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All-you-can-eat study shows body copes well with one-off calorie indulgence
- sbierwagen 6y agoN = 14 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/physiological-responses-to-maximal-eating-in-men/25C29D75CB1553B9D3D23E276295A4D8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
- saas_sam 6y agoSample size isn't as big of a deal-breaker as the layperson may think. If the mechanism of action is well understood and the potency of the effect is strong, you don't need a big sample size. For an extreme but apt example of this: how many people really need to be beheaded to prove that it kills someone to a reasonable degree?
- kickling 6y agoHow many other factors than beheading can affect a persons risk of dying from being beheaded?
- thaumasiotes 6y agoA huge number. People die without being beheaded all the time.
- youdonthavekids 6y agoYou did not understand the question.
- mgraczyk 6y agoThe relevant statistic is not how many people die, it's how many people die in a short time window. The probability of a particular person dying in a 5 minute interval after being beheaded is much larger than the probability of a particular person dying in an interval after they were not beheaded.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoThat just shows that beheadings are targeted at people who were already about to die.
- mgraczyk 6y agoYeah I think it really reveals a breakdown in our ability to quantitively model the intuitive notion of "causality". A targeted public health intervention that prevented beheadings just at the time of beheading would clearly break the link in the causal change. This result is insensitive to any imaginable confounders. However, the executioner would find another strategy, say a gunshot or noose, which did not appear anywhere in our dataset. Really makes you question the validity of observational studies. At least when acts of government are concerned.
- nsl73 6y agoYes the answer is more than 1, but because the mechanism of action is so well understood and the temporal association so strong the answer is less than 10.
- dooglius 6y agoThat's not a good example because we (implicitly) make conclusions based on the very large background control group of people who rarely die.
- Natsu 6y agoOver what time period? Sure, if you measure the time surrounding the beheading, it's obvious, but if you expand the time range far enough, then you find out that everybody dies whether they're beheaded or not and suddenly it looks irrelevant.
- riotman 6y ago> If the mechanism of action is well understood In OP's paper, I'm not sure if they met this criteria.
- sbierwagen 6y agoWow, motte and bailey. Hengist et al publish a toy paper where they fed 14 guys pizza and ran a blood panel. Sure, why not. Probably took an afternoon, and was real cheap to do, gave some of his grad students publication credits and LaTeX experience. We learn that eating a pizza will not instantly give you diabetes, or make you obese, which we already knew. This, by itself, is fine. Separately, the University of Bath has a press office which is required to issue a certain number of press releases per year, even when the research isn't interesting. Again, no real problem. Plenty of press releases are issued with nobody ever reading them. If the University of Bath wants to employ people to do nothing useful, that's their own business. This press release is submitted to HN and gets a bunch of upvotes. Problem. People in the comments try to generalize the study. Big problem! The paper had no followup, no dose schedule, tiny experimental groups... because it wasn't trying to solve obesity! Nobody knows what's causing the obesity epidemic. There are many hypotheses, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results. There is no reliable way to lose weight.1 There are many diets that work for some people, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results. This is a nice little toy study. I don't doubt the data or the results. I just don't think it's useful. And studying obesity certainly isn't like running a randomized clinical trial on if beheading will kill a person! --- 1: Yes, if you lock someone in a cage and not give them food, they will lose weight. Obviously. Once you release them back into modern society, they will regain that weight.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- totony 6y ago>There is no reliable way to lose weight Correct me if I'm wrong but that is false. It seems pretty well known and accepted that caloric intake below BMR will make you lose weight. Your BMR might fluctuate, but if you take that into account there shouldn't be a problem. Going back into society and resuming your previous eating habits (before the cage) will ofc make you gain weight because your BMR will have lowered during your starvation.
- saas_sam 6y ago
- sadfev 6y agoYup, worthless. It doesn’t account for different metabolisms, age and eating habits sufficiently to be considered worthwhile.
- hprotagonist 6y agoIt shouldn't be terribly surprising that we do OK with "feast and famine", especially if you're young. I remember being 16 and eating an entire large NY pizza for an afternoon snack before dinner... I assert without proof that it's the all-feast-all-the-time dietary novelty for most of humanity in the last, oh, 200 years that probably throws a spanner in the works.
