16 ms·

Challenges and opportunities for better nutrition science

55 points by barney54 6y ago

johnchristopher 6y ago
I believe it's more urgent to get rid of "serving" as measurement.I recently tried to build up a dash diet shopping list and was sent on a wild hunt for what is a serving exactly (turns out a serving is different depending on the food and measured in different cups and other imperial units). Most dash diet books (or others) I read spend 200 pages out of 250 explaining basic useless nutrition factoids then get on a "sample week menus" that aren't practical at all if all you want to know is "how much pounds of this and that should I eat per day or per week ?". I should open a blog about how to get that (easy recipes, easy shopping list), would be a nice journey.
- nsl73 6y ago
  It’s a little annoying, but you can do the math with a spreadsheet and a scale. Also many online resources has nutritional information for an item per 100g, and adjusting measurements of weight to other measurements of weight is much easier than adjusting measurements of volume to measurements of weight.
nattefury 6y ago
as
barney54 6y ago
There is a lot of interesting points in this article--not just about demoting the calorie as nutritional advice--such as the lack of funding for basic nutritional studies and the role of large food companies.
jasonv 6y ago
I couldn’t disagree more, having used it for myself, and having coached hundreds doing it as a personal trainer. An individual who employs reasonable practices well can thrive using this modality. EDIT: IIFYM is “act, measure, adjust” using calorie counting and body weight / size measurements. I understand that there are triggers for some individuals in that statement. Doesn’t really change what needs to be done if body weight / size goals need to be addressed. And yes, there may be other manners of going about this, but those will mostly work around directly engaging in the anchors of IIFYM.
tekproxy 6y ago
I eat 5000 calories worth of sawdust a day and can't gain weight.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Insoluble fiber is not included in calorie counts on nutritional labels.
  - makomk 6y ago
    As I understand it, what's actually subtracted from the calorie counts on nutritional labels is a very rough estimate of the number of calories that aren't actually available because they're stuff like insoluble fiber, based mostly on the type of food. So it's not necessarily that accurate.
- sk0g 6y ago
  What a lame strawman. First off, that's not even food that would be digestible by a human. Secondly, reasonable people don't say all calories are equal, but that estimating TDEE + calories eaten is the best calculation to make for many people, in terms of accuracy vs effort required.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > that's not even food that would be digestible by a human Well that's the point. Obviously not all calories are equal. Nobody ever meant that literally. There are calories in diamonds, but you aren't likely to be able to digest them are you?
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      > There are calories in diamonds Not in this context. A nutrition label for a 50 pound diamond would indicate zero calories.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
maps7 6y ago
> New research in humans suggests our bodies and metabolic rates can behave differently when given identical calories in different contexts. I wonder what the "a calorie is a calorie" zealots would say about this?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jhayward 6y ago
  Those folks tend not to be very interested in the actual problems of nutrition and obesity. In my experience, they are much more about sitting in moral judgement of people who have other-than-ideal bodyweight and fitness.
- contravariant 6y ago
  I'm not a zealot so I'm actually interested in knowing whether this is true, but I noticed that they provide no references for that statement, does anyone know of one?
- bad_user 6y ago
  Proponents of alt-truth theories misunderstand the claim ;-) Yes, we can talk about the thermic effect of food, about how absorption of food differs depending on quality of food, stress, gut health, etc, but on average the effect was measured and is ... negligible. There’s also another misunderstanding ... just because calories are what matters in weight loss or weight gain, it does not follow that counting calories is the best strategy for achieving your goals. It’s a logical fallacy basically, used by alt-truth proponents as evidence that the theory is unsound. For all practical purposes however a calorie is a calorie.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    Yeah, I find the "calories in equals calories out" argument stupid not because it's wrong (it's basically the first law of thermodynamics), but because it's relatively useless, and because its proponents usually use it to imply stuff that isn't true. For example, "calories in" and "calories out" are not independent variables. A reduction of calories in will normally result in the body lowering metabolic rate, resulting in a reduction of calories out. Similarly, humans aren't robots. Any "solution" that basically tells people to ignore their hunger, one of the body's most basic physiological responses, is not a viable society-wide solution.
nkurz 6y ago
The title does not mean that they think calories have no impact on nutrition. They state their stance more clearly midway through the paper: "We need urgently to overturn calorie counting as the mainstay of nutritional advice and prevention of obesity. There is growing consensus that it lacks value as a practical tool in weight management. It is impossible to measure intake accurately, and too many variables influence calorie expenditure to make calorie counting useful. New research in humans suggests our bodies and metabolic rates can behave differently when given identical calories in different contexts." This seems accurate to me. What we're doing isn't working great, and it seems unlikely that if we had less emphasis on calorie counting that the obesity epidemic would be much worse. So let's try something else, and see if it works better!
