Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

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On cannot eat too much starch. Try to eat only potatoes or rice prepared without any oil/butter for couple of weeks with perhaps few vegetables or fruits in addition with any amount of salt or herbs for taste. You learn that it is impossible to overeat as normal appetite controlling signals kicks in and limit the consumed amount. One does not gain weight on such diet and likely even loose some.

Similarly with sugar. Try to drink plain water with sugar (not tee/coffee or anything else that bring own taste). It is just impossible to drink too much of it. In fact for many people such plain water with sugar is a useful trick to limit appetite and loose weight.

So it is not the amount of what is eaten but rather something in food or food composition that makes people overweight.

As regarding exercising consider that doing high-intensity strength training for 15 minutes once per week is often enough to get into shape. So again, it is not the amount but rather the details of the exercise that are important.

> So it is not the amount of what is eaten but rather something in food or food composition that makes people overweight.

> As regarding exercising consider that doing high-intensity strength training for 15 minutes once per week is often enough to get into shape. So again, it is not the amount but rather the details of the exercise that are important.

You make some wild claims here. Do you have anything to back that up, or are you just hypothesizing?

For the starch just search for effects of starch diet. For sugar water, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet. For high-intensity training, see www.bodybyscience.net - the blog there links quite a few medical studies about high intensity training. My personal experience or experience of my relatives confirms this.

> Try to drink plain water with sugar (not tee/coffee or anything else that bring own taste). It is just impossible to drink too much of it

This is blatantly not true in the US, you can observe any number of people anywhere drinking full sugar sodas all day long.

One have to specifically drink plain water with table sugar or fructose - anything else reverses the effects, search the Shangri-La diet for details.

Sugar water tastes horrible. I'd have to be literally starving before I'd choose sugar water over plain water. This doesn't mean that it's impossible to overconsume. It just means that no one wants to consume this.

I'd probably lose weight drinking sugar water because it would kill my appetite by inducing nausea.

The same applies to your starch comment. Yeah, it's hard to overconsume plain rice if you eat it with no sauce and no salt. Not because it's better for you, but because it's unpleasant. It'd also be hard to overconsume pure lard if that were all you could eat. It'd get old immediately and you'd eat enough to survive and not much more because it's so unpleasant.

With no negative impacts on health one can eat just rice or potatoes with salt or herbs as one please for months with no weight gain unless one is rather lean. That shows that there is food where body feedback loop works nicely preventing over-consumption without any conscious limits on the amount of food.

"No negative impacts on health" is a bold claim. If you eat nothing but rice (with salt[1] and herbs) for months, you'll end up with a number of vitamin deficiencies. You'll also end up critically deficient in certain amino acids eventually, because rice does not provide a complete protein profile. Weight is not the only factor in overall health.

I'll point out that Atkins makes similar claims for a fat-heavy diet. In essence, they claim that if you cut carbs entirely, you can eat as much as you want. In reality, people on Atkins tend to just eat less because the diet gets so monotonous.

[1] I misread initially and thought you said no salt. Sorry about the confusion there.

Rice is amino-deficient only for rats, it has all 8 essential for human amino-acids. But I should wrote "brown unpolished rice" as that contains much more minerals.

> Rice is a good source of protein and a staple food in many parts of the world, but it is not a complete protein: it does not contain all of the essential amino acids in sufficient amounts for good health, and should be combined with other sources of protein, such as nuts, seeds, beans, fish, or meat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice

I wrote that too quickly. Brown rice has sufficient variety of protein so a person can survive on diet of rice and juices for many months, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_diet

Every time you add another comment you modify the proposed diet....

But anyway, key points on the rice diet:

> patients were hospitalized for several weeks at the beginning of treatment.

This was a diet specifically created for people who were otherwise going to die. It was never promoted as a healthy diet for normal individuals.

> white rice, sugar, fruit, fruit juices, vitamins and iron

So not just rice. Not just rice and fruit juice. But also whole fruit plus vitamins and iron to account for the fact that just eating rice will kill you.

Also, not brown rice at all. You're just pulling in random stuff to try to support your wild claims.

> Kempner described his diet as "a monotonous and tasteless diet which would never become popular.... Kempner's only defense of its use was the fact that “it works,” and that the diet was preferable to the alternative of certain death"

Sounds like a great endorsement of the diet from its creator.

I do not propose a diet (and I should not diverged into the health - that was a mistake indeed). What is important is that with potato, rice and other starchy food without added oil one does not need to consciously limit the amount consumed while staying on normal weight despite apparently excessive calories.

So the comment that started this thread proposing that people consume too much is not true. It is just that people consume too much of wrong stuff. The solution is to limit bad items so normal body feedback loops work, not the amount of food.

This is not true. If you only eat potatoes, you will wind up deficient in B vitamins. It doesn't take much to make potatoes a good basis for a diet. This is why the Irish Potato Famine was a big deal: Large families with small farms were mostly growing potatoes to keep everyone fed. But, no, you cannot live on potatoes alone with just salt or herbs without ending up deficient.

Those include flavorings and acids. Plain sugar in water tastes much worse.

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