- centimeter 6y agoAnother complication is that most of our ancestors would probably only have been "feasting" on meat - there wouldn't have been any bread, sugar, palm oil, etc. in the mix.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoI'm not sure that's correct. Honey and fruit feasts are both quite common among extant forager groups in Africa. I don't see why our ancestors wouldn't have made use of the same resources.
- hprotagonist 6y agothat's at best a very contentious claim. Midden heaps tend to preserve bones longer than carrot-tops, though, which certainly skews the record. Certainly the vast majority of humanity throughout written history -- numerically, the bulk of our ancestry -- has subsisted primarily on non-meat foods, be they wheat, barley, maize, or whatever. Peasants were not regularly eating meat; often we have the written record to point to for that, as well as archaeological evidence from grave finds and the like. and my usual critique of "paleo" holds here, which is that it ignores evolution. As a species, we've evolved the persistence of digesting lactose at least twice, in independent subgroups, through two different metabolic pathways, so it's not like we're incapable of getting used to dietary shifts over the span of human history.
- distrill 6y agoMy addition is purely anecdotal, but I've noticed in my family that it's the overweight members who make the most noise about overeating on holiday meals. It seems to me that they're not fat because of overeating during the holidays, they're fat because they overeat all year.
- notJim 6y ago> Hormones that are released by the gut to stimulate insulin secretion and increase feelings of fullness were changed the most by overeating (e.g. GLP-1 and peptide YY). I wonder if people who chronically overeat (hello!) develop insensitivity to these hormones, leading to a cycle where it becomes harder to eat the correct amount. Similarly, I wonder if people who tend to eat too little are hyper-sensitive to them, making it hard to gain weight.
- leetrout 6y agoI think it’s a lot of what Tim Ferris talks about in 4 Hour Body.
- pier25 6y agoI once worked with a biochemist that works on diets and he told me that the body "forgets" how to process carbs after a couple of days. If you only indulge in carbs once a week it won't be able to process it, much like the cheat day thing from Tim Ferris. I don't remember the exact technical mechanism he described and quite frankly I don't know if it's true... but there you go.
- mrfusion 6y agoInteresting idea. Tim is fine with slow carbs though like legumes.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago> I wonder if people who chronically overeat (hello!) develop insensitivity to these hormones, leading to a cycle where it becomes harder to eat the correct amount. Sounds like Leptin Resistance. [0] I wonder if I have that. When I see that my rather sedentary lifestyle means I'm only supposed to eat 2,000 calories a day, I don't see how the hell that's possible without constant hunger. Even if I eat a diet rich in protein and fiber, which is supposed to make me feel fuller longer, I'm still always hungry. I can eat a 20 oz ribeye with a large side of broccoli and wheat rolls (A meal that's likely 1500+ calories) and still be hungry in only 2-3 hours. If I eat something in the 600 calorie range, like a 10 oz chicken breast and veggies, I'll be hungry again in an hour, if I ever even feel full at all. Meanwhile, I know a couple people that say "I eat like a lion and I can't gain weight!" then discover that they'll cook up an 8 oz filet and sides and be full without even eating it all. [0] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/leptin-101 https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/leptin-101
- opportune 6y agoIs this really that interesting? Overeating doesn’t appear to affect blood sugar beyond regular eating in healthy adults - seems normal to me. Lipids didn’t spike after a single meal - also seems normal. All they found is that these are linear up to the point of satiety and then the body’s hormones keep levels in check beyond that.
- notJim 6y agoWhy this anti-intellectualism? Are studies only worth doing or reading if you personally find the results surprising? If we don't have data about something, we should get it, rather than just assuming our intuitions are correct.
- opportune 6y agoI’m not being, or at least intending to be, anti-intellectual. I do think that a study confirming something this obvious is not notable or interesting enough to be at the top of HN though
- enjeyw 6y agoI personally agree that you're not being anti-intellectual, and that your original question was valid. That said, I think there's huge value in studies that scientifically validate things we believe to be true to 'common knowledge' (because often common knowledge is totally wrong), which justifies this study being at the top of HN.
