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A Massive New Harvard Study Shows Which Diet Burns the Most Calories
- ohiovr 8y agoCarbohydrates are also the cheapest calories.
- mjevans 8y agoI was actually just lamenting how difficult it is to get a "real" (no lettuce) salad this evening. Making them at home isn't /really/ an option for me, not unless I want to eat it literally every day. The greens would go bad in about half a week; the other semi-perishable things would need to go shortly after. It's so much easier to go out and get something fresh and variety from a common kitchen (restaurant) that services many others all day. However, because carbs are cheap, and because meat is popular, those are the two things every restaurant has a focus and spin on. Eating healthy is too expensive.
- monochromatic 8y agoWhy don’t “real” salads include lettuce?
- sjf 8y agoBecause lettuce is filler whose main purpose seems to be to take up space on the plate. It doesn't provide an saity, and something like iceburg lettuce has very low nutritional content. It just a cop out for restaurants.
- xiphias2 8y agoWhy would it be just filler? You're probably not eating enough. It has high fiber content, just like most vegetables (and actually a very similar macro nutrient ratio)
- WalterSear 8y agoThis is misinformed. Iceberg lettuce contains very little fiber, either.
- AstralStorm 8y agoLettuce is mostly water. Romani lettuce is a bit better but still bad. Out of leafy greens: spinach, beet greens, nettle, rucola and cabbages (everything Brassica spp.)- are decent nutritionally, a few others in small doses too.
- moltar 8y ago100%. My go-to saying is “lettuce is for rabbits”. And I opt out of lettuce on anything I can.
- copperx 8y agoAren't vegetables and thus salads mostly carbs, though?
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoIn terms of chemical composition, yes, but mostly carbs that humans can't effectively digest, so nutritionally, they would be considered low-carb.
- tropo 8y agoYou can get single-serve fruit salad cups without any lettuce.
- orev 8y agoWhen people say “salad” they don’t mean fruit salad, and I think you know that. Salad almost always means something with lettuce and other kinds of raw vegetables, sometimes with sprinklings of other things in there.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoYes, I'm sure bits of pineapple, grape and cherry floating in sugary syrup works just fine compared to a good salad. I like fruit salad just fine, but I would consider it more of a dessert.
- maxpupmax 8y agoArticle is a massive pain to read without paragraphs.
- malkia 8y agoI had massive attack while reading it, ... playing in the background...
- arkades 8y agoSummary: Diets that replaced carbs with fat burned an average of 250 calories a day more, in a study whose methodology wasn’t described or skeptically analyzed whatsoever. Author then goes on to repeat “not all calories are identical” repeatedly.
- beatgammit 8y agoThe methodology seems to be described in the linked research paper, which should be the article linked, not this lame summary: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4583 https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4583
- lucas_membrane 8y agoSimple question is, "Where did the energy go?" First guess would be that the bodies of the fat eaters produced more heat, perhaps on account of a less efficient metabolism of fat. Couldn't that be measured directly with a thermometer? Other guess would be that the fat eaters were more active, producing more mechanical energy. That would be a very interesting possibility to explore. A few decades back, my reading led me to think that conventional wisdom was that fat-burning exercise was aerobic, ie requiring oxygen and breathing. Could burning fat require more exertion to acquire the oxygen? Does the “not all calories are identical” assertion reduce to "the number of calories of heat obtained when a food is burned in a flame outside the body (the number of calories on the label) is not equal to the net number of useful calories obtained when the food is metabolized?" 250 calories per day is only about 1 kg per month of weight loss. This is not trivial compared to typical weight loss results, but it is quite a bit less than what people searching for diet advice would consider a game-changer. And it is not clear if there are other consequences of changing the composition of the diet over the long term of steady weight loss that most dieters need.
- masonic 8y agoonly about 1 kg per month That's 26 pounds in one year. For most people, that's a game-changer.
- 8y ago
- dnhz 8y agoAlready reported and discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453665
- darawk 8y agoI've always found this aspect of the low carb debate to be mostly irrelevant. The benefit I get from eating a low carb diet isn't that I burn more calories (as in, i'm not expressing an opinion either way on that). It's that I have a desire to eat dramatically fewer calories on a low-carb diet, and the weight loss effects come from that, not higher metabolism. I don't understand why so many studies want to focus on metabolic rate, when it seems clear to me that the most material benefit is the blunted calorie-adjusted hunger.
- thanatropism 8y agoMy experience with low carb dieting is that you end up eating a lot more fat, which is more satiating -- so you naturally eat less.
