I Hacked My Diet with Science

http://thras.blogspot.com/2009/08/diet.html

by thras • 17 years ago

34 54 17 years ago

thras.blogspot.com

Good for you, but ... some details would be nice. Reads like a lazy blog entry. Please inform us as to more of your specifics. Do you eat non-veggie carbs ... like, at all?

thras6• 17 years ago

Sorry, I thought that I was clear on that: I eat meat, eggs, cheese, and green vegetables. That's it.

I suppose I do use wine, salt, and other seasonings when I cook. By "meat" I mean meat, poultry, and fish.

I don't worry about no-calorie drinks. I drink mostly tea. Sometimes diet soda. It doesn't seem to make any difference.

kingkongrevenge6• 17 years ago

No eggplant, squash, onions, peppers, and such? Just greens? Sounds boring.

Also, no organ meat?

andrewbadera2• 17 years ago

Gotcha, thanks. No milk?

javanix• 17 years ago

While I'm sure this approach has general merits, I'm also fairly certain that different dietary approaches will work with varying levels of success for different people.

burke2• 17 years ago

Eggs (yolks) have a load of cholesterol. Watch out for that. IIRC, they're about 200mg each, where a sensible daily limit is 300-400mg.

EDIT: If you want to go all crazy-health-nut, the whites are 100% protein calories (~50/50 fat/protein in the yolks), have no cholesterol, and taste pretty much the same.

EDIT again: But I guess you don't really have much else in the way of fat sources, cheese aside. If you do this long-term, you might want to make sure your blood cholesterol levels don't go nuts.

Aevin1387• 17 years ago

If you read the book mentioned in the article, he also talks about how the whole "eating cholesterol is bad" is also a myth and bad science.

burke2• 17 years ago

Maybe. I've heard a couple people with similar diets wonder why their plasma cholesterol is so high, whether or not it's from the dietary cholesterol. YMMV.

eonwe• 17 years ago

Then again, there is evidence that dietary choices affect your blood cholesterol levels and your expected life span. For example, see North Karelia project: http://www.ktl.fi/portal/english/research__people___programs...

thras6• 17 years ago

I generally choose the fattiest cuts of beef and pork that I can find. My triglycerides have gone down and my HDL has gone up, as one would expect given the link between carbohydrate intake and serum cholesterol. I'm planning to get retested in January.

As for the link between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol? Here's an ACN meta-study:

http://www.jacn.org/cgi/content/abstract/16/6/530

"The misperception that dietary cholesterol determines blood cholesterol is held by many consumers in spite of evidence to the contrary...10 clinical trials (1994 to 1996) of the effects of dietary cholesterol on blood lipids and lipoproteins indicate that addition of an egg or two a day to a low-fat diet has little if any effect on blood cholesterol levels."

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

In passing, weightlifting is mentioned. I think this is perhaps as relevant to the story as diet. Even if weightlifting has always been a part of the story, boosting protein and the resulting increase in muscle mass, can account for dramatic fat loss, as well. Muscle burns more calories than fat, so it is self-reinforcing.

kingkongrevenge6• 17 years ago

This idea that resting muscle burns calories is a bit of a popular misconception. The fat loss advantages of strength training come from boosted testosterone and growth hormone, which simply direct the body to become leaner. Idle muscle mass doesn't really burn calories.

Muscle mass also soaks up insulin and glucose, before it accumulates as fat.

thras6• 17 years ago

That could be a good theory.

That is if I hadn't been out of the gym for three months starting at the end of January due to a wrist injury. :)

nova2• 17 years ago

I'm also doing a low-carb diet, for a month and a half. No exercise of any kind. 6 kg lost, and counting.

fuelfive• 17 years ago

I always like to see a little more science in articles that use the word "science" in the title.

chancho3• 17 years ago

Ditto for "hacking." I mean, good on you thras for losing the weight but it seems to me that what you're really hacking here is the global food economy. An all meat-and-horticulture diet is completely economically infeasible for a great number of people, to say nothing of environmental impact or sustainability.

chandler5• 17 years ago

Regarding the environmental impact and sustainability: http://www.westonaprice.org/mythstruths/mtvegetarianism.html...

Here's another take: http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarian.html#link1

One missing piece regarding the idea of sustainability of ruminant farming versus grain farming is that the former tends to rejuvenate the soil, and can be performed in areas unsuitable for crop growth. The latter, on the other hand (unless performed in concert with ruminant farming), encourages deforestation (to locate healthy, nutrient dense soil), using up the nutrients in the soil, maintaining the soil via petroleum fertilizers, and then abandoning the land once depleted/eroded.

Ruminants are a key piece to the puzzle in sustaining the fertility of the soil when growing crops.

jonknee• 17 years ago

I'm not sure if following a low-carb diet qualifies as "hacking" (Atkins published his book in 1972 afterall), but congrats on the weight loss.

thras6• 17 years ago

Oh, I thought it was much more of a hack than the "Hacker's Diet" -- which is just low-calorie eating, after all. I've done low-calorie, and this is so much easier that it's not even funny. Plus, it appears to be a hell of a lot healthier.

And I designed my diet after reading Gary Taubes -- "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is very much not a diet book.

chandler5• 17 years ago

I read GCBC about two months ago; although I've been interested in health & nutrition for several years now, it's amazing that I never understood how badly science has been mistreated by nutritionists & health experts.

Moreover, because this advice runs so contrary to conventional dietary wisdom, many in the community are fascinated by reviewing studies for strengths & flaws (in the similar spirit of code-reviews); consequently, I've learned more about both human physiology and the scientific process in the past few months than my entire life (which is beneficial regardless of whether or not I continue down the low-carb path).

