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Comment by drak0n1c | Hacker News Reader

As a skinny young man with a big appetite I've found myself using these calorie counts as a way to maximize calories for the lowest price.

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As a formerly obese person and big loser with almost infinite capacity for stress eating, I love the calorie counts for all of the times they've helped me when I've been in calculation mode (which is healthy, for my personality dynamic). Sometimes a vague-sandwich is all it takes to get off the rails and put my old, bad habits in the driver's seat again.

BTW back when I weighed around 300 lbs. I remember buying a box of Little Debbie's peanut butter snacks for the exact reason you stated (and eating it all). Major calorie density for cost. That became a sort of pornographic activity for me, building up energy stores outside of any real energy-risk context.

This is the point I made below, whole foods are superior to calorie counts

No one eats a grass-fed steak and goes into a downward spiral.

Tons of people spiral out of control if they consume even small amounts of junk food.

WHAT you eat matters more than HOW MUCH you eat long term.

Calories matter, but different foods affect your body differently!

As another former >300lbs man, let me politely suggest that you are completely full of shit. Calories are by far and away the most important metric when losing weight. Controlling food addiction is an issue too, but you're not going to solve it by eating "whole foods".

Why were people before the 1950s almost completely unaware of calorie counts but almost all lean?

They ate fewer calories, but still had lots of starch.

They did a lot more physical labor and food was much more expensive, for starters.

That sounds true but the evidence shows otherwise.

Women in the 1950s were mostly lean and did almost no exercise.

Look around at the people who are the most physically active today (day laborers/construction workers). They’re active all day, and yet most are still overweight.

It’s not about activity, it’s about consuming quality food to fix your hormone levels.

Please provide evidence that hormonal balance or other endocrine mess is involved.

I'm quite interested in such.

I think it is combination of both increased calorie intake and somewhat reduced physical work thus caloric demand - mostly sitting (in car, at work) instead of walking or standing.

Having food be more palatable and caloric plays into this too but seems secondary.

There is absolutely nuance to it, I’m certainly not a proponent of a sedentary lifestyle or not working out. But if people just start exercising without also switching to whole foods, they will never out-exercise their diet — in fact many people end up losing muscle (because they’re running a lot and not eating enough protein), which slows down your metabolism even further.

I great book for you to checkout is Wired to Eat by Robb Wolf — it talks about how different foods affect insulin differently while also including the nuance of differences between people, as well as a way to test your personal response to certain foods to determine your optimal macronutrient intake.

I suspect insulin is only a small part of the story in obesity and other hormones are more important, esp. growth hormone family (e.g. ghrelin) and steroids - in starting the cascade that leads to metabolic syndrome. We do not know nearly enough and any book is liable to be outdated by at least 10 to 20 years and trying to sell something.

Otherwise diabetics with insulin replacement wouldn't go fat - but instead even controlled type 2 diabetes is highly linked to obesity. (Both ways!) Likewise type 1 diabetics are somewhat more likely to be obese despite tight control on insulin levels.

Here's a very interesting but not quite in depth study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4159079/

This book is cutting edge science, with ample references to recent studies. It came out last year and is written by someone who has personally helped hundreds of thousands (if not millions of people) to lose weight and keep it off long term, I highly encourage you to read it before making judgments about the motives of the author.

This means it is only 5 years out of date then?

Unless it is one of those scalping Springer research books there is really no way for it to match latest research...

And just do you know, most books are made to sell and this one does not strike me as a technical (enough) one. Though it is well written (based on the preview), I would not trust the conclusions. It really tries to sell a paleo diet which is an instant red flag because we do not have good evidence for efficacy of any diet, even less so for so-called paleo.

Nutrition science is finally starting to move fast beyond preconceptions hopefully.

This is simply not true, there is ample evidence for Paleo diets, read the book and it references the studies.

What is your theory for why the entire western world is suddenly obese? Why were people not obese even 70 years ago?

People today eat more calories, because technological advances have made food more accessible and convenient.

Cus you had to be a lot richer to have access to shit tons of calories. The meme of the rich fat person goes way back in time; it's only very recently that food is so cheap and calorically dense.

Exactly. I am a strict calorie counter and I am not overweight. (155# 5’10” 55 year old man). Sometimes I have hostess cupcakes for breakfast. (330 calories). Sometimes I have a Big Mac for lunch (550 calories). It’s hilarious when fat people talk about ‘whole foods’ and ‘mindful eating’. It’s calories.

