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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

This seems to make a lot of sense, and removes that ridiculous notion that somehow removing a single element from our diet is what will lead to weight loss - the foods that people gain weights on are the foods that give us mixed signals to their quality and quantity of calories. It's hard to not feel you've eaten a lot of calories roast beef when you've eaten a lot of roast beef, but it's much easier to lose track of how many chips you've eaten, and harder to match that to the relative amount of calories consumed.

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> This seems to make a lot of sense, and removes that ridiculous notion that somehow removing a single element from our diet is what will lead to weight loss - the foods that people gain weights on are the foods that give us mixed signals to their quality and quantity of calories. It's hard to not feel you've eaten a lot of calories roast beef when you've eaten a lot of roast beef, but it's much easier to lose track of how many chips you've eaten, and harder to match that to the relative amount of calories consumed.

It doesn't make sense at all.

There is quite a bit of research on satiety - how full foods make you feel. It's actually quite straight forward: Protein, water and fiber make you feel full. Carbs do not. Mostly fat does not (you need a certain minimum amount of fat in your diet).

You feel full after eating a lot of roast beef, because it's got tons of protein in it, not because it's not "processed".

You can gorge on chips because they are carbs and fat and have almost no protein, not because they the process of creating the chips confuses your body.

Guess what? You can gorge just as heavily on homemade 4-ingredient bread (technically slightly less if you use bread flour, which is high in protein).

Go read the study. The data from this study doesn't support your statement. They matched the carb content (and sugar, fat, etc) of the "highly processed" and "less processed" groups' food offerings. The highly processed ate significantly more, even though both had plenty of carbs available.

> The data from this study doesn't support your statement.

I think you're wrong.

> The increased energy intake during the ultra-processed diet resulted from consuming greater quantities of carbohydrate (280 ± 54 kcal/day; p < 0.0001) and fat (230 ± 53 kcal/day; p = 0.0004), but not protein (2 ± 12 kcal/day; p = 0.85) (Figure 2B). The remarkable stability of absolute protein intake between the diets, along with the slight reduction in overall protein provided in the ultra-processed versus the unprocessed diet (14% versus 15.6% of calories, respectively) (Table 1), suggests that the protein leverage hypothesis could partially explain the increase in energy intake with the ultra-processed diet in an attempt to maintain a constant protein intake (Martı´nez Steele et al., 2018; Simpson and Raubenheimer, 2005).

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(19)30248...

Yes, they matched the meals, but the meals weren't made of homogenous goo. Participants could eat as much as they wanted of the parts they wanted.

Yes, exactly: there were plenty of carbs available to both groups, but those with the highly processed variety ate more of those carbs than those without, suggesting that it's not the availability of the carbs but rather the degree of processing that makes the person eat more of what's available.

Though I would agree that this evidence leaves the possibility that carbs in general are less sating, but that highly processed carbs are even worse, and so the degree of processing would still be linked to weight gain.

It's not clear if that's because there's some sort of stomach-brain "signal" that's getting confused, or because highly processed foods are designed to taste maximally good versus less processed and so people eat more.

Makes sense. I'm on a low-carb diet for almost 10 years, it was the only one that worked for me, as has worked for my dad (he follows it since he was 33, now he is 73 and strong as an ox). One side-effect of this diet is look for better food - most if not all processed foods have carbs, so you are forced to eat vegetables, different meats, etc. to avoid food boredom. I ate more fish and lettuce in the first year of diet than in my whole previous life.

And I had luck with calorie counting - by actually weighing and recording everything I didn't overeat (though I was hungry), even though the food I ate was partially ultra processed.

I know that the net calories consumed/burned is what determines my weight, but the benefit of a low carb diet (only speaking for me) is that I am not hungry. I lost 50 pounds in the first six months and have been at the same weight for 18 months.

There's a bit more to it than that.

First, it's calories absorbed, not consumed. That is, if I eat calories in a form that's harder to digest, my body may not get all the calories out of it that are in the food. I think that this is one of the deals with processed food - the processing makes it easier for your body to extract the calories from the food. The calories were already there, but they're processed into a form that your body can use more easily.

Second, some foods (at least for some people) have some effect on metabolism, so that calories consumed is not totally independent of calories burned.

Well, you are "anti-conflating" the latter and former. They are describing the same mechanism, not two separate ones.

The point is that carbohydrates are calorie dense. You don't need to eat a lot of them to get a lot of calories.

Fish is one of the least calorie dense meats. Vegetables and fruits are some of the least calorie dense foods. It's nearly impossible to eat enough lettuce in a day to go over your daily recommended calories. It just won't fit.