- bad_user 6y ago
  Having calories on food packages helps though, even if it is reductionist, because it's a good surrogate for foods high in energy, low in nutrients, the kind of food that's designed to be overeaten. For whole food, I agree that calories don't matter because we can trust our satiety signals. For junk food designed to be overeaten, I find that information quite useful. Note that I do track my calories periodically. In spite of popular claims it isn't that hard, technically speaking and it doesn't have to be super accurate. The problem with calorie counting is one of mentality. Because you end up thinking about how many calories you have left, it ends up draining you emotionally and you can suffer binging episodes due to it. The brain is unpredictable and we can't necessarily control ourselves which is why we can get fat in the first place. I think everyone should try to measure their calories for educational purposes. If you do, the best app is Cronometer, by far. But to lose weight you need first of all long term compliance, so you need a strategy that can work long term. Counting calories doesn't work long term if you're too emotional and you can't help to treat those numbers as anything else than just data. Counting calories definitely doesn't work for me.
  - to11mtm 6y ago
    >For whole food, I agree that calories don't matter because we can trust our satiety signals. For junk food designed to be overeaten, I find that information quite useful. One of the things I -really- appreciate with the newer labeling is that it shows both the calories per serving as well as total calories in the package. Giving both numbers helps people understand how much a binge really costs them. Speaking of which, since you mentioned satiety signals... Last night I wound up craving doritos like Stewie griffin eating pancakes. But some mindfulness helped me reach instead for some carrots, which quite frankly were a better crunch, and honestly I felt better after eating them.
whatsmyusername 6y ago
I’ve lost weight multiple times using calorie counting. It’s literally the only thing that works for me.
- alecbenzer 6y ago
  A theory I've heard is that any kind of diet is useful for losing weight, because it forces you to think more carefully about what you're eating. But ditto, I've lost 50lbs twice in my life and both times were basically just via calorie counting.
  - shoes_for_thee 6y ago
    Likewise, in my adventures in power lifting and body building, I gained ~25-40 lbs on several occasions. The only way to do this reliably for me was to count calories. Once you establish your basic metabolic rate, it simply works. Yes, it is a pain in the ass. Yes, it's a lot of effort and discipline.. but the results are predictable and reliable.
war1025 6y ago
Sort of a tangent, but I legitimately thought at the start of lockdown that people would lose weight on average because they couldn't go out to eat anymore. It turns out I just completely underestimated how much people eat out, and how quickly they would all switch to just getting take out. I have friends that would always talk about how we spend way more than them at the grocery store each week. Obviously, they'd tell me, it's because we didn't shop at Aldi. Nope. Turns out it's because we cook and eat at home. I don't remember where I heard it (maybe Michael Pollen?), but the advice I try to follow is: Eat whatever you want, just make it yourself.
- standardUser 6y ago
  It's not just intake but also how many calories we're burning. I've had dozens of days where I've barely moved more than shuffling around my home. Those days were rare or non- existent pre-lockdown. As for eating out, I find it to be one of the great joys of life and civilization and wouldn't give it up for anything.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  The other major factors in people gaining weight during lockdown are: 1. Additional Stress/Anxiety 2. Fridge proximity
  - humanrebar 6y ago
    And alcohol consumption.
    - jeffdavis 6y ago
      Can you explain? Is it a metabolic thing, or is it related to the carb content of beer/wine?
      - humanrebar 6y ago
        Alchohol consumption per capita is way up.
texasbigdata 6y ago
This seems so condescending. Maybe it wasn't their intent. "But obtaining a mere $2m-$4m (£1.6m-£3m; €1.8m-€3.6m) for a nutrition study is a lifetime aspiration for most nutrition scientists".
- tenuousemphasis 6y ago
  Why does that seem condescending?
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    CDCs entire "preventing global disease" division is $450M in funding.... For example.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  If it's an accurate portrayal of their struggle compared to other scientists, then I don't see how it could be considered condescending. It seems sympathetic to me.
hirundo 6y ago
