...
If your link was correct, we’d already have a lot of data backing it up, insofar as putting humans on low sodium diets for heart disease, which is a common problem in obese people, is a common intervention. We even have scenarios where nothing else is changed, e.g. when you give people table salt based on potassium rather than sodium.
And for another, anecdotally, I have not been overweight for a single day in my life, and I have an extremely high salt diet. I have clinically low blood pressure to a degree that causes problems, where one of the easiest treatments is high salt consumption. I know a bunch of people with very low blood pressure—who are typically normal weight or underweight—who have been put on long-term high salt diets, and none of them gained fat from it. (You do gain a bit of water weight, see my water weight post. You drop it instantly when you cut out the salt.) I also used to be anorexic as a teen. That made my blood pressure worse, so I had even more salt. That didn’t make me hungrier, nor did it stop my weight loss.
Which brings me to… what working mechanism are you even assuming?
No matter how much salt you eat, your body cannot create energy out of thin air. If you are not consuming the energy you are burning, you will burn your body fat.
It is conceivable that salt intake might modify hunger impulses… but with that kind of thing, I’d suspect it to be a very individual thing, similar to how people respond to keto. - I could imagine that factors correlated with sodium-potassium ratio would have an impact, though. E.g. raw unsalted vegetables tend to work excellently as diet foods, and contain lots of potassium. Meanwhile, highly processed foods tend to be terrible diet foods, and high in salt. But I would wager that you could replace the veggies with, say, algae and pickles, without the result changing.
And the end of the day… weight loss is almost completely determined by caloric intake and exercise. If people’s calories are actually tracked—not reported, that is worthless, but tracked—their weight loss is perfectly predictable. You give them more calories, they gain weight. You give them fewer calories, they lose weight. 7000 kcal cut corresponds to 1 kg of fat lost. When people are deprived of food—in concentration camps, when harvests are lost or conflicts disrupt supply chains in a developing nation, or in North Korea—they lose weight, until they die, whether they can still access salt or no. Notably, when the Irish were deprived of potatoes, this led to mass starvation, despite them having lost their main potassium source. Because it was also their main calorie source.
I know that is boring, because we have known it forever, and people always hope there is something much more complicated going on that just calories in and out. And there are variations in metabolism between humans, which respond to some lifestyle interventions. But they are minor. Your body isn’t wasting energy in a default state, that would run counter to evolution. And so it can’t decide to stop, either. If you stop eating, your calorie burn drops only very little, as long as you still have stores, because a healthily working body has very little energy that it can still optimise without that causing serious issues. Once you get underweight, your body will start seriously throttling metabolism, in order to save your life… but at significant cost, it wouldn’t do that without cause. Your wound healing slows. Your heart rate slows. Your body temperature drops. Your hair falls out. Your periods cease. Your muscles are broken down for fuel. Your metabolism actually being throttled is a really awful experience you can’t miss, and nothing your body does without cause. (And I really would not recommend anorexia. It is a horribly silly disease.) Metabolism is the sum of energy your body spends, not just randomly burning it, but using it for stuff, and when it stops burning it, it cannot do these things. - Vice versa, you can raise your metabolism a little, but this means your body is using the energy for something. The most healthy and effective one is exercise, which burns quite a bit, and is good for you. Nearly everything else depends on making your body overuse a function, e.g. having an artificially accelerated heart rate, which adds little burn; and if you keep pushing there (by switching from a coffee to heavy drugs), you buy this calorie burn at significant cost.
If a diet works for you, hence, what this means is that you have reduced your caloric intake, without significantly reducing your happiness or upping your stress. Pretty much every diet is an attempt to achieve this, and whether it works depends on the person—what low calorie foods make you personally feel full and happy? What high calorie foods honestly aren’t worth it for you? What diet structure do you, personally find pleasant and stress-free? Some people find they effortlessly undereat on keto. Or low fat diets. Or high fibre diets. Or high protein diets. Or high vegetable diets. Or whole food diets. Or high water diets. Or intermittent fasting. Or small portions. Or high fermented product diets. (This last one in particular is a problem for your theory: people who consume a lot of fermented products often lose weight, because the changes to their microbiome often reduce their hunger. But they are eating a lot of extra salt.) But they are losing weight because they are eating fewer calories, not because anything about those diets is magic. The only awesome part is when a diet means you eat less without that making you miserable.
It looks like potatoes are one of your “I can eat fewer calories but still feel great” things. They are one of many things that work like this for many people. (Like I said, other popular choices are low carb foods, low fat foods, high fibre foods, high protein foods, low glycemic index foods, high water foods, fermented foods, hard to digest foods.) Potatoes are low calorie, high satiety, high fibre, high in resistant starch—this is why they work for many people as part of a diet. They are also tasty, dirt cheap, and quite healthy, making them an extra good choice.
So I think you found a thing that works for you, and that will likely work for a bunch of people, and it is a good thing, and you can totally stick with it.
I just don’t think the reason for that is potassium. But low calorie high satiety food.
But this means I think you were wrong in your assumption, but you got excellent results anyway, and if you learn from it, things can just get even better.
I am sorry if my tone was a bit rough—I can get rather intense on nutrition topics. (It upsets me that bad nutrition makes so many people sick, and the information people are given about it to help themselves is often wrong, making something that is already tricky to fix needlessly harder. I’ve seen so many intelligent people push themselves so hard to power through diets that failed to make them slender, but made them miserable and malnutritioned and poor, and it makes me furious.)
Thanks for looking up the historic NaCl intake of Europeans. That’s super useful. For reference also, modern people in the USA (particularly overweight) daily salt intake is only ~3.4g.
> weight loss is almost completely determined by caloric intake
I don’t at all disagree with that. But emperically it seems really hard for people to eat fewer calories, so the question is what makes it so hard? And how can taking fewer calories be made easy and require no willpower? Populations who struggle to get enough calories available to them are not relevant in answering this question.
> what working mechanism are you even assuming?
For the moment, at least experimenting on myself, and from the two SMTM experiments, it seems like Potassium might have something to do with making it easier to consume fewer calories than are expended. I’m currently experiencing with lentilles as a control (low caloric density but very little K compared to potatoes or kidney beans) and the data is still very provisional but they really don’t seem to work as well. I also did a period of going back to my pre-potato diet but adding Coconut water (lots of K but otherwise just sugar water) and it actually helped lose weight (or in this case stop gaining weight), it provisionally seems to work as well as one meal day of lentilles. So the key, it seems is both low caloric density + enough K.
The modern Western diet is K poor, my current working hypothesis is just that if people are lacking a nutrient, they continue to eat to get enough of it (eating not for calories but for getting the nutrient).
The info you turned up on historical NaCl intake is evidence that if that hypothesis is correct it might not be the ratio of K:Na that is relevant, but just the quantity of K. Which sounds plausible, given that any excess ions should be easy enough to eliminate in pee.
Because humans are genetically wired to slightly overeat, in anticipation of future periods where they will be under high calorie demand (e.g. the weekly persistence hunt in which you would run a marathon to catch a prey animal) or forced to undereat (the cold or dry season, when there is no food), so they will have stores, and perishable food does not go to waste. You’d gorge yourself on fruit and nuts and slaughtered animals in fall, when lots are available, because in winter, there would be slim pickings.
But nowadays, we don’t run into periods where we have to undereat for lack of food, so those stores just keep on building. Around Christmas, you should, based on evolutionary history, be getting pretty damn hungry. Instead, we are drowning in chocolate and meat. Nor do most of us run a weekly marathon, or walk an average of 30.000 steps a day, or climb a couple trees and dig out a bunch of roots and carry baskets full of berries each day. We drive our cars and sit in front of our desks.
