Potato diet community trial
slimemoldtimemold.com
slimemoldtimemold.com
So if you are not lactose intolerant and get off lactose for 6-9 months, don't expect that your belly will react well to a glass of milk in a year.
I'm all for _reducing_ X and Y. But completely going polar is trendy and extremely dangerous long term.
While diet can induce a shift in the gut microbiota, these changes appear to be temporary. Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950569/#:~:tex...
I am unaware of dietary induced lactose intolerance as a thing. I tried to google it and can't find support for the idea.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/lactose-intolerance-101
As far as I know, lactose tolerance is the exception for the human race and it is deemed to be genetic. Many humans are lactose intolerant by default.
According to the following source, 65 percent of humans are lactose intolerant and up to 100 percent of the population in some sub groups are lactose intolerant.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lactose-i...
Chances are, you are lactose intolerant but you were adjusted to the side effects as being normal until you had a period of your life where you were not dealing with them.
For a lot of people, lactose intolerance makes them a little gassy, or changes their bowel habits. It's practically negligible until they get away from it for a while and experience relief from the symptoms.
If you are lactose intolerant, you should probably try to not trigger that response, or take lactaid supplements when you are going to knowingly eat lactose so that your body has something to digest those sugars. It's a minor adjustment that can make your daily life just a little more bearable.
On the idea that your microbiome can take a long time to recover from elimination diets: 1) From a gastrointestinal morphology perspective, we are opportunistic scavengers, so our whole biology is directed around sporadically eating just about anything. 2) I've seen several studies showing that, for the most part, our gut microbiome radically reshapes itself within a matter of days in response to major diet changes.
quoted "gastrointestinal specialist Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego"
> “To some extent, our ability to handle lactose is a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon,” Barrett says. The body digests lactose — a disaccharide — by using lactase, an enzyme in the small intestine, to break it down into the monosaccharides glucose and galactose, which can then be absorbed. “If you don’t have the [lactose] substrate in the diet, you start to reduce the synthesis of the lactase enzyme to digest it,” Barrett explains. “After a period of completely excluding lactose from the diet, you may not have any of those digestive enzymes present.”
Maybe unawareness here is a gender thing? I have heard this story too many times from women doing weird short-term restriction diets (or going vegan and trying to undo) to feel like I need "current science" to "support" the very fact that it happens. Many things can happen because of genes or other reasons.
If you are assuming I'm male, you are in error.
That's a good point to bring up, but I do wonder if this is splitting hairs just a little bit. A shift in your microbiome might be technically temporary while still making things feel very weird for that temporary period -- however long that takes to change.
Also keep in mind:
> Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown, mainly due to a lack of long-term human dietary interventions, or long-term follow-ups of short-term dietary interventions. > > [...] > > Our understanding of the duration required for a dietary intervention to have an enduring impact on the gut microbiota, and consequently health, is hampered by several limitations. Firstly, there is a lack of long-term human studies, or indeed follow-ups of short-term dietary interventions, that seek to establish if a diet-induced modulation of the gut microbiota endures, though the wash-out periods of cross-sectional studies provide some indirect insight.
----
All that to say I actually kind of agree, and I also don't see super-strong scientific evidence of induced lactose intolerance, but I qualify that by saying that it might just be a lack of study. And again, could also be a difference in what people mean by "permanent". If something makes you lactose intolerant for a month, that's still interesting, even if that's not meeting GP's "in a year" claim.
I've been vegan for maybe a year and half at this point, and was vegetarian before that. I'm curious how my body would react to eating a meat/cheese/lactose heavy meal if I sprang one on it out of the blue (not curious enough to actually try it, but it would be an interesting experiment).
My anecdotal experience or understanding is that potato starch is generally good for gut health, that you can nearly live on potatoes alone which is why the Irish Potato Famine was such a big deal -- big families on small plots of land were keeping people alive by growing mostly potatoes and people died in droves when the potato crop was screwed up -- and if you include oils in your "potato only" diet like the instructions allow for, coconut oil is medically known for many decades to be good for gut health due to being high in medium chain triglycerides and a guy with a PhD told me it's specifically good for microbiota. Butter is also a decent source of medium chain triglycerides though not as high as coconut oil.
Whatever is or is not true generally about "eat ONLY this" diets, my suspicion is a potato only diet -- especially if you include the right oils/fats -- is probably not a big threat to your microbiota (though other sources here are saying that losing your lactose tolerance totally is a thing and that may well be something that can happen with this diet).
