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private_messaging comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 3: Did the US Government Give Us Absurd Advice About Sugar? - Less Wrong
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This all [i.e. Taubes' convoluted strawmans] seem rather stupid. The way I understand the mainstream, is that human body is normally very good at absorbing calories from what we eat, and in presence of an excess, storing said excess for future use (trading decreased risk of dying in a famine for increased risk of heart disease in the later years of life). Irrespective of whenever the excess is in form of fats or in form of carbohydrates.
Thus in absence of any other pathology, if you estimate a lower risk of famine, and estimate a longer expected lifespan that would have been typical in the ancestral environment, to eat optimally you will have to ignore natural urges, and instead consume less calories, which I imagine is annoying and uncomfortable. Any circumstances where you stay skinny without having to feel any hunger seem highly suspect. (E.g. I have borderline over-active thyroid and consequently stay skinny no matter what, but it is not normal).
Somewhat orthogonally, for a multitude of reasons you need physical exercise to maintain general health.
If this were true we would expect hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets to become fat if they have had plenty of food for, say, the last seven years. Yet from what I understand hunter-gatherers eating their traditional diets never get fat.
I don't know a lot about hunter gatherers, but it occurs to me that "plenty of food" for a hunter gatherer might be very different from "plenty of food" for your typical Westerner.
In a typical American city, you can walk a a couple hundred feet and buy extremely tasty food equal to half your day's caloric requirements for an amount of money a typical person could earn in 10 or 15 minutes. So the cost of food, in terms of time, mental and physical exertion, inconvenience, etc., is extremely low for your typical Westerner. Even if you live in the sticks, it costs very little in terms of money and exertion to get in your car and hit the drive-thru window at MacDonalds.
For a hunter-gatherers, I doubt it's anywhere near that easy to eat -- even in times of plenty.
Would be awfully hard to check if that's even true for temperate climates. Furthermore, having to go through the trouble of hunting your food adds a negative feedback (the heavier you are the harder it is to hunt).
edit: also, in what conditions would ancestral populations get fat? Getting fat may look like a disorder, but it is a complicated biological process that is not going to be preserved if it has no use.
edit2: also, there's a lot of variation between contemporary populations, e.g. between east Europe and US & west Europe. The key thing is that, well, east is poorer, and if you're gaining weight that means you can save some money on food (yay, good news). Perhaps rather than looking into paleolithic, where there's not much evidence for much anything, we can just look at contemporary populations.
This is a random link that shows the the extent of study that has gone into the question of hunter-gatherers, a study of the diets of 229 hunter-gatherer societies, none of which had the "diseases of civilization" which basically means obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
Relevant to the current discussion, there were several hunter-gatherer societies without obesity that have nonetheless consumed a large percentage of their calories from carbohydrates. An often noted example is the !Kung who got 67% of their calories from plants, and 50% of that from a single source (the mongongo nut) which is plentiful year-round, and yet they are still not obese (this is in a subtropical climate).
Actually, what's up with this fascination with hunters-gatherers and other such exotics? Look at the epidemiology of obesity . The difference is even more dramatic through the time (if you go back 30 years).
Sorry, this recent problem has absolutely nothing to do with dietary changes thousands years in the past (guess what, I just drank some liquid that would make any of those hunter gatherers puke and have a diarrhoea. I can drink this liquid because enough evolution has happened), and everything to do with changes in the past 30 years. Basically same foods, larger amounts, cultural changes (more acceptance of obesity perhaps).
I'm sure there isn't more acceptance of obesity.
Theories I consider more plausible: larger portions, more dieting (rebound effect, including in children and grandchildren of female dieters), higher proportion of simple carbs, prescription drugs which cause weight gain, changes in gut bacteria, less sleep.
I'd think at very least people accept themselves being overweight more when there are other people with that condition.
I agree with the theories except the rebound from dieting, while intuitively sensible, seems empirically dubious - there's been starvation events and/or significant under-eating events (world war 2 related for example), and they didn't seem to rebound like that. Changes in gut bacteria also seem like they should not be relevant. Can't comment on less sleep.
You're guessing.
As far as I can tell, there's more public hatred of fat people than there was forty or fifty years ago-- admittedly there's more public hatred in general.
Worries about being fat are being reported in young children. I don't have a timeline for that, but I don't think it used to be that bad.
As far as I can tell, there being more fat people doesn't lead to more acceptance if practically all of them are blaming themselves for being fat.
So far as rebound from dieting is concerned, you've got a point about starvation events. On the other hand, a lot of people do report gaining about twenty five pounds after each diet, so there may be something new involved.
Recent research is finding that gut bacteria affect how nutrients are absorbed.
