All-you-can-eat study shows body copes well with one-off calorie indulgence
bath.ac.uk
bath.ac.uk
It mainly just says your blood sugar won't spike, which is entirely expected ("managed to keep the amount of nutrients in the bloodstream within normal range"). Emphasis added:
> "Specifically, those tested in this study were able to efficiently use or store the nutrients they ingested during the pizza-eating challenge, such that the levels of sugar and fats in their blood were not much higher than when they ate half as much food. The main problem with overeating is that it adds more stored energy to our bodies (in the form of fat)..."
This just confirms the conventional understanding of how our bodies work. The raised insulin levels quickly convert excess blood sugar into glycogen and fat.
A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting this headline as meaning you won't gain weight from a single meal. This study does NOT support that conclusion!
A targeted public health intervention that prevented beheadings just at the time of beheading would clearly break the link in the causal change. This result is insensitive to any imaginable confounders. However, the executioner would find another strategy, say a gunshot or noose, which did not appear anywhere in our dataset.
Really makes you question the validity of observational studies. At least when acts of government are concerned.
Sure, if you measure the time surrounding the beheading, it's obvious, but if you expand the time range far enough, then you find out that everybody dies whether they're beheaded or not and suddenly it looks irrelevant.
In OP's paper, I'm not sure if they met this criteria.
Hengist et al publish a toy paper where they fed 14 guys pizza and ran a blood panel. Sure, why not. Probably took an afternoon, and was real cheap to do, gave some of his grad students publication credits and LaTeX experience. We learn that eating a pizza will not instantly give you diabetes, or make you obese, which we already knew. This, by itself, is fine.
Separately, the University of Bath has a press office which is required to issue a certain number of press releases per year, even when the research isn't interesting. Again, no real problem. Plenty of press releases are issued with nobody ever reading them. If the University of Bath wants to employ people to do nothing useful, that's their own business.
This press release is submitted to HN and gets a bunch of upvotes. Problem. People in the comments try to generalize the study. Big problem!
The paper had no followup, no dose schedule, tiny experimental groups... because it wasn't trying to solve obesity!
Nobody knows what's causing the obesity epidemic. There are many hypotheses, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results.
There is no reliable way to lose weight.1 There are many diets that work for some people, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results.
This is a nice little toy study. I don't doubt the data or the results. I just don't think it's useful. And studying obesity certainly isn't like running a randomized clinical trial on if beheading will kill a person!
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1: Yes, if you lock someone in a cage and not give them food, they will lose weight. Obviously. Once you release them back into modern society, they will regain that weight.
Correct me if I'm wrong but that is false. It seems pretty well known and accepted that caloric intake below BMR will make you lose weight. Your BMR might fluctuate, but if you take that into account there shouldn't be a problem.
Going back into society and resuming your previous eating habits (before the cage) will ofc make you gain weight because your BMR will have lowered during your starvation.
I wonder if people who chronically overeat (hello!) develop insensitivity to these hormones, leading to a cycle where it becomes harder to eat the correct amount. Similarly, I wonder if people who tend to eat too little are hyper-sensitive to them, making it hard to gain weight.
I don't remember the exact technical mechanism he described and quite frankly I don't know if it's true... but there you go.
Sounds like Leptin Resistance. [0]
I wonder if I have that. When I see that my rather sedentary lifestyle means I'm only supposed to eat 2,000 calories a day, I don't see how the hell that's possible without constant hunger. Even if I eat a diet rich in protein and fiber, which is supposed to make me feel fuller longer, I'm still always hungry. I can eat a 20 oz ribeye with a large side of broccoli and wheat rolls (A meal that's likely 1500+ calories) and still be hungry in only 2-3 hours. If I eat something in the 600 calorie range, like a 10 oz chicken breast and veggies, I'll be hungry again in an hour, if I ever even feel full at all.
Meanwhile, I know a couple people that say "I eat like a lion and I can't gain weight!" then discover that they'll cook up an 8 oz filet and sides and be full without even eating it all.
