> It sounds like a dumb gimmick that could never work, but there are a surprising number of people out there saying that they tried it, it worked for them, and they kept the weight off for months or even years after.
Losing weight isn't causal to being healthy. In most cases it correlates because gaining weight is usually done through eating unhealthy (excess calories, refined sugars, etc.) so going on a healthy diet means losing weight gained from unhealthy diet.
Also, there are unhealthy diets on which you can lose weight but the effects on your hormones might be even worse than an unhealthy diet that causes you to gain weight.
I think the important point in the context of this diet is: it may help you lose weight, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll become more healthy. I guess it's very dependent on individual circumstances, and "healthy" is a fairly broad term.
It does not help that we are colloquially using the "overweight" label as an euphemism for morbid obesity, because we do not want to offend anyone including ourselves. I have never met a person who claimed to be merely "overweight" and wasn't actually massively obese.
In doctor's parlance, overweight means BMI between 25 and 30. This tends to correlate with the lowest all cause mortality in older people [0], so it might not be a big deal.
But outright obesity (BMI > 30) and morbid obesity (BMI > 40) are definitely a health problem.
There is at least one case where your argument is clearly false: sleep apnea is often directly mechanically caused by bodyweight, causes health problems when untreated, and is strongly associated with being fat and/or muscular.
They never said being overweight is healthy, so this isn't really a counterargument.
They're saying losing weight != healthy, which isn't the same thing. Take anorexia or bulimia for example. You could be overweight, but that doesn't mean losing weight from an eating disorder is healthy. Same is true for a diet. Just because you're losing weight from a diet, doesn't mean the diet is healthy for you.
Fine, to be extremely pedantic I'm replying to the assertion "Losing weight doesn't help you stop being unhealthy" which I invented; what they really said was "Losing weight isn't causal to being healthy".
Obesity is the most prevalent causal factor for obstructive sleep apnea and in weight loss is the most effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnea in overweight patients. Weight loss can be (but is not always) an effective cure.
Except that's not how it works. An excess of fat can directly cause problems.
Above a certain point, having too much fat causes chronic hypoxia in fatty tissue, leading to chronic inflammation, which can eventually lead to systemic problems like insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, liver disease, and cancer.
Edit: I am specifically referring to abdominal fat in excess of what a given body is able to cope with.
I don't think OP was suggesting that being overweight was healthy or that losing weight was bad.
They merely suggested that weight loss does not occur as a result of a healthy diet, but rather as a result of an intentionally deficient diet (technically an "unhealthy" diet). That you can lose weight eating only potatoes is therefore not very interesting and does not imply that the diet is healthy.
There's a difference between "slightly too few calories to sustain current weight level" and "total absence of certain essential nutrients meaning the body can't grow or indeed adequately replenish cells regardless of the mass of food consumed"
There's nothing inherently unhealthy about being in a temporary state of negative energy flux (unless you are already underweight or deficient in an essential mineral or something)
That being true, it could well be that a "Potato Only Diet" is effective for weight loss not because of the reduced energy intake, nor because of some subtlety in how our gut or our metabolism deals with an only starch diet for a while, but instead because potatoes lack micronutrient X or inhibit its absorption and a symptom of X deficiency is losing weight. That could be unhealthy.
I don't have an opinion either way and I don't think this is a likely reason, but it is a possibility.
pretty remote possibility, unless you have a deficiency in mind that manifests pretty quickly and causes rapid weight loss and doesn't cause systemic disease.
If you eat only potatoes you will only ingest the nutrients found in potatoes so you will risk becoming deficient in all other nutrients, not found in potatoes. I don't know what those are, but for example you'd risk running out of all the stuff that vegans have to take supplements to replenish, like B12, iron, zinc, etc.
Anyway the diet described in the article doesn't make any assumption about calories. If you're taking enough calories to maintain your weight but losing weight, then it's very likely there's something else you're not getting enough of.
At that point you are just kinda throwing spaghetti at the wall in an 'anything is possible' kind of sense, neither of those are very parsimonious explanations.
Besides the fact the diet isn't asking suggesting anyone not supplement, a vegan diet won't lead to a severe B-12 deficiency in a matter months. But hey there is a non-0% chance you are bang on and the people losing weight when trying to eat 20 potatoes a day to meet their caloric demands are actually just noticing the weight loss once they also get pellagra and anemia, they just figured it was a coincidence.
I don't understand what you're trying to say because the derision in your comment is taking up all the space that would normally be dedicated to clarity.
To be fair, your reply wasn't very helpful when I was asking about specific causes of rapid weight loss induced by micronutrient deficiency that wouldn't manifest as other disease states that could make this scenario remotely plausible. But no derision intended, I was noting the possibility that you could well be correct.
I wonder if it is useful for flushing PFAS and other forever chemicals from the body?
They found that indigestible oils like Olestra served to flush out the chemicals that bonded with oils, so maybe the high fiber potato diet is good for flushing out something else?
This will very quickly devolve into a definition of an unhealthy diet, or healthy vs unhealthy in general, none of which is well defined.
From the perspective I took where a healthy diet is a sustainable one with sufficient nutrients and long lifetime expectancy, a weight loss diet is unhealthy and unsustainable, but there to negate a different issue and improve long-term health.
At first approximation, sure, a diet that can be sustained and keep you alive indefinitely is better than one that would eventually lead to your demise due to insufficient calories or essential nutrients.
However, a diet that varies in how 'fed' you are over time is very likely healthier than one where you are constantly taking in nutrients. During that post-prandial state, insulin and growth factors are elevated, and autophagy and other important pathways for 'tidying up' sick cells are turned off. That is why I don't think it is fair to say that fasts or restrictive diets are inherently unhealthy, I reckon 'whether this can be sustained steadily forever' should not be the bar. Similarly, the 200% of normal diet consumed after marathon is healthy that day and probably more healthy than eating normally since it is going to allow for repair and replenishment of depleted substrates, but would not be healthy if eaten every day.
For someone with health issues stemming from obesity, a potato-crash diet could immediately improve health, and continue to for a good while.
Adopting a diet that deprives an overweight person of necessary vitamins and nutrients will not improve their health but will deteriorate it as now alongside all of the health problems they had their body can't function properly.
Adopting a diet that balances nutrients and calories and also provides all needed vitamins will lead to weight loss and health improvement (in most cases).
You can gain weight on a diet of "healthy" foods. It's the amount of calories. Being overweight is bad for your health even if you only eat healthy foods.
Sure, but healthy foods contain more nutrients, that’s why they can be called healthy. So fueling your body to excess with a lot of nutrients will lead to a much better functioning body than doing the same with garbage
>fueling your body to excess with a lot of nutrients
A commonly held myth about eating is that fueling the body with an excess of (micro)nutrients is healthier than fueling the body with an adequate amount of micro nutrients. It is not healthier, it is exactly the same (and then becomes toxic again in excess!)
And as you know, fueling the body with excess macronutrients is unhealthy. Indeed, eating a diet poor or absent in micronutrients is bad for you, but also quite rare.
I don’t think it’s quite as rare as you think. I don’t have sources to back this up at the moment but some common deficiencies include vitamin D, b12, magnesium, zinc, sulphur. Our modern practices have denuded the soil, plants and animals of a lot of their nutrients so nowadays it’s indeed hard to be at good levels of nutrients from diet
It is still causal. You can't add sum of components that "eating x is overall worse than y because it is better in one thing but worse in another". It's hard to compare two axis and specially if one axis is unscientific land of hormone disturbance.
Replacing obesity with malnutrition will still leave you unhealthy but with different health problems.
Also hormone imbalance isn't unscientific. It has been widely been studied that women will have their periods change timing when malnourished.
Anectdotally: I had my testosterone levels wiped out when switching from a diet with excess calories to a one with not enough calories and nutrients. The condition fixed itself when I started practicing a balanced diet (with exercises).
See page xxi, chapter A. Weight loss is recommended for lowering blood pressure, levels of total/LDL cholesterol, and blood glucose, and for blood pressure and blood glucose these effects have also been shown in RCTs with weight lowering medications, so we can't say they were due to more healthy diets alone.
(saying that I agree with you that we shouldn't all adopt the cabbage soup diet, or potato-only diet for extended periods, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater)
(I wouldn't recommend the potato-only diet for someone who hasn't already attempted a healthy, balanced diet with consistent tracking, that should always be the first thing attempted as it can be continued indefinitely with less dependence on tracking over time, but some people find the effort of tracking hard to maintain)
I wasn't arguing that being overweight is healthy. I was just saying that losing weight will lead to bad health if the way you lose weight is by depriving yourself of nutrients needed for your body to function properly.
