LESSWRONG
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All of Mi's Comments + Replies

The Obesity Myth
Mi
43

"There aren't any health differences to speak of for people between BMIs of about 20 and 35"

This is not true. 

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Thoughts on seed oil
Mi
-2-16

We eat too much, that's all. if you only do "breakfast + lunch, no snacks, no extra butter", it should be enough to have your BMI <25. 

I am an asian european with quite healthy habit, but even with all of that , I find it impossible to get the BMI below 25. It's always somewhere between 26 and 29. That is until COVID happens and I started experimenting a new type of diet: only eating lunch, no dinner. 

I skipped dinner for a year and got my BMI from 29 to 23. 

I finally realize how utterly stupid the whole concept of dinner is. I mean, who ... (read more)

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3Unirt
The problem with too-hungry people is that yes, they eat too much, and no, they cannot just stop. The way it works is so: they eat a meal, start feeling very hungry an hour later, make an effort and resist eating for another hour, then some more until they can't anymore and they give in and gobble up everything in the fridge. In cases like this skipping dinner is not actually possible, at least long-term.
3ChristianKl
Eating a meal does not immediately increase the available amount of energy. After eating a meal the body has to first spent hours on processing the meal before the energy is available.  If a hunter goes for a hunting trip they are usually eating the food after they did their hunting and not before starting their hunting trip. Our body is not optimized to at the same time sending a lot of blood to the intestines to gather resources and send the blood to the muscles for performance. 
1gwd
FWIW I normally eat dinner around 6, go to bed 5 hours later at 11pm, and eat my next meal 8.5 hours later at 7:30am; at which point "break-fast" is certainly the right word, since I haven't eaten for 13 hours.  Contrast to breakfast, which only has to last me 5 hours (until lunch at 12:30pm), and lunch which again only has to last me 5.5 hours (until 6pm).
6RHollerith
The problem with routinely skipping dinner is getting enough protein. No matter how much protein you eat in one sitting, your body can use at most 40 or 45 grams. (The rest is converted to fuel -- glucose, fructose or fatty acids, I don't know which.) On a low protein diet, it is difficult to maintain anything near an optimal amount of muscle mass (even if you train regularly with weights) -- and the older you get, the harder it gets. One thing muscle mass is good for is smoothing out spikes in blood glucose: the muscles remove glucose from the blood and store it. Muscle also protects you from injury. Also men report that people (men and women) seem to like them better when they have more muscles (within reason). But yeah, if you don't have to worry about maintaining muscle mass, routinely skipping meals ("time-restricted eating") is a very easy way to maintain a healthy BMI.
AI's impact on biology research: Part I, today
Mi
10

Machine learning has great applications for biology. But beware that some of the media headlines are far too often focused on the intersection with Tech/Deep Learning, which aim mostly at solving a specific problem of biology. But it tells absolutely nothing about disease mechanism and does not answer why some combination of drugs can be synergistic or not in certain disease. It's almost like engineers trying to find a use case to their fancy algorithm. And Tech VC pouring money into this because they understand the tech language but totally missed the poi... (read more)

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1octopocta
I totally agree. The techniques that have worked well so far are quite far from understanding cells, organs, organisms, or ecosystems. However, the incredible rate of progress at the small molecule to protein complex scale is already showing a strong impact, at least on getting a much better funnel before we begin in vivo testing.
"Humanity vs. AGI" Will Never Look Like "Humanity vs. AGI" to Humanity
Mi
*10

"Human vs AGI" war would be the same as "Rome vs Spartacus". Some people fundamentally believe that others (with similar or even superior intelligence) are born to serve them. Nothing we can do about this kind of mentality...

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