"The top 10 companies control over 70% of what we eat and drink and have annual sales larger than the gross domestic product of many countries ... systemic change is needed first and this is likely to require governmental action.” But when the government acts, it acts according to the influence of the companies that its regulatory agencies have been captured by, particular those same top 10 companies that control most of what we eat and drink. This is not a new development. When U.S. nutritional recommendations emerged in the early 1970s they were already being written by these same companies and their predecessors. From my perspective they were already dead wrong, and those recommendations have wrought enormous damage in chronic disease and lives cut short. There is no realistic prospect that this is about to change. I've been watching as one of my favorite nutrition authors, Nina Teicholz, has been tilting at these windmills via the Nutrition Coalition. They have struggled mightily to present the dissenting science to the people who control these recommendations, and have met with roughly the same success as Don Quixote. Watching them lose their innocence is like watching a slow motion train crash and not being able to do a thing about it. My preference is to get the government out of the nutrition science business, but that's about as unlikely. Barring that the best approach is to either ignore them or count them as just one more opinion, and to do the research and N=1 experimentation for yourself.
- nsl73 6y ago
  > My preference is to get the government out of the nutrition science business, but that's about as unlikely. It’s critically important that the government is in the nutrition science business and it does nutrition science correctly. Think about all of the ways the government is implicitly taking a stance on nutrition. The farm bill, school lunches, checkoff programs, government cheese, prison meals, snap, and many more. The problem is one of incentive alignment. For example, the FDA is responsible for both the agricultural industry and the health of the population, which currently are at odds as the agricultural industry producing a lot of junk food. Democratic systems can work by increasing the transparency of the government and by increasing the education of the voting population.
  - rdudekul 6y ago
    "Democratic systems can work by increasing the transparency of the government and by increasing the education of the voting population." Most of the big problems facing the humanity can be addressed using transparency of government combined with better education for all. To that list I would add, decreasing the role corporate money plays into influencing government and universities. For this to happen we need to rethink Economics (https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_sho...).
snowwrestler 6y ago
Calorie counting functions properly for controlling weight. The physics and chemistry of it is sound. And the empirical proof is the many thousands of professionals who use it successfully: models who need to be a certain shape; football players who need to be heavy so they don't get lifted off their feet by their competitors; or dancers who need to be light so that they can get lifted off their feet by their partners. I say that up-front because there are a bunch of people out there who think that the basic science of calorie counting is wrong; that there are other hidden factors that keep some people thin and make other people fat. BUT, what is true--and which this article highlights--is that calorie counting is super hard to do. As a system, it's hard "operate". You can't make mistakes, like forget to enter a meal or a snack, or forget to properly record activity. And it's kind of miserable to live that way. That's probably one reason it's mostly professionals who really do it well. In software terms, calorie counting has terrible UX. And our food system has bad defaults. The cheapest, most heavily-advertised food is often high in calories per volume. And of course calorie-counting does nothing for your nutrient intake, which is arguably more important to think about now because foods across the board (i.e. even organic kale) seem to have falling nutrient content.
- jhrmnn 6y ago
  Very much agreed. I’ve once tried to count calories for about a month out of curiosity. Having Fitbit and tracking all my (amateur) cycling with a powermeter, I could record calorie output consistently. But if you want to eat out regularly, it becomes extremely difficult to estimate the intake right IMO.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > models who need to be a certain shape; football players who need to be heavy so they don't get lifted off their feet by their competitors; or dancers who need to be light so that they can get lifted off their feet by their partners. I have never seen or heard about a professional diet based on calorie counting. Every single diet is based on a prescription of nutrient types and quantities, when it's not a detailed prescription of food types and quantities. And the diets that end-up working are all revised several times after controlling by patient's health.
fortran77 6y ago
The obese and overweight will see these headlines and keep eating 6,000 kcal/day thinking "See! It doesn't matter."
- sk0g 6y ago
  Anecdotal, but a few overweight people I've known have been terrible at estimating how much they eat. Usually they'd skip over/forget very hefty 'snacks', or think a portion is a portion, while scooping up a small family's serving onto their plate. The really sad thing is when they don't have a coping mechanism for sadness except for eating, which leads to them being sad over body image issues. It's a terribly vicious cycle.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    > Anecdotal, but a few overweight people I've known have been terrible at estimating how much they eat. That's pretty much the thrust of the article. Calorie counting works in theory, but evidently the average person finds it too hard to follow (either miscalculating, overestimating, forgetting to track or just giving up).
hackandtrip 6y ago
I skimmed the contents, but I don't get any alternative to the standard calories counting. It's the only way to quantify the intake without revolutionising the food industry packaging, or am I missing something?