Also because we are also genetically wired to be hungry enough to go to the trouble of finding and prepping food—but both those things are trivial nowadays. - Yesterday, we made a traditional food: chestnuts. Quite trivial to prep and harvest, as historic foods go, I didn’t have to dig through dirt, or walk down an impala, or fight a hive of bees after climbing up a huge tree. We just walked outside in the rain, and picked chestnuts between the spiky balls, until we got annoyed and headed home, figuring they were enough, because we were cold. Then we washed them, roasted them (on an instant fire, we didn’t even have to collect firewood), and ate them, while peeling them one at a time. They are tasty, but peeling them is annoying and fiddly. Eventually, you aren’t quite full, but you are too annoyed to carry on peeling, let alone walk out again in the rain to get more. When I went to sleep, there were still a bunch of chestnuts on the table. I finished them for breakfast, and it took me a while.
If, instead, I had just taken a pizza from the freezer, popped it in the oven, and shoved it in my face, I am sure I’d have eaten my fill.
And finally, because our food is highly processed to be tastier than it should be, and less filling than it should be, and faster to consume than it should be. Even our healthy food—we puree our fruit and veg into smoothies, so something we would have previously chewed for an hour can now be gulped down. Things that previously would have filled us up are now bereft of fibre. Things previously digested slowly are now digested instantly, so we are hungry again a few hours later. Eaten and digesting used to take time. Now, you gulp down, and then, you could do with another snack. Kids used to get mandarins and nuts in their Christmas stockings. Now, they get candy.
The other week, I had the flu. I didn’t feel like eating, but knew I should. So I did make a deep frozen pizza. It was so delicious, and so easy to eat, that a thousand calories just slipped down. And then, a couple hours later, I was hungry again. I had tricked my body into overeating effortlessly.
Overeating yourself to obesity used to be really, really difficult. You wouldn’t have the amount of food available; all obesity related diseases used to be diseases of the very, very rich. And even if you did have the food available, the volume you needed to fit inside yourself, the time you needed to chew… it would have been crazy. There have been cultures that fed people to obesity, using natural whole foods, and it was really hard. They kept throwing up from the liters and liters of milk they had to drink, and still ended up skinnier than your typical American superfat—like, look at pics of the poor girls forced through Leblouh.They basically had a full-time job of eating and taking naps, just from how long it took to get it all down and process it, and they still get nowhere near what many Americans achieve without effort.
You basically need someone to process the food for you so that its volume and nutrients and fibre are reduced, all tricking your body into thinking it has barely eaten, while keeping the calories high, and keeping it tasty. Breeding a grainy grass into a cultivar high in starch, then processing the result and sieving it until all the fibre is gone. Extracting the oils from plants and milks and enriching foods with them through frying. Crushing the fruit, and then filtering out the fibre.
From your stomach’s perspective, the idea that something as small as a donut could possibly contain enough calories for a lunch seems ludicrous. From your pancreas perspective, your blood sugar has dropped again, because it all entered at once and was pulled out in the insulin overreaction that provoked, ergo there is not enough blood sugar and you should eat more. From your intestines perspective, you are still low on protein, vitamins, minerals, omega 3, and anyway, you are done digesting. So of course it all signals that you should eat more, and when you don’t, you get hungry and grumpy.
Our bodies hunger cues developed for a very different world than the one we live in.
But grow/gather/hunt and process from scratch your own food, eat whole foods, and be physically active… and you will look exactly like people hundreds of years ago, and without feeling like your have to force yourself to refrain from overeating.
You are right on the obesity + malnutrition thing, though. But I think that is not about potassium—potassium is just a good stand in, because it is so abundant in most vegetables.
You can eat yourself to morbid obesity, and yet be so deficient in folate (something crammed in vegetables and organ meats and wholegrains, all huge parts of historic diets that are now neglected) that your fetus during pregnancy gets a spinal deformity (spina bifida). It is common enough that we give pregnant women b vitamin supplements as a default nowadays; yet if it had been common historically, humans would hardly be unable to generate folate. It is crazy to me that we live in a rich nation, and yet we have to give people pills so their fetuses don’t develop severe disease from malnutrition.
I’ve known a bunch of obese people who give compelling accounts of being absolutely ravenous. And I think that is one part that their blood sugar is heywire (prediabetic), one part bad habits they are conditioned too… but another the fact that, despite drowning in calories, they are starving. And the tricky thing here is that your bodies cravings have become useless. I’ve seen obese people describe cravings for sour things—and then they eat sour candy. And I think… your body is probably seeking vitamins, and minerals you need vitamin c to absorb, like iron, and hence trying to direct you to fruit and ferments. And then sour candy seems like a hyperstimulus for that… but it totally lacks the thing you are looking for. They crave salty foods, because they crave minerals; but the only mineral in the processed food they get is sodium. They crave crunchyness and popping sensations, because our bodies associate them with ripeness, and hence, maximum density of vitamins; but they are just eating empty calories. I think this is one of the reasons making obese people eat heaps of vegetables and protein and fish oil often helps—their nutrient needs are actually met, so their drive to overeat goes down. You can get all your protein from pasta, but by the time you do, you have also massively overeaten on calories.
A lot of the crap sold in our supermarkets simply is not food. It does not give you the things your body needs. It does not keep you healthy. It does not make you happy. It starves your microbiome. It pushes your body fat to unhealthy levels, while leaving you nutrient deprived. It has been processed until most of its nutrients are gone, while lots of stuff has been added that your body would never have naturally encountered and certainly does not require. It confuses the hell out of all the systems in you that have evolved to judge how much you still need to eat. It is basically a obesogenic wrapped in a hyperstimulus, with a bonus for giving you cancer, diabetes, broken digestion, hormone disruption and dementia. The fact that this plastic wrapped shit can be advertised to children and placed near the cash desk as a trap, priced to outcompete real food and prey on poor people, described in ways that mislead consumers into thinking it is healthy and happiness promoting, all while putting massive stress on the average person and having ads tell them that this garbage is somehow integral to dealing with their emotions, spending time with friends, having celebrations and keeping their children happy, only to then blame the consumer for “lacking the willpower” to stay slim… it makes me furious. Our society incentivises obesity, and then shames obese people, and then tries to sell them artificial cures that would not be necessary if this system wasn’t broken, and often does not even work.
The relevant part of the above article: ““JOHNSON’s surprising observation is that, in mouse models, high consumption of salt triggers the body’s own fructose production.
Salt and glucose are very different compounds? Why would they trigger fructose production?
According to Johnson, because both act as distress signals.
If there is a lot of glucose or salt (or both) in the blood, the concentration of the blood changes, and this happens when the body dries out.
The body therefore thinks that the creature is suffering from a lack of water.
The body prepares for the threat of dehydration by accumulating fat, because fat is not only an energy store but also a water store.
When fat is burned, water is produced, which the body can use. For the same reason, camels accumulate a hump of fat on their back—to get water.””
Calories-in, Calories-out is a distraction. A red herring. True but useless. Nobody here is disputing the laws of physics. Obviously, a caloric deficit is required to lose weight and a surplus is required to gain it.
Does that explain the obesity epidemic? Hardly. Why the sudden change? Has humanity never had enough Calories before? Is it a cure? Hardly. It implies the “willpower” diet (Just stop eating so many Calories!), which doesn’t work. Yes, the Caloric deficit makes you lose weight in the short term, then you get hungrier until you binge and gain the weight back with interest. Or just gradually give up because you’re miserable and gain it back slowly, again with interest.
