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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Oddly enough, I can share an anecdote too. After a health scare, I decided to change my diet. I didn't think that I was self disciplined enough to count calories, so I arbitrarily eliminated certain things from my diet, most notably butter.

My exercise didn't change much: Cycling to work every day. I got a new bike, but it didn't make me go that much faster.

Within a few months, I went from 175 to 150 pounds (about 79 to 68 kg), and have kept it off.

Now, this goes against the current "ketogenic" hypothesis, and is actually kind of puzzling, but I realize that butter makes things tasty, and I was just eating a lot less food overall because it was less pleasant. So it probably was a reduction in carbs.

It took more than a year before I could enjoy a piece of toast without anything on it.

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I remember reading a study that indicated that simple carbs combined with fat are worse than either fat or simple carbs alone. I can't find the study at the moment, but the gist of it was that a high fat, high sugar, meal will be metabolized differently than either in isolation and also that it triggers cravings for more fat and sugar.

So, a keto diet is fine. Eating bread every now and then is fine. But, something like a fast food meal consumed with a sugary soda may be particularly unhealthy and may cause you to eat more and crave more similar foods.

I don't know all the mechanisms at play, and I don't think even experts have a really good understanding of how our very complex digestive and metabolic systems (and the bacterial colonies that live in our guts) interact. It's clear that caloric reduction works for weight loss, even if you're eating mostly carbs or mostly fats. Some people report better management of cravings and hunger on different kinds of diets, and the research indicates that a low-fat or low-carb diet results in weight loss at about the same rate (contrary to popular belief about low-carb diets lately).

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/low-carb-v...

But, really, if you run a caloric deficit, you'll lose weight. Cutting arbitrary foods can do it for some folks. Some folks like keto or other relatively extreme restrictive diets. Some folks do intermittent fasting (I've been intermittent fasting for several months and have lost a little over 20 pounds). No matter how you do it, if you cut 500 calories off of your diet, you'll lose weight at a healthy clip.

I saw that study. I never saw if they kept the amount of protein people ate constant. Do you know? It seems mysteriously lacking the third macronutrient. And I can't tell from the article if there was a control "eat fat and carb" group.

https://www.google.com/search?q=dissociated+diet

I remember seing a book about that diet 20 years ago by a singer:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffaella_Carr%C3%A0

No, that's definitely not related to what I'm talking about. I don't believe I've ever seen any good evidence related to the notion of "alkaline" and "acidic" foods. The top result for "dissociated diet" doesn't sound credible at all, to me. (Sure, it offers reasonable advice, like "eat lots of vegetables", but its reasoning is completely made up, as far as I can tell.)

And, the example meal plan on the same first result page is for a 1200 calorie diet! That's a massive caloric deficit for any adult; of course you'll lose weight if you follow it!

I was specifically talking about a study on sugar and fat and how they might trigger cravings and overconsumption, and possibly also cause metabolic effects that can cause weight gain and other problems, and not at all about alkaline/acidic food combining theories.

Sorry, IIRC it was called alimentación disociada in Spanish. I tried the probable translation, made a search and assumed the links were pointing to the same thing. I just browsed the book 20 years ago and it said nothing about ph, but about avoiding certain mixes of proteins, carbs and fats. The owner of the book said it had helped him a lot, but I didn't take much interest because that guy was not exactly thin and low-carb worked fine for me... actually it seemed like a softened keto diet, designed to make it a little funnier.

Ah, thanks for clarifying. I've got several friends who believe in various forms of the pH diet. They also tend to be folks who believe in a lot of other woo, so I'm a bit trigger happy in shooting down pH-based diet theories (those diets are particularly ridiculous because they often categorize quite acidic foods into the alkaline category and vice versa). If there's ever been a good study about it, I'd certainly read it.

I think there's a lot of superstition in general, but one could certainly have independently noticed that eating sugar or fat alone (say butter or honey) is somewhat self-regulating. You get sick of it pretty quick. But, put them together in a pie or pastry or donut or something and suddenly it gets really easy to eat hundreds of calories worth of sugar and fat in a few quick bites.

Its part of the Fit for Life diet and that's debunked [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fit_for_Life#Controversy

I haven't seen a specific study but I have read assertions along the same lines: either low-fat or low-carb can work.

I believe the insulin-centric explanation (I'm a low carb eater and this is the perspective I tend to see) would be something like:

- Low carb and high fat: The fat goes to your fat cells (that is, whatever fat you don't burn for fuel immediately after eating), but since your insulin is low the fat is readily burned off relatively soon.