Potatoes lack a lot of vitamins and nutrients needed in order for them to be the sole food you can eat and stay healthy.
The term 'healthy' is thrown around too easily and conflated with 'low calorie food'; I try to call out people who call food healthy too easily.
That said, being overweight (fat) is not where you want to be at, it results in big and small health issues like joint troubles, high blood pressure, diabetes, and finding trivial things like getting up from the couch or walking up the stairs difficult.
"No dairy": would result in a Vitamin D deficit unless the some other food fortified with vitamin D is used, person is living in a tropical region with little clothing, or the multivitamin option is chosen over the emphasized B12 supplement. It also lacks fiber: https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/potatoes-and-milk-is-t...
All day at Arctic latitudes, and that assumes your skin is somewhat lightly pigmented, and that you don't live too far north. If you do, there is no sunlight during winter.
If you've got a daytime job, live above the Arctic circle or immigrated, then your only option is to eat vitamin D-rich foods or eat supplements.
Not necessarily. The best way to get it is arguably via the sun, but with caveats.
Because of the thickness of the atmosphere when the sun is at lower altitudes you will only start to get enough UV-B penetrating when the sun is at an angle of >=35 degrees. If you are within 35 degrees of equator you can get UV-B every day, but outside of these latitudes there are many months where there's just not enough solar hang time high enough in the sky to deliver any meaningful amount of UV-B.
The shitty part is, the whole time and more you're still getting UV-A, which is a known cancer risk. Depending on your clothing, skin pigment, weight, and age, UV-B uptake may be significantly reduced (up to 6x for dark skin pigment, 2x for age over 50).
So while you can get UV-B from the sun in mid-day at the right latitudes, most people benefit from supplementing.
As long as one does not have various gastrointestinal disorders and accepts the adverse cardiovascular, cancer, and diabetes risks. A lack of dietary vitamin D also does not risk immediate death like a lack of oxygen, but similarly increases risk of adverse conditions like rickets.
i consider myself a potato connoisseur. i have been eating and loving potatoes ever since i can remember and even before as far as my family can tell me.
"don't you get bored from eating potatoes"? i am asked on a regular basis. my answer is a standard "potatoes are life, potatoes are my comfort food. now get off my lawn"
edit: i am willing to do an all potato diet but its not like i hate anything else, i just cant hate potatoes.
When you say you are asked on a regular basis… What basis is that? Once a week? Once a month? I have never had anyone so interested in my diet and I am a little jealous. Also who are these people and what impels them to be so interested in what you are eating?
anytime there is a discussion on food, i bring in potatoes into the conversation automatically. i can't help it. its not like people come up to me and ask about my eating habits.
i am willing and have at many times given up a plate of a variety of meats and stuff for a plate of fried/baked potatoes so i bring that up and people start saying stuff...
One of the first solid foods I remember eating is my grandpa's fried potatoes. Fried potatoes in general were a staple in our household, always server with a glass of milk. I don't consume potatoes that much now (and am lactose intolerant), but those fried potatoes will always be my favourite food. I can never make them taste the same.
I did this for a year. Its not sustainable, you'll loose muscle mass.
I eat potatoes daily now, but not exclusively - complex carbs are harder to burn, so they are fattening, so I have gained some weight. Maybe I'll eliminate the rice and see how that goes.
I'd recommend against olive oil and for coconut oil, frying potatoes needs a lot of heat. Add parsley, bacon, caraway, onions and serve with pickled white cabbage. Good & simple!
Interesting. I am one year on mostly keto and lost all excessive fat and gained a lot (!) of muscle. And I seem to be burning fat and gain muscle at the same time.
One thing to note, I am not sure why would you suggest to remove olive oil. All the research (I’ve seen) suggests that olive oil is really good for humans
Did you start sedentary and with a bit of extra weight? It would make sense if you started strength training at the same time and benefited from 'noob gains'
Also the other fellow might be referencing EVOO's low smoke point, it's true there isn't much point using it for high heat cooking.
My sport is cycling, when I started on keto my power metrics jumped up, from an FTP of about 220 W in August 2021 to currently 276 W, where it's plateaued for the last few months. My legs are also visibly much bigger and harder.
I get the feeling that it is possible to gain muscle on keto, it's just being low-carb doesn't lend itself to high-intensity efforts, so at some point you just can't put out enough effort to damage your muscles any further.
I've recently starting eating carbs on days where I'm doing 80+ km and the difference is astonishing, I've set PRs up hills at the end of 100 km rides and I'm approaching being able to do 100 km solo at 32 km/h, where before on strict keto I'd start getting very lethargic after just 50 km.
I imagine there's probably some direct impact to muscle anabolism as well, since the anabolic hormone insulin has a low and stable profile on keto. Really interesting though to hear how your power increased.
Taking carbs on big effort days seems like the best of both worlds, fat adapted but able to take advantage of both energy systems. I think on Inigo san Milan's first appearance on Peter Attia's podcast they got into this a bit, also mentioned that high level fat adapted cyclists could do a few hundred grams of carbs in a day and still maintain ketosis
EVOO? Extra virgin especially low, and also a waste of money using it for cooking. I don't use even cheap olive oil for anything hotter than say medium-high frying or grilling. Unless you're in Italy, where perhaps it's (at the low end) dominant cheap oil, otherwise (or if olivey flavour not desired) I'd suggest something cheap flavourless & high-smoke point, exactly what varies by region - sunflower, rapeseed, mustard, whatever.
I am 175cm. Went from 80 kg to 66 in 6 months or less. Then I plateaued and was around 67kg. Still had excessive fat tissue, but not a lot. Was sedentary, couldn't even do 1 pull around March 15. No I am ~70kg, with less fat tissue and doing 5/5/5 pull ups with 5KG added.
So def. noob gains. But I also see that fat tissue is burning (slowly but surely) and muscles are growing. Lifting, no cardio or HIIT.
Yeah, I meant EVOO in general. Great for salads, maybe not so much for frying :)
Oils go rancid by premature oxidation of the fat. Saturated fat is least susceptible to this, polyunsaturated oil the most. Rancid fat is quite toxic and will suppress the immune system, slow metabolism and cause other issues.
Butter and coconut oil are nearly 100% saturated fats, with 2-3% PUFA. Olive oil is a bit higher in PUFA, 8-11%, so it decomposes more easily when heated up.
Consider that olive oil is one of the most counterfeited products in the world. It is very common for producers (Greece, Italy, Macedonia etc) to add low-quality seed oils, and this is hard to detect. Research the price of olives, the amount of olives needed for one liter of olive oil, and the price olive oil sells for in supermarkets - it doesn't add up.
It worked well for me, my endurance in e.g. cycling improved. However usually stay on it about half a year to lose extra weight and then go back to a "regular" diet.
Can keto meals really be described as "delicious"?
I mean, I love the taste of butter, cream, marbled steaks and pork fat, but when you have to consume whipping cream as a beverage it sounds absolutely nauseating.
I eat and enjoy quite a lot of Mexican food and all of it has way too much protein and carbs to put you in ketosis. We’re talking about getting 90% of all calories from fat here, I seriously doubt many if any Mexican recipes at all are that fatty.
Almost any diet with a predominant control can work. It’s the attention to what is being eaten that’s enabled. Vegan? No meat. Carnivore? Just meat. IIFYM? Caloric control.
“Dieting” usually has too broad a set of parameters. You need a control. And if you have a goal and you’re paying attention, you’ll probably see an improvement over not having a control and eating freely.
Health, over the long term, may be more complicated but having a lean body mass makes health easier to achieve than not having a lean body mass.
I tried it for a couple of months last year. It worked in that I lost weight, quickly the first month, less so the second. The weight did not stay off for me.
It wasn't particularly difficult but not particularly easy either compared to other diets I've tried.
One word of caution on these "only this diet". Your gut bacteria is a jungle with many species of microbes, trillions of them. They basically fight for territory and some subspecies will die if you stop injecting <x food>.
So if you are not lactose intolerant and get off lactose for 6-9 months, don't expect that your belly will react well to a glass of milk in a year.
I'm all for _reducing_ X and Y. But completely going polar is trendy and extremely dangerous long term.
> Your gut bacteria is a jungle with many species of microbes, trillions of them.
