Pretty much every time I've had kale in the USA, it's been cooked or baked like other plants in the brassica oleracea family. Okay, some people eat it raw like in smoothies or salads and have decided that the taste doesn't bother them. Why assume they couldn't make that decision for themselves or that they're missing out on some sort of ancient wisdom?
It's that in the US it's a fashion vegetable that is too coarse to be eaten raw. If you want fresh greens on your sandwich you are better advised with watercress, arugula or spinach.
Everytime I read "resilience" I instantly remember "antifragility" concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His book Antifragile goes in more depth about stress causing improvement in systems (therefore antifragility), both in human body and other systems (economics, social, political, etc).
Every time I read "antifragility" I instantly remember a web of pseudo-science babble built around a core of repackaged bullshit and regurgitated by someone who comes off as a whiner and an arrogant ass at the same time.
His whole "antifragility" concept is mostly just cherry picked examples with little basis in science or true systems analysis. He has extremely high self confidence which many people confuse with actual knowledge. Don't take it too seriously, it's just entertainment.
I've thought that "antifragility" as a concept has been a useful way to think about a lot of different things, could you clarify what you mean by true systems analysis? I'm always interested in learning more about this stuff!
Agreed, and I would add he's extremely combative with those of opposing view points. So much so, that he spends large portions of his books (and social media posts) not expounding upon his theories and why they are right, but why his opposition is so stupid and wrong.
In any event, I do think many/most of the things Talib expounds upon are correct/have merit. The best way to read his is probably through via second hand accounts of his work.
In other words, positive knowledge and negative knowledge aren't symmetrical. It helps to say why people are wrong (although if you want to say he's rude and offputting about it, I won't disagree, although I've gotten past it)
There are also a lot more ways to be wrong than to be right. So describing why people are wrong could take a lot of space in the book, and still be valuable.
Some animals are better than others for eating and spreading seeds. If a plant could choose it might prefer birds eat its fruit, especially over animals with molars that crack the seeds. Not coincidentally, the active ingredient in hot peppers, capsaicin, impacts mammals but not birds.
Saying it's not coincidental does not mean it's planned. The whole point is that random variations that are advantageous are the ones that survive; that's not coincidence, it's consequence.
There's different ways to look at it. Evolution doesn't plan, and the development of this or that compound is driven by random mutation- but it reliably exhibits all kinds of emergent behaviors, like evolutionary arms races, convergent evolution, and so forth. Like many other systems with feedback, given a set of constraints it reliably trends towards a local optima.
It's not coincidental that the adaptation wasn't lost. Mutation and genetic drift may be thought of as a random process, but natural selection is much less so.
Evolution does not plan, but it does react. Capsicum seeds eaten by birds have a reproductive advantage over seeds eaten by mammals, so a defense chemical in the fruit that discourages consumption by mammals without affecting birds is not a coincidence.
This is why it is necessary to stretch bird nets over research-breeding beds for strawberries, to get varieties more attractive to paying human customers. Otherwise, the evolutionary pressure to be attractive to birds still heavily affects the results.
Evolution doesn't plan, no, but when you're looking at survivorship, can you still call it a coincidence?
Co-evolution uses happy accidents all the time, but then some of those accidents get baked in, and what's left over is the result of that accident.
Peppers became more likely to be spread by birds because they became unsavory to mammals. Then what happened? And then what happened? And now we had pre-agricultural peppers, and now we have ... something else.
It might very well be coincidental, because the hot compound also has anti-fungal properties. So the primary evolutionary benefit might have been that, not selection of animals eating the seeds.
This information seems to combine well with information offered by Mark Sissons of "Primal Lifestyle" fame. I am currently exploring that specific avenue, I have lost over 10 pounds in 2 weeks, and it does not seem to be all based on water retention.
I am awaiting blood work lab results to make sure I do not have anything out of whack, and if I get a green light, I'll continue.
Insulin response is quite a weighty subject to study, and the Standard American Diet (I bet some love the initials of that) appears to aggravate that system within us.
All that's telling you is that you're in a caloric deficit, which is probably a result of restricting the food groups you are eating. You often see this with people who do a low carb diet. They lose a bunch of weight initially, and think it was because carbohydrates were making them fat. The reality is they just eliminated one of the 3 big macronutrients, and as a result their caloric intake went down.
I’m not sure this is true. As you ramp down eg carbs you ramp up protein and fat, sometimes significantly. It’s not clear that a caloric deficit is the reason you’re losing weight.