- ska 6y agoConsidering how little we actually understand scientifically about these processes, nearly any good study (not a judgement on this paper) would seem to be worth doing.
- jldugger 6y agoI guess it's the difference between science and news. We can do all kinds of confirm common belief science, but maybe it's not worth the HN thread when common beliefs are upheld?
- rozab 6y agoThis makes sense to me since early humans hunted large game. Also, feasting seems to be present in some form in almost all human cultures. If it really were harmful, I would expect some cultures to have figured that out.
- benatkin 6y agoAdd Brazilian Steakhouses to the list of anecdotes.
- rootusrootus 6y agoI really love going to Fogo de Chao, but it's hard not to overindulge. The worst I've ever felt in my life was after a trip to Fogo. An hour later I was still just sitting up straight on my couch trying not to look as uncomfortable as I felt. Took a while before I went back again, and I had a lot more control.
- carrolldunham 6y ago> Four hours after eating maximally, the participants [...] reported no desire to eat anything else, including sweet foods. This was surprising because reward centres in the brain are usually food specific, so eating pizza might not be expected to change the desire for sweet food. No it's not surprising because - whether it's contrary or not the neurodrivel "reward centres in the brain" i'm not sure - as an adult you know that craving for a specific food item is entirely a high-level construction in your psychology to do with the story you're telling yourself about what it will mean to eat that, etc. and you should have experienced that it will go away as soon as you eat enough of anything else.
- cma 6y agoThis seems very handwavey given things like pica disorders stemming from anemia and stuff.
- piva00 6y agoSweet foods work differently in our brains though [0], it is surprising that people would reject sweet foods in that case. [0] https://particle.scitech.org.au/food/always-have-room-for-dessert-heres-why/ https://particle.scitech.org.au/food/always-have-room-for-de...
- curiousllama 6y ago> Young men can eat twice as much food as they need to feel ‘full’, research shows. I. AM. SHOCKED.
- yboris 6y ago"The researchers acknowledge that their study involved healthy young men, so they plan to investigate whether similar effects are apparent in women, and for overweight and older populations."
- distrill 6y agoBy definition this would be hard to test with an overweight population. The reason they're overweight is because their calorie indulgence is not one-off.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoThis was a big thing with Tim Ferris when he was making an argument for "cheat days". Personally, I also found cheat days to be effective when on a restrictive diet. I think he ended up actually weighing his poop to prove the point. I did notice that I couldn't breakthrough some key weight loss levels without both cheat days and intermittent fasting, with the cheat days seeming counter-intuitive to me.
- mrfusion 6y agoWhat point did he prove? I don’t remember that part.
- mrfusion 6y agoIt seems like this would be obvious. Why would one instance of overeating damage your metabolism?
- jmcgough 6y agoA lot of things that seemed obvious at the time (spontaneous generation, geocentrism) didn't turn out to be true after being studied.
- kevincox 6y agoYou can also find this anecdotally by talking to competitive eaters. They will almost all tell you that as long as you eat a regular amount of calories most days they have no problem with weight gain from binge eating once or twice a week. AKA there is there is a difference between eating 2000 calories 6 days a week and 6000 one day than eating 2500 calories 7 days a week.
- xenospn 6y agoFascinating. I thought it was more like once a month.
- d4mi3n 6y agoThis makes sense to me given a layperson's understanding of biology and evolution. In modern times, food is plentiful. Throughout history, it was not: people often had to eat what was on hand, and make use of as much of the available calories present when they had the opportunity. I'm also curious if there's any research done on things we get from binge eating that are not calories. Do we see a similar uptake of nutrients? Is eating less efficiently from a calorie perspective still beneficial in evolutionary terms if we get something else (vitamins, minerals, etc)?
- mrfusion 6y agoI have always wanted to see that idea studied. Is it possible? Any further reading? It certainly violates calories in/calories out. But I’m ok with that. We’re not steam engines.
- hammock 6y agoIt's called homeostasis. This is the reason why it's hard to lose weight and keep it off. Your body has "set points" that it creates, and it takes a consistent effort to push your body off of that set point and dig a groove into a different one.