Which I didn't want to say and may yet regret saying, but in for a penny, in for a pound as they say.
Not sure if my phrasing got this across, but I didn't mean "splitting hairs" as an intentional act or in the sense of spreading division or prompting argument, and I didn't interpret your comment as making a really strong claim in either direction. I just interpreted your comment as public musing, same as what I was doing.
I only meant "splitting hairs" in the sense that a person who runs into temporary lactose-intolerance will still have trouble for the duration of that time period. For whatever it's worth, I didn't interpret your comment as trying to say that temporary changes couldn't exist, or that you were supporting a potato-only diet, or that the OP was lying, or anything like that.
At the end of the day I'm not a doctor, I've got no idea what a potato-only diet will do to someone's microbiome. I'm just posting stuff on the Internet.
AIUI drinking whole milk is mostly a Hong Kong thing.
I've tried it myself and try to stick to it. When strict on it my horrific whole body burning pain stopped.
Not everyone, but many people are either cured, show no symptoms, or have reduced symptoms.
I've also noticed a lot of people that have never heard of it eventually rediscover it via trial and error on how their body responds.
Funny enough in contrast to the article. Potatoes (nightshades) are not allowed. Sweet potatoes are.
To clarify: modern science estimates 300–1000 species in gut microbiota, 99% by number of cells coming from 30-40 species. The total number of microbial and viral cells throughout a healthy adult body is estimated at over 100 trillion, or roughly 10x the number of one's own body cells.
I want to get beyond the boring "too much of anything is bad". Of course it is! That's what "too much" means!
Well, have fun!
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/24/5456315...
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-micr...
Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher. Paleolithic teeth have little of the damage associated with eating grit from ground grains. We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
The Hadza are a modern people, and modern hunter-gatherers have been pushed to the fringes. Early English and French explorers documented the diets of the North American people they encountered: they ate a lot of meat, growing the Three Sisters as a supplement to a diet heavy in game and fish.
It was the Neolithic in which population pressure forced people to start eating grain, and eventually growing it. They immediately became shorter and their teeth started falling out.
> Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher.
That's only because all the archaeologic evidence is preserved in bones and tools. All if not most of the plant based evidence has been reclaimed by nature. There are some new discoveries surrounding preserved pollens that are showing how early hominids had plants in their camps.
> We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
That's because all the wooden based structures didn't survive. We should quit calling it the Stone Age and call it the Wood Age, because their stone tools were used to build wooden structures (along with butchering critters).
Maybe I should have worded it better... "realize that our Paleolithic friends ate more plants than we were lead to believe"
Paleo goes a bit beyond that, to be fair.
Obviously everyone will react differently.
My doctor put me on a "no milk products" diet years ago for a digestive ailment. I [too rigorously, perhaps] held to it for a year and a half. The diet solved my problems but at end left me lactose intolerant.
It didn't at first seem like much to live without milk products. But the ramifications of eating say, a banana pudding, which then turns one's intestines into a freestyle trumpet, cannot be ignored.
I've quit all dairy for years in the past and had no issues when chugging a glass of milk or having something with cheese in it later. It's very case by case
They promote it to people not in their situation, the other people adopt it and now they have to eat a specialized diet because they sensitized their body.
This is noted in, of all things, Adam Smiths the Wealth of Nations when he compares the diet of the poor in England (mostly wheat), in Scotland (Barley?) and, of course, Ireland (Potatoes). He notes that, of these groups, it is not the relatively well-of poor in England who are the healthiests, but the poorest of the all, the Irish. The poor in Ireland would not be able to afford more than the cheapest food, which would be whatever greens were in season and potatoes.
Losing weight isn't causal to being healthy. In most cases it correlates because gaining weight is usually done through eating unhealthy (excess calories, refined sugars, etc.) so going on a healthy diet means losing weight gained from unhealthy diet.
Also, there are unhealthy diets on which you can lose weight but the effects on your hormones might be even worse than an unhealthy diet that causes you to gain weight.
Except that's not how it works. An excess of fat can directly cause problems.
Above a certain point, having too much fat causes chronic hypoxia in fatty tissue, leading to chronic inflammation, which can eventually lead to systemic problems like insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, liver disease, and cancer.
Edit: I am specifically referring to abdominal fat in excess of what a given body is able to cope with.