There are a lot of people, especially on HN, that think delta_weight = calories_in - calories_burned is all there is to it. There is a lot of truth in that, but it seems to not be the whole story. Some eating habits cause us to eat more or less, while others seem to change our metabolism. What you eat and when you eat it seem to make a difference beyond just that simple equation.
It doesn't change the fundamental principles though. Meal timing and composition can affect how your body burns those calories (resting metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, etc.), but they're relatively minor effects overall. At best, meal composition and timing can improve adherence, and that's a very important factor.
Minor effects that can have drastic effects over the long term. I have seen plenty of people wax about how metabolic variation in healthy people is only a few percentages.
Well 2% is a HUGE difference. That means if two people eat exactly the same diet and same level of activity, assuming a 2000 calorie daily intake, the person with a 2% slower metabolism is going to be 40 lbs heavier over a 10 year period.
Metabolic rate is not static. That 2% difference would not persist beyond a short time frame. Both bodies would down regulate metabolism to roughly the same levels given the same caloric deficit over time. One might change faster than the other, but the differences aren't as significant over longer time frames as you imply.
To paraphrase Peter Attia, this is akin to answering the question, "Why is Bill Gates so rich?" with, "Because he gained more money than he spent".
What we really care about is why people are eating more than they expend, and how we can get people to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight unconsciously.
For the human body, chemistry matters more than thermodynamics...
For example, diet soda has no calories, but has biochemical interactions that mimic those of regular soda, resulting in the trigger of hormones like insulin that trigger the body to store fat. Even worse, other biochemical reactions can kill the good gut flora lower down in your digestive system. Based on some studies, you're arguably better off just drinking regular soda despite the calories.
That "delta_weight = calories_in - calories_burned" expression is absolutely technically correct--the best kind of correct.
But...
Some forget that calories_in is the output of a function with multiple input variables, and calories_burned is also the output of a function with multiple input variables, plus whatever your wrist-worn fitness monitor says you burned directly through exercise.
If you stand in the freezing cold for 15 minutes, and then go back inside, and you still have some brown fat left after infancy, it will add to calories_burned for a little while. If you are insulin resistant, and you cut carbs out of your diet for a while, that will tend to deduct from calories_in, because the foods you are now eating impact your competing appetite and satiety functions differently, such that satiety is winning more often now. If you exercise vigorously, your calories_burned rises by when you burned directly, but you will also increase metabolism for a few hours afterward, and the fitness monitor won't tell you that, but it will also boost your appetite function, and your food scale might catch that.
It really is just calories_in - calories_burned. If you change your eating habits and now eat less you have reduced calories_in. If you changed your eating habits and it boosted your metabolism you've increased calories_burned.
Sure, but what if the increased metabolism has the same calorie intake as prior to the change? In that case "just eat less" is not what leads to weight loss, its "eat the right things". Ditto for the other changes that make one less hungry.
Neither my comment, nor your comment that I replied to, mentioned "just eat less". Your comment said that calories in minus calories out doesn't work. It does.
> It’s not clear that a caloric deficit is the reason you’re losing weight.
umm what...
That is the only way to lose lean body mass. You should be thinking "its not clear that removing carbs is reason you're losing weight." Your bayesian priors are completely backwards.
The reality is that protein and fat are more satiating so people eat less and lose weight when they cut out carbs.
CICO is too simple a model. Satiety is a factor but it’s facile to say fat satiates more so you eat fewer calories. If I understand it correctly that’s not how leptin works (satiety hormone). It doesn’t trigger at eg 500 calories regardless of which macro you ate.
In reality it’s more nuanced:
“It is true that fat has more calories than carbohydrates, including sugar. But by that logic, a sugary beverage is better for you than a handful of nuts. That’s just not what the unbiased studies have shown. Looking only at calories ignores the metabolic effects of each calorie; the source of the calorie changes how you digest it and how you retrieve energy from it.”
I wouldnt claim that fat satiation causes someone to eat fewer calories either.
But I disagree that the quote you presented somehow claims that a person can lose weight while not being in a deficit. It's physically impossible. That doesn't mean other processes aren't going on, or that you shouldn't consider other things like macronutrients and micronutrients when trying to construct a "healthy" diet.
It's definitely possible to lose weight without being in a deficit of calories.
For example, insufficient protein (or protein precursors like amino acids) can cause the breakdown of muscle, which is denser and weighs more than fat. You'd have to have a sizable excess of calories to have the fat storage to cancel out the loss of muscle mass.
I would love for you to show me a study that validates this, I just don't think the effect would be all that significant, especially if you're controlling for calories. Sure, your body comp can change, but I would expect weight to be stable.
Feel free to post some pubmed studies if you like.
