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Diet Advice That Ignores Hunger
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoJust a trawl through old diet advice, but what stood out to me was the crappy advert (something about how many triangles I see). I cannot for a moment image the published paper accepting some crappy trawling / phishing ad for its sunday edition - even if they ponied up the cash. How has advertising got so bottom-feeder and no one seems to care - this is your brand guys !
- lowmagnet 11y agoIt's your ad preferences. If they can't slot a valuable ad for your position, they go on to remnant networks. Install something like uBlock or uMatrix (or both) and then put them in permissive mode. You'll see about 48 domains connected in uBlock. That's a lot of 3rd party domains to deliver content; digging down, about 2 are related to the content, and the remainder are ad networks and social garbage. All to serve about 20k of text. As many others have noted, there's something really wrong with the web. It's not just their brand, it's everybody's. Note: I work for a newspaper company.
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago>>> If they can't slot a valuable ad for your position, they go on to remnant networks I guess the answer is economics, but just don't go onto remnant networks. But yes, there is something very wrong - but it's been wrong since banner ads were cool. I think it's not the tragedy of the commons but rather the profitability of the commons. Common ownership is not inherently profitable, even if it is inherently valuable. Maybe adblockers are the right answer. We shall see in ios9 I guess.
- lowmagnet 11y agoRight-o on remnants. I'd rather we display no ad than a low quality one. The most valuable type of ad is the brand establishment ad, where they care more about mass demographics than tracking users. They will rise again in the wake of ios9 blockers since disabling tracking ads will become one of the available heuristics. I'd love to see ads go away, but we might as well start by eliminating the scum first.
- x0x0 11y agoAs mentioned, it's a remnant ad network. As for why they're doing it, well, look in a mirror. Advertising has turned, as the saying goes, print dollars into online nickels. If you wish to have free online content, something has to pay the bills.
- thebigkick 11y agoAds pay my salary. I agree. Someone has to pay for the free content everyone is getting. I will say that we try to created interesting and meaningful ads, not just garbage. We are one of the good guys, at least we try to be. Honestly, ad devs are some of the savviest javascript developers out there. We have a lot of constraints and need to move fast and scrappy on a daily basis. I won't be doing it forever however it's one of those things that holds my interest until i get in my car and go home for the day. * I work for a very large company that own radio & publishing properties.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoI don't agree it's the fault of the mirror. A tradition jam newspaper can be seen as a vertically integrated article aggregator and curation site. So the model for reddit and HN is to charge for access, and pass on to the articles clicked through to. However in that game, I would pay NYT a long time before I paid Reddit.
- x0x0 11y agoA newspaper is exactly not an aggregation and curation site. They pay to produce content. No income, no more content. Reddit and hn are entirely different: they pay nobody to produce content, nor do they charge for access.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoBut if you got the editors and writers in NYT and said do Reddit /r but your upvotes are worth 10x or 1000x then essentially I would be asking for curation by the editors, not production and curation Production will be valuable - but the curation is the secret sauce.
- frou_dh 11y agoWhy has the simplistic traditional advice worked for some? Is there big variation in the extent to which different humans are affected by macronutrient ratio and food quality? Are nuanced dietary dos and don'ts a domain reserved for the unlucky?
- mateuszf 11y agoI'm not an expert, but as far as I know some factors are different between people, for example insulin resistance is inherited via genes.
- tomjen3 11y agoPossibly somewhat but that ignores the people who dropped weight, adopted healthier habits and saw improved insulin resistance.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoIt doesn't ignore those people at all; it just suggests that "healthier habits" is relative to an individual's baseline rather than being uniform throughout the population.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoHow hard your body holds on to calories is genetic. I carry a gene variant that makes it much more difficult for me to shed fat cells than other people in my family.
- melling 11y agoI've never found it easy to diet. Unless you can precisely and easily measure your caloric intake, it seems too difficult, especially if you don't cook. When I was younger I could just start running 3-4 days a week and lose 20lbs over several months. Now that I'm older, and more out of shape, I've resorted to a lot of walking, plus I'm adding a spinning bike. The Apple Watch's ability to monitor my activity got me started getting me moving enough to see results. https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/apple-watch-8-weeks-and-9-pounds/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/apple-watch-8-weeks-... I'm hoping to lose another 20lbs this year.
- SixSigma 11y agoDon't call it hunger, call it : "the sensation of weight loss"
- gaius 11y agoYou shouldn't have been downvoted, thats a valid technique for some. Often phrased as "nothing tastes as good as being lean feels".