They merely suggested that weight loss does not occur as a result of a healthy diet, but rather as a result of an intentionally deficient diet (technically an "unhealthy" diet). That you can lose weight eating only potatoes is therefore not very interesting and does not imply that the diet is healthy.
I don't have an opinion either way and I don't think this is a likely reason, but it is a possibility.
They found that indigestible oils like Olestra served to flush out the chemicals that bonded with oils, so maybe the high fiber potato diet is good for flushing out something else?
Anyway the diet described in the article doesn't make any assumption about calories. If you're taking enough calories to maintain your weight but losing weight, then it's very likely there's something else you're not getting enough of.
Besides the fact the diet isn't asking suggesting anyone not supplement, a vegan diet won't lead to a severe B-12 deficiency in a matter months. But hey there is a non-0% chance you are bang on and the people losing weight when trying to eat 20 potatoes a day to meet their caloric demands are actually just noticing the weight loss once they also get pellagra and anemia, they just figured it was a coincidence.
From the perspective I took where a healthy diet is a sustainable one with sufficient nutrients and long lifetime expectancy, a weight loss diet is unhealthy and unsustainable, but there to negate a different issue and improve long-term health.
However, a diet that varies in how 'fed' you are over time is very likely healthier than one where you are constantly taking in nutrients. During that post-prandial state, insulin and growth factors are elevated, and autophagy and other important pathways for 'tidying up' sick cells are turned off. That is why I don't think it is fair to say that fasts or restrictive diets are inherently unhealthy, I reckon 'whether this can be sustained steadily forever' should not be the bar. Similarly, the 200% of normal diet consumed after marathon is healthy that day and probably more healthy than eating normally since it is going to allow for repair and replenishment of depleted substrates, but would not be healthy if eaten every day.
For someone with health issues stemming from obesity, a potato-crash diet could immediately improve health, and continue to for a good while.
Aren’t all diets whose goal is weight loss “intentionally deficient” ?
Adopting a diet that balances nutrients and calories and also provides all needed vitamins will lead to weight loss and health improvement (in most cases).
See page xxi, chapter A. Weight loss is recommended for lowering blood pressure, levels of total/LDL cholesterol, and blood glucose, and for blood pressure and blood glucose these effects have also been shown in RCTs with weight lowering medications, so we can't say they were due to more healthy diets alone.
See also this summary of evidence of the benefits of moderate (5-10%) weight loss: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5497590/
(saying that I agree with you that we shouldn't all adopt the cabbage soup diet, or potato-only diet for extended periods, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater)
(I wouldn't recommend the potato-only diet for someone who hasn't already attempted a healthy, balanced diet with consistent tracking, that should always be the first thing attempted as it can be continued indefinitely with less dependence on tracking over time, but some people find the effort of tracking hard to maintain)
Potatoes lack a lot of vitamins and nutrients needed in order for them to be the sole food you can eat and stay healthy.
Strictly spoken, true, but being overweight definitely is causal to decreased health.
In doctor's parlance, overweight means BMI between 25 and 30. This tends to correlate with the lowest all cause mortality in older people [0], so it might not be a big deal.
But outright obesity (BMI > 30) and morbid obesity (BMI > 40) are definitely a health problem.
Even that is not necessarily always true. I imagine being oevrweight is generally much healthier than going through famine.
They're saying losing weight != healthy, which isn't the same thing. Take anorexia or bulimia for example. You could be overweight, but that doesn't mean losing weight from an eating disorder is healthy. Same is true for a diet. Just because you're losing weight from a diet, doesn't mean the diet is healthy for you.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/weight-loss-breathing-de...
That said, being overweight (fat) is not where you want to be at, it results in big and small health issues like joint troubles, high blood pressure, diabetes, and finding trivial things like getting up from the couch or walking up the stairs difficult.
And as you know, fueling the body with excess macronutrients is unhealthy. Indeed, eating a diet poor or absent in micronutrients is bad for you, but also quite rare.
Sure it is. I mean there are healthy ways to lose weight and less healthy ways, but losing weight if you're overweight is better for your health.
Also hormone imbalance isn't unscientific. It has been widely been studied that women will have their periods change timing when malnourished.
Anectdotally: I had my testosterone levels wiped out when switching from a diet with excess calories to a one with not enough calories and nutrients. The condition fixed itself when I started practicing a balanced diet (with exercises).
