Even without the science... for me personally at 47 and a life long sugar addict (used to eat tablespoons of white sugar from pantry), a low carb (keto) diet has been a complete game changer. I kept my weight in check by doing 6 days of exercise a week, but I was on an energetic roller coaster. 3 months in, no sugar, no cravings (I crave oils sometimes) and damn I just feel well in a way I haven't for long before I can remember.
My habits formed when young and when my body was more capable of handling high sugar. But after aging, insulin sensitivity declines, sugars have a more adverse effect, and feels like high sugar levels have just been feeding an imbalance in the GI tract.
Reading into the peculiar new science of poop transplants it's been interesting to observe my body as a factory process and the quality of the output (poop) is an important great indicator of system health. Obvious to many, but was not to me for years. In parallel to improved gut health my focus and productivity are more predictable.
I thought I'd never kick my addiction to sugar. After making the switch and viewing from a different perspective I'm shocked how where I live 95% of everything in the grocery store has sugar added.
Similarly, with ageing, I started having tons of small health issues + diarrhoea and blood in my faeces.
I tried removing milk (I was eating milk with cereals in the morning) - which appeared to improve the situation (becoming less frequent) - but it turned out it worked only because I got rid of eating cereals in the morning and I can drink milk just fine.
The doctor said nothing was wrong and that it was just stress and other BS.
They told me my cholesterol was high and told me to avoid meat (I was basically on a pasta, meat and vegetables diet) and prescribed me statins to drop cholesterol.
I ignored the advice and switched to a only meat diet; diarrhoea and blood disappeared completely in around 3 days and I started feeling way better. A lot of the small pains disappeared as well.
The only cons I've experienced is that I have less energy for workouts (during the day I feel fine) and I switched from doing sets of 5 reps to set of 3. I should be eating roughly the same amount of calories but no carbs means no immediate energy to use. I'll be on this diet until I drop a few more kgs and then I'll try to up the calories (still only meat) and see if I can go back to 5 reps. If not I'll consider reintroducing some carbs before workouts (from fruit / vegetables, in moderation).
I had ulcerative colitis from I was 18 until 46 which is a chronic inflammation with blood in the faeces. I switched to the carnivore diet and within some months all my symptoms disappeared. This was also confirmed with a colonoscopy in a hospital. My brain fog is also gone.
I used to be really strict but now I am more like 90-95% carnivore, but I try to get the carbs from potatoes, carrots and Nuts. I aim for under 50-100 grams on carbs a day since I lifts weights and do some CrossFit.
Info:
Ulcerative colitis (UL-sur-uh-tiv koe-LIE-tis) is an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that causes inflammation and ulcers (sores) in your digestive tract.
I was having the same (different age range, early 30's) symptoms, and I was able to eliminate my problems by cutting out coffee entirely. I can still drink caffeinated tea without issue. When I first quit coffee, I cut out all spicy foods and beans. Now I eat spicy foods and beans occasionally without issue.
Naturally, the doctor that did my colonoscopy didn't recommend trying any of this, just wanted to slap me on some new drug that messes with the immune system, no thanks.
Some people make coffee with eggshells to help reduce the acidity. I started an experiment recently with my girlfriend to keep eggshells to see if it helps her. I hadn't looked for low acid coffee, thanks. That's probably also worth trying.
Only meat diet has some very serious downsides, though. It’s very environmentally unfriendly and because of the high cost it’s available to a very few people. That makes it rather hard to recommend, regardless of potential health upsides.
Totally agree, this is a misconception. If you look at the numbers you get different results based on how you calculate it. Meat also comes out a lot better if you compare protein instead of calories.
When the tomato is grown in an open field, the production emits an average of 80 kg CO2 per ton. If the tomatoes are grown in a greenhouse, they emit up to 700 kg CO2 per ton. In tomatoes there is 1.31% protein
https://www.sdu.dk/en/om_sdu/fakulteterne/teknik/nyt_fra_det...
At least for us in Northern Europe, all tomatoes are grown in green houses.
I don't understand this list at all. Who is eating dark chocolate, coffee, and tomatoes as a source of protein??
On the other hand, you don't mention it, but greenhouse emissions for 100g of beef protein are 25x the emissions for 100g of oatmeal protein. That's astounding if you care about CO2 from your food production.
To address the tomatoes way more than they deserve, tomatoes have 4 protein per pound, and locally here cost perhaps USD$2 (maybe half that in season on sale). So 100g tomato protein is $50 and requires you to consume 25 lb (!!!) tomatoes.
Doesn't this link confirm that meat is indeed bad with respect to emissions?
With respect, focusing on tomatoes is a bit odd. I don't think anyone is eating tomatoes for their protein source, as it would take a lot of tomatoes to get to 100g of protein (and yes, that would create a lot of emissions).
If we're talking about non-meat protein, it's best to focus on vegetarian protein-dense sources like legumes, grains such as oats or quinoa, nuts, etc. All of these are much lower than the meat examples here, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more. Poultry and fish are the closest, with poultry being 2x "grains" (a broad category), and almost 3x tofu.
You also have to factor in protein quality as well as quantity. Protein in animal products is generally higher quality because it has the right proportions of amino acids and is easier to digest.
Those claims seem questionable. Even if true, is having the "right proportions of amino acids" at all desirable? Human digestive systems are pretty good at extracting what they want from our diet; we don't need to measure out precise proportions.
What evidence have you got that animal products are "easier to digest"?
It’s wildly known that animal protein is easier to digest.
Vegetables have anti nutrients, a class of chemicals designed to make them less edible. It’s one of the main reasons you can’t eat the vegetation around you.
Things like gluten are perfect examples of anti nutrients.
> If the diet is (too) high in saturated fat, increased cardio vascular risk.
You may want to take a look at this meta-study [0].
> “A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD.”
The authors of that meta-analysis adjusted for serum cholesterol, which defeats the entire point. Saturated fat intake above a certain threshold is associated with CVD because it causes an uptake in serum cholesterol, eventually leading to atherosclerosis.
Saying saturated fat intake doesn't correlate with CVD when ignoring serum cholesterol is entirely uninteresting, and not what anyone's claiming.
See also this[0] comment on that flawed meta-analysis.
Meta-analyses are not a panacea, that's clear.
As I suspect you know well, two further meta-analysis came to the same conclusion: Chowdhury 2014 [0], De Souza 2015 [1].
More recently, Kang in 2018 [2] and Zhu in 2019 are also stating that they fail to find evidence of a clear association between SFA consumption and risk of CVD.
Obviously, as science is what it is (and that's a good thing), those study are debatable and do have weak spots.
If you do keto, you are allowed to eat many vegetables that are rich in fibre. But if you follow a meat-only diet will make it really difficult to poop. I wonder how carnivorous animals do it. Are they constipated all the time?
I believe their stomach acids are far stronger, their bowels are a faster path to exit, and they often eat adjuncts which I assume help move things along.
> But if you follow a meat-only diet will make it really difficult to poop. I wonder how carnivorous animals do it. Are they constipated all the time?
Easiest poop was when I was carnivore(you poop very little amount). Being constipated means you didn't get enough fat. Having diarrhea means you got too much fat that your body couldn't absorb fast enough.
At start of carnivore you'll probably have diarrhea since your body/colon isn't yet used to so much fat/meat. But then you get get used to it (1-4 week).
Oats don't contain gluten (Celiac disease), though they can have trace amounts if processed on the same equipment as wheat. That's the difference between regular oats and gluten-free oats.
How does keto work for you doing exercise? Do you have a routine or adaptation that works for you?
I ask because I’ve tried keto a couple of times and usually gave up within a few weeks because it was incompatible with (energetic) cycling. The difference with huge - I was crawling up hills that usually I’d barely notice.
I assume it’s because I’m very carb-adapted and/or my level of exercise intensity is too high for fat-burning anyway, but I’ve not found much about this online. (And here and there, I’ve found mention, even on the most vehemently anti-carb websites, of athletes needing supplemental carbs to exercise efficiently.)
I do intense exercise at least 120 mins / day including running, HIIT, calisthenics but no heavy weights. No cycling here unfortunately as the roads are terrible, drivers are nuts, just not safe, but I used to ride centuries when living elsewhere so have some idea of how demanding that can be. I used to take gels and nuuns in bottle etc. Not sure how you'd go with hitting carbs before a ride but you can always try and then do a ketone urine test after the ride to see if you're still in ketosis. Maybe it works.
The main issue I encountered along the way where resolved by:
1) Supplementing basic electrolytes (sugar free).
This helped with cramps and pains that I got once starting out.
2) Getting the right number of calories per day (how much I burn in the day +/- 150 calories).
I check in on this with data from fitness band connected to a nutrition app. A deficit over 150 calories and I definitely have noticeable side effects, mood, focus etc. But for me it's not as severe once in ketosis as it is on regular diet.
3) Ensuring the right macros
I was shocked how much fat I had to eat at first. I'd always thought keto was closer to a high protein diet. Getting quality fats was key. Tallow, Ghee, MCT oil, avocado, olives etc. For snack sometimes I take a tablespoon of feta marinated in olive oil and herbs.