- gnoway 11y agoA 6 day study on diet in 19 people somehow generating meaningful conclusions about weight loss in general is absurd. It does seem like you could learn something about rates of change - are we speedboats or supertankers - but that's about all.
- leshow 11y agothank god there is someone else in here who saw that.
- dang 11y agoThe recent study Taubes critiques here was covered in several articles posted to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10061426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10061426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058190
- plaguuuuuu 11y agoThe interesting thing about that study is that the low-fat diet had 8% fat, which is crazy low and a ~75% reduction, whereas the low-carb diet had 29% carbs, which is only a 40% reduction and not extreme at all. The studies that support low-carb being a more efficient diet have far lower carbohydrates than this study. I mean, sure, if you just put people into ketosis with ~0% carbs it would be a different story! But 29% is on the other end of the spectrum. It is high enough that IMO, it makes the study's argument sound, but not valid, if you get my drift.
- leshow 11y agoNot really, unless the diets controlled protein intake between the groups (which is often overlooked in low carb studies), low carb really just means high protein. in which case the beneficial results of the low carb group could just be because of increased protein consumption.
- plaguuuuuu 11y agoYep, that would be another way to get relatively useless results, since protein metabolism is not at all energy efficient compared to carbs or fats. So if caloric intake is kept constant at say 1500 but protein makes up a large proportion, "usable" calories is actually much smaller.
- leshow 11y ago
- scythe 11y agoIt appears Taubes has been bitten by a meme. The subjects in the NIH study consumed isocaloric diets and were put in a chamber that measured all of their thermodynamic outputs -- it turned out thermogenesis was a tiiiiiiny amount higher on one diet. Why is that? Well, the "loading" (pre-test) diet was mostly carbohydrate, the low-fat diet was also, but the low-carbohydrate diet was mostly fat. After only six days, the subjects' metabolisms were still adjusting to the diet. Where did I get that idea? It's in the study abstract: > Mathematical model simulations agreed with these data, but predicted that the body acts to minimize body fat differences with prolonged isocaloric diets varying in carbohydrate and fat. Even some of the media stories, like the one in your first link, quote the author of the paper saying this: >Indeed, Hall's mathematical modeling predicts that in the long term the body acts to minimise body fat differences between diets that are equal in calories but varying widely in their ratio of carbohydrate to fat. >"Over the long term it's pretty close," says Hall. You'll recognize Hall as the first author of the study. Let's be clear: the lead author of the study said in plain English that there was probably not a significant long-term difference in energy usage resp. composition. Why is the media blowing this up? Because they just want a story. They want nutrition to be an argument, rather than a gradually developing science with occasional surprises. Their goals are at odds with researchers who want to make useful information about nutrition available to consumers. That includes the New York Times. Keep that in mind.
- Almaviva 11y agoThe facts of that study brushed aside: the participants diet was based on potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni. Notice, not enough protein to maintain lean body mass. This is a bad idea. Also, over 24 weeks the group lost 25% of their body mass. Look at pictures of the participants: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25782294 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25782294 These look like frail bodys that, indeed, can sustain on 1600 calories per day, which explains slowed weight loss. If you're an individual looking at how to seriously lose fat and recompose your body, don't look at popular media, but look at those with vested interest in effective results. E.g. athletic trainers in sports where weight management is a key point of the sport, like bodybuilding, wrestling, MMA, powerlifting. The science is quite clear, you just have to figure out how to filter out popular articles. (Lyle McDonald's site is a great start.) Calorie restriction, with adequate protein intake, works. Also, any diet or lifestyle change that works creates a caloric deficit, and will also work if you count this deficit.
- mistermann 11y agoMy wife has been failing to lose weight for several months, she is literally weighing everything she eats and recording calories (~1200/day), plus doing a several hours of quite intense exercise (stairs, etc) per week yet has hit a plateau for well over a month - any advice, things to read? (Note: she "can't" do low carb, which I personally recommend.)