As living organisms, we have various mechanisms to maintain homeostasis, including our weight. Somehow these have stopped working in the recent past, for a large fraction of the population. Something environmental has changed (it’s too sudden to be genetic). Our set points are going up. A true explanation would tell us why. I have heard many plausible hypotheses. Some of them readily evaporate upon closer inspection. Na:K seems to be one of these, given the history of salt consumption you just shared.
See my more extensive answer below—I’d propose the reason for the obesity epidemic is constant effortless access to highly processed high calorie, low satiety foods, with zero need to move. With human genetic make-up, the automatic response to that is overeating calories and hence obesity unless one intervenes to resist the impulse (indeed hard to sustain, albeit not impossible—anorexia is a thing), or changes one’s immediate environment (e.g. the food one keeps in one’s home and one’s movement routines.)
I disagree with this. The fact that the active mechanism of any functional weight loss strategy is having lower caloric intake than expenditure is obviously a critical aspect of dieting that makes sense to talk about, so I disagree with calling it a red herring.
Calorie counting doesn’t work well for everyone as a weight loss strategy, but it does work for some people. Obviously a strategy that works well when adhered to, and which some people can successfully adhere to, is worth talking about. Also obviously, people who have trouble with implementing it themselves should try other strategies. Find the strategy that works for you, and combine with a form of exercise that you enjoy.
I tried potassium supplementation. The very first thing I noticed is that a significant portion of hunger was immediately converted into thirst; to be specific, where normally at time X I would be hungry, instead at time X I was thirsty instead. There was an immediate and overall reduction of calories in.
This suggests to me that I had a slight potassium deficiency which my body was compensating for by increasing the amount of food I was consuming.
Cursory research suggests potassium content in fresh foods has declined ~20% over the past century—which is not particularly surprising, if you think about modern farming methodologies. Additionally, it appears that lithium consumption (tying into SMTM’s hypothesis) may deplete the body’s potassium reserves (which could conceivably be the mechanism by which lithium causes weight gain, in slight contradiction to SMTM’s hypothesis). Additionally additionally, and most importantly—low potassium content appears to be correlated with something like a 20% increase in caloric consumption, second only to protein deficiency in terms of increasing “natural” caloric intake. (All of this is cursory internet research, and should not be taken too seriously, but it is all pointing in a particular direction very suggestively).
I think the “sodium intake” is a red herring, sort of (if your body needs potassium, but can’t distinguish between potassium and sodium in food intake, it may result in people salting their food more—another change that occurred after I began supplementing potassium is that I didn’t need as much salt to make food taste like anything—so sodium intake may be a symptom of potassium deficiency).
Supposing we’re all slightly potassium deficient at a healthy level of food consumption, and we cover the potassium intake gap by simply eating more food (thus getting the necessary levels of potassium), then potassium supplementation could quite reasonably decrease caloric consumption without any effort. And if we’re substituting table salt for potassium, because our bodies struggle to tell the difference at intake, we might expect other health issues to arise from that.
If this was the case, then we should expect that all diets that work for most people who try them, while improving overall health, and without requiring exceptional willpower, should be high in potassium. Pondering this, I checked, and, indeed, meats are high in potassium. Ketogenic diets could, then, operate on the same principles as the potato diet.
(Indeed, I have done a combination ketogenic+rabbit starvation diet a few times, at 500 calories a day, with basically no carbohydrates or fats. A key component of this diet is very lean meat, and it required no willpower; I can run on this diet for months, and the only issue I run into is the monotony, which personally isn’t a big deal. It is actually personally easier to be on that diet that to try to maintain a “normal” diet while restraining my food consumption to a level that prevents weight gain—but my normal diet is relatively light on anything with high levels of potassium, including meat.)
I submit that potassium is indeed very important, and is, plausibly, given declining potassium food content, the answer to the question of modern obesity.
Also, @Portia , you say you have never been overweight, I’m curious about you. Is it easy for you stay thin, or do you need use willpower to stop yourself from eating? (i.e. do you count calories and then stop yourself from eating?)
Also do you think you could estimate your daily Potassium intake? (Many thin people I talked about this to said they had a really high potassium intake).
No need to answer those personal question if you are not comfortable answering.
I find that a false dichotomy—it is easy for me, but when needed, I do count calories. I find counting calories relaxing. It gives me an exact certainty of how I am doing, with no worries. I can forget about what I have eaten, because I have tracked it. I don’t have to worry whether I have under- or overeaten, because I know. But usually, it is not required.
I wouldn’t say me being normal weight is automatic at all—it is very much a consequence of awareness and choices. I know that a higher weight fucks up my joint disease and pushes my dysphoria through the roof, while I also have a healthy respect for low weight due to former anorexia. So I have decided to stay normal weight for life, and hence, I am.
But nor would I describe it as a struggle. It runs in the background while I do everything else, and I have never found it hard. If it is hard, it is unsustainable when life gets hard, and hence, one should look for something simpler.
I’m aware of where my body is at a time—usually, I have a scale that I step on once a day in the morning, and I see how my clothes fit (I still fit into clothes I have had since I have been 15, when my bones stopped growing, and I know which parts of my wardrobe correlate with which part of normal weight), notice how fast I run, how easily I climb, how easily body weight exercise comes to me, how slender my waist is. So I notice early when my body fat shifts.
When it is in the perfect range, I don’t think about calories. If I feel like fasting for a day or two, I just do. If I feel like eating a giant portion of food, I just do. If I have a craving for a high calorie healthy food, I eat it. If I am food averse, I don’t force it. I have found my body is usually on to something with the things it wants, and it evens out. I’ve had times where I consumed multiple days worth of calories in a day… to then find that I had come down with the flu, and that my body was now happily burning through it all with an epic fever that had me recover unusually fast. But then vice versa, if it doesn’t want to eat, I don’t give it grief unless this goes on too long and my base weight is not okay.
I just focus on eating healthy (my health condition makes that a necessity), and working out a lot (this is crucial for my mental health). I avoid added sugar like the plague, as it fucks with my joint disease, and eat little processed food, and always have minimum five portions of veggies and a minimum of 75 g of protein average per day. I cycle everywhere, take walks daily (I live in Europe in walkable communities and have never had a car), do yoga most days (I’m a yoga instructor), and get intense cardio or resistance training a couple times a week. The workouts I do have shifted lots over time (they have included ballet, horse riding, sword fighting, lacrosse, inline skating, ice skating, ballroom dance, latin dance, jiu-jutsu, tango argentino, boxing, rock climbing, apnoe diving, step aerobic, swimming, long-distance running, whatever happened to be offered or was convenient and fun where I lived at the time), but since childhood, I have always done some sort of workout a couple times a week. This means I usually stay in the normal range, or my weight only climbs very, very slowly—like a kilogram a year.
But sometimes, routines in my life shift—e.g. the cafeteria at my new university has higher or lower calorie meals than I am used to, or my commuting distance shifts, or my gym closes for the pandemic, or I date someone who keeps cooking high calorie meals, or I am on a medication that needs to be eaten with breakfast when I usually don’t eat breakfast—and the balance gets slightly out of whack, and my weight begins to slowly shift. If I can pinpoint the error and can fix it I compensate it (e.g. beginning a home workout routine, or adding cardio classes, or bringing extra snacks to uni, or asking a partner not to add the copious oil until after I have removed my portion), but sometimes, it is a combination of small factors that are hard to pinpoint or force correct—e.g. I might be under- or overeating due to stress—or it isn’t easily fixable (I am still having to eat breakfast daily for this med, to my annoyance).