- bootsz 8y ago> It's that I have a desire to eat dramatically fewer calories on a low-carb diet Precisely my experience as well. While it’s true that really no one type of nutrient is universally bad or evil and technically weight loss comes down to calories in/out, there is a huge difference in how satisfied you feel after eating X amount of calories in various forms. I can eat an entire loaf of good bread or a big bag of chips without even thinking about it. Fats are tasty too but I don’t find myself wanting to gorge on them to the same extent.
- AstralStorm 8y agoUnless you're carefully measuring you're probably fooling yourself. Alternatively you're eating highly not satisfying foods on the other diets. Which most of the low fat foods are, especially ones marketed for dieting, which are laden with sugar - which means those calories come at the expense of carbs that are slower to absorb. Then there's the effect of added protein uptake which is known to reduce appetite. It is easy to end up with a meaningful difference in this value, what with low carb diets increasing meat intake. The difference is real though and about what I have noticed in burn rates. The actual question is, as always, whether the about 10% faster weight loss is worth any health consequences. Additionally, whether the normocaloric variant is safe is still up in the air - with some big metastudy showing increased total mortality without CHD and stroke morbidity. No idea what's up with that, perhaps some sort of reserve missing or nutrient lacking...
- tsumnia 8y agoIt's carbs. Please stop clickbait.
- kapauldo 8y agoDoes burn calories mean lose weight?
- akeck 8y agoI want to see a massive diet study that's pure math analysis: start with calories going in and calculate all the different ways the energy leaves the body or gets stored in each case.
- jml7c5 8y agoUnfortunately "calories going in" is not easily obtainable, as absorption is affected by cooking, what foods are in the gut together, individual variation, and how the foods are physically composed together (mashed, whole, blended, etc.). Unfortunately protein and carbs = 4kcal/g, fats = 9kcal/g is only useful as a rough guide in practice. Look up studies on the accuracy of the Atwater method for more detail.
- moltar 8y agoPlus caloric content is measured by incineration. Which our bodies aren’t doing.
- sys_64738 8y agoThis is all fluff. There are a few simple rules I followed for successful weight loss (15 lbs in the last 5 months. 1) Burn more calories than you consume. 2) Losing more than a pound per week means you'll gain it back again. 3) If you like the taste of the food item then it's unhealthy.
- war1025 8y agoWas with you until that 3rd point. Lots of healthy foods taste plenty good.
- orev 8y agoOne could say that is both true and false. Many people eat so many processed foods and artificial ingredients they literally have no idea what real food tastes like, and anything that doesn’t have a sugar/salt/fat “hit” just doesn’t taste “good” to them. Essentially their taste has been trained to think that only things in the very narrow range of industrial flavorings are good, and everything else is bad or bland. E.g. people who can’t drink water without adding some kind of flavoring. Once their taste is retrained, then yes, many healthy things taste good.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoHaving lost and kept off about half my body weight, I'd say 1 is correct. The most reliable way to control your weight is calorie counting, end of story. 2 is not. No matter how much you lose, you will gain it back once you start eating more calories. In fact, it will probably take much fewer extra than it did the first time around. 3 is kinda irrelevant. "healthy" doesn't have a concrete meaning, which is why people selling things love it so much as a word. However, if you don't like the taste of what you're eating you are a lot less likely to overindulge, so there is that.
- lhl 8y agoSure #1 is what it all comes down to, but how much are you in control of the calories that you burn? You can find scientific studies as far back as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment that shows that your body tries to maintain homeostasis when calories are reduced via regular caloric restriction, or with extreme overfeeding. Weight, like much of the bodies processes is a strictly hormonally regulated, the the biochemistry/process of fat burning is actually pretty well understood. Oxidation of fatty acids competes w/ glucose (which is generally preferred), known as the glucose-fatty acid, or Randall cycle (doi: 10.1007/s10545-010-9061-2, PMC2950079). The easiest way to increase FAO is therefore to reduce availability of glucose (don't eat carbs, or simply don't eat). This also lowers insulin levels, which independently inhibits lipolysis. (doi: 10.2337/db08-0281) What's also interesting is that as you fast, your ghrelin levels (hunger hormone) goes down (as does insulin, cortisol spikes) - doi: 10.1210/jc.2004-0604 I know everyone's an expert here on HN and I'm glad you were able to lose some weight, but #2 has no scientific or statistical basis, and #3 is prima facie laughable and its hard to imagine any animal surviving if that were the case. (Just stick to tasty natural, minimally processed, real food and you'll be fine).
- mdekkers 8y agounquittable autoplay video? What a horrible website.