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Comment by fbonetti | Hacker News Reader

This isn’t a magic bullet. When you eat carbs, your body produces the hormone insulin in order to convert blood glucose into usable energy. Excessive insulin production triggers the body to store energy as fat. If you drastically reduce your carb intake, your body will enter a state of ketosis where fat will be burned as energy. Barring some rare medical or genetic issue, this WILL cause you to lose weight. It’s a scientific fact. Just take a look at type 1 diabetics prior to diagnosis. They’re skinny and frail due to being unable to produce insulin.

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> If you drastically reduce your carb intake, your body will enter a state of ketosis where fat will be burned as energy.

Ketosis is a lot harder to achieve than you think, and very easy to break out of. The reason low-carb diets work so well is the reason that any effective diet works: you intake fewer calories. You do this because in order to make up the caloric deficit of your missing carbs, you intake more protein and fat. But protein is the most satiating macro, which means you eat less protein than you would have carbs calorie-for-calorie.

The reason so many people rave about keto is because it's simple. The same could be said for intermittent fasting, and many other diets.

All of them work, some just work better than others for certain people. You have to find something that works with your schedule, your tastes and one you can stick to. That's it.

> Excessive insulin production triggers the body to store energy as fat.

The 'insulin hypothesis'? Completely unproven.

> If you drastically reduce your carb intake, your body will enter a state of ketosis where fat will be burned as energy. Barring some rare medical or genetic issue, this WILL cause you to lose weight. It’s a scientific fact.

If you reduce your overall calories you'll lose weight, you can do that on any diet. That's the only thing that is a scientific fact.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253713.php

"The research indicates that people can maintain a healthy weight by constantly bringing the levels of insulin back to a healthy minimum. This can be done by increasing the time between meals and eliminating snacks, without making amends at mealtime."

I believe this is the actual study: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(12)...

Well your quote certainly does not suggest a proof of the insulin hypothesis.

Does the study control for calorie intake and show that preventing insulin spikes with the same calorie intakes reduced overall weight gain? Surely if that was the case they'd just say that?

You might read this. It doesn't defend the insulin hypothesis, but it explains how freaking _weird_ nutrition is. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-...

Specifically it shows that, for some people, they have to eat 4x of what they would normally eat in order to gain any weight. That's super weird. The body has a lot of ways to either preserve or burn energy if it thinks it's in a fasting/feasting mode, which will work again people who are using a simple "cals-in cals-out" model.

I'm basically not interested in reading things like this unless they can put solid facts up-front that are actually relevant to what most people care about (weight-loss/gain) and they actually normalize for calorie intake.

Fact is for the vast majority of people that don't have some rare disease, CICO works.

> If you reduce your overall calories you'll lose weight, you can do that on any diet. That's the only thing that is a scientific fact.

Ketosis is valid and supported by scientific evidence. Likewise, people in ketosis can perform endurance exercises for longer periods of time, because they are working off of pure fat reserves.

Of course all athletes, short of sprinters, burn a mix of glucose and fat, but people who maintain a ketogenic diet for an extended period of time become better at burning fat, and therefor more accomplished at endurance based activities.

None of that is controversial. There is a reason professional athletes, in the right fields, are looking towards ketogenic diets for their performance benefits.

There is also the fact that, for many people, ketogenic diets make it easier to consume less calories.

To put it another way, an 8oz steak and a loaded baked potato have roughly the same number of calories (around 600).

Now imagine an 8oz steak and a side of broccoli, and a loaded potato and a side of broccoli. Which one makes for a more satisfying meal? For most people, the answer is the steak.

For what it is worth, I will eat 2-3 stuffed potatoes and not be satiated. (I'll then go and eat a steak to actually have a meal!)

Same thing with potato chips. I know very few people who get full eating a bag of chips, even though a bag of chips can have more than half the number of recommended daily calories in it!

Ditto for movie theater popcorn.

Now I do know people who can get full eating a carb heavy diet, people who have a bowl of ice cream and are like "well that is enough".

But given the state of America's waistline, and given how much junk food is sold in stores every day, it is apparent that the majority of people are not satiated by carbs after an appropriate number of calories have been consumed.

> If you reduce your overall calories you'll lose weight, you can do that on any diet. That's the only thing that is a scientific fact.

Hate to break it to you, but this is not a scientific fact. The energy equation is calories consumed minus calories expended. Your brain can down regulate your energy level in response to consuming less calories as a way to keep your body in homeostasis.

> Hate to break it to you, but this is not a scientific fact. The energy equation is calories consumed minus calories expended.

No kidding, you're not breaking anything to me here, that was implied. But sure I could've been more accurate. Compare to the pseudo-science-as-fact I'm responding to.

Your body is always burning fat, it's not a state machine, it's a super parallel bunch of cells. The proportion varies robustly with energy demand, oxygen supply is the limiting factor to meeting the demand and getting fat into energy is less oxygen efficient than doing the same with glycogen.

But this is an entirely academic point designed to mislead people. Given glycogen stores top out at ~8 MJ while there is many many magnitudes more in fat, it's like delving into the details of L2 cache or main memory. It's down in the noise given weight gain or loss is a months long process.

Hey, if you feel like you can better maintain by trying to be permanently glycogen depleted, you do you. But why that works or doesn't really has nothing to do with any of the things you mentioned.

Normally I find it harmless when people on HN try to reduce non-tech problems into programming terms, but seriously, what value does this comment add?

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