- nsl73 6y ago
  Weight watchers will allow you to scan a barcode of some food and it will tell you how many “points” it is, and someone in weight watchers has a limited number of “points” they can consume in a day. This is an example of an existing solution to quantifying intake without adjusting packaging.
troughway 6y ago
I thought we already knew that caloric contents are context dependent? Or are we living in some strange dietary multiverse? Weight gain, weight loss, muscle gain, muscle loss, are operations almost independent from each other. There’s a lot of huckstering out there that burning fat and gaining muscle are somehow interlinked or “oppose” eachother such that while you do one, you automatically undo the other. But this is just as ridiculous as the constant lack of good information on nutrition. A few days ago we had that article on how Vegan diet tends to have people eating garbage. This is again because eating healthy and avoiding eating X have nothing to do with one another, but in the marketing of things we equate veganism with uber healthy eating. At any rate, we need a comprehensive explanation of how the body works at all stages, and how does nutrition and exercise impact the body at each of these stages. Once you enter ketosis for example, rules change. Something to consider. Food for thought.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Exmoor 6y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but I honestly couldn't disagree more with the overall premise with regards to losing weight. Yes, nutrition is certainly vastly more complicated than the single data point calories provide, but the vast majority of people (myself included) will never, ever be able to ascertain that knowledge much less be able to interpret them in a way useful for their own health benefit. For me, calorie counting was a revelation. I'd tried eating less and exercising more without much success, and then I read a simple explanation of calorie counting and realized the whole thing could be simplified into a simple math problem. If I just kept track of my inputs (food) and roughly knew my outputs I could control my weight. Once I focused on that I lost ~45lbs in a year.
katzgrau 6y ago
If you're just calorie counting, you can certainly have success, but it's not a bad idea to maintain some idea of where you stand in terms of your consumption of fat, carbs, and protein. If you calorie count and generally try to stay around 33/33/33 in terms of percentage of macronutrient consumption by the end of the day, it's hard to go of course. It's a course set of rules, but sometimes keeping it simple as opposed to precise (since the pursuit of precision involves complicated and likely to be overturned theories) makes it easier to embark on that journey to begin with. I can't tell you how many people I know who say that want to lose a few pounds but reject calorie counting because they heard that's not the right way to do it. They rarely find an alternative so they never get started. Im saying that as someone who has gained and lost significant weight to achieve goals (lifting, running, maintenance) at various times. PS: If you do decide to diet, regardless of what you do - cut out alcohol consumption if that's currently a thing for you, and you'll be amazed at how effortlessly weight comes off, even if you don't really make many changes to other parts of your diet.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
There is physics supporting calorie in, calorie out. However, there is also pharmacokinetics to consider...if your calories are a sugary solution like juice, Coke, beer, etc, they will be absorbed into the bloodstream much more quickly, spiking blood sugar and leading to rapid storage in fat cells. Contrast that with the same calories from a lean chicken breast, it's going to be hours until that's fully digested and absorbed, meanwhile it's much more filling and prevents more calories from being eaten. Also because its protein and not sugar, your body metabolizes it differently and it is not going to be stored as efficiently.
jeffdavis 6y ago
I guess the holy grail is to get to the point where you can take some lab tests (genetic?) and a doctor can tell you: "eat this kind of diet, avoid these kinds of foods, and you'll be healthy". Obviously it would take a lot to get there, but having a few high quality studies that can give a lot of people at least some advice (without tons of qualifiers and weasel words) would be a huge help. This might cost ~50B, but that seems worth it.
- conistonwater 6y ago
  This is kind of funny, but we're already there! Take 0 tests, eat a balanced diet with plenty of vegetables, don't eat too much, avoid processed meats and junk food and the rest of it, exercise, and you'll be healthy, you've heard it yourself already too. How many people do you know who'd actually do it if a doctor said something like that to them? You kinda manage to both under- and over-estimate the current abilities of food science at the same time, and if people don't already do the things that we pretty well know for sure, an extra $50B won't really change any of that, that's a people problem.
  - firethief 6y ago
    If people took a high-tech test and were told that that advice was personalized, imagine how much better compliance would be though.
    - conistonwater 6y ago
      So like a very expensive placebo?
      - jeffdavis 6y ago
        Not quite. Right now there's a lot of confusion. Is gluten a problem for me, or dairy, or fat, or sugar, or alcohol, or caffiene? It's easy to get overwhelmed. If you eliminate everything that might be bad for you, there's not a lot left. There's a lot of value in specificity because it's actionable.
paultopia 6y ago
Less p-hacking would be a start.