When my weight begins to slide too low (my cut-off for that is a couple kilograms over underweight; ever since a horrid gut virus pushed me 8 kg down in a few weeks, I like having a bit of a safety margin for illness, and I like having enough calories on me that if I forget to eat for a day, my performance doesn’t go down, and I can run a marathon; if my body weight drops too low, I also get cold all the time, and sometimes wake in the middle of the night hungry, I hate that),
I gently adjust in the other direction. I include more of the healthy foods I know lead to weight gain in me—that means higher carbs (lots of high sugar fruit like cherries, bananas, oranges; fruit juices like beet and sour cherry; wholegrain sourdough, and especially wholegrain pasta (I always overeat on pasta); higher starch veggies like roots; more cooked food rather than raw), and higher fat (olive oil, walnuts, tahini), as well as make sure I keep healthy snacks at hand at my desk so I don’t forget to eat while working (protein bars, dark chocolate, nut mix), and gently encourage overeating (e.g. if I don’t really feel like eating, I wonder what particularly tasty thing might entice me; or if I feel basically full, I have just a couple more bites). This adjustment is gentle, because the situation is not urgent yet, but gentle and slow tends to suffice to correct it.
If I still slide too low, past the point I consider acceptable, I pull the breaks. I start tracking calories (meaning I weigh all my food), set a goal that will return me to a safe weight, and go forcing food down until my calories are met, whether I feel full or not, choosing anything sorta-healthy I believe I might get down. This is very unpleasant. But it has also been years since I have had to; I’ve figured out how to gently get my body to correct earlier.
(I use the same techniques if I want to change my calorie consumptions for other reasons—e.g. if I want to overeat because I am sick, or will run a marathon tomorrow, or go camping in the cold).
If I begin to slide too high, I do the reverse—include more foods that lead to weight loss in me (raw foods, low starch veggies like brokolli and kale, low cal ferments like sauerkraut) and strongly reduce my carbs (I will exchange quinoa for potatoes, and often leave carb sides out of meals entirely—so a meal is instead a salad with a protein topping, for example; I will also exchange regular bread for protein bread, and fruit juices for teas; though a significant carb sources are things like chickpeas and lentils and occasionally oats), reduce my fats (e.g. sprinkle fewer nuts, carefully measure oil I use in frying) while chosing low fat low carb protein sources, and adding more exercise (like daily crosstrainer use or runs). I also gently encourage undereating—so if I feel like skipping a meal, or fasting, I do.
If I still slide too high, I pull the breaks. I know that otherwise, my pain and depression will become unbearable. So I track calories (meaning I weight all my food), set a low goal, and keep to it. I don’t have the patience for long diets, so I will typically go on a 500-1000 calorie diet for a few weeks until I am back to my target weight, then return to the gentle weight loss diet for maintenance. This might happen every 2-5 years, lasts a few weeks, then I am reset. I actually tend to enjoy it—fasting does interesting things for mental health, and because such a low calorie diet has to be exceptionally nutrient dense to avoid deficiencies, it is usually completely bereft of anything unhealthy, so it also makes my skin look amazing. The speed means I also immediately see the difference—I will struggle to get up a wall one week, and then two weeks later, find it trivial because I am so light. Reminds me of why I do it each time.
I intend to do this for life. The idea does not stress me at all. Which is why I think that will also happen.
But it doesn’t happen by itself. I make it happen.
***
The fact that humans are utterly incapable of estimating their caloric intake unless they actually weight their food has me dubious about any estimations of potassium intake. Humans have no idea how much they have eaten. I wouldn’t trust anything that isn’t tracking food by weighing it, which I am currently not doing, because my weight is fine. The trackers I used are also in German, and only account for calories and macros, not micros. And I haven’t had to properly track for weeks for years, and no idea where the last track info is, I’ve switched devices since. Next time I do, I could send it to you to look the values up, but that might not be for quite a while.
But I do not consciously modify my potassium or sodium. I do consciously modify my calories. And my weight loss is what you would predict from the calories.
I’d bet you that a low potassium 500 kcal diet (food weighed) would still see you drop weight very fast.
I totally believe that a low potassium 500 kcal diet would see rapid and significant weight loss. My experience so far tells me that I would expect doing a 500 kcal diet on low K would be very difficult (my body would just painfully crave food) whereas with high K it would make it much easier.
I notice that I am confused. By the Na:K ratio hypothesis, in particular; I’m not disputing your individual results, which are interesting, so I’ve subscribed for updates.
The obesity epidemic is a relatively recent phenomenon, but I expect that diets before the era of refrigeration (which is before the epidemic) were even higher in salt (used as a preservative), so I don’t think an increase in sodium consumption can explain it.
Anecdote, but when I was intermittent fasting to lose weight, I’d often drink cacao in milk (no sugar), which seemed to help control my appetite. I thought it was the theobromine, but maybe it was the electrolytes.
My model of the past (for example talking with my grandparents) is different to yours. Before refrigeration I don’t feel people ate more salted (that was salted meats on a boat), people ate roots and tubers in winter (as those can keep a long time in the cold, in winter you have natural refrigeration) and fresh veggies in the summer when there was no refrigeration.
As for meat, you would slaughter it “just in time” most of the time (except on a boat).
And pickles (as in pickled vegetables, ketchups, chutneys, etc) are more vinegar than salt.
If you do find a source saying people of old ate more salt than now though, I would find super interesting.
Ya. I have the same feeling with cacao, one cup cuts my appetite for 2-3 hours usually.
Pickles—as in the original food where pickling is a preservation method—are extremely high in salt. The vinegar comes from fermentation. The reason the fermentation becomes something that does not spoil is the high salt content. Source: I make my own, and if the salt is too low, they spoil, it is the one thing all recipes stress.
Especially in the European Nordics, people ate huge amounts of salted fish, cured meats (which often involve copious salt), and vegetables prepped in brine, on a baseline of grains, which tended to be baked with a lot of salt. They often slaughtered most of their animals in fall, so they wouldn’t have to feed them through the winter, and then preserved them so they could live on them through winter. They also tended to have massive catches if e.g. migrating fish, which then had to be collectively preserved, as they couldn’t be eaten all at once. A lot of historic preservation methods specifically indicate the mass catch thing, e.g. when the storage container used was a massive animal carcass. As well as massive vegetable harvests, hence huge barrels of sauerkraut. From other cuisines I have encountered, salt also plays a massive historic use in preservation; e.g. fish sauce is a fermented sauce that is super salty, and a staple in Asian cuisine.
Acid is a preservative, but my understanding was that traditional pickle fermentation mainly produced lactic acid, rather than acetic acid, which is instead fermented from alcohol. Vinegar can be used to jump-start the process by lowering the pH, which favors the non-toxic acidophiles, but many pickle recipes don’t require it. Sauerkraut, for example, is traditionally made with just cabbage and salt.
Yes, preservation via fermentation is typically achieved by putting your thing-to-be-preserved into salt in an oxygen restricted environment, which leads to selective bacterial activity dropping the ph and hence further restricting undesired bacterial activity, while boosting beneficial bacteria, breaking down anti-nutrients, and having all sorts of beneficial health effects. Which is why I rejected the idea “pickles are more vinegar than salt”, insofar as your sole necessary starting base is salt, with the acidity a later result, and vinegar generally only the end-stage product that is often not even reached, and hence often not characteristic—sauerkraut is indeed made out of cabbage, salt, and water only, and the only acid in there is one produced by bacteria, and the predominant acid we target is lactic acid. Hence high salt consumption. - The idea that pickles are just “vegetable plus vinegar” is basically a modern invention—because most pickles you get in stores aren’t actually pickles, they weren’t fermented, they aren’t probiotics, their antinutrients are untouched, and they needed to be sterilised (vitamin loss) or had preservatives added (bad for microbiome) to remain stable—they are just supposed to taste a bit of actual pickles due to the vinegar, and are hence easier, faster and more reliable to make. Actual pickles are basically vegetable plus salt plus time.