It would be hard to measure how the attitudes changed. In general the more people have a condition, the less having that condition makes you stand out, the less does conformity drive you to avoid that condition. Furthermore it would seem to me that "self blame is bad" is a relatively recent idea, as well as blaming everything on metabolic disorders...
Not that those don't play a role. Obviously someone with low levels of certain thyroid hormones will have to ignore hunger more than someone with high levels.
Human digestion is already very efficient... potential gains due to some different bacteria should be insignificant (and would generally be a good thing, i.e. being able to live on less food is good).
Yeah, I dunno. There's definitely something wrong about discontinuity in response to a smoothly changing variable.
edit: an observation, traditionally we'd eat a lot of soups - e.g. borscht, etc. Those are low calorie foods that make you feel full. Now, if you go to a fast food place, or even in a restaurant, there's literally nothing which is low calorie but makes you feel full. Obviously, if you eat the volume of french fries equivalent to the volume of borscht, you're going to be over-eating. West also used to start eating with a soup.
Yes, but I've recently read some comment on some blog stating that in the US, even if you tell people you're on a diet, people will often pressure you into eating high-cal stuff “just this once” (IME the same applies to southern Italy, where there indeed are plenty of big people), whereas in Japan you'd be told “weren't you supposed to be on a diet?” and given stern looks by everyone.
So ISTM that in places like southern Italy (and I'd guess the US too, though I've never been there) “you should be thinner” is used much like belief as attire and not decompartmentalized, or else people are expecting you to achieve that by magic (or maybe by fasting whenever in private or something).
It's the first time I'm trying to lose weight and it's amazing how much energy other people are putting into making it take as much willpower as possible. "Just this once" indeed... For some reason people are also trying to convince me that high calorie foods actually don't contain many calories.
Fat people are also likely to be harassed if they're seen exercising. I think the simplest explanation is that people's beliefs are apt to be incoherent.
A map comparing regions of italy will not tell you much about how italy compares to other countries. A brief search:
http://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/Files/Maps/Global_Obesity_BothSexes_2008.png
... shows that Italy seems to have less obesity than most Western nations.
The point is that energy storage in body fats is normal. Of course in hunter gatherers, there's a multitude of negative feedback mechanisms (e.g. you can't hunt when you're too fat), which presumably can interrupt the weight gain well before it reaches gargantuan proportions (i.e. "obese" BMI).
Ultimately, if you consume a little bit more calories than you spend, you gain weight little by little, and if that goes unchecked, over the years you will get severely overweight, obese, and so on.
edit: albeit maybe the food is to blame as well - it could be that the foods ended up engineered to be enjoyable at lower levels of hunger.
I concur.
Further...
If your objective is to try and provide people with the lowest hanging heuristic for how to avoid unwanted weight gain, avoiding high fat foods is a pretty good candidate, since fat has the highest caloric content per gram (9) when compared to protiens and carbs (4). This appears to be the traditional view that the crazy government is trying to shove down our throats, so to speak.
Along come the carb-cutting people. My hypothesis is that the general rationale for this movement was the recognition that the average American diet was made up of some huge % of carbs (>50% of caloric intake) and so the simple math of avoiding carbs, even if you upped your fat intake, would ensure your daily average caloric intake went down.
Over time, even a relatively small difference in daily average caloric intake can make a relatively large difference in your body weight. For example, a 100 cals/day decrease will yield a ~10lb body mass decrease per yer.
Atkins, the flagship of the carb-cutting movement, advocates an extremely significant decrease in carbs, especially at the outset of the diet. It is zero wonder (to me) as to why it "works" for people. If you basically eliminate carbs from your diet, you'll have to come up with creative way to even find ways to equal your former carb-including diet. You're gonna lose weight pretty fast if you stick to the diet. (duh)
Cutting curbs does not preclude the logic of the crazy goverment's advice to avoid fatty foods. Though there may be some physiological benefits to either low-carb or low-fat diets, in terms of overall weight loss, the primary mechanism is the same: calorie control. This isn't a situation where one is (anything but marginally) better than the other.
We might expect Dr. Atkins, and every other diet-movement guy out there, to try and spin their particular brand of weight loss strategy as something unique and magical. In fact, it seems the existence of the economics of the self-help universe along with the difficult challenge of losing weight (or staying happy or having a good romantic relationship or being successful in your career, etc.) pretty much guarantees that people are gonna keep coming up with new ways of saying the same thing: Eat less calories (or any of the other basic level advice that leads to the other topics of interest often tackled by the self-help universe), and then putting a picture of themselves wearing a big smile and a lab coat on the cover of their book/website, and pretending to have discovered a Revolution in Weight Loss! that turn all the old-fashioned conventional wisdom on its head.
As a historical claim, I believe that this is false. The opposition to consuming fat is primarily about correlation with heart disease. Certainly none of the examples of government advice in this post are about weight loss.