To clarify: modern science estimates 300–1000 species in gut microbiota, 99% by number of cells coming from 30-40 species. The total number of microbial and viral cells throughout a healthy adult body is estimated at over 100 trillion, or roughly 10x the number of one's own body cells.
I really want a huge tech tree and flowchart of all the things these microbes love to eat and everything like that. Not really to provide an argument for only potatoes, but to perhaps have stronger ideas about the value of certain kinds of food
I want to get beyond the boring "too much of anything is bad". Of course it is! That's what "too much" means!
And for all your bro-dieters out there eating a "paleo" diet, realize that our Paleolithic friends ate mostly plants. The Hadza tribe is one of our last living examples and their gut biome is amazing.
This seems pretty dismissive of a diet that - like all diets - has some idiotic and vocal adherents, but consists basically of "don't eat processed food or added sugar."
The only thing we know Paleolithic people ate a lot of is meat.
Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher. Paleolithic teeth have little of the damage associated with eating grit from ground grains. We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
The Hadza are a modern people, and modern hunter-gatherers have been pushed to the fringes. Early English and French explorers documented the diets of the North American people they encountered: they ate a lot of meat, growing the Three Sisters as a supplement to a diet heavy in game and fish.
It was the Neolithic in which population pressure forced people to start eating grain, and eventually growing it. They immediately became shorter and their teeth started falling out.
> The only thing we know Paleolithic people ate a lot of is meat.
> Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher.
That's only because all the archaeologic evidence is preserved in bones and tools. All if not most of the plant based evidence has been reclaimed by nature. There are some new discoveries surrounding preserved pollens that are showing how early hominids had plants in their camps.
> We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
That's because all the wooden based structures didn't survive. We should quit calling it the Stone Age and call it the Wood Age, because their stone tools were used to build wooden structures (along with butchering critters).
Thank you for confirming that "realize that our Paleolithic friends ate mostly plants" is not something we know, that we only have evidence that they ate a lot of meat, and that you knew this to be the case, so I have to ask: why did you state something you know to be untrue?
You can also see proof in the form of bone content - it also shows that paleolithic people ate a lot of meat and that no single vegan has been found so far...
I've been off milk and dairy for about 4 years now and my wife accidentally bought me a vegetarian pizza - I thought I'd have some bad stomach or something but I was actually fine (notwithstanding existential dread).
anecdotal but I didn't eat meat for about 8 years and had absolutely no problems transitioning back to frequent carnivory, despite reading many warnings much like yours. Different strokes I guess.
I read just as much hocus pocus articles about "gut bacteria" then any "fad diets", and it all seems to boil down to "it looks important but we don't know how it works".
I'm a big believer in the idea that diet can influence the microbiome but current science does not support the above statements.
While diet can induce a shift in the gut microbiota, these changes appear to be temporary. Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown
As far as I know, lactose tolerance is the exception for the human race and it is deemed to be genetic. Many humans are lactose intolerant by default.
According to the following source, 65 percent of humans are lactose intolerant and up to 100 percent of the population in some sub groups are lactose intolerant.
Anecdote alert here, but I grew up in Northern Europe and had a standard diet absolutely full of dairy. No problems. Then I moved to East Asia for about a year and inadvertently cut out dairy completely (it just wasn't in any food, and I didn't crave it). When I went back on holiday after the first year and reintroduced dairy into my diet it seemed I had developed a serious intolerance to it which took months to slowly undo. Now I try to eat a little dairy every now and then just to stay accustomed to it.
I actually value anecdotal health stuff more than most folks. I just am not at my best and don't really know how to engage with this other than to say "Thanks."
Most people who are lactose intolerant aren't aware they are lactose intolerant, and many people are lactose intolerant.
Chances are, you are lactose intolerant but you were adjusted to the side effects as being normal until you had a period of your life where you were not dealing with them.
For a lot of people, lactose intolerance makes them a little gassy, or changes their bowel habits. It's practically negligible until they get away from it for a while and experience relief from the symptoms.
If you are lactose intolerant, you should probably try to not trigger that response, or take lactaid supplements when you are going to knowingly eat lactose so that your body has something to digest those sugars. It's a minor adjustment that can make your daily life just a little more bearable.
Born and bred by the most Nordic of Nordic folk, I've had no gastric trouble whatsoever, aside from the odd bout of food poisoning. There were no symptoms from which I felt relief when I stopped having dairy. I can all but guarantee I did not grow up lactose intolerant.
quoted "gastrointestinal specialist Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego"
> “To some extent, our ability to handle lactose is a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon,” Barrett says. The body digests lactose — a disaccharide — by using lactase, an enzyme in the small intestine, to break it down into the monosaccharides glucose and galactose, which can then be absorbed. “If you don’t have the [lactose] substrate in the diet, you start to reduce the synthesis of the lactase enzyme to digest it,” Barrett explains. “After a period of completely excluding lactose from the diet, you may not have any of those digestive enzymes present.”
Maybe unawareness here is a gender thing? I have heard this story too many times from women doing weird short-term restriction diets (or going vegan and trying to undo) to feel like I need "current science" to "support" the very fact that it happens. Many things can happen because of genes or other reasons.
That's a good point to bring up, but I do wonder if this is splitting hairs just a little bit. A shift in your microbiome might be technically temporary while still making things feel very weird for that temporary period -- however long that takes to change.
Also keep in mind:
> Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown, mainly due to a lack of long-term human dietary interventions, or long-term follow-ups of short-term dietary interventions.
>
> [...]
>
> Our understanding of the duration required for a dietary intervention to have an enduring impact on the gut microbiota, and consequently health, is hampered by several limitations. Firstly, there is a lack of long-term human studies, or indeed follow-ups of short-term dietary interventions, that seek to establish if a diet-induced modulation of the gut microbiota endures, though the wash-out periods of cross-sectional studies provide some indirect insight.
----
All that to say I actually kind of agree, and I also don't see super-strong scientific evidence of induced lactose intolerance, but I qualify that by saying that it might just be a lack of study. And again, could also be a difference in what people mean by "permanent". If something makes you lactose intolerant for a month, that's still interesting, even if that's not meeting GP's "in a year" claim.
I've been vegan for maybe a year and half at this point, and was vegetarian before that. I'm curious how my body would react to eating a meat/cheese/lactose heavy meal if I sprang one on it out of the blue (not curious enough to actually try it, but it would be an interesting experiment).
I'm not splitting hairs. I'm engaging in conversation to the best of my ability while under the weather, which is generally true of my interactions on HN.
My anecdotal experience or understanding is that potato starch is generally good for gut health, that you can nearly live on potatoes alone which is why the Irish Potato Famine was such a big deal -- big families on small plots of land were keeping people alive by growing mostly potatoes and people died in droves when the potato crop was screwed up -- and if you include oils in your "potato only" diet like the instructions allow for, coconut oil is medically known for many decades to be good for gut health due to being high in medium chain triglycerides and a guy with a PhD told me it's specifically good for microbiota. Butter is also a decent source of medium chain triglycerides though not as high as coconut oil.
Whatever is or is not true generally about "eat ONLY this" diets, my suspicion is a potato only diet -- especially if you include the right oils/fats -- is probably not a big threat to your microbiota (though other sources here are saying that losing your lactose tolerance totally is a thing and that may well be something that can happen with this diet).
Which I didn't want to say and may yet regret saying, but in for a penny, in for a pound as they say.
> I'm not splitting hairs. I'm engaging in conversation to the best of my ability while under the weather, which is generally true of my interactions on HN.
Not sure if my phrasing got this across, but I didn't mean "splitting hairs" as an intentional act or in the sense of spreading division or prompting argument, and I didn't interpret your comment as making a really strong claim in either direction. I just interpreted your comment as public musing, same as what I was doing.
I only meant "splitting hairs" in the sense that a person who runs into temporary lactose-intolerance will still have trouble for the duration of that time period. For whatever it's worth, I didn't interpret your comment as trying to say that temporary changes couldn't exist, or that you were supporting a potato-only diet, or that the OP was lying, or anything like that.
At the end of the day I'm not a doctor, I've got no idea what a potato-only diet will do to someone's microbiome. I'm just posting stuff on the Internet.
Yeah, you need to be able to produce the lactase enzyme yourself to avoid having your gut bacteria be the ones to break down lactose (and thus produce indigestion).
On the idea that your microbiome can take a long time to recover from elimination diets:
1) From a gastrointestinal morphology perspective, we are opportunistic scavengers, so our whole biology is directed around sporadically eating just about anything.