Which acids you get depends on a number of factors, like the temperature you keep it at, whether you are working with mixed bacteria, fungi, or combinations thereof (sourdough, kombucha...), and what your starting ingredients are, and how long you ferment without adding more raw material. E.g. my sourdough will alternate between being dominated by lactic acid, and dominated by acetic acid, depending on how cold I keep it (fridge or outside) and how much I feed it (daily or less often), which leads to dominance of different groups of bacteria or fungi, and also has them either metabolising raw material (starch) or existing byproducts of fermentation when they run out of raw material (starch can be metabolised into alcohol which can then be metabolised further into vinegar), which leads to different rising and taste results. A starved sourdough will shift in composition to deal with the remaining nutrients, and get to the point where it is so vinegary that this interferes with some of the microbiome you do want, so you need to feed it and warm it for a while before the balance shifts back and it gets properly active to rise a bread again. If you leave a ferment unattended, it will tend to progress to vinegar as it metabolises not just anything it can get its hands on, but its own metabolic products, but we often want to eat them en route already before they get that far.
Thanks. That changed my mind about pickles and vinegar.
The original reason of talking about that was the person who brought it up thought old diets had a higher Na:K than modern diets, I’m highly unconvinced by this still, I think it is the opposite. You seem to know a lot, what is your take on the original point @Portia ?
Thank you. I appreciate your confidence, but I don’t study historic salt intake.
But there are people who do!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1305840/#:~:text=Salt%20became%20a%20precious%20article,about%2018%20g%20per%20day.
“About 1000 years ago, salt intake in the Western world had risen to about 5 g per day. It continued to rise until the 19th century when, in Europe, it was about 18 g per day. In the 16th century in Sweden, when there was a high consumption of salted fish, it has been calculated that the daily salt intake rose to 100 g per day. A worldwide reduction of salt intake to an average of 10 g per day during the 20th century was probably due to the introduction of refrigeration.”
If you were right, that Swedish community eating 100 g per day (Jesus Christ) would have been obese, which would have been very remarkable at the time, and yet was not remarked upon.
Furthermore, if you were right, obesity would have been absent prehistorically (hunter gatherers), then rose (agriculture), then peaked in the 19th century (world-wide trading of salt makes is highly accessible), then faded away to low levels again (refrigeration makes high salt for preservation unnecessary). Yet instead, in the 20th century, they began their rise.
If you were right, we would also expect historic seaside communities (which had cheap salt access, had to excessively salt fish, and consumed algae) to be obese, while landlocked communities (which were comparatively deprived of salt) would be skinny. Yet I have never heard that observed.
And disregarding history...
If your link was correct, we’d already have a lot of data backing it up, insofar as putting humans on low sodium diets for heart disease, which is a common problem in obese people, is a common intervention. We even have scenarios where nothing else is changed, e.g. when you give people table salt based on potassium rather than sodium.
And for another, anecdotally, I have not been overweight for a single day in my life, and I have an extremely high salt diet. I have clinically low blood pressure to a degree that causes problems, where one of the easiest treatments is high salt consumption. I know a bunch of people with very low blood pressure—who are typically normal weight or underweight—who have been put on long-term high salt diets, and none of them gained fat from it. (You do gain a bit of water weight, see my water weight post. You drop it instantly when you cut out the salt.) I also used to be anorexic as a teen. That made my blood pressure worse, so I had even more salt. That didn’t make me hungrier, nor did it stop my weight loss.
Which brings me to… what working mechanism are you even assuming?
No matter how much salt you eat, your body cannot create energy out of thin air. If you are not consuming the energy you are burning, you will burn your body fat.
It is conceivable that salt intake might modify hunger impulses… but with that kind of thing, I’d suspect it to be a very individual thing, similar to how people respond to keto. - I could imagine that factors correlated with sodium-potassium ratio would have an impact, though. E.g. raw unsalted vegetables tend to work excellently as diet foods, and contain lots of potassium. Meanwhile, highly processed foods tend to be terrible diet foods, and high in salt. But I would wager that you could replace the veggies with, say, algae and pickles, without the result changing.
And the end of the day… weight loss is almost completely determined by caloric intake and exercise. If people’s calories are actually tracked—not reported, that is worthless, but tracked—their weight loss is perfectly predictable. You give them more calories, they gain weight. You give them fewer calories, they lose weight. 7000 kcal cut corresponds to 1 kg of fat lost. When people are deprived of food—in concentration camps, when harvests are lost or conflicts disrupt supply chains in a developing nation, or in North Korea—they lose weight, until they die, whether they can still access salt or no. Notably, when the Irish were deprived of potatoes, this led to mass starvation, despite them having lost their main potassium source. Because it was also their main calorie source.
I know that is boring, because we have known it forever, and people always hope there is something much more complicated going on that just calories in and out. And there are variations in metabolism between humans, which respond to some lifestyle interventions. But they are minor. Your body isn’t wasting energy in a default state, that would run counter to evolution. And so it can’t decide to stop, either. If you stop eating, your calorie burn drops only very little, as long as you still have stores, because a healthily working body has very little energy that it can still optimise without that causing serious issues. Once you get underweight, your body will start seriously throttling metabolism, in order to save your life… but at significant cost, it wouldn’t do that without cause. Your wound healing slows. Your heart rate slows. Your body temperature drops. Your hair falls out. Your periods cease. Your muscles are broken down for fuel. Your metabolism actually being throttled is a really awful experience you can’t miss, and nothing your body does without cause. (And I really would not recommend anorexia. It is a horribly silly disease.) Metabolism is the sum of energy your body spends, not just randomly burning it, but using it for stuff, and when it stops burning it, it cannot do these things. - Vice versa, you can raise your metabolism a little, but this means your body is using the energy for something. The most healthy and effective one is exercise, which burns quite a bit, and is good for you. Nearly everything else depends on making your body overuse a function, e.g. having an artificially accelerated heart rate, which adds little burn; and if you keep pushing there (by switching from a coffee to heavy drugs), you buy this calorie burn at significant cost.
If a diet works for you, hence, what this means is that you have reduced your caloric intake, without significantly reducing your happiness or upping your stress. Pretty much every diet is an attempt to achieve this, and whether it works depends on the person—what low calorie foods make you personally feel full and happy? What high calorie foods honestly aren’t worth it for you? What diet structure do you, personally find pleasant and stress-free? Some people find they effortlessly undereat on keto. Or low fat diets. Or high fibre diets. Or high protein diets. Or high vegetable diets. Or whole food diets. Or high water diets. Or intermittent fasting. Or small portions. Or high fermented product diets. (This last one in particular is a problem for your theory: people who consume a lot of fermented products often lose weight, because the changes to their microbiome often reduce their hunger. But they are eating a lot of extra salt.) But they are losing weight because they are eating fewer calories, not because anything about those diets is magic. The only awesome part is when a diet means you eat less without that making you miserable.
It looks like potatoes are one of your “I can eat fewer calories but still feel great” things. They are one of many things that work like this for many people. (Like I said, other popular choices are low carb foods, low fat foods, high fibre foods, high protein foods, low glycemic index foods, high water foods, fermented foods, hard to digest foods.) Potatoes are low calorie, high satiety, high fibre, high in resistant starch—this is why they work for many people as part of a diet. They are also tasty, dirt cheap, and quite healthy, making them an extra good choice.