55 points by barney54 6y ago

I believe it's more urgent to get rid of "serving" as measurement.I recently tried to build up a dash diet shopping list and was sent on a wild hunt for what is a serving exactly (turns out a serving is different depending on the food and measured in different cups and other imperial units). Most dash diet books (or others) I read spend 200 pages out of 250 explaining basic useless nutrition factoids then get on a "sample week menus" that aren't practical at all if all you want to know is "how much pounds of this and that should I eat per day or per week ?". I should open a blog about how to get that (easy recipes, easy shopping list), would be a nice journey.

nsl73 6y ago
It’s a little annoying, but you can do the math with a spreadsheet and a scale. Also many online resources has nutritional information for an item per 100g, and adjusting measurements of weight to other measurements of weight is much easier than adjusting measurements of volume to measurements of weight.

nattefury 6y ago

barney54 6y ago

There is a lot of interesting points in this article--not just about demoting the calorie as nutritional advice--such as the lack of funding for basic nutritional studies and the role of large food companies.

jasonv 6y ago

I couldn’t disagree more, having used it for myself, and having coached hundreds doing it as a personal trainer. An individual who employs reasonable practices well can thrive using this modality. EDIT: IIFYM is “act, measure, adjust” using calorie counting and body weight / size measurements. I understand that there are triggers for some individuals in that statement. Doesn’t really change what needs to be done if body weight / size goals need to be addressed. And yes, there may be other manners of going about this, but those will mostly work around directly engaging in the anchors of IIFYM.

tekproxy 6y ago

I eat 5000 calories worth of sawdust a day and can't gain weight.

ceejayoz 6y ago
Insoluble fiber is not included in calorie counts on nutritional labels.
- makomk 6y ago
  As I understand it, what's actually subtracted from the calorie counts on nutritional labels is a very rough estimate of the number of calories that aren't actually available because they're stuff like insoluble fiber, based mostly on the type of food. So it's not necessarily that accurate.
sk0g 6y ago
What a lame strawman. First off, that's not even food that would be digestible by a human. Secondly, reasonable people don't say all calories are equal, but that estimating TDEE + calories eaten is the best calculation to make for many people, in terms of accuracy vs effort required.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > that's not even food that would be digestible by a human Well that's the point. Obviously not all calories are equal. Nobody ever meant that literally. There are calories in diamonds, but you aren't likely to be able to digest them are you?
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > There are calories in diamonds Not in this context. A nutrition label for a 50 pound diamond would indicate zero calories.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago

maps7 6y ago

> New research in humans suggests our bodies and metabolic rates can behave differently when given identical calories in different contexts. I wonder what the "a calorie is a calorie" zealots would say about this?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jhayward 6y ago
Those folks tend not to be very interested in the actual problems of nutrition and obesity. In my experience, they are much more about sitting in moral judgement of people who have other-than-ideal bodyweight and fitness.
contravariant 6y ago
I'm not a zealot so I'm actually interested in knowing whether this is true, but I noticed that they provide no references for that statement, does anyone know of one?
bad_user 6y ago
Proponents of alt-truth theories misunderstand the claim ;-) Yes, we can talk about the thermic effect of food, about how absorption of food differs depending on quality of food, stress, gut health, etc, but on average the effect was measured and is ... negligible. There’s also another misunderstanding ... just because calories are what matters in weight loss or weight gain, it does not follow that counting calories is the best strategy for achieving your goals. It’s a logical fallacy basically, used by alt-truth proponents as evidence that the theory is unsound. For all practical purposes however a calorie is a calorie.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  Yeah, I find the "calories in equals calories out" argument stupid not because it's wrong (it's basically the first law of thermodynamics), but because it's relatively useless, and because its proponents usually use it to imply stuff that isn't true. For example, "calories in" and "calories out" are not independent variables. A reduction of calories in will normally result in the body lowering metabolic rate, resulting in a reduction of calories out. Similarly, humans aren't robots. Any "solution" that basically tells people to ignore their hunger, one of the body's most basic physiological responses, is not a viable society-wide solution.

nkurz 6y ago

The title does not mean that they think calories have no impact on nutrition. They state their stance more clearly midway through the paper: "We need urgently to overturn calorie counting as the mainstay of nutritional advice and prevention of obesity. There is growing consensus that it lacks value as a practical tool in weight management. It is impossible to measure intake accurately, and too many variables influence calorie expenditure to make calorie counting useful. New research in humans suggests our bodies and metabolic rates can behave differently when given identical calories in different contexts." This seems accurate to me. What we're doing isn't working great, and it seems unlikely that if we had less emphasis on calorie counting that the obesity epidemic would be much worse. So let's try something else, and see if it works better!