So, in a lot of ways, keto, paleo, vegan, Mediterranean diets are all sneaky ways to cut out a major source of calories. You don't have to count them because just the way you're eating is taking care of that aspect.

But if you want to eat Twinkies exclusively, you can do that as long as you eat only so many.

Fat is more calorically dense than sugar, and your examples are all low in fat as well - vegetables and fruits have more carbs than either protein or fats - and the high calorie examples (ie. Avacado) of those categories are high in fat. Fish has few fats and no sugars. The most calorific cuts of meat aren't that way because they are sugary, it's because they are fatty. It's just that fats lead to satiety quicker than carbs, but I'll bet if you ate pork belly for every meal you'd find that you could and would get fat on that.

I didn't say they excluded all major source. I said a major source.

Yes, paleo and keto (I think) don't exclude fat, but they are excluding a major source of calories. Because we do need some fat in our diet or else we go into rabbit starvation.

There's nothing really in bread or refined sugar that we need that we aren't getting from somewhere else.

Fat is 2.25x as calorie dense (Cal/g) as carbs.

And? We already eat fat pretty sparingly. Whereas with sugar, you can color it and fluff it up and people will eat a giant cloud of it.

So, when you point out where I said those diets cut out all major source rather than a major source, feel free to continue.

So would you say it's the low carbiness of the diet, or the high variety of healthy thinginess of the diet that led the weight loss/ whatever?

Perhaps your current diet + healthy carbs would still help you achieve your goals?

Not the op here, but I have been doing low-carb off and on (i get into deep ruts of depression frequently enough that messes with it and I occasionally fall off the wagon) for the past 2 years, and for me personally the strictness of the carb count works for me better than the healthiness of the food I am eating.

I limit myself to 30g of total carbs (minus fiber) a day so it forces me to be more honest with myself. If I am at 25g for the day and I need to make dinner for instance, it basically forces me to always pick the low carb version of a meal (veggies + meat).

I hope to one day be able to transition to a diet with more healthy carbs, but in the process I am focusing on working on better habits and losing weight.

That's something like under 5% of your calories from carbs, assuming a 2500 calories per day diet. Have you tried other amounts between that and 60% or so that is typical in the United States?

Personally, I found that about 35% gave me most of the same benefits people claim for the much lower carb diets, without the hassle of having to put a lot of work into food choice to achieve it.

At 35%, a lot of "ordinary" foods can be tweaked easily to fit. Sandwich is 50%? Get it with regular mayo instead of lite mayo, or make it double meat, or both...and you can get it to under 35%.

At 5%, that sandwich is right out. As are burgers, pizza, pasta...basically most of the mainstream diet is out, and since most food infrastructure is geared toward serving people on the mainstream diet, that can be a big pain.

I have played around with the amount of carbs, right now my level is where it's at for weight loss, but I am planning on scaling up once I get closer to my goal weight.

But yes, food can be a pain (I have been craving pizza and fries for the longest damn time). My other goal aside from losing weight is learning what foods I _do_ like since having been a picky eater, means I defaulted to the mainstream diet and never strayed far from it which was negatively impacting my health and weight.

On the plus side, while it can be slightly more expensive grocery wise, it basically closes any eating out for the most part, so I can save money.

Not OP but my own experience with being low-carb for years is that for me, there is no such thing as healthy carbs. Fruits and whole-grain breads and other things that the mainstream nutritionists regard as "healthy carbs" still spike my blood sugar and cause food cravings for up to 48 hours even after a single tiny serving.

If I stick resolutely to a high-fat, medium-protein diet, I am almost never hungry and have plenty of energy. And after 7 years, it has kept 45 lbs of excess weight off me. I was never truly obese, but others have shed hundreds of pounds permanently doing the same thing.

> still spike my blood sugar and cause food cravings

How do you know that it spikes your blood sugar? Are you diabetic and actively monitoring?

Do you not have any food cravings on your regular diet? What marks the carb-induced ones out as different?

Not the OP, but I've ketoed for months at a time in the past, also for weight loss, and I can describe the lack of cravings like this: when I get hungry on keto, it doesn't demand my attention. It's something I know I can take care of at some point soon, but it doesn't make me distracted, give me pangs of hunger, or make me feel weak or irritable. I don't get "hangry." Eating a regular diet, hunger takes over much more of my conscious experience. It's something I need to address. Keto breaks that, and it's actually a wonderful experience.

