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brazil84 comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Final: The Truth About Diets and Weight Loss - Less Wrong
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It occurs to me that there are two separate questions:
Do low carb diets work better than other diets?
Do low carb diets work at all?
Even if the answer to the first question is "yes," the answer to the second question is clearly "no." In the sense that the vast majority of people end up regaining weight regardless of the diet they are on.
That's a big problem for Taubes' nutritionistic theory. Let's assume for the moment that Taubes is correct, that if you simply eliminate "refined carbohydrates" (whatever that means) from your diet, you can eat anything else ad libitum and get and stay thin. The fact that low-carb dieters experience weight regain must then mean that they are experiencing difficult-to-resist urges to consume refined carbohydrates. But if you find some way to resist difficult-to-resist urges, then arguably you don't need low carb dieting in the first place.
I imagine Taubes' supporters would respond that a low-carb dieter's difficult-to-resist urges are less difficult to resist than those of other dieter's. Which may be true, but it doesn't change the fact that -- any way you slice it --
(1) The central and essential problem of successful dieting is dealing with the problem of difficult-to-resist urges;
(2) Taubes' approach does not solve this problem.
Preponderance of research indicates that high carb meals (especially in form of starches) are more satiating for the same calories than high fat meals, so it is probably not even true that the urges are lessened. There are some counter-intuitive immediate effects (loss of water) and certain psychological factors (it's more fun for some people to believe that mainstream is completely wrong) which can explain the appeal of the low carb dieting.
Another issue is that of health. There's no reason what so ever that the easiest to resist diet would be the healthiest one. If anything, we ought to expect ourselves to naturally avoid at least some highly unhealthy meals, and so a diet that is very unhealthy may be easier to resist overeating on.
On the satiation research:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17539869
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10435117
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7900695
and so on and so forth.
Well I suppose that Taubes' supporters would argue that protein provides extra satiation. Not that it really matters, because there doesn't seem to be a magic balance of macronutrients which lets you eat ad libitum; get and stay thin; and avoid the problem of difficult-to-resist eating urges.
Yes. You know, I have wondered about the chart which shows an average long term weight loss of 5 extra pounds among low-carb dieters. How much of that 5 pounds is water?
I think you mean the "easiest to stick to diet." But anyway, we need to be clear about what "healthiest" means. It occurs to me that "healthy" is multi-dimensional when it comes to food. That said, if your point is that on balance, being a few pounds lighter from low-carb dieting is not necessarily a net benefit in terms of cardiovascular health; metabolic health; etc., I would have to agree with you.
Obesity is a very recent problem, though, so there's something that could be done for majority of people - if anything, rolling back a few decades on as many things as you can (within reason of course) should work well.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant, easiest to resist eating too much with. On normal diets, sticking to the diet is all about resisting the slippery slope of eating more of the same things, but on a very weird diet, sticking to the diet is about merely not buying things proclaimed 'bad', which may be easier. After all we all have mechanisms for resisting the urge to eat colourful, tasty looking berries that are known to be poisonous. It could be psychologically easier to label some things as "poisons" and not eat them, than to limit the amounts.
Agreed, although that sort of subsumes the problem of difficult-to-resist urges. A few decades ago, there were not jumbo slices of pizza available for a dollar on every street corner; there were not hot dogs for a dollar at gas stations and movie theaters; and so on.
It's probably also worth noting that a few decades ago, cigarette smoking was a much more acceptable diet strategy.
I agree, except that I might quibble with your definition of "normal diet."
Yes, and then the next questions are (1) what foods or types of foods are, if treated as "poison," likely to lead to an effective diet; and (2) what is the health cost to eliminating such foods.
In my non-professional opinion, the answer to the first question is the foods which are normally referred to as "junk food" or "comfort food." The answer to the second question is (again in my non-professional opinion) that there is no health cost at all and in fact you are better off without such food in your life.
A lot of people didn't smoke but didn't get overweight either. And today people routinely consume far more potent stimulants (ADHD medications).
Yeah, agreed. Ethics also works - e.g. there's hardly any overweight vegetarians. (At least none that I know)
I agree, I'm not saying that smoking is the main reason people were thinner a few decades ago but surely it played a roll. It was very common back in the 70s and 80s for people to take up smoking as a weight control measure, either intentionally or unintentionally -- it was inexpensive and no prescription was necessary. It was really common to see thin guys walking around with a pack of cigarettes tucked into their shirt sleeve.
Assuming that's the case, one can ask why such an approach might be effective. Is it because meat makes you fat? Is it because eliminating meat and meat derived food from one's diet is a good way to cut out junk food? (I wouldn't think so; how hard is it to make vegetarian french fries and donuts?)
I'm inclined to believe that identity is a good way to motivate oneself. If you think to yourself "I'm a vegetarian and vegetarians don't eat that kind of food" or "I'm a foodie and foodies don't eat processed crap" or "I'm a fitness buff and fitness buffs don't pig out on nachos" it seems pretty effective.
It reminds me of the story of the Jewish girl who had a hard time resisting milk chocolate treats in the evening; so what she would do is eat a small piece of meat every night after dinner so that it would be non-kosher to eat the chocolate.
It's plain difficult to consume a lot of calories if you cut out meat and dairy products, I think (I tried to go vegetarian but couldn't manage to get enough calories, it's just too much work to eat enough not to go underweight. I don't eat junk food). Plus if you are changing your habits for some ethical reasons, you are not a hedonist to begin with.