The other aspect I've found is with periodic fasting, these urges tend to go away for me. I remember being extremely lethargic before dinner when I had a worse diet (lots of carbs). These days I can easily got 16 hours without any loss of energy.
Not sure if that's just changing my diet to be less sugar/carbs or if it is because I exercise more. Either way, I don't struggle with extreme hunger very frequently anymore.
Hope that anecdote helps!
I started a keto diet about a year ago, which has a decent amount of fat. My breakfast is often a Keto Chow shake, which has 47g fat, 9g fiber, 33g protein, and about 600 calories. Some users of Keto Chow report feeling full for hours. I drink one and will still want more.
I recently started fasting (2-3 days every two weeks) and it’s been working pretty well. It seems way less miserable than running a calorie deficit every day. I eat normally the other days but I do have to be vigilant not to overeat.
If it only happened while working, certainly I'd attribute it to being bored. But no, it happens even when I'm playing games with my friends and having a blast.
I had a friend in college who was trying to gain weight, so he copied me with what he put on his tray. The completely expected result was that I finished his food after he was full.
It causes issues with the gut, promoting inflammation and that "chubby" appearance you see. It's not all fat--lots of that is simply inflammation of the gut.
So the article mentions GLP-1, but the primary hormones responsible for hunger and satiety are leptin and ghrelin.
Leptin is an anorexic hormone that is produced by adipose tissue. It regulates metabolism, particularly resting/basal metabolic rate. An interesting thing that you'll find with bodybuilders and competetive athletes, is that when you cross into single-digit bodyfat, it becomes significantly more difficult to continue to lose fat.
Some people attribute this to a phenomena known as "adaptive thermogenesis", which is the idea that your metabolism adapts and regulates itself based on your lifestyle and environmental factors, so that you don't continue either losing/gaining weight forever.
But the major contributing factor is that with diminished adipose tissue, systemic production of leptin is severely reduced and this lowers both metabolic rate and lipolysis.
(You can artificially restore leptin production and re-induce lipolysis in a low-bodyfat state through a short window (~36 hours) of carbohydrate overfeeding)
On the other side of the coin, you have Ghrelin. Ghrelin is a peptide produced in the stomach, and is pretty solely involved in appetite stimulation.
If you've ever taken GHRP (Growth-Hormone-Releasing-Peptide) or Ibutamoren Mesylate (oral growth hormone secretagogue), It will drive you ravenously hungry. A side effect of the peptides/hormones many athletes take for growth hormone production is the release of Ghrelin and a massive appetite, which is great if you're trying to bulk but also tends to make you incredibly tired.
So there you go. Bunch of useless information.
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If anyone is curious, this paper does an astounding job of summarizing the useful bits on Leptin + Ghrelin:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-789X...
Human body is remarkable in responsive to disturbances in balance. You can generally throw things off a fair degree before the systems behind whatever you've thrown off adapt and scale down responses.
Generally when you see things in the extreme in humans, somewhere in the line there's a malfunction in regulation that allowed that state to be reached (or chemical intervention, e.g. anabolic steroids, substance abuse, etc).
Almost anything will work for a little, but the only thing that works forever are things that can become lifestyle factors.
There are a handful of exceptions for "magic diet pills", but please for the love of god don't listen to what I'm about to say below as anything more than science:
- Phentermine
- [Rx but can outright buy it from "Medical Spas" pretty cheap (how is this legal?)]
Stimulatory appetitete suppressant, effects are essentially amphetamine minus the dopaminergic activity (no high, sorry)
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- Sibutramine
- [Rx, Phentermine's little brother]
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- 2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP)
- [Not legal for sale, but you can buy it online if you're determined]
It's what's called a "mitochondrial uncoupler". It disrupts the Krebbs Cycle so that resynthesis of ATP from ADP becomes incredibly inefficient, and it expels the discarded energy as heat.
This is the holy grail of fatloss. You can lose 1.0-1.5lbs of pure adipose tissue (not water/glycogen) per day.
But the excess heat will cause you an incurable, agonizing death if you overdose.
Also makes you hot all day, probably dangerous if you work in the heat.