2) I've seen several studies showing that, for the most part, our gut microbiome radically reshapes itself within a matter of days in response to major diet changes.
> So if you are not lactose intolerant and get off lactose for 6-9 months, don't expect that your belly will react well to a glass of milk in a year.
I've quit all dairy for years in the past and had no issues when chugging a glass of milk or having something with cheese in it later. It's very case by case
I’ve found that a lot of people who advocate alternative diets have weird genetic circumstances where that’s the only diet they can function normally on.
They promote it to people not in their situation, the other people adopt it and now they have to eat a specialized diet because they sensitized their body.
I would agree with this, except that there are actually some good long term suggestion that if you put large groups people on nearly/entirely only potatoes you do end up with remarkably healthy people.
This is noted in, of all things, Adam Smiths the Wealth of Nations when he compares the diet of the poor in England (mostly wheat), in Scotland (Barley?) and, of course, Ireland (Potatoes). He notes that, of these groups, it is not the relatively well-of poor in England who are the healthiests, but the poorest of the all, the Irish. The poor in Ireland would not be able to afford more than the cheapest food, which would be whatever greens were in season and potatoes.
My doctor put me on a "no milk products" diet years ago for a digestive ailment. I [too rigorously, perhaps] held to it for a year and a half. The diet solved my problems but at end left me lactose intolerant.
It didn't at first seem like much to live without milk products. But the ramifications of eating say, a banana pudding, which then turns one's intestines into a freestyle trumpet, cannot be ignored.
Any X-only diet doesn't seem healthy to me. There is no magical ingredient and we are omnivorous. Sure you can reduce weight with many types of different diets but it doesn't mean it is good for your health.
It is better to develop good healthy habits than you can maintain for years and also while socializing and living in family.
Telling an obese person to develop good healthy habits is like telling an alcoholic to drink with moderation. The theory is sound but it get crushed once it gets IRL.
We are not omnivores. Humans are obligate hypercarnivores that are capable of scavenging other energy sources for survival. Plenty of animals, both herbivores and carnivores, are capable of eating foods that they were not developed to eat, but that does not mean it's optimal or good for them.
Humans only became "omnivores" in the last 30,000 years as a result of agriculture. For several million years prior to that, hominins ate diets almost entirely of meat from ruminants and occasionally some roots and tubers. If we were designed to eat everything in a "balanced" proportion, as is often suggested, we would have a cecum to properly ferment plant material, and our digestive systems would be more basic than acidic.
And we can digest plants just fine without having to ferment them.
All those fantastical ideas about how the human body works, they keep cropping up in this kind of thread again and again. Where do they come from, I wonder?
I am really curious. Who comes up with those things?
The other day some guy was saying we can't digest plants. Like, at all. A vegetarian once told me that our teeth and stomach can't deal with meat. Have those people never eaten the things they say we can't eat?
There's clearly a kind of madness in all those diets that starts to become dangerous when it becomes a fad. But I'm still curious: how do they start?
Yes, we have a cecum by name, as do other hypercarnivores including cats, but its design in no way suggests that humans developed to primarily eat plants or even digest them in an efficient way. Even the article you cited states explicitly that the function of the human cecum is different than that of herbavores, and it's dubious whether it should even be referred to as a cecum.
If you look at the digestive tract of herbavores, such as cows, deer, horses, and rabbits, their cecum is a distinctly large and is typically considered a separate digestive organ.
Besides absorbing salts, the human "cecum" is a glorified dead end to the large intestine. A human could easily live without one if it were removed. It would have nearly no impact on our ability to swallow cellulose and excrete it undigested. Removing the cecum from an herbavore like a horse would be an entirely different story because they need it to process cellulose.
> And we can digest plants just fine without having to ferment them.
This is not correct. Humans are entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material. You will find no credible source that suggests that our digestive tracts are good at digesting cellulose, which makes up the bulk of plant material because it composes their cell walls. Just because we can swallow plants and poop them out without necessarily getting sick or dying doesn't mean it's at all optimal.
At best, we can ferment a small amount of cellulose given that it has been sufficiently broken down through cooking. Even if we were better at fermenting it, we are extremely poor at grinding it and are bad at harboring microbiota that produce cellulase enzyme.
Can we derive energy from plants? Of course. If those plants are abundant in sugars and proteins, then we can access those. That is possible in present day because agriculture and selective breeding made edible and energy dense plants available and ubiquitous. Such plants did not exist the way they do today, were usually scarce, only available seasonally, and were energy-expensive to obtain and prepare.
> There's clearly a kind of madness in all those diets that starts to become dangerous when it becomes a fad.
Depends on if those diets are actually dangerous. What's more dangerous than believing that humans are developed to primarily eat meat is to ignore all available scientific evidence and promote fanciful ideas around plants being good or even better for humans. I await the day that a child dies from being fed plenty of meat.
Will you listen to yourself speak for a moment? What you are saying is completely mad! We are "entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material"? The majority of the food eaten by every human culture throughout history consisted of plants! "Staples" they're called: cereals, roots and pulses, the three bloody sisters, wheat, rice, barley, potatoes, taro, cassava and yams. People have subsisted on diets that were for their vast majority only plants for thousands of years but we are entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material?
Why? Why is it that whenever the subject is food all the deranged nonsense of the internets comes out of the woodwork? One group of looney tune characters wants to eat nothing but plants. Another wants to eat nothing but meat. One insance clown posse says meat is bad for you. The other says plants are bad for you. You people are all stark raving mad! You're bananas!
> Yes, we have a cecum by name, as do other hypercarnivores including cats,...
Listen to yourself! We are like cats? Humans? Or are we talking about Thundrecats now? Because unlike Lion-O, humans are nothing like cats:
A hypocarnivore is an animal that consumes less than 30% meat for its diet, the majority of which consists of fungi, fruits, and other plant material.[1] Examples of living hypocarnivores are the grizzly bear (Ursus horribilis), black bear (Ursus americanus), binturong (Arctictis binturong), kinkajou (Potos flavus), and humans
You want a "credible source", really? I mean you can't even spell "herbivore" correctly but can you tell me which "credible source" is it that told you all this nonsense, that we are "hypercarnivores", like cats, and that we are "entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material"?
Pay heed: your friend Napoleon Bonaparte doesn't count. He's not who you think he is.
Fiber is increasingly being recognized as essential to gut health, so arguably it should be considered a nutrient. Classifying it differently risks omitting it from discussions (as we see in the article) and - vitally - food labeling.
Fiber is only "essential" in the context of eating food that isn't appropriate for our digestive system. Eating an appropriate diet primarily of meat requires no fiber whatsoever. The idea that fiber is necessary for anything but mitigating some effects from an inappropriate diet comes from the American dietetics association's desire to push a plant-based diet despite all the evidence contrary to plant-based diets.
This title is fairly disingenuous considering the test subjects are using vitamin supplements to make up for the obvious deficiency.
The weight loss bits are just silly. Any sustained caloric deficit will cause one to lose fat, regardless of the source. This just seems to be rediscovering the already well-known fact that complex carbohydrates (which potatoes provide) keep you better satiated than simple carbohydrates, so the subjects were consuming less calories overall.
The purpose of this random Internet trial is to verify or disprove the assertion that this diet is easy to stick to for most people, which would be absolutely massive if true because no weight-loss diet ever has had this property. And it seems to have done very well at that purpose: four weeks later, only about 10% of the cohort were still doing it.
Lots of diets are "easy to stick to", for the short term, which 4 weeks definitely is. E.g. Keto, Intermittent Fasting, etc.
Most people fall off diets in the longer term, and there are various causes, including hunger, but also including things like wanting to be able to partake in social events that feature other foods.
4 weeks is a very, very long time to only eat potatoes. When Penn Jillette tried this, the all-potato phase lasted 2 weeks. I wonder what % of the cohort was still adhering to the diet at the 2-week mark?
Tbf, last time I was shown this blog it was to highlighy on their detailed arguments to the effect that eating less in general and less processed food in particular and exercising more wasn't an answer to obesity (a remarkable piece of analysis which concluded that the average American eating 20% fewer calories than a time when Americans were less obese was no big deal and couldnt possibly be causal)
Quite why they have chosen to abandon their diet-scepticism in favour of anecdotes from a guy who literally promoted potatos as his day job and a guy who sells courses on how to eat potatos for $199+, but I guess contrarians gotta be contrary...