bad_user 6y ago
Having calories on food packages helps though, even if it is reductionist, because it's a good surrogate for foods high in energy, low in nutrients, the kind of food that's designed to be overeaten. For whole food, I agree that calories don't matter because we can trust our satiety signals. For junk food designed to be overeaten, I find that information quite useful. Note that I do track my calories periodically. In spite of popular claims it isn't that hard, technically speaking and it doesn't have to be super accurate. The problem with calorie counting is one of mentality. Because you end up thinking about how many calories you have left, it ends up draining you emotionally and you can suffer binging episodes due to it. The brain is unpredictable and we can't necessarily control ourselves which is why we can get fat in the first place. I think everyone should try to measure their calories for educational purposes. If you do, the best app is Cronometer, by far. But to lose weight you need first of all long term compliance, so you need a strategy that can work long term. Counting calories doesn't work long term if you're too emotional and you can't help to treat those numbers as anything else than just data. Counting calories definitely doesn't work for me.
- to11mtm 6y ago
  >For whole food, I agree that calories don't matter because we can trust our satiety signals. For junk food designed to be overeaten, I find that information quite useful. One of the things I -really- appreciate with the newer labeling is that it shows both the calories per serving as well as total calories in the package. Giving both numbers helps people understand how much a binge really costs them. Speaking of which, since you mentioned satiety signals... Last night I wound up craving doritos like Stewie griffin eating pancakes. But some mindfulness helped me reach instead for some carrots, which quite frankly were a better crunch, and honestly I felt better after eating them.

whatsmyusername 6y ago

I’ve lost weight multiple times using calorie counting. It’s literally the only thing that works for me.

alecbenzer 6y ago
A theory I've heard is that any kind of diet is useful for losing weight, because it forces you to think more carefully about what you're eating. But ditto, I've lost 50lbs twice in my life and both times were basically just via calorie counting.
- shoes_for_thee 6y ago
  Likewise, in my adventures in power lifting and body building, I gained ~25-40 lbs on several occasions. The only way to do this reliably for me was to count calories. Once you establish your basic metabolic rate, it simply works. Yes, it is a pain in the ass. Yes, it's a lot of effort and discipline.. but the results are predictable and reliable.

war1025 6y ago

Sort of a tangent, but I legitimately thought at the start of lockdown that people would lose weight on average because they couldn't go out to eat anymore. It turns out I just completely underestimated how much people eat out, and how quickly they would all switch to just getting take out. I have friends that would always talk about how we spend way more than them at the grocery store each week. Obviously, they'd tell me, it's because we didn't shop at Aldi. Nope. Turns out it's because we cook and eat at home. I don't remember where I heard it (maybe Michael Pollen?), but the advice I try to follow is: Eat whatever you want, just make it yourself.

standardUser 6y ago
It's not just intake but also how many calories we're burning. I've had dozens of days where I've barely moved more than shuffling around my home. Those days were rare or non- existent pre-lockdown. As for eating out, I find it to be one of the great joys of life and civilization and wouldn't give it up for anything.
bonestamp2 6y ago
The other major factors in people gaining weight during lockdown are: 1. Additional Stress/Anxiety 2. Fridge proximity
- humanrebar 6y ago
  And alcohol consumption.
  - jeffdavis 6y ago
    Can you explain? Is it a metabolic thing, or is it related to the carb content of beer/wine?
    - humanrebar 6y ago
      Alchohol consumption per capita is way up.

texasbigdata 6y ago

This seems so condescending. Maybe it wasn't their intent. "But obtaining a mere $2m-$4m (£1.6m-£3m; €1.8m-€3.6m) for a nutrition study is a lifetime aspiration for most nutrition scientists".

tenuousemphasis 6y ago
Why does that seem condescending?
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  CDCs entire "preventing global disease" division is $450M in funding.... For example.
happytoexplain 6y ago
If it's an accurate portrayal of their struggle compared to other scientists, then I don't see how it could be considered condescending. It seems sympathetic to me.

