4 ms·

There's been a rash of nutrition articles on HN recently. Many challenge the traditional low-fat diet hypothesis. I am beginning to believe some of these articl

There's been a rash of nutrition articles on HN recently. Many challenge the traditional low-fat diet hypothesis. I am beginning to believe some of these articles. But damn, why do I always get the sense that all these articles are pushing some agenda? I feel like an observer in a war, and that I should take sides, but I don't know which side to take because everyone's trying to promote what they believe. I tried googling "ketosis" today. Oops. All the results are apologists for the Atkins Diet saying things like "there is NO EVIDENCE ketosis is bad for you", with lots of bold lettering. Wikipedia has a "controversy" section, which is always a bad sign. Basically I don't know what to believe. There must be people who treat nutrition like a science, but I can't find them...

pj 17y ago
It's not a difficult equation. If you consume more calories than you burn, those calories are converted to fat. The problem is that people want to eat and they end up wanting more than they need. Controlling these urges is sometimes difficult. Especially if meals are high in sugar content. But we also like sugar. The problem really is the curbing of desire.
- derefr 17y ago
  I don't think I would really put it as a matter of "desire"—humans are control systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_system The problem is not that we "want" to eat, in some sort of non-scientifically-deducible free-willed manner, but that the reference value for our "hunger" control is set too high, and so we feel hungry when we shouldn't, and don't feel full when we should. Interestingly, this (and other control systems) are all linked to serotonin: depression moves the reference value down, making you eat more to feel full; anti-depressants move it up, causing a symptom of "lack of appetite." The true diet pill would just be a very selective SSRI, to move your hunger referent to the correct position without affecting your other controls. People don't the idea that they should be taking pills to solve their weight-gain because they have a "brain imbalance", though, so they will just keep trying, and failing, to use conscious willpower to overcome their controls, no matter what gets invented in the meantime.
  - timf 17y ago
    From personal experience, I would absolutely say that a huge component of "desire" can be eliminated by a low glycemic diet (this is orthogonal to depression, I cannot speak to that). The blood sugar/insulin "roller coaster" can be avoided: rises in blood sugar stimulate an insulin response, insulin is released to move the glucose, but eventually this causes a dip which triggers (somewhat misleading) hunger pangs. The trick is to get this to happen as little/gently as possible and those pangs go away. I do it every day and I've lost weight for the past ~20 weeks without being hungry. No willpower is required, just consistency (and taking a great interest in it all...).
hristov 17y ago
Yeah, I hear you. It is rather scary because people that have bought into a particular diet theory are very adamant in supporting it. You would not want to admit that years of suffering to get onto some type of diet were in vain. My personal ethos is the caveman diet. Which means just try to eat what a caveman would have eaten. If one looks at the evolutionary development of man, most of it was spent as a hunter and gatherer. So you can be sure that our digestive system has more or less evolved for the hunter gatherer lifestyle and/or primitive farmer lifestyle. The time humans started modern farming has been far too little to cause any changes. So my theory is to try to eat what a hunter gatherer would have eaten. I guess that means a lot of vegetables and fruits, starch is ok, whole grain bread, and some meat but not a lot in comparison with everything else, and of course little/no fat. Of course there are people that treat nutrition like a science, and you can see a lot of scientific articles, but it is very uncertain because it is very difficult to run experiments on humans.
thras 17y ago
Read Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories. I have never come across a more thoroughly researched book. Taubes, a journalist for Science magazine, was really slumming it to be writing about nutrition.

pj 17y ago

It's not a difficult equation. If you consume more calories than you burn, those calories are converted to fat. The problem is that people want to eat and they end up wanting more than they need. Controlling these urges is sometimes difficult. Especially if meals are high in sugar content. But we also like sugar. The problem really is the curbing of desire.

derefr 17y ago
I don't think I would really put it as a matter of "desire"—humans are control systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_system The problem is not that we "want" to eat, in some sort of non-scientifically-deducible free-willed manner, but that the reference value for our "hunger" control is set too high, and so we feel hungry when we shouldn't, and don't feel full when we should. Interestingly, this (and other control systems) are all linked to serotonin: depression moves the reference value down, making you eat more to feel full; anti-depressants move it up, causing a symptom of "lack of appetite." The true diet pill would just be a very selective SSRI, to move your hunger referent to the correct position without affecting your other controls. People don't the idea that they should be taking pills to solve their weight-gain because they have a "brain imbalance", though, so they will just keep trying, and failing, to use conscious willpower to overcome their controls, no matter what gets invented in the meantime.
- timf 17y ago
  From personal experience, I would absolutely say that a huge component of "desire" can be eliminated by a low glycemic diet (this is orthogonal to depression, I cannot speak to that). The blood sugar/insulin "roller coaster" can be avoided: rises in blood sugar stimulate an insulin response, insulin is released to move the glucose, but eventually this causes a dip which triggers (somewhat misleading) hunger pangs. The trick is to get this to happen as little/gently as possible and those pangs go away. I do it every day and I've lost weight for the past ~20 weeks without being hungry. No willpower is required, just consistency (and taking a great interest in it all...).

hristov 17y ago

Yeah, I hear you. It is rather scary because people that have bought into a particular diet theory are very adamant in supporting it. You would not want to admit that years of suffering to get onto some type of diet were in vain. My personal ethos is the caveman diet. Which means just try to eat what a caveman would have eaten. If one looks at the evolutionary development of man, most of it was spent as a hunter and gatherer. So you can be sure that our digestive system has more or less evolved for the hunter gatherer lifestyle and/or primitive farmer lifestyle. The time humans started modern farming has been far too little to cause any changes. So my theory is to try to eat what a hunter gatherer would have eaten. I guess that means a lot of vegetables and fruits, starch is ok, whole grain bread, and some meat but not a lot in comparison with everything else, and of course little/no fat. Of course there are people that treat nutrition like a science, and you can see a lot of scientific articles, but it is very uncertain because it is very difficult to run experiments on humans.

thras 17y ago

Read Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories. I have never come across a more thoroughly researched book. Taubes, a journalist for Science magazine, was really slumming it to be writing about nutrition.