So I think you found a thing that works for you, and that will likely work for a bunch of people, and it is a good thing, and you can totally stick with it.
I just don’t think the reason for that is potassium. But low calorie high satiety food.
But this means I think you were wrong in your assumption, but you got excellent results anyway, and if you learn from it, things can just get even better.
I am sorry if my tone was a bit rough—I can get rather intense on nutrition topics. (It upsets me that bad nutrition makes so many people sick, and the information people are given about it to help themselves is often wrong, making something that is already tricky to fix needlessly harder. I’ve seen so many intelligent people push themselves so hard to power through diets that failed to make them slender, but made them miserable and malnutritioned and poor, and it makes me furious.)
Thanks for looking up the historic NaCl intake of Europeans. That’s super useful. For reference also, modern people in the USA (particularly overweight) daily salt intake is only ~3.4g.
> weight loss is almost completely determined by caloric intake
I don’t at all disagree with that. But emperically it seems really hard for people to eat fewer calories, so the question is what makes it so hard? And how can taking fewer calories be made easy and require no willpower? Populations who struggle to get enough calories available to them are not relevant in answering this question.
> what working mechanism are you even assuming?
For the moment, at least experimenting on myself, and from the two SMTM experiments, it seems like Potassium might have something to do with making it easier to consume fewer calories than are expended. I’m currently experiencing with lentilles as a control (low caloric density but very little K compared to potatoes or kidney beans) and the data is still very provisional but they really don’t seem to work as well. I also did a period of going back to my pre-potato diet but adding Coconut water (lots of K but otherwise just sugar water) and it actually helped lose weight (or in this case stop gaining weight), it provisionally seems to work as well as one meal day of lentilles. So the key, it seems is both low caloric density + enough K.
The modern Western diet is K poor, my current working hypothesis is just that if people are lacking a nutrient, they continue to eat to get enough of it (eating not for calories but for getting the nutrient).
The info you turned up on historical NaCl intake is evidence that if that hypothesis is correct it might not be the ratio of K:Na that is relevant, but just the quantity of K. Which sounds plausible, given that any excess ions should be easy enough to eliminate in pee.
On the other hand this article says that exess sodium triggers the body’s emergency system trying to get it to store more fat: https://www.hs.fi/tiede/art-2000009775452.html
By the way, I really appreciate your passion for finding the truth, and not having people be mislead on their diets.
Because humans are genetically wired to slightly overeat, in anticipation of future periods where they will be under high calorie demand (e.g. the weekly persistence hunt in which you would run a marathon to catch a prey animal) or forced to undereat (the cold or dry season, when there is no food), so they will have stores, and perishable food does not go to waste. You’d gorge yourself on fruit and nuts and slaughtered animals in fall, when lots are available, because in winter, there would be slim pickings.
But nowadays, we don’t run into periods where we have to undereat for lack of food, so those stores just keep on building. Around Christmas, you should, based on evolutionary history, be getting pretty damn hungry. Instead, we are drowning in chocolate and meat. Nor do most of us run a weekly marathon, or walk an average of 30.000 steps a day, or climb a couple trees and dig out a bunch of roots and carry baskets full of berries each day. We drive our cars and sit in front of our desks.
Also because we are also genetically wired to be hungry enough to go to the trouble of finding and prepping food—but both those things are trivial nowadays. - Yesterday, we made a traditional food: chestnuts. Quite trivial to prep and harvest, as historic foods go, I didn’t have to dig through dirt, or walk down an impala, or fight a hive of bees after climbing up a huge tree. We just walked outside in the rain, and picked chestnuts between the spiky balls, until we got annoyed and headed home, figuring they were enough, because we were cold. Then we washed them, roasted them (on an instant fire, we didn’t even have to collect firewood), and ate them, while peeling them one at a time. They are tasty, but peeling them is annoying and fiddly. Eventually, you aren’t quite full, but you are too annoyed to carry on peeling, let alone walk out again in the rain to get more. When I went to sleep, there were still a bunch of chestnuts on the table. I finished them for breakfast, and it took me a while.
If, instead, I had just taken a pizza from the freezer, popped it in the oven, and shoved it in my face, I am sure I’d have eaten my fill.
And finally, because our food is highly processed to be tastier than it should be, and less filling than it should be, and faster to consume than it should be. Even our healthy food—we puree our fruit and veg into smoothies, so something we would have previously chewed for an hour can now be gulped down. Things that previously would have filled us up are now bereft of fibre. Things previously digested slowly are now digested instantly, so we are hungry again a few hours later. Eaten and digesting used to take time. Now, you gulp down, and then, you could do with another snack. Kids used to get mandarins and nuts in their Christmas stockings. Now, they get candy.
The other week, I had the flu. I didn’t feel like eating, but knew I should. So I did make a deep frozen pizza. It was so delicious, and so easy to eat, that a thousand calories just slipped down. And then, a couple hours later, I was hungry again. I had tricked my body into overeating effortlessly.
Overeating yourself to obesity used to be really, really difficult. You wouldn’t have the amount of food available; all obesity related diseases used to be diseases of the very, very rich. And even if you did have the food available, the volume you needed to fit inside yourself, the time you needed to chew… it would have been crazy. There have been cultures that fed people to obesity, using natural whole foods, and it was really hard. They kept throwing up from the liters and liters of milk they had to drink, and still ended up skinnier than your typical American superfat—like, look at pics of the poor girls forced through Leblouh.They basically had a full-time job of eating and taking naps, just from how long it took to get it all down and process it, and they still get nowhere near what many Americans achieve without effort.
You basically need someone to process the food for you so that its volume and nutrients and fibre are reduced, all tricking your body into thinking it has barely eaten, while keeping the calories high, and keeping it tasty. Breeding a grainy grass into a cultivar high in starch, then processing the result and sieving it until all the fibre is gone. Extracting the oils from plants and milks and enriching foods with them through frying. Crushing the fruit, and then filtering out the fibre.
From your stomach’s perspective, the idea that something as small as a donut could possibly contain enough calories for a lunch seems ludicrous. From your pancreas perspective, your blood sugar has dropped again, because it all entered at once and was pulled out in the insulin overreaction that provoked, ergo there is not enough blood sugar and you should eat more. From your intestines perspective, you are still low on protein, vitamins, minerals, omega 3, and anyway, you are done digesting. So of course it all signals that you should eat more, and when you don’t, you get hungry and grumpy.
Our bodies hunger cues developed for a very different world than the one we live in.
But grow/gather/hunt and process from scratch your own food, eat whole foods, and be physically active… and you will look exactly like people hundreds of years ago, and without feeling like your have to force yourself to refrain from overeating.
You are right on the obesity + malnutrition thing, though. But I think that is not about potassium—potassium is just a good stand in, because it is so abundant in most vegetables.
You can eat yourself to morbid obesity, and yet be so deficient in folate (something crammed in vegetables and organ meats and wholegrains, all huge parts of historic diets that are now neglected) that your fetus during pregnancy gets a spinal deformity (spina bifida). It is common enough that we give pregnant women b vitamin supplements as a default nowadays; yet if it had been common historically, humans would hardly be unable to generate folate. It is crazy to me that we live in a rich nation, and yet we have to give people pills so their fetuses don’t develop severe disease from malnutrition.