I wouldn't call it hilarious, but as Mel Brooks once said "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die".

When you're that obese, food is an addiction in the literal sense. There is a ghrelin/dopamine feedback loop at work and it is not at all fun to break that. People are lured in by these schemes because the addict part of their mind is desperate for excuses not to stop eating. I know how this feels, because I fucking lived it. You wouldn't believe the things you can convince yourself of as an addict. Not to mention that lowered blood sugar is directly correlated with decreased willpower.

It's calories. We know it's calories. We know we shouldn't eat so many calories. That's not the hard part.

But this law is all about calories. And counting calories works. If you’re unable to count calories then of course you need some remedial help. But pretending that it’s about “eating the right foods” is lying to yourself.

Every obese person needs "remedial help", that's the definition of treatment. Even attacking the problem from multiple angles may not be enough. Counting calories combined with accurate monitoring helps but is very often insufficient. And even from just that the drop out rates are big - even without actual caloric restriction.

Increasing base metabolism is known to not work as it does not suppress the appetite or fix reward loop. Though thyroid therapy may be needed for some cases.

Dopamine uptake inhibitors exist but they have other side effects, petty bad. (Among them addiction.) SSRI make the problem worse, as do certain antipsychotics.

Direct appetite suppressants have not been invented yet though you can cheat some with special diets. (Well there are some but they're not stable and pain to inject. Could be done like insulin injections but somehow not considered cost effective and unsafe as ghrelin has additional functions.)

Having accurate data on food contents (including caloric) is vital but insufficient.

This is overly reductionist and places the blame on people attempting diets.

Most people I’ve found have simply been given terrible dietary advice (like eat high carb, low fat), which doesn’t work for the vast majority of people (because it elevates insulin levels, making them hungrier), and then they’re blamed later for not sticking to the program.

It’s completely ridiculous, it’s like putting a faithful man in a whorehouse and forcing him to ingest 4 doses of ecstasy. Sure it’s still his fault if he cheats, but are we going to pretend that the context doesn’t matter?

Ecstasy and whorehouses are a poor plan for fidelity, high-carb low-fat is a poor plan for fat loss.

This would be a lot better without the rudeness.

When you've had to put yourself through the things I've had to put myself through to lose, and keep off, half of my body weight, it becomes a bit difficult not to be rude to some conman trying to sell convenient lies.

Losing large amounts of weight is plenty hard enough without having to wade through misinformation.

Calories matter more than anything when discussing weight. Nutrition matters when discussing health. You can eat too much of almost anything.

Technically correct, but most people don’t overeat when consuming whole foods — just like they didn’t before the 1950s.

This might be an issue of caloric density and fibre content. Volume is a reasonably strong appetite inhibitor.

Not long term it’s not, the studies that show that are short term in nature, like most diet studies.

Fiber is a double edge sword, some people do great with more, some people do terrible with more — it’s highly dependent and the only way to know is experiment. The book Health Gut, Healtby You by Dr. Ruscio is the most up to date book on gut health.

Not quite up to date anymore I'm afraid.

In general I agree. There is a major confounder that the best source of fiber are raw vegetables which have other beneficial properties - but most studies of it tended to use something much simpler than actual fiber combinations found in foods.

We do not know nearly enough about how diet impacts gut microbiome, nor how the environment does. It is really hard to study anyway.

Please provide a resource that is more up to date.

I use to be like that (the snickers bar had the best calories/price ratio in the office vending machine), but I'm not any more (the popcorn has the lowest calories in the office vending machine).

Something very unfortunate happened to my metabolism in my 30s... do enjoy it while you can :)

Heh, I occasionally shop at 99¢ stores, and am often amazed at how many calories one can buy for a dollar.

Chocolate pound cake is the clear winner (not counting items that are just ingredients like cooking oil etc.): 900kcal/99¢! (~1.09 after tax where I live)

Is vegetable oil better? Or what about sugar or syrup?

Sure but eating cake is much less likely to make you sick than drinking vegetable oil

Do you sit down to a nice meal of sugar and vegetable oil often?

Well I don't sit down to a meal of chocolate pound cake either.

...but people do. No one does the former... pretty sure you understand that and are just being purposely dense.

A 10oz jar of creamy peanut butter from the dollar store has ~1700 Calories.

Agreed, but if we count ingredients then a jug of cooking oil wins hands down.

Peanut butter isn't an ingredient. I usually just eat it out of the jar with a spoon.

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