If the miracle cure for the obesity epidemic was “eat any food you want until you’re not hungry, just as long as you don’t eat processed food” then we wouldn’t have a mystery or a problem. We'd just have one set of people who knew how to prepare unprocessed food, and one set of people who chose to continue to eat processed food (and thus remained obese.) We could then deal with the obesity epidemic the same way we dealt with smoking.
But things are not that simple. There is no evidence that simply removing processed food is an effective enough diet to produce the sustained 10-20% weight loss (or more) that many obese Americans would need to experience in order to weigh the same as their grandparents. And in fact there is overwhelming evidence that this modest intervention (and several more extreme calorie restricted versions) tend not to produce durable weight loss in anywhere near that amount.
PS Don’t take this the wrong way. I really really wish that that diet did work. I would pay you literally thousands of dollars to make it work. Because our grandparents ate a very filling and diverse diet, and that diet would be effortless to follow.
That reminds of the old Simpsons episode, "Lisa the Tree Hugger", where she meets a boy who is a "level 5 vegan" and thus "won't eat anything that casts a shadow."
“Potatoes, milk, butter and the occasional piece of meat” is apparently a nutritionally complete diet, but you need to be able to eat something like 10-lb of cooked potatoes a day, which is hard work and also not that inexpensive either.
More like 7lbs for an average man, but that's probably the point. You realistically can only eat something like 4lbs a day (I guess - I haven't tried), and thus you lose weight. If that amount is enough to make you feel full, that would plausibly explain why these people have success with this weight loss strategy.
Note that the article recommends refraining from consuming dairy products, albeit without any reasoning.
Dairy products are usually high in fat and cholesterol, and are generally considered to be unhealthy. They are high in calcium, but the absorption rate (how much calcium you actually get from consuming it) is very low, and according to some research it's even negative (as in, it costs your body more calcium to consume dairy than what you get from it).
Dairy is also a relatively new addition to our diet, and was exclusively for babies for most of our history. A lot of people hate on vegans for being "unnatural", but at least when it comes to eating dairy that's just silly.
At Tesco's you can get potatoes for £0.36/kg. 1kg = ~2.2lb, so ~£0.165/lb. Even at the higher daily consumption in this thread, 10lb/day, that's £1.65 daily cost of food.
I imagine the only way to go cheaper is by dumpster diving.
Tesco does not list calories for potatoes, and for the dry foods only provides calories for the cooked result, so I used values from the USDA nutrient database. The value for potatoes is optimistic, because the cheap potatoes are "imperfect", which suggests there will be significant loss from trimming inedible parts. Assuming efficient technique (pre-soaking dry foods, chopping potatoes small, reducing heat input to minimum once at temperature, covering cooking pots, using insulated pots if possible), cooking cost will probably be similar for all three, although pasta can be eaten "al dente" (undercooked), which might let it beat rice for total cost.
Rice has a satiety index of 138 while potatoes have a satiety index of 323, almost 3 times as much. So you need to eat way less potatoes compared to rice, I don't know if it's a linear scale though but still probably brings potatoes pretty close to rice.
But the point of this diet is that potatoes have a very high satiety so that even if you eat as much you possibly want to you won't eat enough to put on weight. Rice, with its lower satiety, is much easier to overeat (or eat enough to maintain a higher weight).
mrob explains it well - potatoes aren’t the cheapest carb, but there’s also the cost of milk and butter in the quantities needed. I worked it out at over £4 a day, and you can eat the regular and varied protein, carbs and veg diet on that.
This made me wonder whether potatoes are really this expensive in Australia? In the UK buying 2000 calories worth of potatoes from a major supermarket would cost the equivalent of AUD2.12 not AUD9.90 ...
Though by comparison rice gets you 2000 calories for AUD1.03, spaghetti AUD0.92, carrots AUD2.51, "pure vegetable oil" AUD0.059 so a more varied diet could be cheaper.
Actually I'd like to propose the carrot-only diet... Trying to eat 5kg of carrots a day is bound to make you lose weight, though your skin may turn orange ;)
Bad title. They are actually trying to do a study.
They have arguments for taking kind of "a fad diet" seriously enough to do a study based on existing anecdotal evidence that this might not be a crazy fad diet.
And they have a whole other post [1] about why science needs to actually check stuff like this, because reality is full of complexity that prevents us from drawing conclusions as rapidly as we'd like.
It's not that carbs will kill you. It's more like, people growing up on western diets, have such destroyed metabolisms, that you have to resort to going very low carb to try to fix or mitigate the damage.
I think the real tick is not eating highly processed food. Eat highly nutritious whole foods.
Actually, they can all be "right" but only in exclusion.
Eating mostly carbs absent fat or fat absent carbs means engaging the Randle Cycle to a much lesser degree, given that fatty acid and glucose aren't competing fuel substrates.
My long-running pet theory is that eating a large variety of foods is bad for our gut biome. Between breakfast, lunch, and dinner, our intestinal flora cycles through blooms and die-offs of different bacteria. The blooms interfere with bacteria diversity, while the die-offs create waves of toxins that trigger our immune systems. To give an analogy, it's a bit like an ecology having its climate messed with. Imagine a forest that was hot one day, cold the next, dry as a bone on some days, and wet as a swamp the next.
I reckon most animals eat a steady diet of only one or two things, and people did too for a very long time (on a seasonal scale). It was only recently that we ate so many different foods so frequently, and this coincides with a rise in gut-related illnesses and obesity in first world countries. Many people see success treating these diseases with some diet, but what's interesting is how different and disjoint these diets are. For example, both carnivore diets and vegetarian diets have seen success treating inflammatory bowel disease. Perhaps this success isn't due to eating one food over another, but rather to the reduction in variety a diet brings.
I guess maybe they were serially varied, as food is gathered or harvested in season, rather than simultaneously varied though?
So you might eat a wide variety of things during the year, but for weeks at a time you might be eating lots of just the few things that are currently available
Not saying that is the case, I don't know, but I would not totally dismiss OP idea out of hand
An easy counterpoint is that Japan is a very healthy society with the lowest obesity rate in the developed world, and they actually have a mantra that says "eat 30 different foods every day". Japanese people directly attribute their health to the diversity and variety of their diet.
Yes, that's one of the big mindfucks in the nutrition world, which is that arguably the healthiest society on the planet has a diet high in sodium, refined carbs, and fried foods.
My guess here is that the potential benefits come from potatoes satiating better than most other cheap calories and that you quickly get tired of eating potatoes and just quit eating.
Another approach that I've been experimenting with that makes pretty much any diet satiating: semaglutide. FDA approved as of last year, and for people whose main issue with dieting is constantly feeling like you're starving (most dieters, I would bet), it effectively destroys appetite. It's one of two drugs I've tried for weight loss that have been effective for me, and its side effect profile is far, far better.
I ate only potatoes (+oil/butter and spices) for years and was happy (I really love potatoes) but then got too tired of washing potatoes many times a day (you have to wash them because even a clean-looking potato has a serious chance to have a particle of sand stick to it and that's very unpleasant to bite). My mass (rather humble) never changed during those years, mo matter how much I ate, slept or moved.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadShame he study is all google based.. :(
[1] https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/food-drink/irish-potato...
Losing weight isn't causal to being healthy. In most cases it correlates because gaining weight is usually done through eating unhealthy (excess calories, refined sugars, etc.) so going on a healthy diet means losing weight gained from unhealthy diet.
Also, there are unhealthy diets on which you can lose weight but the effects on your hormones might be even worse than an unhealthy diet that causes you to gain weight.
Strictly spoken, true, but being overweight definitely is causal to decreased health.
Even that is not necessarily always true. I imagine being oevrweight is generally much healthier than going through famine.
In doctor's parlance, overweight means BMI between 25 and 30. This tends to correlate with the lowest all cause mortality in older people [0], so it might not be a big deal.
But outright obesity (BMI > 30) and morbid obesity (BMI > 40) are definitely a health problem.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/99/4/875/4637868
So becoming less obese is in fact causing better health.
Of course there are unhealthy ways to lose weight, but that's a separate issue.
They're saying losing weight != healthy, which isn't the same thing. Take anorexia or bulimia for example. You could be overweight, but that doesn't mean losing weight from an eating disorder is healthy. Same is true for a diet. Just because you're losing weight from a diet, doesn't mean the diet is healthy for you.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/weight-loss-breathing-de...
Except that's not how it works. An excess of fat can directly cause problems.
Above a certain point, having too much fat causes chronic hypoxia in fatty tissue, leading to chronic inflammation, which can eventually lead to systemic problems like insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, liver disease, and cancer.