All weight loss is due to caloric deficit in the end. There's no magic from eating fat/protein/carbs. It does happen in the US that most of our carb heavy food is also very calorie dense and doesn't give us a lot of satiety, so by targeting low carb it's easier to be in a calorie deficit (which is why I do low carb).
This statement neglects the role that hormones and other bodily functions play in homeostasis. Calorie-in calorie-out has not really stood the test of time/testing. The body can save calories in a number of weird ways when it needs to
I'd love to see some research supporting that statement because caloric restriction has been consistently upheld by longitudinal analysis and meta-analysis.
Just because overall energy balance will determine whether you're generally losing or gaining weight doesn't mean hormones aren't important, or that macro/micros aren't also important. I'm not sure what you're basing the fact that energy balance hasn't "stood the test of time". It's been well researched for decades.
All weight loss is due to caloric deficit in the end.
Not true. It's possible to lose different types of weight (i.e., muscle or bone) due to the body's inability to repair such tissue in the absence of proper diet sources. For example, if you drink 2000 calories/day as your only food source, you will lose bone mass and muscle mass over time, and the fat stored by your body (if any) will weigh less than the bone or muscle mass lost.
There's no magic from eating fat/protein/carbs.
Fat, carbs, and protein all have different roles in the body. Luckily, our diets generally get enough of all 3 that it's not that much of an issue...but lots of research shows that having the optimal balance of FPC for your current body condition and activity results can drastically affect performance, sleep, behavior, etc.
According to several authors I have recently read, the trick is along the lines of Keto - Switching the body from carb burning to fat burning for energy.
And as stated in comments below, the hormonal differences are also claimed to have a bigger influence than just calorie counting. How those calories are processed (glucose versus fructose versus sucrose - all with potentially different mechanisms, from what I have learned) are treated differently by my body than how saturated fats are treated.
For example, there seems to be proof that saturated fat processing by the body sets the satiety signal more thoroughly than carbohydrate processing, and for longer duration. I feel less hungry, sated, so I eat less. And now when I eat, I focus more on the inclusiveness/variety of the source foods to make sure I am getting a more rounded spectrum of vitamins, minerals, and other vital components our bodies seem to require for good health.
It has so far been a fun experiment, unlike other attempts I have made in the past.
Then why doesn't it work in the other configurations? For instance, a low fat diet has been shown to not cause weight loss. Even though fat is an insanely dense energy source, cutting it out of your diet leads to GAINING weight. If calorie in/calorie out worked then obesity wouldn't be a problem in the USA because 99% of obese people have been treated that way.
For instance, a low fat diet has been shown to not cause weight loss.
Literally every diet has been shown to cause weight loss if paired with a caloric deficit...
Low carb. Low fat. Low protein. No fruits. Only fruits. Etc.
If calorie in/calorie out worked then obesity wouldn't be a problem in the USA because 99% of obese people have been treated that way.
The types of fat and carbs in your diet matter. You can eat healthy carbs all day (i.e., vegetables) and not gain weight over a year, or eat unhealthy fats (i.e., trans fats) and gain 10 pounds in a week.
Low fat diets were the conventional wisdom for quite a long period of time. Lots of people got lean and athletic on them and still do.
> If calorie in/calorie out worked then obesity wouldn't be a problem in the USA because 99% of obese people have been treated that way.
There are two ways of looking at whether a diet "works." First, what happens when a person actually follows the diet. This is what most people are curious about. Second, what happens when you tell a person to follow the diet. This is what all the scientific papers are written about because it's what doctors, public health experts, and other researchers care about. Don't get the two mixed up. From the first point of view, there's a wide variety of very different diets that "work." From the second point of view, basically nothing works, and there is a never-ending (re)search in which occasionally somebody announces weak evidence that the diet du jour is better than yesterday's favored diet, but there's no reason to believe the current conventional wisdom will last any longer than previous expert consensuses such as the need to eat low-fat.
How did you conclude this wasn't just water weight? Weight loss like that is almost always water weight.
A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. To lose 10 lbs of fat in 2 weeks, you would need a deficit of 2500 calories per day in order for that loss to be purely fat. Unless you are training for the Olympics, that doesn't seem likely.
Where did you get that number from? Pure fat is approximately 9 calories per gram, which is 9000 calories per kilogram or ~4090 calories per pound. Body fat is around 87% pure fat, meaning a pound of body fat is roughly 3600 calories. Thus, the necessary deficit for 10 pounds in two weeks is about 2571. Still pretty high, but well under Olympic training levels.