- x0x0 11y agoIf you've ruled out what is (imo) likely to be the most effective method, I'm not sure what results you expect. As gp suggested, you all should start with McDonald's book _The Ketogenic Diet_. I'm not saying it's gospel, but it's a start and it's one of the diets used by strength sports to control weight. There's lots and lots of arguing over this, but it's hard to dispute that many athletes use the ketogenic or similar diets to lose anywhere from 10 to 30 lbs of fat relatively quickly. http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/the-ketogenic-diet/ http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/the-ketogenic-diet/
- stone-monkey 11y ago
- hiou 11y agoMore diet fad posts. Again, I have no idea what diet fads have to do with the stated relevance of this site. This is an opinion piece with little to no information beyond harping on one particular vein of diet ideology. I really hope these types of ideological off topic posts begin to be penalized and flagged soon.
- jschwartzi 11y agoI guess the point the author was trying to make is that extreme calorie restriction with a nutrient poor diet is bad for you, but I would be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees. I guess he was trying to extrapolate from that study somehow but the article goes off the rails and drops a bunch of factoids about calorie restriction and diet and then closes by mentioning a study of dubious quality.
- plurinshael 11y agoFrom "What to submit" paragraph of the Guidelines page: "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Not saying this article is the best in the world or whatever, but it discusses a complex system with a measure of nuance and grace. Metabolism possesses multi-linearities and non-linearities, and that we are so intimately tied into its processes makes it a decent place to being asking what those things even are. (Multilinear algebra being linear algebra's psychedelic cousin.) It's a fascinating, totally unsolved puzzle.
- codahale 11y agoTaubes breezily dismisses the Hall paper, which is, methodologically speaking, pretty conclusive. If you're curious about the paper and its implications for Taubes's obesity-insulin hypothesis, I'd recommend these two blog posts by Stephan Guyenet, an obesity researcher: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-new-human-trial-seriously-undermines.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-new-human-tr... http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/more-thoughts-on-recent-low-fat-vs-low.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/more-thoughts-...
- 3pt14159 11y agoI wouldn't dismiss the controversy just yet. Although the obesity-insulin hypothesis ignores other hormones and factors such as leptin, glucagon, and ghrelin; as well as other factors to nutrition, like how insulin spikes contribute to muscle growth, it is pretty effective at predicting heart disease and diabetes and reduction in not just carbohydrates but also starches / free sugars is almost universally agreed to provide long term health benefits.
- rasz_pl 11y ago24 week study sounds brutal, would never happen today in politically correct society. participant: I want to chop of my fingers and eat them, or kill myself, please let me go. "doctor": You signed a waiver, now shut up and eat your turnip! Anecdote: There was a Polish Survivor edition in 2004, ran out of ideas halfway thru the series and started starving contestants out. They did things like an hour long swimming/running race culminated in holding item over your head in full sun until you collapse, all for the prize of small bag of sugar, while losers got small portions of white rice instead. Ordinary men got turned into stick figures. Last program was recorded one month after the contest, all previously super skinny guys sported huge beer bellies, when asked said they couldnt stop eating.
- leshow 11y agoSo many problems with the interpretation of the starvation study here. Quantity of food (in caloric terms) not type, is the single biggest predictor of weight loss. In fact unless your body magically defies the law of conservation of energy; it's impossible to lose weight in a caloric surplus regardless of food choices. The subjects in the study stopped losing weight despite staying at the same caloric consumption BECAUSE THEY LOST A LOT OF WEIGHT ALREADY. Therefore, their maintenance caloric requirements were lower than when they started. To assume that this is because of anything other than their body mass lowering is ridiculous. The second study had too small of a population and was too short in duration to try and extrapolate anything to a longer term diet. Taubes is a vehement believer in the low carb movement and has sold a lot of books on the topic. His opinions are heavily biased and he has a lot invested in interpreting the data in a way that's favourable to him. The fact remains, it's physically impossible to lose weight when not in a caloric deficit, so sorry Taubes, you really do have to either "eat less" or exercise more (hopefully both).
- waterlesscloud 11y agoSo if I eat 3500 kcal worth of sand a day I won't lose weight?
- leshow 11y agoI did say "food" right? ignoring the stupidity of your question i'd just like to point out that without the knowledge of your caloric maintenance requirements (and not from a bullshit online calculator), we can't make any assumptions on what amount of calories would be required to lose weight
- waterlesscloud 11y agoInsults and anger aside, it seems we agree that the source of the calories does in fact make a difference. A moment of reflection reveals that "food" is a very vague and somewhat arbitrary classification of materials. And what may be "food" for some may not be for others. I've never understood why it should be at all controversial to consider that different individuals could have substantial variance in their ability to absorb calories from different sources. As often as not, the response to the idea is anger, which is kinda weird, frankly.