The only 'violation' I allow is the high-fiber carbs, which do strike a note with your opinion.

If he’s eating vegetables he’s likely eating all the healthy carbs there are.

A category of food that had escaped me as highly processed was food at specific kinds of restaurants. David Kessler has an eye opening chapter "A visit to Chili's" in his book, The End of Overeating.

Everything they serve at chili's, even seemingly innocuous things like a chicken breast meal have been made or modified to make them hyper-palatable, easy to chew, swallow, and overeat.

For non-American's, chili's is a sit down chain restaurant where you order off a menu. Other comparable restaurants are Applebee's, and TGI Fridays.

https://www.chilis.com/

I'm curious as to how fast food being highly processed escaped you. It's fairly obvious just by the texture and taste of most food at those places that it's highly processed into some form far from what it originally was. If you take a bite into just about any chicken Burger, nugget, strip, boneless wing, whatever, from any fast food place and inside is just a formless, whitish pinkish mush. That's not what chicken's supposed to look like. It's also something that's been repeatedly said in media and other places since at least I was a kid in the 90's.

Most things in fast food places come premade and frozen from some factory somewhere and usually just fried up either in oil or on a 'grill'. Almost nothing is actually prepared in those places.

Though, if you're in Canada, A&W serves real eggs and Bacon and stuff for breakfast and their onion rings are actually cut and prepared in store(though the batter and breading aren't). Everything else though came preprepared.

> I'm curious as to how fast food being highly processed escaped you.

I'll read this as a genuine question and you not just calling me out for being an idiot.

I of course, saw A&W/McDonald's/Wendy's as highly processed junk.

1) But a Chili's or an Applebee's where I can order a chicken entree that looks like chicken, that I can get with a side of vegetables, that comes on a real plate, with real silverware--I guess my mind put that in a different category with expectations that it was more like 'real' food.

2) I hadn't seen how the "sausage was made" so to speak. Yes, I know food is processed, frozen, prepared off site, but the book I referenced peeled back so many curtains on just what that looks like, even for that seemingly benign chicken breast I talked about in my first point.

Here's one excerpt pulled from a sea of them:

The uncooked chicken had been in a marinade that combined orange juice, tequila, triple sec, sweet-and-sour mix, and artificial color, thereby including sugar, two kinds of oil, and salt. It was shipped frozen in twenty-five-pound bags, each containing about fifty pieces of meat, plus whey protein concentrate and modified tapioca starch. Nick Nickelson, a chief scientist at the Dallas-based Standard Meat, a supplier to Chili’s, said that the chicken and marinade were tumbled together in a piece of equipment that resembled a cement mixer. “It pulls the marinade into the muscle,” said Nickelson, breaking down the cellular structure of the meat and tenderizing it in the process. Another common way to get marinade into meat is through needle injection. Hundreds of needles are used to pierce the meat, tearing up the connective tissue. “It’s been prechewed,” said Billy Rosenthal, former president of Standard Meat. For all that, very little in the appearance or flavor of Chili’s food suggests how much sugar, fat, or salt it contains, or how easily it goes down.

It was a genuine question, sorry if it came off as insulting. I dunno, I've been learning to cook my own food since I was a kid, so I've got a pretty good idea of what meat and other food should look and taste like, to the point where most processed food doesn't really look or taste like 'real food' to me and I don't even look at it as food. Even those bottom tier just above fastfood style restaurants. I've always thought people realized this but just didn't really care. It's just never really came to mind there are people who just never realized.

I didn't notice either until my 30s. The reason for me is that I grew up on highly processed and packaged foods, and places like Chilis seemed to serve more "whole" foods in comparison to a lot of the junk I was eating. It wasn't until I did a lot of reading and cooking that I understood the difference.

> have been made or modified to make them hyper-palatable, easy to chew, swallow

Isn't this just a very scary way of saying "delicious"?

The book sounds really interesting, thank you for mentioning it!

And that's why you gotta look up the nutritional information if you want to make good choices. A salad isn't just a salad at a restaurant.

Indigenous people of South America chewed on coca leaves for 1000s of years. Then humans started processing it into cocaine. It became a problem then. We have effectively done the same thing to foods. Extracted the sugars and fats into refined form and combined them to create tasty but energy dense food with not much other nutrition.

Agreed. Seems to me the simplest explanation is that our bodies were calibrated over years of evolution eating "real" foods. Processed foods of any kind are significantly less likely to have the correct energy/satiety ratio.

It is not the weight loss alone. Look on the inside of the body. Ateries clog - and this is due to animal food.

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