They wrote down their reasons and this certainly isn't any of reasons that Atkins gives.
While that is widely claimed, it is false. Think about it for a minute: do you really think that a decade of such deprivation would kill a light person? The problem is not all the complications of metabolism that people bring up in these posts, but the very basic fact that energy consumption is roughly proportional to body mass. Under that model, a caloric deficit will not lead to linear weight loss nor a surplus to linear weight gain. Instead, the new caloric intake is enough to support a new weight and the difference between the current and new weight decays exponentially. Here is a recent model, with some testing; one of the authors is quoted claiming that a 100 Cal/day deficit will lead to a total loss of 10lb, after about 3 years.
Thanks for this. It is the first substantive comment I've seen.
I read the NYT article; the other is above my head. Frankly, I don't buy this: "Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one."
I think they are observing (primarily) genetically slow metabolisms.
I'd agree that the 3500 calorie = 1lb of weight loss is not linear because 100 pound people don't disappear in 10 years. Conventional wisdom says that metabolism will adjust to a 100 cal deficit so that one would need to reduce cals more with time In order to achieve the same result. OR they would need to add exercise, which is also conventional wisdom.
Would you agree that this: "An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one." is because they are looking at people with genetic abnormalities?
genetic abnormalities implies it's not a giant fraction of the population. I think it's very likely that either because of historic population genetics or possibly gut flora biomes that different people simply will gain different amounts of weight from the same food over the course of their lives.
Downvoted. You understood what was meant, yet chose to 'win the argument' instead of helping correct the wording to make it easier for others to understand.
Example of proper clarification:
"Over time, consuming fewer calories than you burn can make a relatively large difference in your body weight. For example, consuming 100 cals/day less than you burn will yield a ~10 lb body mass decrease per year."
And yes, this is quite sufficient to kill most people within ten years.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but:
Why is “per gram” the relevant metric? It should be something more like “per unit ‘satiating power’” (to the extent that such a thing can be defined). If drinking a half-litre bottle of Coke doesn't make me less hungry than before¹ but eating a cone of ice cream makes me feel full, if I want to reduce my calorie intake it makes more sense to forgo the former even if it weighs several times as much.
That makes sense. I think calories per gram is a reasonably good metric, but there are probably much better ones.
I think the principle still holds: low fat or low carb diets work (when they do) because it is a simple way to help a consumer modify their diet using the lowest hanging fruit based on some reasonable logic (i.e. cut fat 'cuz generally high calories, or cut carbs cuz' Americans generally eat lots of them). You don't have to think about it, and once you form the habit, it's relatively easy to stick to.
Seems to me that this strategy is vulnerable to munchkinism (haha) by the food industry. Which sells "low fat" this and "reduced fat" that. Although fat content used to be a pretty good proxy for unhealthy food, it may be only a proxy.
"Although fat content used to be a pretty good proxy for unhealthy food" examples? Do you mean used to as in the 1980s or used to as in the 1880s?
Doughnuts, french fries, ice cream
1980s
What's unhealthy about ice cream (assuming you're not lactose-intolerant)?
The fat, which is debatable, the sugar, which may also debated, and the ability to eat quart of it without being hungry.
Basically it tastes too good. There is something about foods which taste really good which (for many people) messes up their internal system for eating urges. This is my lay conclusion, resulting from nearly 2 years of informal research into obesity and diet.
This assumes that the average person can meaningful succeed in his attempt to eat less and beat his hunger. What people eat has a lot to do with the desires of the body for food and if you starve a body of fat that has consequences.
Such as? And if you just lower the fat intake?
Hunger. Jojo dieting is a huge failure mode.
The German word "jo-jo" corresponds to the English word "yo-yo."
Thanks. Those words that sound the same way but are spelled differently lend themselves to mistakes.
This is the crux of it: If you wanna weigh less, you gotta eat less.
Tell a person who"s 1.60 meter tall and who wants to be taller: If you want to be taller you need to grow more.
But there are adults who've lost a sizeable fraction of their body weight without any surgery, whereas hardly anybody grows taller.
Oh my god.
As I've said, losing weight is much more complex than just eating less... but the center of the issue is calorie control.
This is an issue where I think LW has collectively lost its mind.
Mainstream health advice with is centered around that maxim has failed to provide people who want to lose weight with a way that performs well.
What kind of evidence makes you think that a nutrition strategy should be centered around that maxim?
You'll have to restate this.
Dunno if it's not mainstream enough for you, but FWIW as of now the average rating of The Hacker's Diet on Goodreads is 3.85 out of 5.
If one wants to get simplistic, saying "calorie control" is horribly wrong as a first approximation.
It's calories versus metabolism. That at least recognizes a trade off, instead of picturing calorie control as a single unopposed knob to tune your weight.
And yet there are people who can eat a lot without gaining weight.