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Brillyant comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 3: Did the US Government Give Us Absurd Advice About Sugar? - Less Wrong
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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.
If you look at a modern home you can see that the surface area of heating equipment is important for a warm home. You could run and tell people who want warmer homes to increase that surface area.
In reality a much better advice is to turn the thermostat. You can be right about some parts but still miss the point.
There are multiple ways you can theoretically approach weight loss.
I think that calorie control is a center piece of the mainstream view.
As far as I can see preaching calorie control is not effective.
Gary Taubes focuses on reducing eating carbohydrates that raise insulin.
Another approach would be Seth Roberts set point frame. If you follow it than you give people nose clips and let them drink a bit of oil.
There are people who practice hypnosis who also operate on the set point model.
There are people who tell you that the key is about starting to listen to your body and perceive signals from it that most people ignore.
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.
I don't think that the Hacker"s diet is a mainstream work. It"s not written by a nutrition professor or by a government health agency but by a tech CEO.
I don't think that says much. The number also happens to be lower than Gary Taubnes Good Calories, Bad Calories.
As far as the Hackers diet itself goes, it preaches to measure weight with moving averages and make decisions based on that measurement.
As far as I know you can't even buy a scale that does moving averages automatically that's how non-mainstream the recommendations of the hackers diet happens to be.
I think if you ask most mainstream health folks what they think about moving averages for weight measurements they have no idea what you are talking about.
In a world where studies indicate that people who weight themselves daily lose more weight, a lot of mainstream health advice recommends against daily weighting to avoid negative emotions associated with seeing your weight.
I see nobody funding a study to see whether a scale that measures someone weight and then gives them the moving average performs against a scale that just tells people their weight directly.
Mainstream nutrition researchers focus to much on food to investigate theories like that.
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.