- dirtyid 6y agoI have AYCE sushi scheduled monthly as part of lifting routine, and notice overcompensation that day has no real long term consequences. Body will either eat less or shit more in the following days. I track calories as well and will definitely end the week with AYCE surplus, which never makes it to scale weight.
- refurb 6y agoDo you notice water gain? Back when I worked out 6 days a week, cardio and weights, I'd do the binge meal for one dinner a week. I'd eat whatever the heck I wanted and have a beer or two. It was a good way to not feel like your depriving yourself. That said, I'd usually notice the scale went up the next morning by 3-5 lbs. It was pretty much water weight from the carb overload and it went away after a couple days.
- dirtyid 6y agoYeah, a few days of incredible water bloat from extra carbs = exploit schedule for extra cushion on squat days. Otherwise, all things normalized like calorie + pedometer for NEAT + morning weigh in trend suggest thousands of indulgence calories just goes straight the colon. If I spread the extra calories over weekdays, I will gain weight. If I skip fiber, the food will stay around (=more absorption?) and I will gain weight. I've also done big weekly binges a few years ago to similar affect. 6000 calories over 3-4 meals just doesn't account get registered on the scale at the end of the month. Had to stop due to heartburn :-/.
- gruez 6y agoSo are "one-off calorie indulgences" okay because they're smaller in scale than long term over eating, or because they're not frequent? In other words, is eating 3000 more calories for one meal, once per month worse/better/equal for you than eating 100 more calories every day?
- Noumenon72 6y agoI suspect that either your gut bacteria, or general homeostasis, don't make permanent changes based on one-off indulgences. I even think that bingeing gives you psychological safety to eat fewer calories -- your body "knows" it will catch up eventually, so it doesn't demand you get 2400 calories every single day. This is just my experience as someone who eats a full bag of Doritos/peanut butter cups every 3-5 days and got to middle age without getting fat.
- obilgic 6y agoBody can only consume X amount of calories from the food you eat every day (just like any other process/machine it has its upper limit), and the rest will be thrown out without being digested. That's why short bursts of high calorie intake won't result anything more than the X amount. However reaching that upper limit everyday will add up to weight gain.
- aidenn0 6y agoSource? I'm almost certain that's not true. The human body is fairly stingy about sending digestible calories out as waste.
- baal80spam 6y agoI was wondering about this myself for some time now. I haven't been able to find any research regarding the amount of food/energy/calories that human body is able to digest. For example: I eat 10 buns with butter. How much of this food will be digested by my body and how much will 'go through' and not be converted into energy? What's the ratio? Is there even a ratio or everything we eat we eventually digest?
- aidenn0 6y agoDietary fiber is known to be largely undigested, (the microbes in your intestine will feed off of them). Your body is really efficient at pulling nutrients from simple carbohydrates and fats. I forget what happens to excess protein though.
- crazygringo 6y agoSome commenters here are misinterpreting the headline/article -- the study does NOT say you won't gain weight! It mainly just says your blood sugar won't spike, which is entirely expected ("managed to keep the amount of nutrients in the bloodstream within normal range"). Emphasis added: > "Specifically, those tested in this study were able to efficiently use or store the nutrients they ingested during the pizza-eating challenge, such that the levels of sugar and fats in their blood were not much higher than when they ate half as much food. The main problem with overeating is that it adds more stored energy to our bodies (in the form of fat)..." This just confirms the conventional understanding of how our bodies work. The raised insulin levels quickly convert excess blood sugar into glycogen and fat. A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting this headline as meaning you won't gain weight from a single meal. This study does NOT support that conclusion!
- CarbyAu 6y agoHuh. So everything in moderation, including moderation.
- Markoff 6y agoOnly twice as much? I'm quite surprised, when I used to go to AYCE buffets I could easily push it to 3-4 times to make it worth the money, twice as much would not be worth the money.
- dgudkov 6y agoNo surprise, TBH. For thousands of years prehistoric humans didn't eat similarly sized meals N times a day every day. They ate whenever and whatever they could hunt/catch. Which means huge meals after days/weeks of hunger only to have days/weeks of hunger again. No wonder our bodies are well adapted to such irregularities.