I’ve known a bunch of obese people who give compelling accounts of being absolutely ravenous. And I think that is one part that their blood sugar is heywire (prediabetic), one part bad habits they are conditioned too… but another the fact that, despite drowning in calories, they are starving. And the tricky thing here is that your bodies cravings have become useless. I’ve seen obese people describe cravings for sour things—and then they eat sour candy. And I think… your body is probably seeking vitamins, and minerals you need vitamin c to absorb, like iron, and hence trying to direct you to fruit and ferments. And then sour candy seems like a hyperstimulus for that… but it totally lacks the thing you are looking for. They crave salty foods, because they crave minerals; but the only mineral in the processed food they get is sodium. They crave crunchyness and popping sensations, because our bodies associate them with ripeness, and hence, maximum density of vitamins; but they are just eating empty calories. I think this is one of the reasons making obese people eat heaps of vegetables and protein and fish oil often helps—their nutrient needs are actually met, so their drive to overeat goes down. You can get all your protein from pasta, but by the time you do, you have also massively overeaten on calories.
A lot of the crap sold in our supermarkets simply is not food. It does not give you the things your body needs. It does not keep you healthy. It does not make you happy. It starves your microbiome. It pushes your body fat to unhealthy levels, while leaving you nutrient deprived. It has been processed until most of its nutrients are gone, while lots of stuff has been added that your body would never have naturally encountered and certainly does not require. It confuses the hell out of all the systems in you that have evolved to judge how much you still need to eat. It is basically a obesogenic wrapped in a hyperstimulus, with a bonus for giving you cancer, diabetes, broken digestion, hormone disruption and dementia. The fact that this plastic wrapped shit can be advertised to children and placed near the cash desk as a trap, priced to outcompete real food and prey on poor people, described in ways that mislead consumers into thinking it is healthy and happiness promoting, all while putting massive stress on the average person and having ads tell them that this garbage is somehow integral to dealing with their emotions, spending time with friends, having celebrations and keeping their children happy, only to then blame the consumer for “lacking the willpower” to stay slim… it makes me furious. Our society incentivises obesity, and then shames obese people, and then tries to sell them artificial cures that would not be necessary if this system wasn’t broken, and often does not even work.
Ya, all that sounds about right to me :) Thanks for writing out so clearly :)
The relevant part of the above article:
““JOHNSON’s surprising observation is that, in mouse models, high consumption of salt triggers the body’s own fructose production.
Salt and glucose are very different compounds? Why would they trigger fructose production?
According to Johnson, because both act as distress signals.
If there is a lot of glucose or salt (or both) in the blood, the concentration of the blood changes, and this happens when the body dries out.
The body therefore thinks that the creature is suffering from a lack of water.
The body prepares for the threat of dehydration by accumulating fat, because fat is not only an energy store but also a water store.
When fat is burned, water is produced, which the body can use. For the same reason, camels accumulate a hump of fat on their back—to get water.””
Calories-in, Calories-out is a distraction. A red herring. True but useless. Nobody here is disputing the laws of physics. Obviously, a caloric deficit is required to lose weight and a surplus is required to gain it.
Does that explain the obesity epidemic? Hardly. Why the sudden change? Has humanity never had enough Calories before? Is it a cure? Hardly. It implies the “willpower” diet (Just stop eating so many Calories!), which doesn’t work. Yes, the Caloric deficit makes you lose weight in the short term, then you get hungrier until you binge and gain the weight back with interest. Or just gradually give up because you’re miserable and gain it back slowly, again with interest.
As living organisms, we have various mechanisms to maintain homeostasis, including our weight. Somehow these have stopped working in the recent past, for a large fraction of the population. Something environmental has changed (it’s too sudden to be genetic). Our set points are going up. A true explanation would tell us why. I have heard many plausible hypotheses. Some of them readily evaporate upon closer inspection. Na:K seems to be one of these, given the history of salt consumption you just shared.
See my more extensive answer below—I’d propose the reason for the obesity epidemic is constant effortless access to highly processed high calorie, low satiety foods, with zero need to move. With human genetic make-up, the automatic response to that is overeating calories and hence obesity unless one intervenes to resist the impulse (indeed hard to sustain, albeit not impossible—anorexia is a thing), or changes one’s immediate environment (e.g. the food one keeps in one’s home and one’s movement routines.)
I disagree with this. The fact that the active mechanism of any functional weight loss strategy is having lower caloric intake than expenditure is obviously a critical aspect of dieting that makes sense to talk about, so I disagree with calling it a red herring.
Calorie counting doesn’t work well for everyone as a weight loss strategy, but it does work for some people. Obviously a strategy that works well when adhered to, and which some people can successfully adhere to, is worth talking about. Also obviously, people who have trouble with implementing it themselves should try other strategies. Find the strategy that works for you, and combine with a form of exercise that you enjoy.
I tried potassium supplementation. The very first thing I noticed is that a significant portion of hunger was immediately converted into thirst; to be specific, where normally at time X I would be hungry, instead at time X I was thirsty instead. There was an immediate and overall reduction of calories in.
This suggests to me that I had a slight potassium deficiency which my body was compensating for by increasing the amount of food I was consuming.
Cursory research suggests potassium content in fresh foods has declined ~20% over the past century—which is not particularly surprising, if you think about modern farming methodologies. Additionally, it appears that lithium consumption (tying into SMTM’s hypothesis) may deplete the body’s potassium reserves (which could conceivably be the mechanism by which lithium causes weight gain, in slight contradiction to SMTM’s hypothesis). Additionally additionally, and most importantly—low potassium content appears to be correlated with something like a 20% increase in caloric consumption, second only to protein deficiency in terms of increasing “natural” caloric intake. (All of this is cursory internet research, and should not be taken too seriously, but it is all pointing in a particular direction very suggestively).
I think the “sodium intake” is a red herring, sort of (if your body needs potassium, but can’t distinguish between potassium and sodium in food intake, it may result in people salting their food more—another change that occurred after I began supplementing potassium is that I didn’t need as much salt to make food taste like anything—so sodium intake may be a symptom of potassium deficiency).
Supposing we’re all slightly potassium deficient at a healthy level of food consumption, and we cover the potassium intake gap by simply eating more food (thus getting the necessary levels of potassium), then potassium supplementation could quite reasonably decrease caloric consumption without any effort. And if we’re substituting table salt for potassium, because our bodies struggle to tell the difference at intake, we might expect other health issues to arise from that.
If this was the case, then we should expect that all diets that work for most people who try them, while improving overall health, and without requiring exceptional willpower, should be high in potassium. Pondering this, I checked, and, indeed, meats are high in potassium. Ketogenic diets could, then, operate on the same principles as the potato diet.
(Indeed, I have done a combination ketogenic+rabbit starvation diet a few times, at 500 calories a day, with basically no carbohydrates or fats. A key component of this diet is very lean meat, and it required no willpower; I can run on this diet for months, and the only issue I run into is the monotony, which personally isn’t a big deal. It is actually personally easier to be on that diet that to try to maintain a “normal” diet while restraining my food consumption to a level that prevents weight gain—but my normal diet is relatively light on anything with high levels of potassium, including meat.)
I submit that potassium is indeed very important, and is, plausibly, given declining potassium food content, the answer to the question of modern obesity.
Thanks for this info. Ya this really goes in the direction of what I think is happening.
Also, @Portia , you say you have never been overweight, I’m curious about you.
Is it easy for you stay thin, or do you need use willpower to stop yourself from eating? (i.e. do you count calories and then stop yourself from eating?)
Also do you think you could estimate your daily Potassium intake? (Many thin people I talked about this to said they had a really high potassium intake).
No need to answer those personal question if you are not comfortable answering.
I find that a false dichotomy—it is easy for me, but when needed, I do count calories. I find counting calories relaxing. It gives me an exact certainty of how I am doing, with no worries. I can forget about what I have eaten, because I have tracked it. I don’t have to worry whether I have under- or overeaten, because I know. But usually, it is not required.