My goal in switching was about freeing myself from sugar addiction. But the side benefit is I now exercise less (120 mins down from 160 mins). Yet in these last ~3 months I went from 90kg (198lbs) to 85kg (187lbs), the lightest and most energetic I've been for over a decade.
It's been great for me so far, but recognize it's not for everyone.
You might find Dr. Dominic D'Agostino's websites or podcasts with various people instructive. He gained prominence after being amplified on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, but long before that, he was developing ketogenic solutions for the ONF (Office of Naval Research), specifically using ketones and the ketogenic diet to allow SEALs to remain submerged for longer periods due to a synergistic effect with ketones and oxygen metabolism in the brain.
He has specifically discussed how to solve the problem you had, but it's buried in one of his podcasts somewhere, and I haven't listened to them in ages.
I’ve done marathon training while on keto. Obviously a much different power output need to cycling so take this with a grain of salt… it took me about a month to adjust. That first month had me really struggling to even do 50% of the training distance I was used to. And then it all just clicked suddenly. Not like I started improving again, literally went from struggling to straight back to race performance. One day I was struggling to do a slow 10km. A few days later I ran 35km near race pace. It was a very weird experience.
I’ve been out of keto and training habit for a few months now (recovering from surgery) but I also seem to recall having a different sense of energy awareness while running. Like somewhere between the 30-40min range of a run I’d suddenly feel more awake and like I’d just had a coffee.
As someone who both runs and bikes, I don't think Marathon vs Cycling is that different. You just need to compare similar efforts, are you pushing a marathon to hit 2:30 or whatever? Then compare to biking a shorter crit. Or if you are doing a 5:00 marathon, compare to a century.
Marathon running is typically at a steady pace with only minor variations in the energy output needed. Except for time trials, cycling power is a lot more variable. A cyclist in a road race might be cruising along in the peloton for most of the race but then have to sprint near maximum power to attack or chase several times at unpredictable intervals. So training plans focused on one sport or the other end up looking significantly different in terms of target heart rate zones or perceived exertion, even when training for races of similar duration.
More like a low 3:00 time for me these days (to answer OP). Which as you’ve said is mostly a product of a very steady pace. Hopefully only a 3% variance of my cadence over the distance. Pace may change a little based on the gradient. But it’s a pretty consistent power output for 3hrs.
I’m basing my incredibly limited cycling knowledge on listening to my friends talk about their weekend rides. Certainly seems like a lot more variance with power demands for the climbs, slip streaming on the descents, and then the variance from peloton positioning when they’re in the long flat sections along the coast.
Here's a good example from when Sepp Kuss won Stage 15 of the 2021 Tour de France. It was a massive effort over 5 hours but his power output varied a lot at various points.
>Even without the science... for me personally at 47 and a life long sugar addict
This is the tricky thing with a lot of health science., mainly diets or supplementation. In a random sample, and in aggregate, a lot of these things have little to no effect on the population studied, so we dismiss them. And yet, on an individual level people claim huge benefits. I fall into that latter group for some things myself.
Our biology is complex. How do we reconcile this? Doctors don't want to be recommending snake-oil, and yet it's possible some of these things could work for "you".
Good for you. Strictly speaking, poop is not your body's output, it's your body's waste, and as such is indeed a good indicator of your body's efficiency in pulling out what it needs from the input. I guess your body's output is energy?
I would say there is no strictly speaking there without a strict context. Bear in mind the characteristics of different animals excrement is not designed to any specification, it evolves in the context of it altering the animals habitat to some extents. We specify 'waste' should alter our habitat to a minimal degree, but we cant say for sure it evolves to that effect. It can fertilize, it can create apparent immediate problems, but such apparent problems can have significant systematic roles. To me the term 'output' then is less potentially misleading than 'waste'. A bit like the distinction between a crop and a weed. Our naming of things encapsulates presumptions and intentions, which is fitting for design, but things that are not designed are liable to exceed expectations.
Good point. Similar to a car. Fuel is necessary to create power (output) and the exhaust is the waste. Putting bad fuel in reduces power and bad exhaust can be a symptom.
It's not the exhaust, that's what you exhale. It's more like disposable packaging. There isn't really a good analogy to fueling up a car; being fed by IV maybe?
> Strictly speaking, poop is not your body's output
A significant fraction of poop is bacteria. Sources vary a bit, but for example, this study gives the fraction as ~55% of solid matter: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7359576/
To the extent that your body contains a large bioreactor in the gut to maintain a population of beneficial microflora, you could argue poop thus is one of your bodies outputs (and yes, it contains waste products as well).
> eat tablespoons of white sugar from pantry), a low carb (keto) diet
You jumped from an extreme diet to the opposite. Some societies (mostly US) have a very unhealthy sugar addiction and it should be avoided.
Equally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet is meant to ameliorate epilepsy and it's not a safe diet to be adopted without medical supervision or without a real need.
It had been turned into an internet fad, like no-gluten diets and so on.
Also, just because you feel better it does not mean something is healthy.
EDIT: silent downvotes for saying this. Some cargoculting here...
>Equally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet is meant to ameliorate epilepsy and it's not a safe diet to be adopted without medical supervision or without a real need.
So a ketogenic diet can affect a human body as drastically as controlling a specific debilitating disease, but has no other benefits (or, of course costs)? I find those sorts of claims really hard to believe.
What are you going on about? I believe GP was specifically saying that there were costs associated with e ketogenic diet and that it shouldn't be done willynilly.
And there are tons of things that control diseases that do jack shit for healthy people, or are even harmful. Antibiotics will control an infection, but if used in healthy people it'll kill your gut flora, stimulants that might help ADHD will absolutely fuck up a normal person, consistent use of PPIs without an underlying issue will unbalance your gut's acidity, cocaine is a great numbing agent and vasoconstrictor for nasal surgery, but we all know what happens to people using cocaine. All these examples ignore things like cancer drugs that control a disease, but will absolutely wreck your body.
It's not like GP is saying the keto diet will help with epilespy and is side effect free. GP said it will help epilespy, and it might.
100% agree with you. If you listen to what food scientists are actually saying, they're almost always espousing fractional improvements with small tweaks to diets and the media runs with "You should stop eating X because Y" or "You should only eat Z" stories.
Any dietitian will tell you, the key to a healthy diet is moderation and variety.
>If you listen to what food scientists are actually saying
"The science" again.
Food scientists say all kinds of things, including promoting vegetarian or ketogenic diets. Which ones are the true scientists here?
>Any dietitian will tell you, the key to a healthy diet is moderation and variety.
What does "moderation" and "variety" mean in scientific terms? Global nutritional availability varies drastically across the globe, and I'm not just talking about poor versus rich countries.
>Food scientists say all kinds of things, including promoting vegetarian or ketogenic diets. Which ones are the true scientists here?
Sure, but look at what they publish professionally in journals. It's never black or white. Ignore what they talk about from a personal perspective to journalists or on TV, that stuff isn't peer reviewed.
>What does "moderation" and "variety" mean in scientific terms? Global nutritional availability varies drastically across the globe, and I'm not just talking about poor versus rich countries.
Come on dude, being obtuse isn't helpful. I'm not going to argue semantics with an internet stranger. If you can't figure out what moderation and variety mean in this context, I'm not sure you're worth arguing with.
I did keto for a year and the sugar cravings never stopped. :-\
I let myself have a donut 3 months in, and everyone on keto always tells me that after a few months, if you eat something sweet, you'll find it disgustingly sweet. Nope. As I ate that apple fritter, I was like "Oh my god this is so delicious, I've missed sugar so bad"
In about 9 months, I had gone from 260 lbs to 205 lbs, but then COVID hit, I fell off the bandwagon, stopped going to the gym (I went to the one at the office), and very slowly rose back to the 250 lbs I am today. :-(
I still generally avoid high-carb foods like pasta and bread, rarely eat sweets, and will use low-carb alternatives when possible, but I'm certainly not keto anymore.
Mine went away at three months and came back three months later. Plus my dentist said the acid reflux was damaging my teeth. So gave up keto and binged for a few months. Now trying going dairy-free, which feels more sustainable and eliminates most of the things I'd binge on but leaves a couple options for when cravings start. So far so good, but I'm only at the three months mark so....
The "fall off the bandwagon" effect is huge. I find Keto to be one of the most tolerable long-term diets, but it is a long term diet. It's an unnatural restriction diet, and there is nothing at all durable about its effects.
Thoughts on artificial sugars like Splenda or natural alternatives like Stevia that don’t spike blood sugar? What about Agave or lower glycemic index sweeteners.
Finally, what about fruit? Isn’t Fructose really bad for your body, the science tells us?
I'm not convinced by some of the common beliefs about low-carb diets either. They seem to be good for weight loss[0] but bad for all-cause mortality[1]. If you're making dietary recommendations, it's hard to justify choosing a diet that makes the people who eat it skinnier and less diabetic but also kills some of them.
I'm also not convinced that "low-carb" in the literature means you can draw conclusions about ketogenic diets, especially ones that actually send you into ketosis. Some low-carb diets from that first meta-analysis had 35% carbs by energy!
My impression of the available evidence is that if you want to lose weight, calorie restriction and high-satiety foods matter more than macros.
"Our meta-analysis supported long-term harm and no cardiovascular protection with low-carbohydrate diets. However, the observational studies were limited and moderately heterogeneous. Our findings underscore the imminent need for large-scale trials on the complex interactions between low-carbohydrate diets and long-term outcomes."