It's use was discontinued, not actually due to overdose and death by heat, but because in some women it had a chance of causing cataracts, and if you're overly susceptible to oxidative stress/damage it can cause peripheral neuropathy.
These effects are generally mitigated through supplementation efforts with anti-oxidants though.
Back in 2012 I lost 12 kg in about 3 months by counting calories to get to my ideal weight, it was pretty hard as I was still eating breakfast + lunch + dinner and trying to squeeze my calories around the day.
Fast-forward some years, 2015-16 I wanted to drop 5 kg during winter but wasn't very keen on counting calories again, I started skipping breakfast and having late lunch, unaware of intermittent fasting schemes, restricting myself to eat between 3pm-9pm made it much, much easier to control my hunger pangs. After a week or two I didn't wake up hungry anymore, at all, the hunger feeling was much easier to control and forget about.
To this day I don't really feel very hungry during a day, at least not in the way I would feel before where I needed to eat, would get quite irritable and so on. I've forgotten to eat proper meals during days I've been active just because the hunger doesn't really bother me, it's a pretty good feeling to be honest.
I'm also curious if there's any research done on things we get from binge eating that are not calories. Do we see a similar uptake of nutrients? Is eating less efficiently from a calorie perspective still beneficial in evolutionary terms if we get something else (vitamins, minerals, etc)?
It certainly violates calories in/calories out. But I’m ok with that. We’re not steam engines.
Can your intestines stop adding sugar to your bloodstream?
- Inability of us to efficiently consume large quantities of food so we pass more calories than we would for smaller levels. - Changes to metabolism to adjust.
I think at the end of the day it is still calories in/calories out but you may be taking in less than go in your mouth and may be using more than you usually would.
I assert without proof that it's the all-feast-all-the-time dietary novelty for most of humanity in the last, oh, 200 years that probably throws a spanner in the works.
Certainly the vast majority of humanity throughout written history -- numerically, the bulk of our ancestry -- has subsisted primarily on non-meat foods, be they wheat, barley, maize, or whatever. Peasants were not regularly eating meat; often we have the written record to point to for that, as well as archaeological evidence from grave finds and the like.
and my usual critique of "paleo" holds here, which is that it ignores evolution. As a species, we've evolved the persistence of digesting lactose at least twice, in independent subgroups, through two different metabolic pathways, so it's not like we're incapable of getting used to dietary shifts over the span of human history.
For example: I eat 10 buns with butter. How much of this food will be digested by my body and how much will 'go through' and not be converted into energy? What's the ratio? Is there even a ratio or everything we eat we eventually digest?
No it's not surprising because - whether it's contrary or not the neurodrivel "reward centres in the brain" i'm not sure - as an adult you know that craving for a specific food item is entirely a high-level construction in your psychology to do with the story you're telling yourself about what it will mean to eat that, etc. and you should have experienced that it will go away as soon as you eat enough of anything else.
[0] https://particle.scitech.org.au/food/always-have-room-for-de...
That said, I think there's huge value in studies that scientifically validate things we believe to be true to 'common knowledge' (because often common knowledge is totally wrong), which justifies this study being at the top of HN.
Back when I worked out 6 days a week, cardio and weights, I'd do the binge meal for one dinner a week. I'd eat whatever the heck I wanted and have a beer or two. It was a good way to not feel like your depriving yourself.
That said, I'd usually notice the scale went up the next morning by 3-5 lbs. It was pretty much water weight from the carb overload and it went away after a couple days.
Otherwise, all things normalized like calorie + pedometer for NEAT + morning weigh in trend suggest thousands of indulgence calories just goes straight the colon. If I spread the extra calories over weekdays, I will gain weight. If I skip fiber, the food will stay around (=more absorption?) and I will gain weight. I've also done big weekly binges a few years ago to similar affect. 6000 calories over 3-4 meals just doesn't account get registered on the scale at the end of the month. Had to stop due to heartburn :-/.
I. AM. SHOCKED.
I did notice that I couldn't breakthrough some key weight loss levels without both cheat days and intermittent fasting, with the cheat days seeming counter-intuitive to me.