- Low fat and high carb: The carbs cause an insulin spike, and insulin inhibits fat burning, BUT since you haven't stuffed much fat into your fat cells, there isn't much to burn off when your insulin eventually comes back down. You need to be relatively insulin sensitive, so that your insulin level does come back down. Even if you're insulin resistant, this diet might still work if you eat only a tiny amount of fat.

- High fat and high carb: Fat goes to your fat cells and insulin levels are high, which inhibits fat burning, so you gain fat faster than you burn it.

(Edits: I thought Markdown lists would work but they didn't.)

"Low carb and high fat: The fat goes to your fat cells (that is, whatever fat you don't burn for fuel immediately after eating), but since your insulin is low the fat is readily burned off relatively soon."

- The fat you eat does not have to be stored as fat, the raised insulin levels are necessary for the body to store energy as fat.

"Low fat and high carb: The carbs cause an insulin spike, and insulin inhibits fat burning, BUT since you haven't stuffed much fat into your fat cells, there isn't much to burn off when your insulin eventually comes back down. You need to be relatively insulin sensitive, so that your insulin level does come back down. Even if you're insulin resistant, this diet might still work if you eat only a tiny amount of fat."

- Carbs can be converted to fat via lipogenesis.

And in fact they have to be converted to fat. There are only two other options:

stored in muscles as glycogen - however, the muscle stores can only store up to 1600 calories so they may be full. Also, once sugar gets into a muscle it can't get out - it can only be used by that particular muscle.

used by the brain - however the brain doesn't need more than 500 kcal per day. (and can live with as little as 120 kcal / 30g of glucose provided that the rest of the energy is supplied by ketones)

So... exercise doesn't help lose weight, but it sure helps prevent weight gain when eating carbs. With the amount of carbs we eat nowadays and the low amounts of physical activity, its no wonder at all we store a lot of fat.

Before assigning top much blame on butter, remember that being on any diet, including e.g. taking only placebo diet pills, will lead to improvement. When you are on a diet you are on a diet you pay attention to what you are eating, and that helps in itself. This is probably why there are so many kinds of diet - most diets work.

If butter is the only thing you removed from your diet, you must have been eating an incredible amount of it?!

There is _no_ amount of butter (or fat, in general) that you can eat that will make you gain weight, provided there is no sugar in your diet. You will physically not be able to eat more than your body can deal with, this is because fat, unlike sugar, triggers the i-am-full hormones which make food impossible to eat.

No, that is plain wrong. Calories count, no matter where they are from.

Ketogenic diets might increase your metabolism and reduce your appetite and hunger, which makes weight loss easier, but you'll still gain weight if you eat too many fat calories each day. Even if you cut out carbs entirely.

"Calories count, no matter where they are from."

This is the exact point the article is proving wrong.

It doesn't really prove it wrong. If you eat 3000 calories of butter every day, you're gonna get fat. In that sense, a calorie is a calorie.

"a calorie is a calorie"

This is the exact point the article is... arguing against in a very convincing fashion

No, the article is saying that people are getting obese and diabetic because of sugar.

Its further pointing out that there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight. I didn't disagree there either.

The article never claims that you can eat any amount of calories as long as you leave carbs from the table. And thats the only thing i pointed out. Because thats just plain wrong. If you eat too many calories, you will gain weight. And if you're predisposed to obesity, you will eat more calories when you're flavouring stuff with sugar. This will, as the author pointed out, cause you to get even more obese and eventually get diabetes.

You are getting lost in semantics, because if you are saying:

there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight.

Then a calorie isn't a calorie.

Calories are calories (it's literally a measure of energy!) The packages they come in will effect hormonal and psychological responses differently which may affect the amount you would take in if intake is left unmonitored. To that extent, it's wise to take in foods which don't nudge you towards over consuming, but if you can be disciplined and take in a quantity of energy less than you expend on a consistent basis, eating that intake as sugar rather than other macros isn't going to magically make you gain weight.

You are making the same semantic argument I was criticizing. In the context of this discussion we aren't talking about the literal measure of energy, but the package. I.e., is a quantity of sugar that has a calorie of energy the same to the body as a quantity of fat or fiber that contains a calorie of energy. That's what someone is claiming when they say a calorie is a calorie. And to that question, the evidence bears out that it the effects are not just psychological, and don't just affect desire to eat. If you took two twins, and fed one 2000 calories of cane sugar a day, and fed the other 2000 calories of raw broccoli, after a month, they wouldn't have the same weight.

Sure, it is a measure of energy, but it is not a measure of of how much energy we as humans will utilize from the food. Some calories are much more efferent for us to extract than others. Some can't be extracted at all.