I wouldn’t say me being normal weight is automatic at all—it is very much a consequence of awareness and choices. I know that a higher weight fucks up my joint disease and pushes my dysphoria through the roof, while I also have a healthy respect for low weight due to former anorexia. So I have decided to stay normal weight for life, and hence, I am.
But nor would I describe it as a struggle. It runs in the background while I do everything else, and I have never found it hard. If it is hard, it is unsustainable when life gets hard, and hence, one should look for something simpler.
I’m aware of where my body is at a time—usually, I have a scale that I step on once a day in the morning, and I see how my clothes fit (I still fit into clothes I have had since I have been 15, when my bones stopped growing, and I know which parts of my wardrobe correlate with which part of normal weight), notice how fast I run, how easily I climb, how easily body weight exercise comes to me, how slender my waist is. So I notice early when my body fat shifts.
When it is in the perfect range, I don’t think about calories. If I feel like fasting for a day or two, I just do. If I feel like eating a giant portion of food, I just do. If I have a craving for a high calorie healthy food, I eat it. If I am food averse, I don’t force it. I have found my body is usually on to something with the things it wants, and it evens out. I’ve had times where I consumed multiple days worth of calories in a day… to then find that I had come down with the flu, and that my body was now happily burning through it all with an epic fever that had me recover unusually fast. But then vice versa, if it doesn’t want to eat, I don’t give it grief unless this goes on too long and my base weight is not okay.
I just focus on eating healthy (my health condition makes that a necessity), and working out a lot (this is crucial for my mental health). I avoid added sugar like the plague, as it fucks with my joint disease, and eat little processed food, and always have minimum five portions of veggies and a minimum of 75 g of protein average per day. I cycle everywhere, take walks daily (I live in Europe in walkable communities and have never had a car), do yoga most days (I’m a yoga instructor), and get intense cardio or resistance training a couple times a week. The workouts I do have shifted lots over time (they have included ballet, horse riding, sword fighting, lacrosse, inline skating, ice skating, ballroom dance, latin dance, jiu-jutsu, tango argentino, boxing, rock climbing, apnoe diving, step aerobic, swimming, long-distance running, whatever happened to be offered or was convenient and fun where I lived at the time), but since childhood, I have always done some sort of workout a couple times a week. This means I usually stay in the normal range, or my weight only climbs very, very slowly—like a kilogram a year.
But sometimes, routines in my life shift—e.g. the cafeteria at my new university has higher or lower calorie meals than I am used to, or my commuting distance shifts, or my gym closes for the pandemic, or I date someone who keeps cooking high calorie meals, or I am on a medication that needs to be eaten with breakfast when I usually don’t eat breakfast—and the balance gets slightly out of whack, and my weight begins to slowly shift. If I can pinpoint the error and can fix it I compensate it (e.g. beginning a home workout routine, or adding cardio classes, or bringing extra snacks to uni, or asking a partner not to add the copious oil until after I have removed my portion), but sometimes, it is a combination of small factors that are hard to pinpoint or force correct—e.g. I might be under- or overeating due to stress—or it isn’t easily fixable (I am still having to eat breakfast daily for this med, to my annoyance).
When my weight begins to slide too low (my cut-off for that is a couple kilograms over underweight; ever since a horrid gut virus pushed me 8 kg down in a few weeks, I like having a bit of a safety margin for illness, and I like having enough calories on me that if I forget to eat for a day, my performance doesn’t go down, and I can run a marathon; if my body weight drops too low, I also get cold all the time, and sometimes wake in the middle of the night hungry, I hate that),
I gently adjust in the other direction. I include more of the healthy foods I know lead to weight gain in me—that means higher carbs (lots of high sugar fruit like cherries, bananas, oranges; fruit juices like beet and sour cherry; wholegrain sourdough, and especially wholegrain pasta (I always overeat on pasta); higher starch veggies like roots; more cooked food rather than raw), and higher fat (olive oil, walnuts, tahini), as well as make sure I keep healthy snacks at hand at my desk so I don’t forget to eat while working (protein bars, dark chocolate, nut mix), and gently encourage overeating (e.g. if I don’t really feel like eating, I wonder what particularly tasty thing might entice me; or if I feel basically full, I have just a couple more bites). This adjustment is gentle, because the situation is not urgent yet, but gentle and slow tends to suffice to correct it.
If I still slide too low, past the point I consider acceptable, I pull the breaks. I start tracking calories (meaning I weigh all my food), set a goal that will return me to a safe weight, and go forcing food down until my calories are met, whether I feel full or not, choosing anything sorta-healthy I believe I might get down. This is very unpleasant. But it has also been years since I have had to; I’ve figured out how to gently get my body to correct earlier.
(I use the same techniques if I want to change my calorie consumptions for other reasons—e.g. if I want to overeat because I am sick, or will run a marathon tomorrow, or go camping in the cold).
If I begin to slide too high, I do the reverse—include more foods that lead to weight loss in me (raw foods, low starch veggies like brokolli and kale, low cal ferments like sauerkraut) and strongly reduce my carbs (I will exchange quinoa for potatoes, and often leave carb sides out of meals entirely—so a meal is instead a salad with a protein topping, for example; I will also exchange regular bread for protein bread, and fruit juices for teas; though a significant carb sources are things like chickpeas and lentils and occasionally oats), reduce my fats (e.g. sprinkle fewer nuts, carefully measure oil I use in frying) while chosing low fat low carb protein sources, and adding more exercise (like daily crosstrainer use or runs). I also gently encourage undereating—so if I feel like skipping a meal, or fasting, I do.
If I still slide too high, I pull the breaks. I know that otherwise, my pain and depression will become unbearable. So I track calories (meaning I weight all my food), set a low goal, and keep to it. I don’t have the patience for long diets, so I will typically go on a 500-1000 calorie diet for a few weeks until I am back to my target weight, then return to the gentle weight loss diet for maintenance. This might happen every 2-5 years, lasts a few weeks, then I am reset. I actually tend to enjoy it—fasting does interesting things for mental health, and because such a low calorie diet has to be exceptionally nutrient dense to avoid deficiencies, it is usually completely bereft of anything unhealthy, so it also makes my skin look amazing. The speed means I also immediately see the difference—I will struggle to get up a wall one week, and then two weeks later, find it trivial because I am so light. Reminds me of why I do it each time.
I intend to do this for life. The idea does not stress me at all. Which is why I think that will also happen.
But it doesn’t happen by itself. I make it happen.
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The fact that humans are utterly incapable of estimating their caloric intake unless they actually weight their food has me dubious about any estimations of potassium intake. Humans have no idea how much they have eaten. I wouldn’t trust anything that isn’t tracking food by weighing it, which I am currently not doing, because my weight is fine. The trackers I used are also in German, and only account for calories and macros, not micros. And I haven’t had to properly track for weeks for years, and no idea where the last track info is, I’ve switched devices since. Next time I do, I could send it to you to look the values up, but that might not be for quite a while.
But I do not consciously modify my potassium or sodium. I do consciously modify my calories. And my weight loss is what you would predict from the calories.
I’d bet you that a low potassium 500 kcal diet (food weighed) would still see you drop weight very fast.
wow. nice post. and respect!
I totally believe that a low potassium 500 kcal diet would see rapid and significant weight loss. My experience so far tells me that I would expect doing a 500 kcal diet on low K would be very difficult (my body would just painfully crave food) whereas with high K it would make it much easier.
Wow! Thanks for all the detail. You seem to have a precise and detailed knowledge of how your body works! I’m impressed.