In many ways it certainly is. Knees don't go bad because they are carrying excess serum triglycerides that just happen to correlate with body mass.
So becoming less obese is in fact causing better health.
Of course there are unhealthy ways to lose weight, but that's a separate issue.
I reckon most animals eat a steady diet of only one or two things, and people did too for a very long time (on a seasonal scale). It was only recently that we ate so many different foods so frequently, and this coincides with a rise in gut-related illnesses and obesity in first world countries. Many people see success treating these diseases with some diet, but what's interesting is how different and disjoint these diets are. For example, both carnivore diets and vegetarian diets have seen success treating inflammatory bowel disease. Perhaps this success isn't due to eating one food over another, but rather to the reduction in variety a diet brings.
So you might eat a wide variety of things during the year, but for weeks at a time you might be eating lots of just the few things that are currently available
Not saying that is the case, I don't know, but I would not totally dismiss OP idea out of hand
A healthy gastrointestinal microbiome is dependent on dietary diversity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4837298/#:~:tex...
The weight loss bits are just silly. Any sustained caloric deficit will cause one to lose fat, regardless of the source. This just seems to be rediscovering the already well-known fact that complex carbohydrates (which potatoes provide) keep you better satiated than simple carbohydrates, so the subjects were consuming less calories overall.
Most people fall off diets in the longer term, and there are various causes, including hunger, but also including things like wanting to be able to partake in social events that feature other foods.
Quite why they have chosen to abandon their diet-scepticism in favour of anecdotes from a guy who literally promoted potatos as his day job and a guy who sells courses on how to eat potatos for $199+, but I guess contrarians gotta be contrary...
But things are not that simple. There is no evidence that simply removing processed food is an effective enough diet to produce the sustained 10-20% weight loss (or more) that many obese Americans would need to experience in order to weigh the same as their grandparents. And in fact there is overwhelming evidence that this modest intervention (and several more extreme calorie restricted versions) tend not to produce durable weight loss in anywhere near that amount.
PS Don’t take this the wrong way. I really really wish that that diet did work. I would pay you literally thousands of dollars to make it work. Because our grandparents ate a very filling and diverse diet, and that diet would be effortless to follow.
“Dieting” usually has too broad a set of parameters. You need a control. And if you have a goal and you’re paying attention, you’ll probably see an improvement over not having a control and eating freely.
Health, over the long term, may be more complicated but having a lean body mass makes health easier to achieve than not having a lean body mass.
One of the options "plain potato", for about 2 quid IIRC, was literally just the spud with a sachet of butter and pepper to add if you wanted.
I found that quite addictive TBH.
Don't recall there ever being much or any TV, radio or billboard marketing. They just sprung up in the high street in premium spots and out-competed McDonald's, KFC, Subway, PizzaHut and whatnot, which are all total junk-food in my reckoning.
Sadly they couldn't weather the property hike and probably over-reached on prime location real estate [2] (but that does how location is everything).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spudulike
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/04/spudulike-c...
The highest SI score was produced by boiled potatoes (323 +/- 51%) which was seven-fold higher than the lowest SI score of the croissant (47 +/- 17%)
edit: added (boiled)
It is better to develop good healthy habits than you can maintain for years and also while socializing and living in family.
Humans only became "omnivores" in the last 30,000 years as a result of agriculture. For several million years prior to that, hominins ate diets almost entirely of meat from ruminants and occasionally some roots and tubers. If we were designed to eat everything in a "balanced" proportion, as is often suggested, we would have a cecum to properly ferment plant material, and our digestive systems would be more basic than acidic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecum
And we can digest plants just fine without having to ferment them.
All those fantastical ideas about how the human body works, they keep cropping up in this kind of thread again and again. Where do they come from, I wonder?
I am really curious. Who comes up with those things?
The other day some guy was saying we can't digest plants. Like, at all. A vegetarian once told me that our teeth and stomach can't deal with meat. Have those people never eaten the things they say we can't eat?
There's clearly a kind of madness in all those diets that starts to become dangerous when it becomes a fad. But I'm still curious: how do they start?
If you look at the digestive tract of herbavores, such as cows, deer, horses, and rabbits, their cecum is a distinctly large and is typically considered a separate digestive organ.
Besides absorbing salts, the human "cecum" is a glorified dead end to the large intestine. A human could easily live without one if it were removed. It would have nearly no impact on our ability to swallow cellulose and excrete it undigested. Removing the cecum from an herbavore like a horse would be an entirely different story because they need it to process cellulose.
