= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
byrnema comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Final: The Truth About Diets and Weight Loss - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (87)
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?
Assuming this is true, I don't see how it contradicts anything I have said.
Do you dispute any of the following:
The vast majority of people end up regaining regardless of the diet they are on;
In general, the central and essential problem of successful dieting is dealing with the problem of difficult-to-resist urges;
Taubes' approach is not a general solution to this problem.
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?
If the criteria is that over half won't benefit, almost every drug on the planet. I wasn't exaggerating.
Here's a paper that explains NNT, and on page four there are some examples. NNT under 10 is pretty good no matter what time span or endpoint of interest we're looking at. Then there's also NNH.