My jeans are now loose, as well. I can no longer "pinch an inch" (or two) as the popular saying went. I have one of those scales that computes body fat percentage based on resistance - It may be rather inaccurate, as some have suggested, but for what it is worth, it is also suggesting my body fat is going down ever so slightly. Theoretically this is probably due to my body now consuming fat as fuel instead of carbohydrates. And although I am now increasing my fat intake, (hopefully) my body will continue to utilize the various places it has stored adipose fat in the past (around organs being the decidedly more dangerous form).
So I am assuming, based on those measurements, that some of the weight loss is due to fat consumption, even if the lion's share is water weight.
I will soon have to punch another hole in my leather belts, at this rate (already loose fitting)...
I agree, I lost 10 pounds of weight after stopping the intake of alcohol, measured over months.
It is working for me, and I no longer seem to be quite so affected by overcast/gloomy days. I would refer to it as mild Seasonal Affectation Disorder, but I am reading that this is now being challenged as maybe not a real reason for the blahs in winter/extended rainy season (paraphrased, maybe poorly, based on my own experience).
Regardless, I have found my own success for now, time will tell if I remain convinced.
Also, I find it remarkable that I do not know you (so I doubt you are acting to offer assistance, as my friends might), and yet you offer 4 rebuttals, the latter 2 which suggest my thinking is suspect...
I can't help but think this line of claims has an eerie resemblance to homeopathy, naturalism, and assorted fallacies mixed within. Not hard disproof but enough to raise alarm bells and frustrating to try to pick through truth from the dubious.
Oxidation both being damaging in too much and having a purpose? Perfectly consistent with prior health experience and toxicology that adding something everywhere like a toddler doesn't generally help. Communication with herbivores? That is assuming too many mechanisms and ascribing agency which doesn't exist.
Self-propagation can look remarkably like agency but it isn't it. If a plant puts energy into making its fruits delicious to an animal and gets its seeds distribuited far and wide that plant will spread more than the one whose fruit is horrifyingly toxic. Never did a plant decide "lets be tasty".
> Volunteers who took large doses of vitamins C and E before training failed to benefit from the workout.
I find it hard to believe that they didn't benefit at all from a workout because they took vitamin C or E. I'd like to see the methodology of this study if that's really the conclusion they came to.
Here is the study if you want to dig into it![1] We know exercise improve insulin resistance and glucose uptake, so that's the benefit of exercise they measured.
It's actually not that surprising. Vitamin C and E have anti-oxidant properties. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are generated during metabolism. Generally we think of them as being bad since they can damage molecules in the body, but it appears that ROS are actually a signal to the body that causes it to improve cardiovascular fitness. Take too much vitamin C and E and you're blocking that signal.
Derek Lowe has a nice blog post on it.[2]
It's a good lesson in Chesterson's Fence. Before you tear down the fence (ROS), you may want to double check why it's there in the first place.
Thanks for the link. IMO that's a pretty narrow definition of what constitutes "benefit". You could say that about what they call a workout too I guess.
They should also be careful with E. Most supplements only have α-Tocopherol and not gamma. The imbalance increases risk of prostate cancer in males. Some studies found that increasing selenium offset the risk, but there is a point of diminishing returns where selenium becomes toxic.
Low levels of stress are health-inducing on the individual organism in the form of hormesis. Similarly, low levels of stress can benefit a population, e.g. predation on a herd of ungulates results in a healthier herd. So too little of bad things is also a bad thing, including toxicity and even death itself.
When too little evil is evil, it makes ethics complicated.
It’s worth noting that one of the more successful ways to evolve is to be so appealing to humans that we cultivate the species and farm it.
Incidentally, we are the only species on the planet that will sit there with our mouth burning from a jalapeño and wonder, “how can we make this hotter?”
Yep, this is more or less the thesis of M. Pollan's 'The Botany of Desire,' which, whatever one thinks of his stance or other works, is a thought-provoking read [misguided treatment of Appleseed expert W.E. Jones aside]
Someone made a joke last week about 'dogs domesticating us' and I pointed out that may not be quite as ha-ha crazy as it sounds.
There's also a thing about jackfruit and elephants? Aside from tool users they're the primary consumer, and they'll grab one while they're on the march and eat it when it's break time.
Not so sure... considering we tend to eventually isolate a few characteristics and bread widely for them, practically eliminating most variety and creating huge mono-crop environments.
Regarding another thread, if plants could chose their characteristics I would imagine we'd see anti-veg memes much like we see anti-meat memes. While there are carnivores out there as a lifestyle, it's nothing compared to what over a century of SDA has brought to veganism.