Edit: I am specifically referring to abdominal fat in excess of what a given body is able to cope with.
They merely suggested that weight loss does not occur as a result of a healthy diet, but rather as a result of an intentionally deficient diet (technically an "unhealthy" diet). That you can lose weight eating only potatoes is therefore not very interesting and does not imply that the diet is healthy.
Aren’t all diets whose goal is weight loss “intentionally deficient” ?
I don't have an opinion either way and I don't think this is a likely reason, but it is a possibility.
Anyway the diet described in the article doesn't make any assumption about calories. If you're taking enough calories to maintain your weight but losing weight, then it's very likely there's something else you're not getting enough of.
Besides the fact the diet isn't asking suggesting anyone not supplement, a vegan diet won't lead to a severe B-12 deficiency in a matter months. But hey there is a non-0% chance you are bang on and the people losing weight when trying to eat 20 potatoes a day to meet their caloric demands are actually just noticing the weight loss once they also get pellagra and anemia, they just figured it was a coincidence.
They found that indigestible oils like Olestra served to flush out the chemicals that bonded with oils, so maybe the high fiber potato diet is good for flushing out something else?
From the perspective I took where a healthy diet is a sustainable one with sufficient nutrients and long lifetime expectancy, a weight loss diet is unhealthy and unsustainable, but there to negate a different issue and improve long-term health.
However, a diet that varies in how 'fed' you are over time is very likely healthier than one where you are constantly taking in nutrients. During that post-prandial state, insulin and growth factors are elevated, and autophagy and other important pathways for 'tidying up' sick cells are turned off. That is why I don't think it is fair to say that fasts or restrictive diets are inherently unhealthy, I reckon 'whether this can be sustained steadily forever' should not be the bar. Similarly, the 200% of normal diet consumed after marathon is healthy that day and probably more healthy than eating normally since it is going to allow for repair and replenishment of depleted substrates, but would not be healthy if eaten every day.
For someone with health issues stemming from obesity, a potato-crash diet could immediately improve health, and continue to for a good while.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12030379/
Adopting a diet that balances nutrients and calories and also provides all needed vitamins will lead to weight loss and health improvement (in most cases).
And as you know, fueling the body with excess macronutrients is unhealthy. Indeed, eating a diet poor or absent in micronutrients is bad for you, but also quite rare.
Sure it is. I mean there are healthy ways to lose weight and less healthy ways, but losing weight if you're overweight is better for your health.
Also hormone imbalance isn't unscientific. It has been widely been studied that women will have their periods change timing when malnourished.
Anectdotally: I had my testosterone levels wiped out when switching from a diet with excess calories to a one with not enough calories and nutrients. The condition fixed itself when I started practicing a balanced diet (with exercises).
See page xxi, chapter A. Weight loss is recommended for lowering blood pressure, levels of total/LDL cholesterol, and blood glucose, and for blood pressure and blood glucose these effects have also been shown in RCTs with weight lowering medications, so we can't say they were due to more healthy diets alone.
See also this summary of evidence of the benefits of moderate (5-10%) weight loss: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5497590/
(saying that I agree with you that we shouldn't all adopt the cabbage soup diet, or potato-only diet for extended periods, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater)
(I wouldn't recommend the potato-only diet for someone who hasn't already attempted a healthy, balanced diet with consistent tracking, that should always be the first thing attempted as it can be continued indefinitely with less dependence on tracking over time, but some people find the effort of tracking hard to maintain)
Potatoes lack a lot of vitamins and nutrients needed in order for them to be the sole food you can eat and stay healthy.
In many ways it certainly is. Knees don't go bad because they are carrying excess serum triglycerides that just happen to correlate with body mass.
That said, being overweight (fat) is not where you want to be at, it results in big and small health issues like joint troubles, high blood pressure, diabetes, and finding trivial things like getting up from the couch or walking up the stairs difficult.
In practice most people, especially at non-Tropical latitudes or who don’t spend multiple hours outside everyday don’t get nearly enough.
If you've got a daytime job, live above the Arctic circle or immigrated, then your only option is to eat vitamin D-rich foods or eat supplements.
Because of the thickness of the atmosphere when the sun is at lower altitudes you will only start to get enough UV-B penetrating when the sun is at an angle of >=35 degrees. If you are within 35 degrees of equator you can get UV-B every day, but outside of these latitudes there are many months where there's just not enough solar hang time high enough in the sky to deliver any meaningful amount of UV-B.
The shitty part is, the whole time and more you're still getting UV-A, which is a known cancer risk. Depending on your clothing, skin pigment, weight, and age, UV-B uptake may be significantly reduced (up to 6x for dark skin pigment, 2x for age over 50).
So while you can get UV-B from the sun in mid-day at the right latitudes, most people benefit from supplementing.
Good info at the D-Minder app site: https://dminder.ontometrics.com/
I think what I've learned from this is supplement, supplement, supplement.
I thought it was 'via diet', it's just that sunlight is necessary for the extraction/absorption?
Sort of like carbohydrate in a plant is 'generated via sun light' (photosynthesis) - but other inputs, carbon dioxide & water, are necessary too.
"don't you get bored from eating potatoes"? i am asked on a regular basis. my answer is a standard "potatoes are life, potatoes are my comfort food. now get off my lawn"
edit: i am willing to do an all potato diet but its not like i hate anything else, i just cant hate potatoes.
anytime there is a discussion on food, i bring in potatoes into the conversation automatically. i can't help it. its not like people come up to me and ask about my eating habits.
i am willing and have at many times given up a plate of a variety of meats and stuff for a plate of fried/baked potatoes so i bring that up and people start saying stuff...
I eat potatoes daily now, but not exclusively - complex carbs are harder to burn, so they are fattening, so I have gained some weight. Maybe I'll eliminate the rice and see how that goes.
I'd recommend against olive oil and for coconut oil, frying potatoes needs a lot of heat. Add parsley, bacon, caraway, onions and serve with pickled white cabbage. Good & simple!
One thing to note, I am not sure why would you suggest to remove olive oil. All the research (I’ve seen) suggests that olive oil is really good for humans
Also the other fellow might be referencing EVOO's low smoke point, it's true there isn't much point using it for high heat cooking.
I get the feeling that it is possible to gain muscle on keto, it's just being low-carb doesn't lend itself to high-intensity efforts, so at some point you just can't put out enough effort to damage your muscles any further.
I've recently starting eating carbs on days where I'm doing 80+ km and the difference is astonishing, I've set PRs up hills at the end of 100 km rides and I'm approaching being able to do 100 km solo at 32 km/h, where before on strict keto I'd start getting very lethargic after just 50 km.
Taking carbs on big effort days seems like the best of both worlds, fat adapted but able to take advantage of both energy systems. I think on Inigo san Milan's first appearance on Peter Attia's podcast they got into this a bit, also mentioned that high level fat adapted cyclists could do a few hundred grams of carbs in a day and still maintain ketosis
So def. noob gains. But I also see that fat tissue is burning (slowly but surely) and muscles are growing. Lifting, no cardio or HIIT.
Yeah, I meant EVOO in general. Great for salads, maybe not so much for frying :)
Butter and coconut oil are nearly 100% saturated fats, with 2-3% PUFA. Olive oil is a bit higher in PUFA, 8-11%, so it decomposes more easily when heated up.
Consider that olive oil is one of the most counterfeited products in the world. It is very common for producers (Greece, Italy, Macedonia etc) to add low-quality seed oils, and this is hard to detect. Research the price of olives, the amount of olives needed for one liter of olive oil, and the price olive oil sells for in supermarkets - it doesn't add up.
That isn't how it works. A calorie of complex carbs is the same energy as a calorie worth of glucose.
It worked well for me, my endurance in e.g. cycling improved. However usually stay on it about half a year to lose extra weight and then go back to a "regular" diet.
I mean, I love the taste of butter, cream, marbled steaks and pork fat, but when you have to consume whipping cream as a beverage it sounds absolutely nauseating.
When kids are put on the diet for epilepsy they make them chug cream and mayonnaise, not exactly my idea of a delicious meal: https://www.epilepsy.com/treatment/dietary-therapies/ketogen...?
Here in Mexico we have a large number of keto friendly recipes, but the amount of saturated fats in them guarantee a heart attack.
- carnitas - barbacoa - birria - queso fundido - taquiqueso
Among many others
“Dieting” usually has too broad a set of parameters. You need a control. And if you have a goal and you’re paying attention, you’ll probably see an improvement over not having a control and eating freely.