From your second link. Also not a surprise when many research about low carb diets is refined carbohydrates + unspecified oils.
"Low carb" studies are as interesting as "high carb" studies. High carb is a Mediterranean diet or is the Twinkie diet, just like keto can be meat and vegs or low carb pizza and processed meat. Lumping everything under one very generic name is not very good science. The whole dietary world is made of bad science and repeated by bad journalists.
The scientific jury is still out, as your very source stated, yet every HN thread the top voted comment is "low carb kills some people." Seriously?
I am still waiting for someone to show me a long-term study based on low carb meat, nuts, fruit and vegetables, unrefined oils and fats diet. Even an observational one. Oh wait, there's none!
I think low carb diets are easier to mess up without realizing.
one - you cant go no carb, so it requires very accurate moderation which is something people tend to be bad at
two - the cheaper sources of protein and fat, which you now must eat more of, are often high in omega-6 instead of omega-3, or have the wrong balance of saturated vs unsaturated fats, not enough amino acids, etc
three - if you go for Keto, getting hit by points 1 and 2 together can easily create a health risk. Too much protein kicks you out of ketosis as well. You might chronically knock yourself out of keto without realizing it and eat a bunch of foods that you really only get away with eating by being in
So even though a proper keto diet, for example, might be perfectly fine. Recommending a keto diet to the general public very well might kill some people who historically have a bad track record for moderating their food intake
This is incorrect information. You can go, and live on literally zero grams of carbohydrates, though in reality there is always trace amounts in meat and vegetables. My optimal diet is around 5g of carbs per day. Unlike fats and proteins, there is no minimum level of dietary carbohydrates required to function.
The little amount the body requires can produce thanks to gluconeogenesis, and the vast majority of the energy is provided first by ketones then by free fatty acids after adaptation.
> You might chronically knock yourself out of keto without realizing it
Isn’t the keto flu something almost everyone experiences? That was always my understanding, so chronically knocking yourself out of ketosis would mean chronically being sick, I have a hard time believing people can do that without realizing it (and I’m one of the lucky ones where the process only takes a few days, it’s 1-2 weeks for my wife)
Not only my source, but me as well. I think it's plausible that e.g. keto (as in actually entering ketosis) could raise mortality but low carb diets could lower it, or that there's a confounding effect with dietary fibre, or that low carb diets usually involve increased processed meat intake, or [insert story here].
However, we're talking about general health advice. If you tell people to eat low carb diets, they eat less dietary fibre as a result, and some of them die, then your advice has killed them. Doesn't matter if there's some hypothetical better diet out there, until you've found it and proven it works.
That's not a given, it's the first two predicates of an illustrative example of how dietary advice is more complicated than "which diet is best?" If all three of those predicates hold true, then your advice has killed them, therefore all-cause mortality rate is important.
It doesn't matter what the exact reason for higher all-cause mortality rates on low carb diets is unless you can give people advice on how to avoid them. What's important is the outcome of giving the advice, not a theoretical ivory-tower diet that most of the population won't or can't eat.
That’s like saying you should never give any advice unless you exhaustively list all possible ways for someone to fuck up the implementation. Telling someone the pharmacy is on the other side of the street will raise mortality unless you also tell them that they should check for cars before crossing. And not run into cars. Or walls close to the pharmacy.
No. You should give advice that causes good outcomes. You don't need to do anything else.
We know that low carb diets have higher all-cause mortality. Because of this, telling people to eat low carb will (probably) cause a bad outcome. If we want a good outcome, we need to work out more specific advice.
To be clear, advice doesn't always have to be very specific. This particular advice needs to be improved, because it looks like it would kill more of them than current dietary advice. We can tell it would kill them because the meta-analysis several comments above shows an increase in all cause mortality.
This is not the same as telling people where the pharmacy is, because A) we have no studies at all about going to the pharmacy, B) people need to get important medicine from the pharmacy and going to it could plausibly lower mortality, and C) telling someone where to find a building is not lifelong public health advice and the risk for one person crossing one road is miniscule anyway.
yeah, obviously nutrition is far from being the only factor for their longevity and health in old age, but if you take the japanese diet, rice is a pretty major component in their calorie input...
For another perspective on the parent comment: I've gotten some use out of Ayurvedic* diet and lifestyle tips (hailing from ancient India). Here's a balanced article on a ketogenic diet detailing some of the modern science as well as one practitioner's take from an Ayurvedic perspective:
*Ayurveda is cool — it's like a compendium of cause and effect relationships for foods and activities and their qualitative, subjective effects on the body and mind.
The BMJ has had to issue several corrections about this author’s work. For example:
This Feature (BMJ 2015;351:h4962, doi:10.1136/bmj.h4962) by Nina Teicholz stated that when the guidelines advisory committee started its work in 2012 there had been several prominent papers, including a meta-analysis and two major reviews (one systematic), that failed to confirm an association between saturated fats and heart disease. This statement did not aptly reflect the findings of the more authoritative of these reviews, by Hooper et al (Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2012;5:CD002137), which found that saturated fats had an effect on cardiovascular events but failed to confirm an effect on cardiovascular mortality.
In the western world the default is a high-carb diet. Moving away from that i probably beneficial to most people. My personal journey has been from a rather normal western diet towards more vegetarian, but i still don't mind a little bit of bacon on top. The effect was OK, but not spectacular. Now in my mid-40 (25ish BMI) I started walking 2-3 times weekly about two years ago and have advanced to running about as often. Now a few weeks ago started running interval 1-2 times a week. The weight loss is really good with interval training. It doesn't take long to do the exercise, and the body keeps burning fat for hours afterwards. Or so it appears on my bathroom weight and on my garmin watch (forrunner 745, nice and not too expensive). So I save a lot of time doing interval vs walking for hours. That said walking alone in the forest is magic for solving problems, and prepares the untrained body for harder workouts. Also I realized I had a lot of time. I spent 15 years not maintaining this body properly, I can spend 5 years getting back to where I want to be. There is no rush, there is just life.
You say Western diet but I think you’re forgetting about India. Most of the vegetarian dishes have huge amounts of carbs. I was kinda shocked at how much carbs and fried starchy foods it contains.
The one thing I do like about the Indian vegetarian diet is they arent trying to recreate meat-like foods, ex. veggie burgers and fake meat.
Yes, I more accurately moved form "normal diet" including beer, processed food and fast carbs to eating much more vegetables with oil and spices rather than sauce. I don't like the "looks like meat" vegetarian stuff.
But the major effects for me seems to be coupled to activity rather than eating, although cutting animal fat and alcohol has been a good help on the way.
My major findings:
- reduce alcohol and animal fat
- start soft, walk until you are fit to run, then interval
- walking is great for problem solving
- running uphill and walking downhill is great if the knees hurt
- interval really is much more efficient than running long distances for pretty much any meaningful measure of progress for me (weight, VO2 max). I'm not trying to win at anything specific.
Eating fruits is actually good for preventing type 2 diabetes [1]. In my personal experience, I've found that following a keto-ish approach for my diet by decreasing processed carbs, as well as increasing fruit intake, has had a positive impact on my weight/fasting blood sugar.
Uric acid is a metabolite of protein. All the N's in it is the giveaway since the liver is incapable of alchemical transformation. Uric acid is a byproduct of any cell metabolizing protein.
Fructose, or "fruit sugar", is the main carbohydrate in fruits and vegetables. If you are on a low-carb "keto" diet (keto is <5% carbs, most low-carb diets are no where near ketogenic) you probably get more carbs from fructose than any other source. High-fructose corn syrup added to things is associated with fatty liver but there's a very long way between guzzling gallons of soda pop and blaming a normal natural ingredient our bodies are tuned to utilize for all problems.
The liver is not an empty vat you dump things into that products bubble out of. It is a fact that the metabolic pathway in the liver that processes fructose does emit uric acid and fat, once the glycogen store is full. The purine component of the uric acid does not, in fact, come from protein, but from the ADP consumed in the process.
Our bodies are not, in fact, tuned to "utilize" fructose, unlike for glucose. Fructose is processed only in the liver, like other toxins, most particularly alcohol, which is processed identically. The resulting fat is shipped off to fat cells after the liver is saturated. The uric acid is released into the bloodstream to be collected by the kidneys.
The normal pathway by which fructose is processed, when it comes with adequate fiber, is through the gut biome, as I noted.
Inventing a claim of "alchemical transformation" to discount facts you are wholly ignorant of is dishonest. Maybe look things up? You could learn something.
Correct - and I'm shocked at how many HN readers are so hilariously wrong about diet advice.
I've seen people here say "you can't outrun your fork" as though one of the greatest impacts of exercise (appetite suppression and hormonal renormalization) doesn't happen.
Also, the people trying so hard to disprove calories-in-calories-out here are even funnier. I can tell that the average HN user is overweight just from these comments.
Eating low-carb doesn't reduce weight directly, but indirectly. It reduces hunger because you don't get the sugar spike and subsequent crash which causes you to feel hungry 2 hours later. Instead, you get hungry 6 hours later. This helps reduce snacking between meals and total daily calories.