I agree with you insofar as what you said properly applies to industrial scale agriculture. Mono cultures are easier to scale with fewer people, and only about 1% of the workforce in the US, maybe less, is a farmer in any meaningful capacity despite the sheer quantity of food that we grow and even export.
We have only been doing industrial scale agriculture for about two hundred years though, and we’ve been farming for at least eleven thousand years.
Choice has next to nothing to do with evolution. You’re born with the genes you have and you may or may not pass them on, whether you’re a wolf or a potato. (I say “next to nothing” because with sexual reproduction, maybe you can choose which traits from the opposite sex to pass on.)
I'm not so sure about that : take the banana for exemple. We decided that the best species was a sterile one, which can't reproduce without us. It's actually a pretty common story. And it's worth with GMO (steril crops after one or two generations)
The story of the carrot matches your idea though : only the orange one survived today, solely because of farming.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff has a master of arts degree, no science degrees or background even remotely related to nutrition or biology or aging. This article is hocus pocus.
I hate to say it and know I'm going to get a lot of flack especially from vegans, which I have a lot of respect for from an ethical standpoint. Realize that my critic comes purely from a scientific and evolutionary standpoint. So here goes:
The growing body of evidence is that humans are not evolutionary cut out to eat plants to the level we do today. This article somewhat reinforces that point. The reason we stand out from other apes is likely the fact that we diverged to become a carnivorous ape roughly 3 million years ago, leading to our massive brain size as well as other abilities.
Evidence:
-Bone analysis of our ancestors indicates they were primarily carnivorous over the last 3 million years before the advent of agriculture. Probably only 10-15% of our food was plant based. That puts us in the same place as wolves and bears in the food chain.
-Humans require vitamin B12 to thrive, which can only come from animal sources or certain bacteria (vegans must supplement their diet).
-Your gut structure closely matches that of a carnivore, not a herbivore. Just because you can tolerate plants doesn't mean you should.
-Humans are the only living primate adapted for endurance running. This was likely to out last running prey.
-The healthiest populations on the planet are those that still maintain hunter gatherer lifestyles with no spill over of modern food. Plenty of anthropological field research pointing this out.
-Humans are among the few mammals that don't produce vitamin C naturally. A sign we primarily got this from eating animal organs since access to citrus fruit is seasonal.
-The prevailing theory is that our large brain capacity came along with the fact that we high and easy to access sources of Omega-3 fats. Fish or large game primarily. There is also a related theory that we were primarily aquatic apes, since we also have a lot of adaptations for water.
-Tapeworms: Without infecting a human host, at least four species of tapeworm would be unable to reproduce. Humans are a definitive host for them. The only other mammals to be definitive hosts for tapeworms are carnivores like lions and hyenas.
-Smaller canine teeth compared to great apes indicates they were less used for male to male conflict like we see in great apes, and more so used for meat eating. This falls in line with the time frame we see a switch to carnivore.
-Interestingly, we have very powerful livers for detoxification and a very strong ability to smell rot, decay and decomposition relative to other animals. This suggests we may have evolved first as scavengers then grew into hunting more.
-Egyptian mummies are the first times we see heart disease and tooth decay, as well as less robust skeletal features. In fact anthropologist recognize pre and post agricultural specimens pretty easily.
As I read this article I can only see another drop in the bucket that reinforces the point: Humans are not meant eat this many plant. We keep fooling ourselves with this notion that hormetic responses are "good for you" and "toughen you up". Its like telling a wolf that eating a salad is "good for you". Sure you can't feed the planet without agriculture nor can we feasibly go back to being hunter gatherers, and the vegans do hold the ethical high ground. However if the question is simply: "What are humans evolved to eat." The answer is right in our face and our modern culture hates to accept it: meat. Primarily nose to tail. Vegan diets tend to be healthy in the short term especially when you switch from the Standard American Diet, and deleterious in the long term without serious hacks to make up for nutrient deficiencies and the accumulation of plant toxins. Look at the high rates of infertility in vegan communities, the likely culprit is plant toxin accumulation and malnutrition. Especially when you look at the research involving the long term accumulation of plant oxylates.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 72.5 ms ] threadInterestingly, it's commonly mixed with potatoes across cultures in the culinary examples you can find on wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kale#/media/File:Kogt_skinke_b...
Pretty much every time I've had kale in the USA, it's been cooked or baked like other plants in the brassica oleracea family. Okay, some people eat it raw like in smoothies or salads and have decided that the taste doesn't bother them. Why assume they couldn't make that decision for themselves or that they're missing out on some sort of ancient wisdom?