Are you aware of how calories are measured? They essentially set the food on fire and count how long it takes to go out.

Does our body digest things by acting like a furnace? No. There are different ways to extract energy from food and our body does things that aren't accounted for by the nutrtional facts blurb on the box. In some cases the food will just go straight through you, such as when you eat loads of fat. All those "calories" don't necessarily translate into x pounds on your body in new fat.

>In that sense, a calorie is a calorie.

This has been thoroughly disproven for ages -- starting with the naive assumption that you can just eat X amounts of anything and it doesn't affect anything else in your health/apetite/metabolism.

I know we like to one up each other on HN, but you're just talking past the main point.

Calories matter. If you eat too many, you get fat. Some calories might be "better" than others, but they are a standard of unit of energy for a reason. A calorie is a calorie.

Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.

>Calories matter. If you eat too many, you get fat. Some calories might be "better" than others, but they are a standard of unit of energy for a reason. A calorie is a calorie.

That's quite irrelevant though (besides tautological), as we don't just eat calories, we eat food that has calories and tons of other stuff in different arrangements.

A calorie being a calorie doesn't cover whether the food you got the calorie from makes you satiated, or conversely makes you eat more, or makes you feel more energetic, or makes you store it as fat, or brings hormonal changes, etc.

A "milligram is a milligram" too, a standard unit of weight, but 1mg of cyanide can kill a person, and 1mg of water won't do anything to them.

>Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.

Again this presumes that people can just eat, regardless of what they eat -- and continue to eat it without that affecting anything else. I guarantee you if I ate just butter, I'd threw up after several hundred grams, and feel quite bad and stop the diet after some days.

We're not disagreeing, just talking about different things.

Surprisingly, you wouldn’t. I basically have been on your “butter diet” for over a year. I get about 80% of my calories from fat, much of it saturated. The rest is protein. I’ve lost about 50 pounds, normalized my blood pressure & cholesterol, and feel amazing.

How many calories were you eating pre and post diet?

2 sticks of butter is almost 1800 calories, that would be a weird diet with lots of hunger. There probably are a lot of sources of fat that work better than that.

To illustrate the point: dietary fiber, which contains a lot of calories, is not digestible. Eat as much as you can, but you will not get one calorie of energy from it. So just based on that, where calories come from matters.

There is a difference between fat metabolism and sugar metabolism. They use different metabolic pathways, in other words the process by which a fatty acid molecule becomes ATP (the ultimate source of cellular energy) is very different from how fructose (which has to first be converted to glucose in the liver) becomes ATP.

This is exactly what puzzles me. Increasing your metabolism should increase your body temperature, all other things being equal. I still suspect that sheer reduction of calories is the main driver of weight loss, and if anything, fine-tuning one's metabolism plays a minor role.

I'm just talking anecdotally here but yes, the body temperature does increase significantly. Keto wasn't for me, especially because of the increased food budget, but it sure did help with my chronically cold feet/hands.

But I'd still agree with your second assessment: the biggest contributor is the decreased hunger/appetite after the first few weeks.

No, butter makes the other stuff more delicious, making you eat just a little more each time.

Doesn't fat make food more satisfying, making you feel fulfilled sooner?

Needs a citation I guess.

https://www.ncbi.nqlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10435117

For most people high fiber foods are better.

It is a study of 14 people that self reported how hungry they were and how much they ate on their own. I don't think we can get to advice stating "most people" should do anything from that. It is an example of how bad science gets translated to bad advice and bad behavior. Not picking on you, you are responding rationally to a headline or blurb about the study. But it is a worthless study.

There are more studies. That was an example. Go look around for the others. Most importantly try it for yourself. It is pretty easy to figure out.

I don't know why @gras's comment in this thread is marked as dead, but I agree with them.

Reposting the question from the comment:

> Doesn't fat make food more satisfying, making you feel fulfilled sooner?

You can click the comment permalink (the age indicator) and on that page you have the option to vouch for the person /comment if it seems appropriate. I did so and they appear to be visible again. I've seen it take two vouch operations before though.

Ah, the vouch option seems to only be available on the comment permalink, and not on the general comments page. TIL, thanks!

I think this is important, and that the food industry has been progressively making food more and more yummy over the past few decades. So far I really don't have a good answer for how to reduce consumption without reducing pleasure, at least in the short term. Developing a taste for food that isn't designed to be addictive, probably requires a long term change of habits.

>So far I really don't have a good answer for how to reduce consumption without reducing pleasure

Salt.

Good one, with that comes increased water intake due to increased thirst, therefore quicker satiation due to being full quicker.