> And we can digest plants just fine without having to ferment them.
This is not correct. Humans are entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material. You will find no credible source that suggests that our digestive tracts are good at digesting cellulose, which makes up the bulk of plant material because it composes their cell walls. Just because we can swallow plants and poop them out without necessarily getting sick or dying doesn't mean it's at all optimal.
At best, we can ferment a small amount of cellulose given that it has been sufficiently broken down through cooking. Even if we were better at fermenting it, we are extremely poor at grinding it and are bad at harboring microbiota that produce cellulase enzyme.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8661373/
Can we derive energy from plants? Of course. If those plants are abundant in sugars and proteins, then we can access those. That is possible in present day because agriculture and selective breeding made edible and energy dense plants available and ubiquitous. Such plants did not exist the way they do today, were usually scarce, only available seasonally, and were energy-expensive to obtain and prepare.
> There's clearly a kind of madness in all those diets that starts to become dangerous when it becomes a fad.
Depends on if those diets are actually dangerous. What's more dangerous than believing that humans are developed to primarily eat meat is to ignore all available scientific evidence and promote fanciful ideas around plants being good or even better for humans. I await the day that a child dies from being fed plenty of meat.
Meanwhile...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/vegan-coup...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjqbem/judge-convicts-parent...
It's as if the human body is optimized to process animal material and is not so good at processing plants.
Why? Why is it that whenever the subject is food all the deranged nonsense of the internets comes out of the woodwork? One group of looney tune characters wants to eat nothing but plants. Another wants to eat nothing but meat. One insance clown posse says meat is bad for you. The other says plants are bad for you. You people are all stark raving mad! You're bananas!
> Yes, we have a cecum by name, as do other hypercarnivores including cats,...
Listen to yourself! We are like cats? Humans? Or are we talking about Thundrecats now? Because unlike Lion-O, humans are nothing like cats:
A hypocarnivore is an animal that consumes less than 30% meat for its diet, the majority of which consists of fungi, fruits, and other plant material.[1] Examples of living hypocarnivores are the grizzly bear (Ursus horribilis), black bear (Ursus americanus), binturong (Arctictis binturong), kinkajou (Potos flavus), and humans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocarnivore
You want a "credible source", really? I mean you can't even spell "herbivore" correctly but can you tell me which "credible source" is it that told you all this nonsense, that we are "hypercarnivores", like cats, and that we are "entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material"?
Pay heed: your friend Napoleon Bonaparte doesn't count. He's not who you think he is.
> Magician Penn Jillette lost over 100 lbs using a strategy that started with two weeks of a potato-only diet, and seems to be keeping it off
I know this because Kevin Smith started in a similar way after talking to him, and discussed it on his podcasts; it follows the teaching of some other guy who wrote a book and works as personal dietician.
The thing is: that initial stint was meant to effectively wean them off carbs. By bombarding the body with the same complex carbs for an extended period, they got so tired of them that they actually switched to craving less starchy foodstuff. It also "reset" their psychological attitude to food: because after a while you are kinda disgusted by potatoes, you stop eating for pleasure, and figure out how to eat only when strictly necessary. Obviously they both moved on to more balanced diets after a month or two.
So yeah, it can work in the short term, as a gateway to something better. But it's not a sustainable diet.
They have arguments for taking kind of "a fad diet" seriously enough to do a study based on existing anecdotal evidence that this might not be a crazy fad diet.
[1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-wei...
And please, for the love of god, don't do any "only X" diets. Just eat balanced and go outside every now and then, and you'll be okay.
Hot take: If it were that easy, obesity wouldn't exist.
People are different, their metabolism works at different rates, they might have sensitivity to different foods, and not everyone has the chance or resources to solve the likely psychological issues related to the condition (either cause of, or caused by) - which are often the hardest ones.
Diets can provide some direction, and are useful in a number of situations. You can't tell a prediabetic person to "just eat balanced", because that will not work - they need a precise diet to survive and possibly revert the condition.
Guess what; no one can agree on what a balanced diet actually is. It's quite literally one of the least scientific concepts ever invented.
In fact, there's evidence to the contrary that eating a "balanced" diet that combines macronutrients really is not a good thing.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2739696/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randle_cycle
The potato diet likely works because fatty acids and glucose aren't competing to such an extent that cells stop accepting more energy, thereby causing the body to have to release more insulin. And because potatoes are very satiating.