Low-carb also helps because the carbs you eat are turned to sugar which your pancreas then has to produce insulin to tell your body to push that sugar into fat cells, increasing weight.
A reminder to those who demonize carbs: as Stephan Guyenet points out, restricting your consumption of any category of food--whether you're avoiding carbs, or fat, or meat, or plants--will reliably cause weight loss by removing some highly rewarding/palatable foods from your diet.
So we shouldn't be surprised that both low-carb and vegetarian diets can produce weight loss, and that many people have had success with each method.
> Carbohydrate restriction is currently the only whole-foods approach that can reverse a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.
Carbohydrates break down to glucose in the bloodstream, the same as pure sugar. For a large and growing number of people, low-carb diets are not simply a means of weight loss.
That's my theory too. Almost any diet will work because people will have a more controlled and thoughtful approach to eating vs the average diet where people eat all kinds of crap and too much.
Important to note here is that the diet guidelines are largely used to underscore the USDA's funding for production guidelines.
Carb-heavy diets are tied to grain-heavy cultivation.
You might be able to think of a company or two that might be significantly interested in slowing that turn for as long as possible.
Initially there was a DoD influenced posture for ensuring that the country's diet and fields were appropriately aligned. I haven't been able to find any recent documentation of those conversations, but they're understandably difficult to track.
The guidelines here aren't a micro-service, and they're too tightly coupled to all the other fingers in the pot.
> Carb-heavy diets are tied to grain-heavy cultivation.
Not as grain-heavy, at a national level, as if grains in the diet were replaced with animal products. A calorie of beef was required quite a few calories of grain.
I imagine if the headline news declared that we should reduce the carbs in our diets, most Americans would up the meat intake and not vegetables, and that would reduce fiber in their diet even more.
I am not sure. I think it’s hard to tell if that would happen. A lot of low carb and keto processed foods on the market today are normally very high fibre and are more convenient to consume than making low carb meals at home which would have a reduction of fibre in comparison.
However, I personally cannot eat fibrous foods. I’ve had to cut that completely out as a result of the damage fibre has done to my bowels after years “healthy” eating.
I am not alone in this either as there was even a clinical trial that studied the effects of fibre on patients with idiopathic constipation and the results were highly statistically significant in that it showed causation between the consumption of fibre and increased risk of bowel related illnesses. This is not an epidemiological study either that only shows correlation! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3435786/
> I am not sure. I think it’s hard to tell if that would happen.
I’ve been on Keto for close to ten years, my impression of at least the keto subreddit is that this would certainly happen. They’ve always been highly resistant to any statement that tons of meat is not the best thing. It was not great at the start, but it got worse over time where apparently almost everyone starting now needs electrolyte supplements because their dietary intake sucks.
/rant Sorry, I simply regularly get annoyed how a (for me) amazing diet gets dragged into the mud by the people of that sub.
There are lots of different fibres with different functions, and I have ended up on eating a supplement that mostly lets the stool keep is moisture content, and I have not been constipated once since I started with it: hydrolysed guar gum. This way I can avoid other fibres which are horrible to my gut. I used to try eating fibre to keep from getting constipated, but often I happened to eat some fibre that instead gave me extremely runny stool.
A lot of success that carnivores have is attributed precisely to the removal of fiber, so fiber seems to be giving some people severe issues.
Whether one should stay on the carnivore diet forever is ofcourse a different thing, but fiber is not an innocent thing as people say (at least for people in certain state, god knows what is going on in their intestines which causes them bloating etc.. after eating fiber).
Also don't forget that the Inuit (eskimos) hardly eat any fiber at all and they end up living a normal life.
Easing into higher fiber probably should be more gradual. A lot of people doing keto jump right into the processed breads and foods that have mostly fiber. That’ll catch you off guard very quickly if you’re not used to it.
How has that government caring worked out over the past five decades of ballooning BMI and heart disease? Should we double down on government caring for us, or admit defeat and defund government food recommendations?
If you haven't tried a low-carb diet, you should and see how it works for you. I never felt better than I did when I was eating pretty much just Chipotle salads (chicken+salad+guac) and doing a bit of weightlifting three times a week (https://stronglifts.com/5x5). Of course, I was in my mid-20s and had three fewer kids, so there's that...
I'll add--free office snacks are the devil's work.
I tried it not long ago with kids in the house. It was extremely onerous to prepare different meals and despite being very rigorous in my induction phase, I lost no weight and felt constantly nauseous. I found it extremely difficult to get enough calories because I just couldn't stomach all that protein.
That's true, though when your body is used to low carb, having a heavy pasta meal means going into carb coma for a couple hours. It's not fun.
Ease yourself into it, if you really have to. Or better yet, indulge in more natural sugary stuff, like fruit. Eating a pasta meal is like eating refined sugar, a massive shock if you're not used to it and are older than 20.
But I agree on your general point. It doesn't have to be a life of restriction. Nothing's better than pairing a glass of nice red wine and fancy European cheese with your steak and salad, once in a while.
My main issue with low carb is that humans have been eating carbs for thousands of years. The obesity epidemic is only decades old. I've seen enough evidence that low carb is working for people, so it would seem like something in the carbs we eat in particular is causing the problem... not carbs in general. We should significantly increase the science in this area in my opinion.
Fats were far more prevalent in the 70s and 80s though. Many recipes called for lard, shortening, butter, or tallow. Food was also far less processed, featuring less added sugars or other carbs that have been added for appearance or shelf stability reasons.
IMHO it's obvious why it works. If you came up with a diet program that cut out cake, cookies, candy, chips and basically every other bit of junk food that'd get you a "no duh". Add on eating your hamburger with lettuce buns and suddenly you're an innovative genius.
You are right - The a big difference is the increase in processed sugars/foods and what I personally call hidden sugars(For example, corn syrup is added into sausage). Many people do not also think of carbs as sugars. Our ancestors ate carbs for thousands of years but it was healthier carbs e.g whole grains. So its better for you to eat corn/beans than something like a big mac with a chocolate shake(the science is there).
I believe that the point of this article is low carb diet should also be included in the diet recommendations so that health practioners should also have it in their arsenal of tools && schools to teach it. It's not an either or argument.
IMO, a big difference is the way food is grown and processed. When I was a kid, my great aunt and uncle had a farm and grew wheat. Now most things are grown by large, profit-oriented corporations that don't give a shit about the quality of food but only how much profit they make from it. If some GMO trick kills bugs, great! They don't care if it also kills people or makes them sick.
Correct. Yet demonizing carbohydrates is more dramatic that just eating the right amount. Fad diets are driven by hot takes and propelled by psychological biases.
Also, radical changes in diet often lead to temporary improvements in mood and energy levels.
People often ascribe the improvement to the new diet rather than the change and think they found the holy grail.
"""The ketogenic diet is not considered a benign, holistic, or all-natural treatment. As with any serious medical therapy, it may result in complications, although these are generally less severe and less frequent than with anticonvulsant medication or surgery"""
Keto is not a fad diet nor a hot take. I've been on the diet for a decade and I know plenty of others who have as well. There is quite a bit of research around it and it has been in use for a century or more. It may not be for everyone and that is totally fine. But it's just a normal diet.
I've seen someone close to me having success with losing weight with this diet. But truth be told to me the low carb diet looked like lower calorie diet redefined. Whatever works of course.
Reducing carbs reduces the subsequent blood sugar spike, which reduces the insulin the pancreas must produce to push that sugar into the fat cells, increasing weight, and eliminating the subsequent sugar crash which causes you to feel hungry. On a keto diet, instead of being hungry 2 hours after eating, you won't be hungry until 6 hours later. This reduces calories eaten which helps reduce weight.
As someone who has lost significant weight on a keto diet (~80lbs) I can say it works in assisting someone who is overweight lose weight which can help with their health issues. It is easy to stall out by eating too much protein and fat, you still have to go hungry to cut down calorie intake. But it's overall a fad diet that ignores a lot of valuable nutrition that will be lacking essential healthy food.
My take on the diet you need is that it should have a good fiber to carb ratio (5:1 or less) and low in added salt, fat, and sugars (ideally none added). If you start looking at foods in this category they are all the so called superfoods. Soluble fiber slows down absorption of sugar, lowers cholesterol levels and increases satiety.
The nutrients you'll be lacking typically include Folate, Thiamin(B1), Potassium, Calcium, and Manganese. You can do a healthy Keto and incorporate all of these but a lot of people stop and think I'll just eat as much bacon, steak, and chicken as I want. Also missing are legumes which are very healthy for you.
Please do some research before stating some blatantly incorrect facts. Here, I've done it for you.
* The biggest amount of folate per 100g can be found in chicken and calf liver, then nuts. There's some in legumes but "it is soluble in water, and so may be lost from foods boiled in water": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate#Sources
* Calcium is found in great amounts in dairy and animal bones (stock, marrow, etc.)
* Potassium is found pretty much anywhere and deficiency is extremely rare.
* Manganese is found in leafy green vegetables and nuts, both very low carb.
In general meat is the most complete food you can ingest. Nothing else comes even close. And meat is not only filet steak, organ meat is where most of the micronutrients are.
--
> missing are legumes which are very healthy for you
Another wives' tale. I guess you've never heard of phytic acid, have you? The more legumes you ingest, the less minerals your body is able to absorb.