Restaurants like salt because customers won't order water (even though tap water is free here in NL it makes one look as too much of a cheapskate); they'll order a drink like wine which they can upsell and already has large profit margins.

Nephrologists won't be happy though (although it does generate them more customers, they probably got more than enough as it is).

My suggestion would be: less salt + umami + herbs.

Herbs is a bit vague, it really depends on the dish (and there's more than herbs; look at things like garlic, ginger, and turmeric you can buy these dried as well, in same tins or glasses as herbs are).

Personally, I'm a fan of the Italian spices as well as mixes like baharat and ras el hanout even though I don't have a background in any related culture (I'm Dutch).

You can achieve umami in various ways: yeast extract, Vetsin, E621, MSG, etc. In the end its all the same, but I put the one consumers fear the least first in the list wink

The reason why our satiety mechanisms don't work is because carbs upregulate insulin, which supresses leptin [1]. Leptin and ghrelin are the two main hunger hormones; leptin tells our brain we're full. The signal doesn't work too well in the presence of high insulin, and gets worse with insulin resistance, causing people to have a "second stomach" for sweet foods.

https://olumialife.com/knowledge/how-does-insulin-affect-lep...

I find a great substitute is olive oil where I'd use butter for non-cooking (eg. instead of butter on pasta or instead of butter on bread). It's not quite as tasty but still a huge improvement over dry, and it's healthier.

For cooking, I understand olive oil is unhealthy (I think you create carcinogens as a side-effect), as are many other oils, but that coconut oil doesn't do this because of its different melting temperature.

Ah, but coconut oil has other potential issues. I would not put it in the healthy category, despite its current popularity.

> For cooking, I understand olive oil is unhealthy (I think you create carcinogens as a side-effect), as are many other oils, but that coconut oil doesn't do this because of its different melting temperature.

I believe the situation with oil is a bit more complicated than that, and you're generally fine with olive oil unless you make it smoke, which is fairly non-trivial to do, despite its low smoking point. There seems to be some debate on the topic: http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/03/cooking-with-olive-oil-fa...

Coconut oil in particular actually has a low smoking point. If you want to be safe, you want Avocado oil.

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

I encourage you to try some top-shelf olive oil, if you haven't already -- I find that it blows butter out of the water in most cases.

I initially felt the same way as you wrt tastiness, but had a friend bring me back a tin of oil from Italy recently and whoooo boy it's just the most phenomenal thing. Add a bit of salt & pepper to a shallow bowl of oil for dipping bread.

Coconut oil is a (mostly) saturated fat; olive oil and sunflower seed oil are (mostly) unsaturated fat.

Olive oil with herbs is amazing. Give it a whirl.

As I mentioned above, removing butter also resulted in the elimination of other things from my diet.

Perhaps you removed bread?

Yes, that was probably a lot of it. I have no doubt that my caloric intake decreased more than just from butter, and next on the list would most likely be carbs. I started eating more of some other things such as lean meats and beans.

I tend to think good quality butter, especially grassfed & unpasteurised, is very healthy in moderate amounts (great vitamin K2 source).

Imagine somebody whose favourite snack is a nice slice of baguette with butter slathered on it.

By cutting butter, he's also effectively cut an unnecessary carb-heavy between-meal snack, since he doesn't want the baguette without the butter.

It sounds like they learned to enjoy the plain bagel.

I was just eating a lot less food overall because it was less pleasant. So it probably was a reduction in carbs.

It literally says in the text that he ate less overall.

If I have to choose between "don't eat artificially added sugar but don't feel like I'm eating less" and "don't eat butter, and by extension eat less because food tastes worse", I can tell you I'll choose the former in a heartbeat.

FYI: The butter in my fridge has 743kcal per 100g.

Could you share how much butter you bought per month and what the package size was?

I'd estimate that my family of four was going through a pound of butter a week. As I mentioned above, I doubt that butter alone was the cause, since the butter was always accompanied by something else.

My whole family has reduced our butter intake quite drastically, so I don't have a good estimate of how much I was personally consuming.

The new bike could've made your commute more efficient.

The main difference was more closely spaced gears (9 instead of 3) allowing me to find a better cadence at higher speeds. So I was going faster and working harder. No free lunch. But it wasn't enough to account for my weight loss. My commuting is only about 1600 miles per year.

Now I'm riding single speed, so who knows.

> So it probably was a reduction in carbs

No, it was a reduction in calories, quite simply. If anything, butter is very heavy on fats and low on carbs...

> It took more than a year before I could enjoy a piece of toast without anything on it.

Sounds like in his particular case, reducing fat (butter) also reduced carbs (toast).

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