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NancyLebovitz comments on The Science of Cutting Peppers - Less Wrong
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See also Seth Roberts, who's done a lot with self-experimentation by way of many small low-cost experiments looking for large effects.
Seconded.
Reading through his blog shocked me at just how much important stuff you can learn by simple tests.
I've personally experienced several benefits from the results of his/my self experiments. The most noteworthy to this community would be that I have eliminated 3 different causes of mental fatigue. For instance, due to changes in diet, I can go without food all day and still be mentally productive, whereas before, if I hadn't eaten in a few hours, I wouldn't be able to think clearly enough to be productive.
Details? Please? ;-)
In short, replace carbohydrates with animal fats.
I still get hungry if I don't eat all day, and it can still have some negative impact, but it's an order of magnitude less of a problem.
It took a little while for my body to adapt to the changes. I didn't actually take notes, and it was sort of a gradual transition for me, so I'm not sure how long everything took. I'd expect a lot of the benefits to come after the first meal, but by a month or so I think most things stabilized and my tastes adjusted to fit my diet better.
If anyone wants to know more details, I'm more than happy to share, but I'm not sure exactly which parts would be interesting. Just PM me and we can chat.
Why animal fats in particular? This is somewhat disheartening as I find both the idea and the taste of eating mammals to be physically nauseating. Poultry and fish aren't as significant for me, but I don't eat much of those either.
Since you've significantly increased your animal fat intake, how has your animal protein intake changed? Do you just add lard to your diet, or do you eat really fatty cuts of meat?
Partly for the saturated fat, partly for less extreme amounts of omega-6 (though some plant oils are not as bad as others), and partly the personal fact that my stomach doesn't seem to like significant quantities of olive oil, but craves large amounts of animal fat. Whipping cream and butter are both mammal fat that don't require killing the animal - eggs fried in butter are quite tasty :)
I never really monitored the amount of protein I eat, but it has to have gone up. I do eat fatty cuts of meat, but I add a lot of nearly pure fat to my diet, so it's a bit of both.
Good point.
I like butter, though not as much as olive oil, but I also eat a good deal of cheese and eggs, so I guess I already eat a fair quantity of animal fat, just not animal body fat.
Good Calories, Bad Calories is a comprehensive and detailed discussion of why the conventional wisdom on diet is flawed. Here's a less rigorous run down of the different fats. Saturated fat is the main reason to prefer animal fats as it is hard to find in non animal sources. One non animal derived option is coconut oil.
Most people who question conventional wisdom are cranks. As a non-expert, I am not capable of evaluating the object-level arguments on the subject. Why should I grant Gary Taubes any more credibility than any other random person who writes a book with lots of footnotes?
I haven't read the book either.
I don't know about heart disease and cancer risk and I'm in roughly the same epistemic position as you on that.
For plain old fat loss, though, there's more reason to believe that more fat and protein compared to carbohydrates is effective. First, that's what athletes and their nutrition coaches do -- it's always useful to look at the practices of people whose livelihood depends on objective success. Second, I've read a fair number of CDC studies showing that diets have modest to zero effect -- and usually the test diets do not have a high protein + fat to carb ratio. That's weak evidence, but evidence: the stuff that doesn't work is not the candidate in question. Third, it just makes sense that simple sugars break down into glucose faster than anything else, which means a quick spike in blood sugar instead of slow release over time, which means you'll be hungry soon after. No, plausible mechanisms aren't science, but they help. Fourth, it's easy enough to perform the experiment yourself for three months and see what happens.
If you are not confident in your own ability to recognize cranks (either in general or in a particular field) then sticking with conventional wisdom may be your best option. In general my experience is that it is not very difficult to spot genuine cranks however but YMMV. I'd suggest that health in general is a poor place to put great faith in conventional wisdom however since there are many powerful interest groups influencing things like government issued recommendations whose interests are not always well aligned with yours.
Nutrition and diet are relatively amenable to self experimentation however and so at least some claims are fairly easily testable. Obviously you aren't going to be able to confirm claims of reducing your risk of heart disease or various cancers (for example) in the short term but claims about weight loss are trivial to verify and it is not terribly difficult to test other claims by having blood work done (triglyceride levels, LDL/HDL ratios etc.) and by keeping a record of possibly diet related symptoms under different regimes (mood, energy level crashes, digestive problems, etc.).
Thanks for the information. Although I haven't read it, I'm familiar with the topics covered by Good Calories, Bad Calories, and feel that the points it brings up have good support among people who care about the scientific method.
The two pages on Mark Sisson's website that you linked to only claimed that saturated fat isn't bad; I can agree with that, but what I'm really interested in is why you seem to feel that they are especially healthful. It doesn't seem like he claims that.
Well he tends to emphasize that the key to healthy eating is to minimize refined carbohydrate intake and he recommends a protein intake in the range of 0.7-1.0g per lb of lean body mass so fat intake is in part driven by the need to make up the rest of your target calorie intake. Saturated fat seems to be the a fairly healthy way to make up the calorie deficit given the options.
That a much less dramatic claim than it sounded like you were making at first, which is good for me, since it doesn't make me feel obliged to add animal fat to my diet.
I do eat a lot of fat, though mostly unsaturated (nuts and avocado). I also eat a lot of carbs, but I try to eat almost no refined carbohydrates; your example of beans and rice amuses me because brown rice and beans are a significant portion of my diet.
I think beans and rice was actually jimmy's example but yeah, rice is pretty horrendous health wise, brown or not. The jury's still out on beans from what I've read. You can't easily match the calorie intake from grains without upping your fat intake though since you need to eat a hell of a lot of green vegetables to match the caloric value of grains.
Done that myself. It fixes a lot of problems: more energy, easier to stay full for longer on less food, the only "diet" I've ever tried that worked.
It's strange that something so "unnatural" seems to be good for the body along a variety of dimensions. (It's unnatural in the sense that animal products are expensive, and require a lot of biomass input, and so it's weird to make them a dietary staple whereas most of the world lives on grains.)
It's natural in the sense that it seems to be closer to the pre-agricultural diet of hunter gatherers which represents a much larger period of time in our evolutionary history than the relatively recent rise of agriculture. That's the idea underlying the Paleolithic Diet which I've had a lot of success with.
Interesting. I've had little luck with that in the past, due to carb cravings. A few days ago, though, I googled "craving raisins and cheese" (my usual craving) and found a page that suggested this (and other sweets-cravings) were likely a need for tryptophan.
So, yesterday and today I've been taking some L-tryptophan and it seems to have knocked my carb cravings down a bunch; I've not had a compelling urge to eat anything sweet today as yet.
I used to desire carbs, but not particularly more than fats. My appetite for carbs has almost disappeared though. When I look at a plate of rice and beans, my body gives me the "that's not food. I don't want it" feeling.
Thanks for the L-tryptophan tip. I might get some and test it on some carb loving friends.
Mmmm... rice and beans...
Just to add to the anecdotal data, I've had the same experience upping animal fat and being able to be productive (mentally and physically) even without eating, and I work a physically demanding job at night, either of which alone can induce fatigue. I eat mostly butter, egg yolks, cream, coconut oil, and fatty cuts of meat like pork belly and fatty ground beef (epsom salts, mineral water and magnesium supplements take care of any muscle soreness).
The thing holding me back from much more self-experimentation is a good data capture tool. Anyone have any recommendations (web, mac, iPhone)?