Agreed, and I would add he's extremely combative with those of opposing view points. So much so, that he spends large portions of his books (and social media posts) not expounding upon his theories and why they are right, but why his opposition is so stupid and wrong.
In any event, I do think many/most of the things Talib expounds upon are correct/have merit. The best way to read his is probably through via second hand accounts of his work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile#Via_negativa
Lots of descriptions on the web:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=taleb%20via%20negativa (google seems to have mutilated its URL, so using bing)
In other words, positive knowledge and negative knowledge aren't symmetrical. It helps to say why people are wrong (although if you want to say he's rude and offputting about it, I won't disagree, although I've gotten past it)
There are also a lot more ways to be wrong than to be right. So describing why people are wrong could take a lot of space in the book, and still be valuable.
Antifragility is a very useful concept and is clearly real, regardless of the author's traits.
It is coincidental. Evolution doesn't plan.
Else you're just wasting time.
edit: assuming 'coincidental' doesn't mean there is no framework at all in which all of this happens. That would also be wrong.
This is why it is necessary to stretch bird nets over research-breeding beds for strawberries, to get varieties more attractive to paying human customers. Otherwise, the evolutionary pressure to be attractive to birds still heavily affects the results.
It's more of an optimization algorithm. But that's not the same as coincidence.
Co-evolution uses happy accidents all the time, but then some of those accidents get baked in, and what's left over is the result of that accident.
Peppers became more likely to be spread by birds because they became unsavory to mammals. Then what happened? And then what happened? And now we had pre-agricultural peppers, and now we have ... something else.
I am awaiting blood work lab results to make sure I do not have anything out of whack, and if I get a green light, I'll continue.
Insulin response is quite a weighty subject to study, and the Standard American Diet (I bet some love the initials of that) appears to aggravate that system within us.
YMMV, consult with your health partner expert.
evidence?
Well 2% is a HUGE difference. That means if two people eat exactly the same diet and same level of activity, assuming a 2000 calorie daily intake, the person with a 2% slower metabolism is going to be 40 lbs heavier over a 10 year period.
As well as when and what foods you eat may change your metabolism.
What we really care about is why people are eating more than they expend, and how we can get people to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight unconsciously.
For example, diet soda has no calories, but has biochemical interactions that mimic those of regular soda, resulting in the trigger of hormones like insulin that trigger the body to store fat. Even worse, other biochemical reactions can kill the good gut flora lower down in your digestive system. Based on some studies, you're arguably better off just drinking regular soda despite the calories.
There is nothing even slightly controversial in that statement.
But...
Some forget that calories_in is the output of a function with multiple input variables, and calories_burned is also the output of a function with multiple input variables, plus whatever your wrist-worn fitness monitor says you burned directly through exercise.
If you stand in the freezing cold for 15 minutes, and then go back inside, and you still have some brown fat left after infancy, it will add to calories_burned for a little while. If you are insulin resistant, and you cut carbs out of your diet for a while, that will tend to deduct from calories_in, because the foods you are now eating impact your competing appetite and satiety functions differently, such that satiety is winning more often now. If you exercise vigorously, your calories_burned rises by when you burned directly, but you will also increase metabolism for a few hours afterward, and the fitness monitor won't tell you that, but it will also boost your appetite function, and your food scale might catch that.
If you eat a lot of veggies, wheat, or whole grains, you get a lot of fiber.
In other words, "calories in" and "calories burned".
umm what...
That is the only way to lose lean body mass. You should be thinking "its not clear that removing carbs is reason you're losing weight." Your bayesian priors are completely backwards.
The reality is that protein and fat are more satiating so people eat less and lose weight when they cut out carbs.
In reality it’s more nuanced:
“It is true that fat has more calories than carbohydrates, including sugar. But by that logic, a sugary beverage is better for you than a handful of nuts. That’s just not what the unbiased studies have shown. Looking only at calories ignores the metabolic effects of each calorie; the source of the calorie changes how you digest it and how you retrieve energy from it.”
From https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/theres-no-sugar-coating-...
But I disagree that the quote you presented somehow claims that a person can lose weight while not being in a deficit. It's physically impossible. That doesn't mean other processes aren't going on, or that you shouldn't consider other things like macronutrients and micronutrients when trying to construct a "healthy" diet.
For example, insufficient protein (or protein precursors like amino acids) can cause the breakdown of muscle, which is denser and weighs more than fat. You'd have to have a sizable excess of calories to have the fat storage to cancel out the loss of muscle mass.