Health, over the long term, may be more complicated but having a lean body mass makes health easier to achieve than not having a lean body mass.
It wasn't particularly difficult but not particularly easy either compared to other diets I've tried.
So if you are not lactose intolerant and get off lactose for 6-9 months, don't expect that your belly will react well to a glass of milk in a year.
I'm all for _reducing_ X and Y. But completely going polar is trendy and extremely dangerous long term.
To clarify: modern science estimates 300–1000 species in gut microbiota, 99% by number of cells coming from 30-40 species. The total number of microbial and viral cells throughout a healthy adult body is estimated at over 100 trillion, or roughly 10x the number of one's own body cells.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_microbiota
I want to get beyond the boring "too much of anything is bad". Of course it is! That's what "too much" means!
Well, have fun!
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/24/5456315...
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-micr...
Paleo goes a bit beyond that, to be fair.
Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher. Paleolithic teeth have little of the damage associated with eating grit from ground grains. We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
The Hadza are a modern people, and modern hunter-gatherers have been pushed to the fringes. Early English and French explorers documented the diets of the North American people they encountered: they ate a lot of meat, growing the Three Sisters as a supplement to a diet heavy in game and fish.
It was the Neolithic in which population pressure forced people to start eating grain, and eventually growing it. They immediately became shorter and their teeth started falling out.
> Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher.
That's only because all the archaeologic evidence is preserved in bones and tools. All if not most of the plant based evidence has been reclaimed by nature. There are some new discoveries surrounding preserved pollens that are showing how early hominids had plants in their camps.
> We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
That's because all the wooden based structures didn't survive. We should quit calling it the Stone Age and call it the Wood Age, because their stone tools were used to build wooden structures (along with butchering critters).
Maybe I should have worded it better... "realize that our Paleolithic friends ate more plants than we were lead to believe"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g-Yk9F2mM8
Obviously everyone will react differently.
While diet can induce a shift in the gut microbiota, these changes appear to be temporary. Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950569/#:~:tex...
I am unaware of dietary induced lactose intolerance as a thing. I tried to google it and can't find support for the idea.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/lactose-intolerance-101
As far as I know, lactose tolerance is the exception for the human race and it is deemed to be genetic. Many humans are lactose intolerant by default.
According to the following source, 65 percent of humans are lactose intolerant and up to 100 percent of the population in some sub groups are lactose intolerant.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lactose-i...
AIUI drinking whole milk is mostly a Hong Kong thing.
Chances are, you are lactose intolerant but you were adjusted to the side effects as being normal until you had a period of your life where you were not dealing with them.
For a lot of people, lactose intolerance makes them a little gassy, or changes their bowel habits. It's practically negligible until they get away from it for a while and experience relief from the symptoms.
If you are lactose intolerant, you should probably try to not trigger that response, or take lactaid supplements when you are going to knowingly eat lactose so that your body has something to digest those sugars. It's a minor adjustment that can make your daily life just a little more bearable.
quoted "gastrointestinal specialist Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego"
> “To some extent, our ability to handle lactose is a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon,” Barrett says. The body digests lactose — a disaccharide — by using lactase, an enzyme in the small intestine, to break it down into the monosaccharides glucose and galactose, which can then be absorbed. “If you don’t have the [lactose] substrate in the diet, you start to reduce the synthesis of the lactase enzyme to digest it,” Barrett explains. “After a period of completely excluding lactose from the diet, you may not have any of those digestive enzymes present.”
Maybe unawareness here is a gender thing? I have heard this story too many times from women doing weird short-term restriction diets (or going vegan and trying to undo) to feel like I need "current science" to "support" the very fact that it happens. Many things can happen because of genes or other reasons.
If you are assuming I'm male, you are in error.
That's a good point to bring up, but I do wonder if this is splitting hairs just a little bit. A shift in your microbiome might be technically temporary while still making things feel very weird for that temporary period -- however long that takes to change.
Also keep in mind:
> Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown, mainly due to a lack of long-term human dietary interventions, or long-term follow-ups of short-term dietary interventions. > > [...] > > Our understanding of the duration required for a dietary intervention to have an enduring impact on the gut microbiota, and consequently health, is hampered by several limitations. Firstly, there is a lack of long-term human studies, or indeed follow-ups of short-term dietary interventions, that seek to establish if a diet-induced modulation of the gut microbiota endures, though the wash-out periods of cross-sectional studies provide some indirect insight.
----
All that to say I actually kind of agree, and I also don't see super-strong scientific evidence of induced lactose intolerance, but I qualify that by saying that it might just be a lack of study. And again, could also be a difference in what people mean by "permanent". If something makes you lactose intolerant for a month, that's still interesting, even if that's not meeting GP's "in a year" claim.
I've been vegan for maybe a year and half at this point, and was vegetarian before that. I'm curious how my body would react to eating a meat/cheese/lactose heavy meal if I sprang one on it out of the blue (not curious enough to actually try it, but it would be an interesting experiment).
My anecdotal experience or understanding is that potato starch is generally good for gut health, that you can nearly live on potatoes alone which is why the Irish Potato Famine was such a big deal -- big families on small plots of land were keeping people alive by growing mostly potatoes and people died in droves when the potato crop was screwed up -- and if you include oils in your "potato only" diet like the instructions allow for, coconut oil is medically known for many decades to be good for gut health due to being high in medium chain triglycerides and a guy with a PhD told me it's specifically good for microbiota. Butter is also a decent source of medium chain triglycerides though not as high as coconut oil.
Whatever is or is not true generally about "eat ONLY this" diets, my suspicion is a potato only diet -- especially if you include the right oils/fats -- is probably not a big threat to your microbiota (though other sources here are saying that losing your lactose tolerance totally is a thing and that may well be something that can happen with this diet).
Which I didn't want to say and may yet regret saying, but in for a penny, in for a pound as they say.
Not sure if my phrasing got this across, but I didn't mean "splitting hairs" as an intentional act or in the sense of spreading division or prompting argument, and I didn't interpret your comment as making a really strong claim in either direction. I just interpreted your comment as public musing, same as what I was doing.
I only meant "splitting hairs" in the sense that a person who runs into temporary lactose-intolerance will still have trouble for the duration of that time period. For whatever it's worth, I didn't interpret your comment as trying to say that temporary changes couldn't exist, or that you were supporting a potato-only diet, or that the OP was lying, or anything like that.
At the end of the day I'm not a doctor, I've got no idea what a potato-only diet will do to someone's microbiome. I'm just posting stuff on the Internet.
I've tried it myself and try to stick to it. When strict on it my horrific whole body burning pain stopped.
Not everyone, but many people are either cured, show no symptoms, or have reduced symptoms.
I've also noticed a lot of people that have never heard of it eventually rediscover it via trial and error on how their body responds.
Funny enough in contrast to the article. Potatoes (nightshades) are not allowed. Sweet potatoes are.
On the idea that your microbiome can take a long time to recover from elimination diets: 1) From a gastrointestinal morphology perspective, we are opportunistic scavengers, so our whole biology is directed around sporadically eating just about anything. 2) I've seen several studies showing that, for the most part, our gut microbiome radically reshapes itself within a matter of days in response to major diet changes.
I've quit all dairy for years in the past and had no issues when chugging a glass of milk or having something with cheese in it later. It's very case by case
They promote it to people not in their situation, the other people adopt it and now they have to eat a specialized diet because they sensitized their body.
This is noted in, of all things, Adam Smiths the Wealth of Nations when he compares the diet of the poor in England (mostly wheat), in Scotland (Barley?) and, of course, Ireland (Potatoes). He notes that, of these groups, it is not the relatively well-of poor in England who are the healthiests, but the poorest of the all, the Irish. The poor in Ireland would not be able to afford more than the cheapest food, which would be whatever greens were in season and potatoes.
My doctor put me on a "no milk products" diet years ago for a digestive ailment. I [too rigorously, perhaps] held to it for a year and a half. The diet solved my problems but at end left me lactose intolerant.
It didn't at first seem like much to live without milk products. But the ramifications of eating say, a banana pudding, which then turns one's intestines into a freestyle trumpet, cannot be ignored.
It is better to develop good healthy habits than you can maintain for years and also while socializing and living in family.
Humans only became "omnivores" in the last 30,000 years as a result of agriculture. For several million years prior to that, hominins ate diets almost entirely of meat from ruminants and occasionally some roots and tubers. If we were designed to eat everything in a "balanced" proportion, as is often suggested, we would have a cecum to properly ferment plant material, and our digestive systems would be more basic than acidic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecum
And we can digest plants just fine without having to ferment them.