For example, compare the quality of minds at work in the following post (it takes off in the comments): http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-are-the-inui...

Here's another example: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/saturated-fat/abcs-big-me...

wvl• 17 years ago

If it takes a link bait title to get this message across, then I'm all for it. This diet is essentially Primal, similar to the Paleo Diet (http://www.thepaleodiet.com/ ). I've been doing it for a while now, and have nothing but good things to say about eating this way.

An introductory link: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/definitive-guide-primal-bluep...

An index into most of the content: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-101/

FAQ, and comparisons to other diets: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-book/references/questions...

asdlfj2sd33• 17 years ago

I seriously doubt any cavemen or any human other then modern man, ever had regular access to THIS much animal protein and fat. During peak times, migratory season, sure, but not all the time.

And I don't think the diet as described, most calories from meat, cheese and eggs, is the most healthy. Perhaps healthier then any diet high in processed sugar, depending on individual physiology. I certainly agree sugar is bad for you, but I think a "mostly plants" diet, is still better for most people.

aswanson2• 17 years ago

Slightly off topic, but do any of you folks ingest whey protein shakes or use creatine monohydrate before workouts?

FWIW, my current diet consists of fruit, tuna, protein shakes and the occasional chicken breast.

shard2• 17 years ago

I used to drink a whey protein shake with banana and peanut butter after workouts when I was in bulking phases, but now that I'm just maintaining, I haven't bothered. I used to do creatine drinks before workouts as well, I found that it made it easier to pump out that last few reps whereas before I did creatine my muscles would be screaming bloody murder.

flooha• 17 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but I tried creatine some years ago and without fail it always made me really angry.

philwelch• 17 years ago

If you're using creatine to prep for weight training, that's a feature, not a bug. Being really angry helps weight training, or at least makes it feel more satisfying.

helloworld• 17 years ago

Tuna seems to be high in mercury:

http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/tuna.asp

You might want to substitute some lower-mercury alternatives:

http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/guide.asp

aswanson2• 17 years ago

Good lookout.

tome• 17 years ago

I've used both, and didn't notice any difference with either. That's not to say there was no difference though.

Tichy• 17 years ago

Nice success, but I am not yet convinced that weight is the only important variable to watch.

chandler5• 17 years ago

One of the points Taubes makes in his GCBC book (which is phenomenal, by the way), is that obesity is a dysfunction of excess adipose tissue (fat), not merely a problem of excess weight.

As you suggest, using only weight as the variable means that a dieter who loses 10 lbs of lean muscle tissue is considered as successful as a dieter who loses 10 lbs of adipose tissue.

swerling• 17 years ago

While the article does not go into specifics about the "Science" involved, it is not hard to find hard science that show unequivocally that only lowering calories lowers weight, eg. this one from the New England Journal of Medicine: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/360/9/859. Why is the first law of thermodynamics so hard for people to internalize? Shall we start measuring the energy in stars in terms of grams of fat too? One expects this kind of thing on Oprah, not on HH.

At any rate, let's assume for a moment that the blogger is still eating the same number of calories, and doing the same amount of weight lifting (that is, still burning the same number of calories), but he is still losing weight. To be consistent with the 1st law of thermodynamics, it will mean he has made his body less efficient at absorbing the calories in food. So he has successfully shocked his metabolism into being less efficient. Will he stay on this diet forever? Because as soon he starts eating bread again, presumably his metabolism will emerge from the state of shock he induced. When that happens, while he will feel as if he were eating the same amount of calories, he will effectively be eating much more since his metabolism will no longer be so inefficient.

nova2• 17 years ago

Why is the first law of thermodynamics so hard for people to internalize?

The first law of thermodynamics stablishes a relation between energy input, energy output and energy storage. It does not say which variables are independent, ie, the direction of causality. The theory of low-carb diets is that carbs affect energy storage via insulin first leaving a constraint bewteen energy in and out, not the reverse.

Also note that in the article cited the lowest amount of carbs was 35%, which still is a moderatelly high amount. And the result seems to be very modest (about 4kg lost only).

chandler5• 17 years ago

Different nutrients are processed differently by the body, fully in line with thermodynamics.

Take 100 Calories of sawdust (cellulose). If you eat this, how many calories did you consume? Did consuming these calories contribute to fat accumulation? Because the answer to this is no, does this cause a violation of the 1st law?

Your body doesn't merely "absorb calories" from food. It absorbs and transforms chemicals, and directs these chemicals through various pathways. Eating a low carbohydrate diet doesn't "shock his metabolism" into being less efficient, it simply uses different pathways for nutrient absorption.

Also, regarding the referenced study: All four diets tested were virtually identical regarding the % calories derived from fat, protein, and carbohydrate.

http://content.nejm.org/content/vol360/issue9/images/large/0...

Moreover, the low-fat diets weren't particularly low-fat, and the high-fat (low-carb) diets weren't particularly low-carb.

So what happens when you feed a group of people the same 1600 Calorie diet for two years, and then measure their weight loss? What exactly are you demonstrating?

stonemetal• 17 years ago

So then there is no reason for any type of sort beyond bubble. After all it is data in data out right? The human body is a bit more complicated than sorting algorithms. When you eat a no carb. diet interesting things happen the least interesting of which is that protein takes more processing to turn into energy than sugar does. One of the most interesting,(from a dieter's perspective) is that the body enters a state called ketosis in which excess protein is expelled from the body instead of being stored as fat. This makes your body self regulate its weight. Second eliminating sugar from your diet makes you less hungry since your body experiences less blood sugar variation.

I Hacked My Diet with Science

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