[1] https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/food-drink/irish-potato...
"don't you get bored from eating potatoes"? i am asked on a regular basis. my answer is a standard "potatoes are life, potatoes are my comfort food. now get off my lawn"
edit: i am willing to do an all potato diet but its not like i hate anything else, i just cant hate potatoes.
anytime there is a discussion on food, i bring in potatoes into the conversation automatically. i can't help it. its not like people come up to me and ask about my eating habits.
i am willing and have at many times given up a plate of a variety of meats and stuff for a plate of fried/baked potatoes so i bring that up and people start saying stuff...
Any diet that says "only eat X" is a red flag in my not so humble opinion. It's trying to make it easy for you, while the hard part that most people don't want to confront is learning to cook, actually cooking, and eating steadily. Few people that start a diet start off with having a regular eating pattern in the first place.
Diets don't last either; they're too big a change from your norm. The diet yoyo effect is from people starting a diet, and either slowly going back to their old habits or stopping and changing back completely after a few weeks / whenever their initial goal has been achieved.
This type of restriction is often more about the mental, "lifestyle" part than biology. It's an alternative to calorie-counting, you automatically eat much less.
I went meat-only for a few months and then slowly transitioned to low carb (relative to western diets) paleo-ish. I now enjoy eating vegetables I never touched before. Penn Jillette said the same thing about the potato method, it was more about palet-cleansing for him than actually losing weight on the potato itself.
It also gave me the opportunity to learn about every ingredient as I added it back into rotation.
> is learning to cook, actually cooking, and eating steadily
I grew morbidly obese on >80% homecooking. It's actually about making the right choice, 10 to 20 times per day.
If you go potato-only, meat-only or whatever - you're eliminating a lot of bad choices. In the end, reading a lot about food allowed me to make informed decisions and that seems to work for the long haul.
> a regular eating pattern
And what is that supposed to be? SAD? There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
I eat potatoes daily now, but not exclusively - complex carbs are harder to burn, so they are fattening, so I have gained some weight. Maybe I'll eliminate the rice and see how that goes.
I'd recommend against olive oil and for coconut oil, frying potatoes needs a lot of heat. Add parsley, bacon, caraway, onions and serve with pickled white cabbage. Good & simple!
One thing to note, I am not sure why would you suggest to remove olive oil. All the research (I’ve seen) suggests that olive oil is really good for humans
Also the other fellow might be referencing EVOO's low smoke point, it's true there isn't much point using it for high heat cooking.
I get the feeling that it is possible to gain muscle on keto, it's just being low-carb doesn't lend itself to high-intensity efforts, so at some point you just can't put out enough effort to damage your muscles any further.
I've recently starting eating carbs on days where I'm doing 80+ km and the difference is astonishing, I've set PRs up hills at the end of 100 km rides and I'm approaching being able to do 100 km solo at 32 km/h, where before on strict keto I'd start getting very lethargic after just 50 km.
Taking carbs on big effort days seems like the best of both worlds, fat adapted but able to take advantage of both energy systems. I think on Inigo san Milan's first appearance on Peter Attia's podcast they got into this a bit, also mentioned that high level fat adapted cyclists could do a few hundred grams of carbs in a day and still maintain ketosis
So def. noob gains. But I also see that fat tissue is burning (slowly but surely) and muscles are growing. Lifting, no cardio or HIIT.
Yeah, I meant EVOO in general. Great for salads, maybe not so much for frying :)
Butter and coconut oil are nearly 100% saturated fats, with 2-3% PUFA. Olive oil is a bit higher in PUFA, 8-11%, so it decomposes more easily when heated up.
Consider that olive oil is one of the most counterfeited products in the world. It is very common for producers (Greece, Italy, Macedonia etc) to add low-quality seed oils, and this is hard to detect. Research the price of olives, the amount of olives needed for one liter of olive oil, and the price olive oil sells for in supermarkets - it doesn't add up.
It worked well for me, my endurance in e.g. cycling improved. However usually stay on it about half a year to lose extra weight and then go back to a "regular" diet.
That isn't how it works. A calorie of complex carbs is the same energy as a calorie worth of glucose.
I mean, I love the taste of butter, cream, marbled steaks and pork fat, but when you have to consume whipping cream as a beverage it sounds absolutely nauseating.