It seems to me that huge majority of people who are successful at maintaining their weight never subscribe to any defined diets or calorie counting. I think that works like this - as you eat, you feel more and more full. You can just stop eating at an earlier point (when you don't feel entirely full) or at a later point. Also, for the dieters slowly gaining back everything - they still succeed to maintain the weight below the level that makes them take a drastic measure. It's just that this level is quite high, probably because only a level that high can justify a measure so drastic.
Is that so? What about french fries, donuts, and soda? Those things can be made without animal products, no?
Well that may be part of it. Perhaps part of it is that vegetarians spend a lot of mental energy thinking about what they are eating. My impression is that fat people tend to consume a lot of food without being fully consciously aware of it.
Are you talking about former fat people or never fat people?
Haven't got a deep frier, not a fan of french fries anyhow (not to the point of eating, what, 600 grams of them a day plus other stuff), prefer to eat at home. Also, sweets are a dessert. edit: and correct me if i'm wrong but with french fries something like half the calories come from fat, which is too much fat. Then, there's silicone oil, trans fats, a wide variety of carcinogenic chemicals produced at high temperatures....
Apparently, it is a common experience
Though I do cook baked potatoes quite often.
Never fat or only ever fat due to a depression or the like.
edit: with the presently obese, if they are to lose weight and keep it low, that would imply future behaviour inconsistent with past behaviour under same conditions, i.e. simply is not going to happen without significant psychological changes or the like.
OTOH a sizeable fraction of the ones I've met are visibly underweight.
Which fraction of the population takes such medications?
I'm just now seeing this discussion, and don't have time to read earlier posts.
Has it already been worked into the model that there are different sub-types of people? Some members of my family have successfully managed our weight, but it definitely wasn't the same solution for each of us, while other members of the family are still needing a better solution. (How useful could it be to look at average results, except to determine that there is no 'one size fits all' strategy?)
Maybe you can hire someone to read them for you and prepare an executive summary :)
Sure, that's fair. :)
...curiously, if I did look, would I find that this had been addressed?
I'm not saying you should look. I'm just saying, time spent is not so often rewarded, whereas anyone that has kept with the discussion would readily know.
Furthermore, it helps to keep track of and repeat one's assumptions. To write, "doesn't work at all" doesn't sound right without some qualifications.
Dude, the thread has 39 comments at the moment, two of which are yours. If you are too busy to read 37 comments, then I doubt it is worth engaging.
That's very funny. I meant that I hadn't read the previous posts:
At some point, it was probably discussed in which context it was appropriate to look at averaged data...I was hoping for a recap. I have composed a comment about whether I should have read the previous posts in the open thread.
Whatever, if there's anything I said which you disagree with or would otherwise like to discuss with me, feel free to quote it and respond.
Ok, I wanted to ask about this bit:
If the diet should work for some people, but not most people, why should you say it doesn't work at all?
To emphasize the fact that even though it might work better than some other diet, it still (generally speaking) does not work.
Anyway, your question is simply about my word choice, right? You do not dispute my substantive point?
There appears to be some substance in the disagreement.
Suppose that there are many different 'metabolic' types of people, and different diets work with different efficacies for these different types. Perhaps any diet works well with a small subset of people (we already know some people don't need to diet). Perhaps particular diets work well with certain subsets of people. Maybe a particular diet works extremely well for one subset, in that they lose weight and keep it off, whereas it only works moderately well for others (they gain the weight back or must combine different diets). This model -- which seems quite likely anyway -- would imply two things:
the effectiveness of a diet for small subsets of people would be completely obfuscated by averaging the data -- for example, in all groups in Figure 2, dieters kept off some of the weight on average. This might mean that some people gained all the weight back, whereas some kept it off, or it might mean that everyone gained some back. (Note that showing standard error, rather than standard deviation, especially hides the role of individual variation.)
it would not be reasonable to expect a diet to work by working for everyone; instead, each person must find which diet, if any, works for them, and then we would say that a diet "works" if it works for any subset of people that would otherwise be overweight
I'm pretty certain that this paradigm is mainstream. Increasingly, we're recognizing that medical solutions (for example, blood pressure medications or cancer therapies) need to be tailored to individual people.
Here's what the authors of the 2008 paper (Figure 2) have to say about individual differences:
Gender and diabetes are individual differences that are easy to recognize. Who knows (yet) how many characteristics are relevant for diet. If someone is sensitive to sugar like me (can't go long periods without eating, tends to put on weight on their belly), the low-carb diet might work for them. Another complication is that changes in gut-bacteria populations over longer time-scales might result in long-term changes in your diet type. For example, over-weight people have different gut bacteria, diets change gut bacteria and gut bacteria might change your equilibrium weight. (The media is dominated by these studies recently.) I find a positive effect -- once I've been on the low-carb diet for a few months, I'm not as sugar-sensitive and can maintain my ideal weight with a higher level of carbs than before I began the diet. Over time I lose the effect (too many holiday parties?) and need to return to a stricter low-carb diet.
I don't fault the discussion for not accounting for gut bacteria yet (the diet science literature is huge, and you have to begin somewhere)...but would you agree that it is complicated enough that we can not infer much of anything from average responses to a diet, other than that a particular diet doesn't work for everyone?
Good point. If we applied the same principle to drugs, very few of them would be used at all.
What examples were you thinking of?