Feel free to post some pubmed studies if you like.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31303390
Not true. It's possible to lose different types of weight (i.e., muscle or bone) due to the body's inability to repair such tissue in the absence of proper diet sources. For example, if you drink 2000 calories/day as your only food source, you will lose bone mass and muscle mass over time, and the fat stored by your body (if any) will weigh less than the bone or muscle mass lost.
There's no magic from eating fat/protein/carbs.
Fat, carbs, and protein all have different roles in the body. Luckily, our diets generally get enough of all 3 that it's not that much of an issue...but lots of research shows that having the optimal balance of FPC for your current body condition and activity results can drastically affect performance, sleep, behavior, etc.
And as stated in comments below, the hormonal differences are also claimed to have a bigger influence than just calorie counting. How those calories are processed (glucose versus fructose versus sucrose - all with potentially different mechanisms, from what I have learned) are treated differently by my body than how saturated fats are treated.
For example, there seems to be proof that saturated fat processing by the body sets the satiety signal more thoroughly than carbohydrate processing, and for longer duration. I feel less hungry, sated, so I eat less. And now when I eat, I focus more on the inclusiveness/variety of the source foods to make sure I am getting a more rounded spectrum of vitamins, minerals, and other vital components our bodies seem to require for good health.
It has so far been a fun experiment, unlike other attempts I have made in the past.
Literally every diet has been shown to cause weight loss if paired with a caloric deficit...
Low carb. Low fat. Low protein. No fruits. Only fruits. Etc.
If calorie in/calorie out worked then obesity wouldn't be a problem in the USA because 99% of obese people have been treated that way.
The types of fat and carbs in your diet matter. You can eat healthy carbs all day (i.e., vegetables) and not gain weight over a year, or eat unhealthy fats (i.e., trans fats) and gain 10 pounds in a week.
> If calorie in/calorie out worked then obesity wouldn't be a problem in the USA because 99% of obese people have been treated that way.
There are two ways of looking at whether a diet "works." First, what happens when a person actually follows the diet. This is what most people are curious about. Second, what happens when you tell a person to follow the diet. This is what all the scientific papers are written about because it's what doctors, public health experts, and other researchers care about. Don't get the two mixed up. From the first point of view, there's a wide variety of very different diets that "work." From the second point of view, basically nothing works, and there is a never-ending (re)search in which occasionally somebody announces weak evidence that the diet du jour is better than yesterday's favored diet, but there's no reason to believe the current conventional wisdom will last any longer than previous expert consensuses such as the need to eat low-fat.
Sticking to diets is really really hard.
A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. To lose 10 lbs of fat in 2 weeks, you would need a deficit of 2500 calories per day in order for that loss to be purely fat. Unless you are training for the Olympics, that doesn't seem likely.
Where did you get that number from? Pure fat is approximately 9 calories per gram, which is 9000 calories per kilogram or ~4090 calories per pound. Body fat is around 87% pure fat, meaning a pound of body fat is roughly 3600 calories. Thus, the necessary deficit for 10 pounds in two weeks is about 2571. Still pretty high, but well under Olympic training levels.
So I am assuming, based on those measurements, that some of the weight loss is due to fat consumption, even if the lion's share is water weight.
I will soon have to punch another hole in my leather belts, at this rate (already loose fitting)...
Also, water takes up space too, not just fat.
Also, losing weight is exciting and can cause mild mania.
Also body dysmorphia is a real condition.
It is working for me, and I no longer seem to be quite so affected by overcast/gloomy days. I would refer to it as mild Seasonal Affectation Disorder, but I am reading that this is now being challenged as maybe not a real reason for the blahs in winter/extended rainy season (paraphrased, maybe poorly, based on my own experience).
Regardless, I have found my own success for now, time will tell if I remain convinced.
YMMV.
Where is that coming from? And why?
Oxidation both being damaging in too much and having a purpose? Perfectly consistent with prior health experience and toxicology that adding something everywhere like a toddler doesn't generally help. Communication with herbivores? That is assuming too many mechanisms and ascribing agency which doesn't exist.
Self-propagation can look remarkably like agency but it isn't it. If a plant puts energy into making its fruits delicious to an animal and gets its seeds distribuited far and wide that plant will spread more than the one whose fruit is horrifyingly toxic. Never did a plant decide "lets be tasty".
Also 'a plant putting energy' into anything specific other than existing implies agency, doesn't it?
Evolution is hard to understand and I distrust anyone who claims to have figured it out fully.
Being tasty and toxic doesn't exclude itself simply because we like to think that.
I think the whole point of the article is that we don't understand things nearly as much as we think we do.
Especially the part about caffeine is fascinating.
It'll probably require a paradigm shift to make sense of it all. I have a hunch but I can't articulate it right now.