hirundo 6y ago

"The top 10 companies control over 70% of what we eat and drink and have annual sales larger than the gross domestic product of many countries ... systemic change is needed first and this is likely to require governmental action.” But when the government acts, it acts according to the influence of the companies that its regulatory agencies have been captured by, particular those same top 10 companies that control most of what we eat and drink. This is not a new development. When U.S. nutritional recommendations emerged in the early 1970s they were already being written by these same companies and their predecessors. From my perspective they were already dead wrong, and those recommendations have wrought enormous damage in chronic disease and lives cut short. There is no realistic prospect that this is about to change. I've been watching as one of my favorite nutrition authors, Nina Teicholz, has been tilting at these windmills via the Nutrition Coalition. They have struggled mightily to present the dissenting science to the people who control these recommendations, and have met with roughly the same success as Don Quixote. Watching them lose their innocence is like watching a slow motion train crash and not being able to do a thing about it. My preference is to get the government out of the nutrition science business, but that's about as unlikely. Barring that the best approach is to either ignore them or count them as just one more opinion, and to do the research and N=1 experimentation for yourself.

nsl73 6y ago
> My preference is to get the government out of the nutrition science business, but that's about as unlikely. It’s critically important that the government is in the nutrition science business and it does nutrition science correctly. Think about all of the ways the government is implicitly taking a stance on nutrition. The farm bill, school lunches, checkoff programs, government cheese, prison meals, snap, and many more. The problem is one of incentive alignment. For example, the FDA is responsible for both the agricultural industry and the health of the population, which currently are at odds as the agricultural industry producing a lot of junk food. Democratic systems can work by increasing the transparency of the government and by increasing the education of the voting population.
- rdudekul 6y ago
  "Democratic systems can work by increasing the transparency of the government and by increasing the education of the voting population." Most of the big problems facing the humanity can be addressed using transparency of government combined with better education for all. To that list I would add, decreasing the role corporate money plays into influencing government and universities. For this to happen we need to rethink Economics (https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_sho...).

snowwrestler 6y ago

Calorie counting functions properly for controlling weight. The physics and chemistry of it is sound. And the empirical proof is the many thousands of professionals who use it successfully: models who need to be a certain shape; football players who need to be heavy so they don't get lifted off their feet by their competitors; or dancers who need to be light so that they can get lifted off their feet by their partners. I say that up-front because there are a bunch of people out there who think that the basic science of calorie counting is wrong; that there are other hidden factors that keep some people thin and make other people fat. BUT, what is true--and which this article highlights--is that calorie counting is super hard to do. As a system, it's hard "operate". You can't make mistakes, like forget to enter a meal or a snack, or forget to properly record activity. And it's kind of miserable to live that way. That's probably one reason it's mostly professionals who really do it well. In software terms, calorie counting has terrible UX. And our food system has bad defaults. The cheapest, most heavily-advertised food is often high in calories per volume. And of course calorie-counting does nothing for your nutrient intake, which is arguably more important to think about now because foods across the board (i.e. even organic kale) seem to have falling nutrient content.

jhrmnn 6y ago
Very much agreed. I’ve once tried to count calories for about a month out of curiosity. Having Fitbit and tracking all my (amateur) cycling with a powermeter, I could record calorie output consistently. But if you want to eat out regularly, it becomes extremely difficult to estimate the intake right IMO.
marcosdumay 6y ago
> models who need to be a certain shape; football players who need to be heavy so they don't get lifted off their feet by their competitors; or dancers who need to be light so that they can get lifted off their feet by their partners. I have never seen or heard about a professional diet based on calorie counting. Every single diet is based on a prescription of nutrient types and quantities, when it's not a detailed prescription of food types and quantities. And the diets that end-up working are all revised several times after controlling by patient's health.

fortran77 6y ago

The obese and overweight will see these headlines and keep eating 6,000 kcal/day thinking "See! It doesn't matter."

sk0g 6y ago
Anecdotal, but a few overweight people I've known have been terrible at estimating how much they eat. Usually they'd skip over/forget very hefty 'snacks', or think a portion is a portion, while scooping up a small family's serving onto their plate. The really sad thing is when they don't have a coping mechanism for sadness except for eating, which leads to them being sad over body image issues. It's a terribly vicious cycle.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  > Anecdotal, but a few overweight people I've known have been terrible at estimating how much they eat. That's pretty much the thrust of the article. Calorie counting works in theory, but evidently the average person finds it too hard to follow (either miscalculating, overestimating, forgetting to track or just giving up).

hackandtrip 6y ago

I skimmed the contents, but I don't get any alternative to the standard calories counting. It's the only way to quantify the intake without revolutionising the food industry packaging, or am I missing something?