"It is [...] present in many legumes, cereals, and grains. Phytic acid and phytate have a strong binding affinity to the dietary minerals, calcium, iron, and zinc, inhibiting their absorption in the small intestine".
This issue is really, really old. Well, the bible starts with it!
Hebrews had a predominantly meat-eating culture, where at first, roaming semi-nomadic herds dominated, and later ranching was important. Of course this also means their diet was skewed toward proteins.
The second "human" action in the bible (ie: not something God did), was when the first farmer, murdered the first rancher out of jealously.
A lot of people remember "Cain and Abel" and whatnot and forget that detail, that is very important, in fact it was the reason for the murder (Cain was upset sacrifice of meat was accepted and vegetables weren't).
The two cultures generate a lot of other political conflicts we have now.
For example: when you are a rancher, if someone breaks into your property, that someone can literally walk off with your food before police arrives. Thus they are pro private guns. While if you are a vegetable farmer the way to 'steal' from someone is taking their land, thus they aren't afraid of small individuals, they are afraid of corporations and countries, thus they favor the government having the guns, to be able to retake territory if needed.
The USDA only protects and represents producers: full corporate capture. They run interference for Puppy mills [1], organic food mislabeling [2], misdirected trade aid to large operations instead of family farms [3], and germane to OP, all kinds of lobbying and gigabuck price supports for dairy products which shouldn't even be recommended daily diet. Etc.
"Certain dietary choices that have been linked to heart disease, such as an 8 oz (230 g) serving of hamburger daily, were technically permitted under the pyramid."
Citations needed. I worked on an organic vineyard for a summer and I can tell you it took a lot of work to get that label.
Non-organic vineyards in our area had barren earth or gravel under the stalks as they used weedkillers regularly. In contrast, we practiced “turf flipping” where we would, with clever machine and hard work, turn the soil over to smother weeds. The soil was alive and rich with the longest earthworms I’ve ever seen. This took incomparably more time than spraying chemicals but we believed in the mission. And the extra money from labeling it organic didn’t come close to covering the extra effort.
In some cases at least, the label means something.
I think the question really is about benefit/trade-offs of the work/costs that goes into the organic. Apart from of course outright fraudulent actors.
Case in point is Sri Lanka's current economic meltdown (1) - which is to a significant extent attributed to the government going all in on organic, banning fertilizers resulting in yields plummeting - less food to go around and no longer self sufficient, exports plumetting so less hard cash to buy oil, medicines no way to provide power, transport etc
The question I asked was about cost/benefit trade offs of organic and indeed as the linked article indicates, what are the trade offs with how the math adds up. I am not pre-supposing that a switch to organic is even desirable like this comment above.
For instance, if without inorganic fertilizers, yields plummet 20-30%, does that mean we need more forest land converted to farming tonkeep people fed? Do 20-30% more people have to work in agriculture vs today and stop working in cities? What would that do to urban services? What similarly are the trade offs from using fertilizers for land? What happens over time?
If there are good research papers that explore the total system costs and economic impacts?
From the article linked in the parent comment, the failure was very well predicted by it sounds like basically everyone who knew anything about agriculture. And that prediction was based entirely on basic facts about agriculture rather than any "how to get there" effects like you're saying caused it to not work.
Our vineyard didn’t make as much money as surrounding vineyards but it was still self sustaining. More robust demand for organic wines would have made it even more so.
Organic farming has external benefits as well, or rather the absence of negative externalities like harmful chemical run off and less water usage. These aren’t as easily noticed by just looking at market dynamics currently.
All that being said, my understanding is that organic farming isn’t the right choice in all cases. It’s definitely more labor and sometimes resource or land intensive. It takes a certain wealthy consumer base to support it.
I hope that robots can eventually make organic practices more widespread. Instead of spraying pesticides (some of which are permitted under organic rules in the US and Europe) have robots come by continuously and pluck each weed as it appears. Pluck the pests from The leaves and stems. Water each plant individually per its need, etc. There should be no need to sacrifice a human on backbreaking and fiddly labor.
There is little scientific evidence of benefit or harm to human health from a diet high in organic food, and conducting any sort of rigorous experiment on the subject is very difficult.
In a word, sustainability. It is about the farming.
Many people who buy organic food expect a reduced pesticide load (particularly in secondary products like eggs and dairy), but the main point is to support the organic farms and organic farmers, with the hope that the practice will spread.
It’s (generally, though not always) a proxy for “premium” food; so it’s useful to me as a consumer in that sense. But yeah, the idea that “organic” has any meaningful benefit is flimsy even when the definition is strict.
While the label "organic" may have been hijacked and rendered largely meaningless by government agencies like the FDA and their corporate masters, there is indeed a difference between food produced using chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics and growth hormones (among other things), and food that is produced naturally without these drugs, poisons and other additives. That some people dispute the fact that there is a measurable difference in health outcomes when consuming food produced "naturally" vs food produced with a host of drugs, chemicals and poisons is irrelevant to the fact that the word "organic" actually has a meaning, and people who choose to consume food produced without drugs, chemicals and poisons should be free to do so (even if this is considered silly by those who believe that the drugs, chemicals and poisons used to produce their food have no measurable effects).
You're being pedantic but not actually using a common definition of chemical. Perhaps "chemical substance" might apply.
AOED definition of chemical: a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, especially artificially: _never mix disinfectant with other chemicals | controversy arose over treatment of apples with this chemical._
His point was they are/were using chemicals regardless of if they understood the chemistry at a low level or not. When ancient people/(or modern) used dung to fertilize crops they are using chemicals. With that being said I think when the power of modern chemistry / genetic engineering and modern economic agricultureraly forces collide caution is warranted.
>His point was they are/were using chemicals regardless of if they understood the chemistry at a low level or not.
Even if that was his point, it is still completely wrong.
>It is impossible to produce food without chemicals.
If you live in the northern hemisphere, it is only June. Go plant a handful of pumpkin and watermelon seeds in a patch of fertile earth. Add no "chemicals" of any kind - man made or otherwise. Return in 4 months and you will very likely see food that has been grown with absolutely no chemicals at all.
I point that out in conversations similar to ours because (in my experience) so many people who make the chemical-free argument do so because they've fallen for the Appeal-To-Nature fallacy, e.g. "naturally grown food must be better for you." The reality is that Nature only finds local maxima for some variables relevant to the organism's survival, and those variables aren't necessarily relevant to what is best for human health.
In this particular thread, my first contribution was too flippant to be constructive, so I deserved the down-vote. But I wasn't being intellectually dishonest.
Discussing individual chemicals by name is inefficient, confusing and almost certainly requires scientific citations to be remotely worthy of discussion.
Going by groups of chemicals is a bit better, but then citations are largely not applicable.
There are no synonyms or near synonyms. The dictionary definition of ”chemical” (noun), however, is explicitly clear:
1 : a substance obtained by a chemical process or producing a chemical effect
2 : a drug
I posit that the person saying ”chemical” is not being lazy, they are being scientifically accurate while enabling rational discussion.
It’s anyone saying ”but EVERYTHING is chemicals” that needs to check the dictionary.
Your definition "1" describes just about anything. Water, for example, produces a chemical effect. So do amino acids. Your entire metabolism is a chemical process, as is the growth of plants. What I think that people mean when they talk about "chemicals" in their food is artificially synthesized chemicals and that's easy enough to say.
Sri-Lanka decided to only produce food "without drugs, chemicals and poisons". Now they're starving. You're lucky 99% of the organic labeled food you consume were in fact produced using the same things all of the vegetables in the world use, but anyways, if you prefer to pay double the price for smaller carrots, who am I to stop you.
What they decided was to ignore every detail of well understood methods to manage transition from one system to another. Their failure is wholly a product of that choice.
Getting rid of the sugar and refined carbohydrates in my diet (as well as learning to cook my food from scratch) was the big lifestyle change that has kept the weight off of me for the past decade and a half.
I do eat a lot of legumes, which still have carbs, just not refined carbs.
> what’s key is to focus on what you eat, that’s probably 80% of the battle.
As someone close to 10 years on keto, that’s something I’ve always been saying. Focus on what you eat, and find something you can stick with (well, and don’t eat crap :D)
You are right, that would be terrible advice. On the other hand that's not what he posted (although you can certainly read it that way if you want to.)
I read it more as "there's no one true diet" which seems to gel with my personal observation.
The best exercise is any exercise you actually do - the best diet for you is one that is both healthy, and that you can adapt to. Small adjustments are more likely to "stick", and doing something small can be beneficial.
For example, I'm not going to entertain "go vegan". That's too big a jump. But cutting down on meat is achievable. I'm not going carb free overnight, but I can start to reduce sugar (no sugar in coffee for example), eat more nuts for snacks, and less chips, and so on. I can do a "carb free month", I can reduce portion sizes.
Ultimately my balance will be different to the next person's.
I disagree.
When it comes to your eating habits listen to your body and ignore well meant but oftesn outright dangerous comments like this.
Especially from anyone that has a “miracle” cure just for you.
I have never eaten breakfast, always hated eating before lunch.
Having had this exact comment thrown in my face for 30 years.
Turns out ignoring everything and doing whatever fit me was not only healthy but has strong scientific basis.