> Volunteers who took large doses of vitamins C and E before training failed to benefit from the workout.
I find it hard to believe that they didn't benefit at all from a workout because they took vitamin C or E. I'd like to see the methodology of this study if that's really the conclusion they came to.
It's actually not that surprising. Vitamin C and E have anti-oxidant properties. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are generated during metabolism. Generally we think of them as being bad since they can damage molecules in the body, but it appears that ROS are actually a signal to the body that causes it to improve cardiovascular fitness. Take too much vitamin C and E and you're blocking that signal.
Derek Lowe has a nice blog post on it.[2]
It's a good lesson in Chesterson's Fence. Before you tear down the fence (ROS), you may want to double check why it's there in the first place.
[1]https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/05/11/0903485106.sho... [2]https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2009/05/13/ex...
When too little evil is evil, it makes ethics complicated.
I have considered the same thought, but I always dismiss it as possible true, but too unlikely to occur to be worth including in ethical calculus.
Do you think it actually happens in real life? Such profoundly little evil happening that things start to suck?
Incidentally, we are the only species on the planet that will sit there with our mouth burning from a jalapeño and wonder, “how can we make this hotter?”
Great book.
There's also a thing about jackfruit and elephants? Aside from tool users they're the primary consumer, and they'll grab one while they're on the march and eat it when it's break time.
Regarding another thread, if plants could chose their characteristics I would imagine we'd see anti-veg memes much like we see anti-meat memes. While there are carnivores out there as a lifestyle, it's nothing compared to what over a century of SDA has brought to veganism.
We have only been doing industrial scale agriculture for about two hundred years though, and we’ve been farming for at least eleven thousand years.
The growing body of evidence is that humans are not evolutionary cut out to eat plants to the level we do today. This article somewhat reinforces that point. The reason we stand out from other apes is likely the fact that we diverged to become a carnivorous ape roughly 3 million years ago, leading to our massive brain size as well as other abilities.
Evidence:
-Bone analysis of our ancestors indicates they were primarily carnivorous over the last 3 million years before the advent of agriculture. Probably only 10-15% of our food was plant based. That puts us in the same place as wolves and bears in the food chain.
-Humans require vitamin B12 to thrive, which can only come from animal sources or certain bacteria (vegans must supplement their diet).
-Your gut structure closely matches that of a carnivore, not a herbivore. Just because you can tolerate plants doesn't mean you should.
-Humans are the only living primate adapted for endurance running. This was likely to out last running prey.
-The healthiest populations on the planet are those that still maintain hunter gatherer lifestyles with no spill over of modern food. Plenty of anthropological field research pointing this out.
-Humans are among the few mammals that don't produce vitamin C naturally. A sign we primarily got this from eating animal organs since access to citrus fruit is seasonal.
-The prevailing theory is that our large brain capacity came along with the fact that we high and easy to access sources of Omega-3 fats. Fish or large game primarily. There is also a related theory that we were primarily aquatic apes, since we also have a lot of adaptations for water.
-Tapeworms: Without infecting a human host, at least four species of tapeworm would be unable to reproduce. Humans are a definitive host for them. The only other mammals to be definitive hosts for tapeworms are carnivores like lions and hyenas.
-Smaller canine teeth compared to great apes indicates they were less used for male to male conflict like we see in great apes, and more so used for meat eating. This falls in line with the time frame we see a switch to carnivore.
-Interestingly, we have very powerful livers for detoxification and a very strong ability to smell rot, decay and decomposition relative to other animals. This suggests we may have evolved first as scavengers then grew into hunting more.
-Egyptian mummies are the first times we see heart disease and tooth decay, as well as less robust skeletal features. In fact anthropologist recognize pre and post agricultural specimens pretty easily.
As I read this article I can only see another drop in the bucket that reinforces the point: Humans are not meant eat this many plant. We keep fooling ourselves with this notion that hormetic responses are "good for you" and "toughen you up". Its like telling a wolf that eating a salad is "good for you". Sure you can't feed the planet without agriculture nor can we feasibly go back to being hunter gatherers, and the vegans do hold the ethical high ground. However if the question is simply: "What are humans evolved to eat." The answer is right in our face and our modern culture hates to accept it: meat. Primarily nose to tail. Vegan diets tend to be healthy in the short term especially when you switch from the Standard American Diet, and deleterious in the long term without serious hacks to make up for nutrient deficiencies and the accumulation of plant toxins. Look at the high rates of infertility in vegan communities, the likely culprit is plant toxin accumulation and malnutrition. Especially when you look at the research involving the long term accumulation of plant oxylates.