nsl73 6y ago
Weight watchers will allow you to scan a barcode of some food and it will tell you how many “points” it is, and someone in weight watchers has a limited number of “points” they can consume in a day. This is an example of an existing solution to quantifying intake without adjusting packaging.

troughway 6y ago

I thought we already knew that caloric contents are context dependent? Or are we living in some strange dietary multiverse? Weight gain, weight loss, muscle gain, muscle loss, are operations almost independent from each other. There’s a lot of huckstering out there that burning fat and gaining muscle are somehow interlinked or “oppose” eachother such that while you do one, you automatically undo the other. But this is just as ridiculous as the constant lack of good information on nutrition. A few days ago we had that article on how Vegan diet tends to have people eating garbage. This is again because eating healthy and avoiding eating X have nothing to do with one another, but in the marketing of things we equate veganism with uber healthy eating. At any rate, we need a comprehensive explanation of how the body works at all stages, and how does nutrition and exercise impact the body at each of these stages. Once you enter ketosis for example, rules change. Something to consider. Food for thought.

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Exmoor 6y ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but I honestly couldn't disagree more with the overall premise with regards to losing weight. Yes, nutrition is certainly vastly more complicated than the single data point calories provide, but the vast majority of people (myself included) will never, ever be able to ascertain that knowledge much less be able to interpret them in a way useful for their own health benefit. For me, calorie counting was a revelation. I'd tried eating less and exercising more without much success, and then I read a simple explanation of calorie counting and realized the whole thing could be simplified into a simple math problem. If I just kept track of my inputs (food) and roughly knew my outputs I could control my weight. Once I focused on that I lost ~45lbs in a year.

katzgrau 6y ago

If you're just calorie counting, you can certainly have success, but it's not a bad idea to maintain some idea of where you stand in terms of your consumption of fat, carbs, and protein. If you calorie count and generally try to stay around 33/33/33 in terms of percentage of macronutrient consumption by the end of the day, it's hard to go of course. It's a course set of rules, but sometimes keeping it simple as opposed to precise (since the pursuit of precision involves complicated and likely to be overturned theories) makes it easier to embark on that journey to begin with. I can't tell you how many people I know who say that want to lose a few pounds but reject calorie counting because they heard that's not the right way to do it. They rarely find an alternative so they never get started. Im saying that as someone who has gained and lost significant weight to achieve goals (lifting, running, maintenance) at various times. PS: If you do decide to diet, regardless of what you do - cut out alcohol consumption if that's currently a thing for you, and you'll be amazed at how effortlessly weight comes off, even if you don't really make many changes to other parts of your diet.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

There is physics supporting calorie in, calorie out. However, there is also pharmacokinetics to consider...if your calories are a sugary solution like juice, Coke, beer, etc, they will be absorbed into the bloodstream much more quickly, spiking blood sugar and leading to rapid storage in fat cells. Contrast that with the same calories from a lean chicken breast, it's going to be hours until that's fully digested and absorbed, meanwhile it's much more filling and prevents more calories from being eaten. Also because its protein and not sugar, your body metabolizes it differently and it is not going to be stored as efficiently.

jeffdavis 6y ago

I guess the holy grail is to get to the point where you can take some lab tests (genetic?) and a doctor can tell you: "eat this kind of diet, avoid these kinds of foods, and you'll be healthy". Obviously it would take a lot to get there, but having a few high quality studies that can give a lot of people at least some advice (without tons of qualifiers and weasel words) would be a huge help. This might cost ~50B, but that seems worth it.

conistonwater 6y ago
This is kind of funny, but we're already there! Take 0 tests, eat a balanced diet with plenty of vegetables, don't eat too much, avoid processed meats and junk food and the rest of it, exercise, and you'll be healthy, you've heard it yourself already too. How many people do you know who'd actually do it if a doctor said something like that to them? You kinda manage to both under- and over-estimate the current abilities of food science at the same time, and if people don't already do the things that we pretty well know for sure, an extra $50B won't really change any of that, that's a people problem.
- firethief 6y ago
  If people took a high-tech test and were told that that advice was personalized, imagine how much better compliance would be though.
  - conistonwater 6y ago
    So like a very expensive placebo?
    - jeffdavis 6y ago
      Not quite. Right now there's a lot of confusion. Is gluten a problem for me, or dairy, or fat, or sugar, or alcohol, or caffiene? It's easy to get overwhelmed. If you eliminate everything that might be bad for you, there's not a lot left. There's a lot of value in specificity because it's actionable.

paultopia 6y ago

Less p-hacking would be a start.