Aka intermittent fasting.
Do not give bad advice or scold people for listening to their bodies and follow what works for them.
Most nutritional science is basically junk. Mostly observational studies with multiple uncontrolled confounding factors, especially the healthy subject effect.
A better approach is to conduct your own informal n=1 experiments. Try different diets or eliminating certain foods. Keep records of your athletic performance and of how you feel to find what works best for you.
<Looks around> Surely you don’t mean that. You just stereotyped ~350M people, some of them are obese, and some of them world class athletes, and everywhere in between. What a thoughtless, low-effort comment to make.
The problem isn't finding a diet that works: anything that reduces calories below maintenance does it. The problem is what a person will stick to. Different people find different diets to be easier to stick to. If they're luck they find one that leads to a spontaneous reduction of calories consumed and don't need to count.
Not anything, you could run a five hundred calorie deficit and only eat table sugar. You’d lose weight and gain serious metabolic disease.
This is an extreme, but obviously there’s better and worse things. Maybe it’s pretty comparable in the reasonable middle, but let’s not kid ourselves and say anything can work if we are talking whole body health not just weight loss.
Given Professor Twinkie's experience I wouldn't be surprised if I didn't. We're finding more and more that for overweight people losing weight (and keeping it off, hence "what works for you") is the single best intervention they can do for better health.
ETA: obviously I'm not advocating eating only sugar or twinkies. The point is that adherence is an crucial factor, more so than is often given credit.
Taking off my pedantic hat, I think we agree. Meaning in the pragmatic real world, if you can keep weight off it’s better than having the weight on, and no one is doing that in the real world with an all sugar diet.
With that being said, metabolic disease produces lots of skinny diabetics, and that will definitely shorten your life span.
When you present with DM as an adult the immediate presumption is DM II not LADA and the insurance companies (and their actuaries) are uninterested in investigating otherwise. Thus endocrinologists are disincented to look as the hospital admin gets very upset when insurance companies deny reimbursement.
The ADA training the insurance companies recommend is weird too. It says, for example, that it’s fine to have a slice of cake, just have half. I assume this is because too large a change will lead to negligible compliance. I was at first shocked, but then wondered what kind of baseline recommendation would actually be effective.
And yet there was that girl which went on a chocolate diet and lived just fine. It was a publicity stunt, but does kinda show that depending on your body, it might not matter anyway.
> And yet there was that girl which went on a chocolate diet and lived just fine. It was a publicity stunt, but does kinda show that depending on your body, it might not matter anyway.
How long did she stay on it? I imagine serious metabolic complications will take some time to develop. Moreover, she'd be missing out on some essential minerals and vitamins so I suspect she was using supplements? In that case the diet is not really chocolate, but chocolate + supplements
The "calories-in" approach sets minima and maxima, nothing else. For one thing we still are very bad at determining how much energy an individual will actually extract from a given food. We still get calorie counts from setting food on fire.
That's mostly only an issue with an open cycle approach. If intake is titrated according to how the scale moves[1] individual variation in digestive efficiency, activity levels etc is handled.
A prerequisite for "works for you" is "works at all". A less efficient diet that you stick with is better than a more efficient one that you don't stick with.
The best way to change your oil is the one that works for your car"
Which changes depending on your car, and standards have changed over time - in no small part because they wanted to sell more oil and filters (like selling diet food to folks) and you might not even need one if you have an electric and you might need more oil changes if you have a diesel engine. It doesn't mean that you should apply a one-size-fits-all to your car, it is just going to be off. Not only that, but a lot of folks go well past the recommendations and rarely change oil and they at least get by. Doing it sometimes is better than none at all.
Yeah, I can understand the analogy. It still is lacking a bit, but it works well enough. There is no one size fits all in diets, and you'll need to do the one that works for you and your situation, kinda like doing the oil change that is right for the car you have.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is the sort of analysis that you intended.
Both of the above statements are true, which anyone who is an expert in the field of cancer treatment or automotives will be happy to explain. Cancers, like automobiles (and most everything else), vary widely, and have different optimal courses of treatment for the ideal outcome.
The difference is that for weight loss they basically all work (to the extent that they reduce calories). So "what works for you" translates to "what lets you consume X calories with less mental effort".
Are you implying that there isn't nuance in diet from person to person? i.e. low-carb diets works for everyone?
Oil in cars and cancer treatments you don't really have choices but there are many choices for diets. On top of that, in my experience some people's bodies have different affinities or intolerances (i.e. lactose intolerance). I feel like I agree with the original sentiment that diets can vary from person to person.
I was actually sincerely wondering if there is information indicating that low-carbing works for everyone. I apologize for coming off like I was looking for a straw man.
Interesting reports of individuals turning their life upside down. Just don't understand how they account for confounders and seem to make carbs responsible for everything that went wrong before their transition. But since sometimes it's those individual reports that get people to take action, I don't judge, happy for everyone taking charge of their health.
There are many factors driving weigth loss or gain, the macronutrients per se seem to be irrelevant in the long term though: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19246357/
There are health risks involved in low/no carb diets and the article mentions none of those.
Too much carbohydrate creates issues, but I think the real culprit is sugar. The science is pretty solid there. Refined sugar can border on toxic.
Close behind sugar would be heavily processed carbohydrates like white bleached flour, etc., which are not that much better.
But there are of course confounding factors. There are people who eat more of this stuff and are healthy, but they seem to get a lot of exercise. That probably helps in multiple ways including burning up extra sugar quickly.
I'd hypothesize that high carb and especially high sugar diets are really unhealthy when coupled with a more sedentary lifestyle.
If you want to convince regulators, perhaps you should first try to convince serious nutritionists. Because very few of them really buy this keto narrative.
And yet there are thousands of people who posted their successful weight loss or bloating and autoimmune issues online which were solved by keto or carnivore.
The term "modern serious nutritionist" is a joke anyway: a true nutritionist is one who heals himself with a diet, and many people on keto do.
Science advances one funeral at the time.
Remember: ~150 years ago people were making fun of the guy and outsted him because he recommended that doctors should wash their hands before surgery! Now that is accepted and is known to be a prerequisite for a safe surgery.
Modern "serious nutritionist" are those kind of people: they are too arrogant and egoistic to see that thousands of people have given successful testemonies online.
Here is a list of them:
(NOTE THE PAGINATION AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE: THERE ARE 86 PAGES OF TESTEMONIALS!)
> And yet there are thousands of people who posted their successful weight loss or bloating and autoimmune issues online which were solved by keto or carnivore.
There are success anecdotes for every diet imaginable; that isn't any kind of high bar for suitability.
> Modern "serious nutritionist" are those kind of people: they are too arrogant and egoistic to see that thousands of people have given successful testemonies online.
Absolute nonsense. Fad diets come and go, and I hope nobody here gets their nutrition advice by shady grifters on blogs/twitter instead of the actual science.
I'm currently doing a keto diet (mainly to support my girlfriend who wanted to do it, and it's easier if we do it together) and I did lose about 7kg in less than three months so far.
That being said I remain a bit skeptical, for instance it seems to be a lot less effective for her than for me, and I feel like my weight loss may be explained by non "low-carb" factors, mainly that I eat a lot less. I have a sweet tooth and am vegetarian so I normally eat tons of carbs (pasta, rice, bread etc...). I haven't bothered monitory my caloric intake but I'm pretty certain that it dropped significantly. Meanwhile my girlfriend tends to eat relatively "low carb" even outside of this diet, so her food intake changed a lot less.
That's just an anecdote in a sea of contradictory anecdotes, but my general point is that a strict keto diet usually means huge changes in eating habits and I wonder how many of these success stories are simply people eating less/better rather than strictly the low-carb element. Obviously the reality is probably somewhere in the middle...
In my experience that’s the primary positive point of carb-restrictive diets.
In general I find it extremely hard to restrict calories under a standard North American diet due to craving carb-heavy foods and feeling a constant base level of hunger. When on keto I tend to only feel hunger around dinner time and have no issues at all with portion control throughout the rest of the day.
I think the real advantage of low carb diets is regulating hunger and making it easier to properly manage carb intake - at least in my case.
> And yet there are thousands of people who posted their successful weight loss or bloating and autoimmune issues online which were solved by keto or carnivore.
I am surprised you think that means anything.
For folks who are not too invested in keto religion, I will leave here the US News Best Diet's ranking, in which they ask a panel of nutrition specialists to rate each diet [0]. This is the closer you can get to what the specialist consensus is. Which haven't changed much, regardeless of fad diet's folks have been telling you.
> Keto requires ~0 carbs (some references I can find claim up to 50g carbs per day)
There’s no hard number. Keto requires you to stay in ketosis (which is something you enter by carb starvation and leave by consuming too many carbs), for many people about 20g/day is a very safe limit, but it depends on mass and body chemistry. 0g would be bad because you’d eat no veggies ;)
50g is totally doable and not too hard if my memory serves me right, but like others have mentioned it's about how your body reacts to those 50g and not the amount itself
Simply put, any form of restriction diet tends to cause people to eat less. That can be restricted time or restricted options. People who eat less tend to lose weight, and some of that weight comes from fat.
People who lower their bodyfat have so many kinds of improved blood markers.