All those fantastical ideas about how the human body works, they keep cropping up in this kind of thread again and again. Where do they come from, I wonder?
I am really curious. Who comes up with those things?
The other day some guy was saying we can't digest plants. Like, at all. A vegetarian once told me that our teeth and stomach can't deal with meat. Have those people never eaten the things they say we can't eat?
There's clearly a kind of madness in all those diets that starts to become dangerous when it becomes a fad. But I'm still curious: how do they start?
If you look at the digestive tract of herbavores, such as cows, deer, horses, and rabbits, their cecum is a distinctly large and is typically considered a separate digestive organ.
Besides absorbing salts, the human "cecum" is a glorified dead end to the large intestine. A human could easily live without one if it were removed. It would have nearly no impact on our ability to swallow cellulose and excrete it undigested. Removing the cecum from an herbavore like a horse would be an entirely different story because they need it to process cellulose.
> And we can digest plants just fine without having to ferment them.
This is not correct. Humans are entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material. You will find no credible source that suggests that our digestive tracts are good at digesting cellulose, which makes up the bulk of plant material because it composes their cell walls. Just because we can swallow plants and poop them out without necessarily getting sick or dying doesn't mean it's at all optimal.
At best, we can ferment a small amount of cellulose given that it has been sufficiently broken down through cooking. Even if we were better at fermenting it, we are extremely poor at grinding it and are bad at harboring microbiota that produce cellulase enzyme.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8661373/
Can we derive energy from plants? Of course. If those plants are abundant in sugars and proteins, then we can access those. That is possible in present day because agriculture and selective breeding made edible and energy dense plants available and ubiquitous. Such plants did not exist the way they do today, were usually scarce, only available seasonally, and were energy-expensive to obtain and prepare.
> There's clearly a kind of madness in all those diets that starts to become dangerous when it becomes a fad.
Depends on if those diets are actually dangerous. What's more dangerous than believing that humans are developed to primarily eat meat is to ignore all available scientific evidence and promote fanciful ideas around plants being good or even better for humans. I await the day that a child dies from being fed plenty of meat.
Meanwhile...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/vegan-coup...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjqbem/judge-convicts-parent...
It's as if the human body is optimized to process animal material and is not so good at processing plants.
Why? Why is it that whenever the subject is food all the deranged nonsense of the internets comes out of the woodwork? One group of looney tune characters wants to eat nothing but plants. Another wants to eat nothing but meat. One insance clown posse says meat is bad for you. The other says plants are bad for you. You people are all stark raving mad! You're bananas!
> Yes, we have a cecum by name, as do other hypercarnivores including cats,...
Listen to yourself! We are like cats? Humans? Or are we talking about Thundrecats now? Because unlike Lion-O, humans are nothing like cats:
A hypocarnivore is an animal that consumes less than 30% meat for its diet, the majority of which consists of fungi, fruits, and other plant material.[1] Examples of living hypocarnivores are the grizzly bear (Ursus horribilis), black bear (Ursus americanus), binturong (Arctictis binturong), kinkajou (Potos flavus), and humans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocarnivore
You want a "credible source", really? I mean you can't even spell "herbivore" correctly but can you tell me which "credible source" is it that told you all this nonsense, that we are "hypercarnivores", like cats, and that we are "entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material"?
Pay heed: your friend Napoleon Bonaparte doesn't count. He's not who you think he is.
Also, sweet potatoes are not potatoes - different families, and different nutritional profiles. The former is considered a root, the latter a tuber.
A well researched diet should be aware of these points.
Here's a discussion: https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(15)01743-8/ful...
The weight loss bits are just silly. Any sustained caloric deficit will cause one to lose fat, regardless of the source. This just seems to be rediscovering the already well-known fact that complex carbohydrates (which potatoes provide) keep you better satiated than simple carbohydrates, so the subjects were consuming less calories overall.
Most people fall off diets in the longer term, and there are various causes, including hunger, but also including things like wanting to be able to partake in social events that feature other foods.
Quite why they have chosen to abandon their diet-scepticism in favour of anecdotes from a guy who literally promoted potatos as his day job and a guy who sells courses on how to eat potatos for $199+, but I guess contrarians gotta be contrary...
But things are not that simple. There is no evidence that simply removing processed food is an effective enough diet to produce the sustained 10-20% weight loss (or more) that many obese Americans would need to experience in order to weigh the same as their grandparents. And in fact there is overwhelming evidence that this modest intervention (and several more extreme calorie restricted versions) tend not to produce durable weight loss in anywhere near that amount.
PS Don’t take this the wrong way. I really really wish that that diet did work. I would pay you literally thousands of dollars to make it work. Because our grandparents ate a very filling and diverse diet, and that diet would be effortless to follow.
Note that the article recommends refraining from consuming dairy products, albeit without any reasoning.
Dairy is also a relatively new addition to our diet, and was exclusively for babies for most of our history. A lot of people hate on vegans for being "unnatural", but at least when it comes to eating dairy that's just silly.
At Tesco's you can get potatoes for £0.36/kg. 1kg = ~2.2lb, so ~£0.165/lb. Even at the higher daily consumption in this thread, 10lb/day, that's £1.65 daily cost of food.
I imagine the only way to go cheaper is by dumpster diving.
Rice[2]: £0.45/3650kcal[3]
Pasta[4]: £0.46/3710kcal[5]
Normalized to rice:
Potatoes: 3.79 rice_cost_units/kcal
Rice: 1.00 rice_cost_units/kcal
Pasta: 1.01 rice_cost_units/kcal
Tesco does not list calories for potatoes, and for the dry foods only provides calories for the cooked result, so I used values from the USDA nutrient database. The value for potatoes is optimistic, because the cheap potatoes are "imperfect", which suggests there will be significant loss from trimming inedible parts. Assuming efficient technique (pre-soaking dry foods, chopping potatoes small, reducing heat input to minimum once at temperature, covering cooking pots, using insulated pots if possible), cooking cost will probably be similar for all three, although pasta can be eaten "al dente" (undercooked), which might let it beat rice for total cost.
[0] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/292332517
[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/170026/n...
[2] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/300843799
[3] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/169756/n...
[4] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/297844134
[5] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/168927/n...
Potato, potato and more potato: surviving on spuds
https://aussielent.com.au/blogs/news/potato-potato-and-more-...
Though by comparison rice gets you 2000 calories for AUD1.03, spaghetti AUD0.92, carrots AUD2.51, "pure vegetable oil" AUD0.059 so a more varied diet could be cheaper.
Actually I'd like to propose the carrot-only diet... Trying to eat 5kg of carrots a day is bound to make you lose weight, though your skin may turn orange ;)
They have arguments for taking kind of "a fad diet" seriously enough to do a study based on existing anecdotal evidence that this might not be a crazy fad diet.
[1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-wei...
The only thing that makes sense to me is that any extreme position is wrong. E.g. only carbs, no carbs at all, only meat, only plants.
I think the real tick is not eating highly processed food. Eat highly nutritious whole foods.
Eating mostly carbs absent fat or fat absent carbs means engaging the Randle Cycle to a much lesser degree, given that fatty acid and glucose aren't competing fuel substrates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randle_cycle
(And I'm not affiliated or suggesting join, just read)
I reckon most animals eat a steady diet of only one or two things, and people did too for a very long time (on a seasonal scale). It was only recently that we ate so many different foods so frequently, and this coincides with a rise in gut-related illnesses and obesity in first world countries. Many people see success treating these diseases with some diet, but what's interesting is how different and disjoint these diets are. For example, both carnivore diets and vegetarian diets have seen success treating inflammatory bowel disease. Perhaps this success isn't due to eating one food over another, but rather to the reduction in variety a diet brings.
A healthy gastrointestinal microbiome is dependent on dietary diversity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4837298/#:~:tex...
So you might eat a wide variety of things during the year, but for weeks at a time you might be eating lots of just the few things that are currently available
Not saying that is the case, I don't know, but I would not totally dismiss OP idea out of hand
Another approach that I've been experimenting with that makes pretty much any diet satiating: semaglutide. FDA approved as of last year, and for people whose main issue with dieting is constantly feeling like you're starving (most dieters, I would bet), it effectively destroys appetite. It's one of two drugs I've tried for weight loss that have been effective for me, and its side effect profile is far, far better.