The only free lunch (pun intended) I think I've observed seems to be protein and unprocessed foods are harder to digest and thus cost some digestion calories (increase the out side of the equation).
When someone tells you that "people lost weight on Diet X" you need to think "Did they lose more or less than on a standard diet equated for how processed it is (fiber), calories, and protein?".
Source: This is all summarized well in the book Fat Loss Forever by Layne Norton and others
For me time restricted eating with high protein intake from beans and tofu and a lot of vegetables+seeds did the thing. I guess there are more ways to achieve the same goal. Some diets are healthier some are not, but i don't think there should be only one approved by fda or any other organization
>high protein intake from beans and tofu and a lot of vegetables+seeds
Saying "high" protein implies that the protein:carb and/or protein:fat ratio is high. Beans have a much higher carb to protein ratio and tofu/seeds have high fat to protein ratios. It is close to impossible to eat a high protein diet that is vegan. The only way to do so requires large quantities of highly processed foods (saitan, etc...)
"Processed" isn't a well-defined term to begin with, but it's strange that you seem to implying that seitan, but not tofu, is highly processed. The steps from soybeans to tofu are: 1) dry soybeans, 2) soak soybeans, 3) puree soybeans, 4) boil soybeans, 5) separate pulp (okara), 6) coagulate with a coagulant compound, 7) press into block. The steps from wheat to seitan are: 1) mill wheat into flour, 2) wash flour to remove starch, 3) knead glutenous dough, 4) boil. That's fewer steps of "processing" for the latter. You can quibble a bit (in particular, if one buys vital wheat gluten powder, rather than making seitan directly from flour, add a drying step and a rehydrating step after step 3), but at the least, they're in the same league. Moreover, tofu production requires a somewhat exotic ingredient (the coagulant), whereas anyone can make seitan at home from a pantry staple.
Also, it's a logical leap from "requires large quantities of highly processed food" to "close to impossible". Whether seitan is "highly processed" or not, it's tasty, and eating a lot of it isn't close to impossible.
"Processed" from a public health standpoint means "stripped the fiber out of". It is what distinguishes real food from the toxic sludge packaged and sold (principally) to Americans and other former UK colonies, and what is killing us at an increasing rate.
Humans cannot live on really "high protein" food, which would eventually cause death. The majority of the energy intake has to come either from fat or from carbohydrates or from both.
So, when speaking about humans, it makes sense for "high protein diet", to mean a diet where proteins make a much higher percentage of the food in comparison to lower protein diets, like those recommended by USDA.
Therefore, when speaking, for example, about a diet where all the cereals (which have very low protein content) are replaced with legumes such as lentils, dried peas or beans (which have a protein content of up to a half of the carbohydrate content), it can be said that the legume-based diet is a high protein diet, as that would be true relatively, in comparison with the food eaten by most people, where the cheaper cereals are the main component.
Because the metabolism of the proteins requires not only oxidation reactions, which are shared with the oxidation of carbohydrates and fatty acids, but also many other chemical reactions, mainly involved in the transfer of the amino- group between various molecules, until eventually it accumulates in urea, which can be excreted.
The total capacity per day of performing those reactions is not sufficient to allow the production of enough energy from proteins to sustain a human, unlike in the carnivore animals.
When too much proteins are eaten, some intermediate molecules accumulate in excess, instead of being converted into excretion products.
Before the 20th century, when this was not understood yet, there have been many cases of illness or even death among people who ate too much lean meat, mainly among European hunters or explorers of the Northern regions, until they learned to copy the methods of the natives, e.g. by eating pemmican, in which the lean meat is mixed with enough fat to provide sufficient energy without having to eat too much proteins.
Like for any food component, for proteins it is bad both to eat too little and to eat too much, but there is a large enough interval of protein quantities per day that are all right.
We have forgotten how to eat. The trope is eat a well-rounded diet, which includes carbs, but being mindful that anything processed is likely going to put you over the limit of sugar intake for that day. That's because carbs are an easy substitute for a meal -- pasta, pizza, bread... then add on a few beers or a glass of wine, some candy, fruit, and not to mention sugar put into everything processed to stabilize it or make it more palatable. They fill us up but don't add a lot of nutrition.
Our bodies just aren't meant to digest this much sugar. It's starting to transcend food groups too. I swear certain meat products are replete with carbs because large-scale hog and cattle operations are feeding their animals almost exclusively with corn or other grains, and I'm not sure they can digest all those carbs either, so it is passed on via bioaccumulation to us when we eat it. (I might be totally off the mark here.)
The cynical part of me isn't surprised that the USDA doesn't care. Sugar is a huge business for American farms. To the extent that we subsidize billions of dollars in corn, wheat, and beets, it's not surprising that the cycle continues because the economy relies on the energy these staples condense into processed and cheap foods. It's an externality that we're taking out on our bodies and has profound implications for underserved communities.
I would be satisfied if the USDA recognized fructose as a toxin, and required labels to say how much fructose is in everything.
We might then start seeing the things pumped full of sugar having glucose/dextrose instead. And, the greatest health crisis the UK and its former colonies has ever seen might then start winding down.
If we can institute emergency measures for COVID-19, it seems like we ought to be able to do a little something about a cause of overwhelmingly worse mortality.
After going on a low carb diet, my skin has never been healthier. Acne, dry skin, dandruff, itchiness and random hives that I've experienced as long as I can remember have all dissapeared.
Also my mood and emotional balance have never been more stable.
I primarily eat whole, unprocessed foods: meat/fish, veggies, nuts and seeds, and occasionally some low sugar fruit after intense exercise.
It's been perhaps the most positive change Ive ever made for my mental and physical health
I'm rarely shocked by the ingredients of food anymore, but I was looking at a packet of "honey sauce" from KFC the other day, and couldn't help but laugh at the things we're doing to ourselves. There are 11 ingredients and 5 of them are added sugar. All to recreate something resembling honey, at approximately 2/3 the cost of real honey.
"High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Sugar, Honey (7%), Fructose, Contains 2% or Less of: Caramel Color, Molasses, Water, Citric Acid, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Malic Acid."
That is sugar, sugar, sugar, honey, sugar, color, sugar, water, acid, flavorant, acid. The lengths they've gone to save a literal penny are staggering.
I’ve noticed that sometimes a snack food will have 3 different kinds of sugar as the 2-4th ingredients. I’ve wondered if they break it up like that so that the first ingredient isn’t sugar, even if there is more sugar-type-ingredients than there is of the first-listed ingredient.
It’s possible they use multiple types for flavor/texture reasons, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some foods where it could be accomplished with sugar, but then everyone would know that the “snack” is mostly just sugar.
Yeah, I saw some soy milk at Whole Foods marked “no added sugar”. I was surprised that sugar might be added at all but I don’t drink the stuff. Anyway, I looked at the label and the #2 ingredient (after water) was “dehydrated cane juice” (i.e. sugar).
I bought a big jug of Starbucks coffee for a party, and they gave us a cup of soy milk for people to use as creamer. After the party, I tasted the leftover soy milk to see if I wanted to keep it for use with cereal or something. It was shockingly sweet — not like any other milk or milk substitute I've ever tasted.
That's a good question. KFC gets 12 million customers per day. Let's generously assume an average of one 9g packet is included per customer. The packets already contain 7% honey, so to go full honey is an additional demand of 100 metric tons out of 4,850 produced daily, which represents ~2% of the total market. The average retail price of this grade of honey is $0.45/oz, so even presuming production continues to decline during this increased demand, we would see an increase of roughly $0.10 per 16oz bottle for store brand honeys. We would also be taking 5,475 metric tons of sugar out of global diets every year, or 22 billion calories.
OK, I imagine higher honey prices would bring more producers. Maybe some corn sugar producers would become honey producers. Then production would increase and price would decrease.
A big part of the reason why we have an epidemic of obesity is because it's cheaper (and easier) to eat junk food than to eat healthy.
Here in the Bay Area, I can buy a McDonalds value menu hamburger and a soda for $2, or I can buy a healthy salad at SweetGreen/Panera/Mendocino for $15-20.
If healthy food was on a level playing field, many people would choose to eat healthier.
(Now, this doesn't address the problem about rising food costs, and the macroeconomic implications hare are beyond my expertise... but surely forcing those with a low income to have to eat junk food isn't what we want as a society.)
I don't think that makes a lot of sense but beyond that I don't get why the high-carb vs. low-carb discussion turns into a meat vs. plant-based debate in many places here.
Most people these days de-facto have a high-carb, high-meat diet. Conversely it's perfectly possible to have a low-meat, low-carb diet (I'm currently doing a vegetarian keto). To me it sounds just like yet another excuse to dunk on the silly hippy vegoonz.
If you want to try low-carb, note that the health effects of lower carbs usually aren't going to be binary. That is you aren't going to have no improvement until carbs go below some threshold and then you suddenly have the full possible improvement as soon as carbs cross that threshold.
In particular you don't have to go to one of the very very low carb diets like keto to get significant benefits. Much of the published research that finds benefits in low carb diets used diets of up to 30% of calories from carbs.
Personally I'd suggest starting off with a target of 40% or fewer calories from carbs. I suggest 40% for three reasons.
1. It's well below both the level of the USDA recommended diets and the even higher amount of carbs that most typical Americans eat. Even if you might achieve more benefit at some even lower level, many people will be able to achieve their goals at 40%, which is an easier target.
2. The math of 40% carbs fits in well with the information on nutrition labels, because 1g of carbs is on average about 4 calories. This means that if the label says some item has C calories, then the number of grams of carbs it can have without going over 40% is C cal x 40% x 1g/4cal = C/10 grams.
For example part of my breakfast today was a sausage, egg, and cheese croissant sandwich. 390 calories, 29 grams of carbs. 390/10 = 39, so this thing was under 40% calories from carbs.
3. 40% is not hard to achieve without giving up much of what you probably currently eat including fast food, pasta, bread, and sweet deserts. I think a lot of people fail at the very low carb diets because they can require major changes to what you eat and often require that you either do a lot more home cooking or eat at more expensive restaurants.
If you decide to try this here are some tips for executing. (Actually they should work for other percentages besides 40%).
1. Most meals consist of more than one thing, so you probably should be looking at the meal as a whole rather than the individual items. If one some items go over 40% and some are under, but total carbs for the mean is not over 40% of total calories it should be OK.
I'm not sure if that reasoning carries over to longer timeframes like days or weeks. When you eat a meal it is all going to get processed at about the same time. So a meal that consists of say one high carb item and one low carb item should be about equivalent to a meal that consists of a single item with the combined calories and carbs.
If you eat a high carb breakfast, say, and try to balance it with a low carb meal so the daily numbers look good, I'm not sure that would work because the breakfast was already processes before you had dinner. Whatever harmful effects high carbs have might have already taken place. Same of weekly or longer numbers.
Thus my current feeling is to aim for 40% max for every meal.
Anyway, there are a couple of ways to do the math for a meal. Let's say I'm thinking of ordering a cheeseburger (300 cal, 30 g carb) and medium fries (320 cal, 39 g carb) from McDonald's for lunch.
One way would be to add things up, giving 620 cal and 69 g carb. I can see that 620/10 = 62 g of carbs allowed, which is under the 69 g of carbs in the meal, so not good.
A simple way I think is to do each item separately, keeping track of a running net carb allowance. So cheeseburger is 300/10 = 30 g allowed carbs and has 30 g carbs, so we are net 0 g carbs. The the fries are 32 allowed 39 g actual, so 7 g over. That brings is to a net 7 g over.
2. If the numbers aren't quite working out for a particular meal, you might be able to fix them by modifying the items. Maybe switch condiments (go from light mayo to regular mayo) or add more meat.
For example, if I change my proposed McD's lunch to have a double cheeseburger (450 cal, 32 g carb) instead of a single cheeseburger, now the double cheeseburger starts us at 13 g carb below target. The fries add 7 g excess carbs, leaving us 6 g of carbs under target.
This is the key to doing 40% without having to totally change how you eat. But be careful with this because those mods usually involve adding calories. Don't let that get out of hand.
One way to address that is portions. For example lets say you were going to eat a whole medium pepperoni and sausage pizza but see that it is over on the carbs but doubling the pepperoni will bring it under. But then it is more calories than you want.
You might drop the size down to a small, and then bring the calories up to what you want by also doubling the cheese and the sausage.
You might not have to worry as much about extra calories as you might think. What I found is that adding low-carb or carb-free calories (extra meat, mayo, butter for example) to get the percent of carbs down to 40% also made the food more satisfying. I actually started the 40% carbs diet just to see what it would do to blood sugar, expecting to maybe gain some weight during the experiment, but found that I actually started losing weight because my total calories had gone down due to the food being more satisfying.
But be careful if you try this. I may be a fluke and purposefully adding fat/protein calories to your food might just make you gain weight.
I wish the article was framed in terms of what the author really wants instead of burying it. The author is framing the issue as something mostly non-political, simply acknowledging the existing body of research, but actually wants something very political which is changing the USDA guidelines (which have far reaching effects) to recommend low-carb as essentially the go to default diet. So while the aim is noble the author doesn’t really care about the science except as a useful tool to drive a particular political outcome. And same with the accusation of ignoring science except as a way to make the board look bad because the author would clearly not be satisfied with “we each read in full literally every paper on the subject of low-carb diets but as a group remain unconvinced in its merits for a general recommendation.”
tl;dr the author is probably right about low-carb diets but made sure to frame it in such a way that makes enemies out of the people with actual power who now can’t actually do what she wants without making themselves look uneducated. Shame has never made people dig their heels in /j
> but actually wants something very political which is changing the USDA guidelines (which have far reaching effects) to recommend low-carb as essentially the go to default diet.
That seems like an uncharitable and inaccurate assumption on your part and goes against what the author explicitly stated. The author summarizes their argument at the end of the article: "But the only way to create change is if the Dietary Guidelines considers low-carb as an option. Not a prescription, just an option."
> the accusation of ignoring science except as a way to make the board look bad because the author would clearly not be satisfied with “we each read in full literally every paper on the subject of low-carb diets but as a group remain unconvinced in its merits for a general recommendation.”
The author laid out a pretty clear case for the claim. Instead of engaging with that case, you instead choose to speculate that the author has unreachable standards.
That is not how you engage in good faith discussion.
A few years ago I was quite overweight. I switched to a keto diet and dropped a quarter of my weight in a year to enter a healthy weight range. I remained on a keto diet for two years and can share my personal experience.
I found long-distance running and cycling rather easy but sprinting and weightlifting caused me to nearly faint. Eventually I had to stop a low-carb diet because it was interfering with my exercise. During this period I also began taking ADHD medication again because I really couldn't focus and complete tasks.
What I think helped with my drastic weight loss was that I had a greater focus on the food and number of calories I was putting into my body. I also partook in intermittent fasting, which prevented me from snacking during periods when I clearly was not hungry. Further, I focused on eating satiating foods, which informed my body that it was full at a much quicker rate. Finally, I fully cut out processed foods and limited my alcohol consumption to moderately on the weekends.
I am skeptical of the low-carb diet itself being the trigger that caused weight-loss. I believe it indirectly taught me good dieting habits because I grew up without those being taught in my household. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that a keto diet was not sustainable long-term.
After some time, I stopped eating low-carb. As a response to the pandemic, I switched to a pescetarian diet and quickly switched to a vegetarian diet as I don't care for the taste of fish. After a year, I switched to an entirely plant-based diet, which I still follow.
My doctor's visits during this process show incredibly improved blood work. I am as healthy as can be. I am able to exercise with tennis, weightlifting, and cycling without feeling like I am going to faint. I stopped taking my ADHD medication awhile back and haven't felt the need to take it at all; sometimes I exhibit classic symptoms of ADHD that leave my family scratching their heads since I still do have ADHD, but it has not interfered with getting my work done like it used to. My symptoms have been largely reduced for the first time in my life.
Perhaps supplementing B12 while eating plant-based helped. All I can say is I have never felt better in my life. My ADHD is severely less pervasive, and my sleep paralysis has vanished. My level of energy is incredible and has made me a better athlete that can execute bursts of speed impossible a few years ago.
I think switching to eating whole foods, getting more nutrients such as fiber in my diet, and eating more fruits and vegetables has led to a healthier life. I never made extraordinary changes overnight. I slowly transitioned from one diet to the next and ultimately arrived at plant-based after discovering how great I felt and seeing how strong my blood work was. If I could go back and tell myself something, it would be: don't skip the fruit. Carbs are fine. Focus on whole foods with nutrients you need. Eating food is an activity to fuel other activities. Not something you do purely for fun. The key to losing weight and remaining healthy is diligence. Being consistent in rejecting your family member that keeps pushing dessert on you is necessary. You have to accept that you learned to eat food incorrectly, but you can correct your bad habits. It is never too late.
There may be some merit to low-carb diets, but I found I had less than stellar blood work and a scattered mind. I was also consuming meat and dairy at this time, so I never dabbled in a low-carb plant-based diet. That sounds pretty tough though. Adding carbs back into my diet resulted in stronger blood-work and better mental and physical energy.
If anyone is interested in how I initially made the transition to plant-based, I found myself interested in the Mediterranean diet and somehow discovered the Greek Orthodox Lenten fasting schedule (nistisima). I decided to follow it for a few months and other than keeping oil and not eating fish, I continued to follow it full-time. I primarily eat Asian food at home, but I eat a lot of Greek food too.
> This amount of carbohydrates may seem quite low to the average person, but remember that for the most part, people turn to this way of eating because they’ve been diagnosed with a serious health problem, such as diabetes, which usually means that they can no longer tolerate high levels of sugars or starches.
(The folks downvoting me... are saying that most people they know on low-carb diets have been diagnosed with a serious health problem such as diabetes?)
My habits formed when young and when my body was more capable of handling high sugar. But after aging, insulin sensitivity declines, sugars have a more adverse effect, and feels like high sugar levels have just been feeding an imbalance in the GI tract.
Reading into the peculiar new science of poop transplants it's been interesting to observe my body as a factory process and the quality of the output (poop) is an important great indicator of system health. Obvious to many, but was not to me for years. In parallel to improved gut health my focus and productivity are more predictable.
I thought I'd never kick my addiction to sugar. After making the switch and viewing from a different perspective I'm shocked how where I live 95% of everything in the grocery store has sugar added.