Here in Mexico we have a large number of keto friendly recipes, but the amount of saturated fats in them guarantee a heart attack.
- carnitas - barbacoa - birria - queso fundido - taquiqueso
Among many others
When kids are put on the diet for epilepsy they make them chug cream and mayonnaise, not exactly my idea of a delicious meal: https://www.epilepsy.com/treatment/dietary-therapies/ketogen...?
Also, sweet potatoes are not potatoes - different families, and different nutritional profiles. The former is considered a root, the latter a tuber.
A well researched diet should be aware of these points.
Here's a discussion: https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(15)01743-8/ful...
It wasn't particularly difficult but not particularly easy either compared to other diets I've tried.
Note that the article recommends refraining from consuming dairy products, albeit without any reasoning.
Dairy is also a relatively new addition to our diet, and was exclusively for babies for most of our history. A lot of people hate on vegans for being "unnatural", but at least when it comes to eating dairy that's just silly.
At Tesco's you can get potatoes for £0.36/kg. 1kg = ~2.2lb, so ~£0.165/lb. Even at the higher daily consumption in this thread, 10lb/day, that's £1.65 daily cost of food.
I imagine the only way to go cheaper is by dumpster diving.
Rice[2]: £0.45/3650kcal[3]
Pasta[4]: £0.46/3710kcal[5]
Normalized to rice:
Potatoes: 3.79 rice_cost_units/kcal
Rice: 1.00 rice_cost_units/kcal
Pasta: 1.01 rice_cost_units/kcal
Tesco does not list calories for potatoes, and for the dry foods only provides calories for the cooked result, so I used values from the USDA nutrient database. The value for potatoes is optimistic, because the cheap potatoes are "imperfect", which suggests there will be significant loss from trimming inedible parts. Assuming efficient technique (pre-soaking dry foods, chopping potatoes small, reducing heat input to minimum once at temperature, covering cooking pots, using insulated pots if possible), cooking cost will probably be similar for all three, although pasta can be eaten "al dente" (undercooked), which might let it beat rice for total cost.
[0] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/292332517
[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/170026/n...
[2] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/300843799
[3] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/169756/n...
[4] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/297844134
[5] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/168927/n...
Another approach that I've been experimenting with that makes pretty much any diet satiating: semaglutide. FDA approved as of last year, and for people whose main issue with dieting is constantly feeling like you're starving (most dieters, I would bet), it effectively destroys appetite. It's one of two drugs I've tried for weight loss that have been effective for me, and its side effect profile is far, far better.
Because of the thickness of the atmosphere when the sun is at lower altitudes you will only start to get enough UV-B penetrating when the sun is at an angle of >=35 degrees. If you are within 35 degrees of equator you can get UV-B every day, but outside of these latitudes there are many months where there's just not enough solar hang time high enough in the sky to deliver any meaningful amount of UV-B.
The shitty part is, the whole time and more you're still getting UV-A, which is a known cancer risk. Depending on your clothing, skin pigment, weight, and age, UV-B uptake may be significantly reduced (up to 6x for dark skin pigment, 2x for age over 50).
So while you can get UV-B from the sun in mid-day at the right latitudes, most people benefit from supplementing.
Good info at the D-Minder app site: https://dminder.ontometrics.com/
I think what I've learned from this is supplement, supplement, supplement.
In practice most people, especially at non-Tropical latitudes or who don’t spend multiple hours outside everyday don’t get nearly enough.
If you've got a daytime job, live above the Arctic circle or immigrated, then your only option is to eat vitamin D-rich foods or eat supplements.
I thought it was 'via diet', it's just that sunlight is necessary for the extraction/absorption?
Sort of like carbohydrate in a plant is 'generated via sun light' (photosynthesis) - but other inputs, carbon dioxide & water, are necessary too.
Basically, not doing too well here.
This is a bad idea.
Potato, potato and more potato: surviving on spuds
https://aussielent.com.au/blogs/news/potato-potato-and-more-...
Though by comparison rice gets you 2000 calories for AUD1.03, spaghetti AUD0.92, carrots AUD2.51, "pure vegetable oil" AUD0.059 so a more varied diet could be cheaper.
Actually I'd like to propose the carrot-only diet... Trying to eat 5kg of carrots a day is bound to make you lose weight, though your skin may turn orange ;)
The only thing that makes sense to me is that any extreme position is wrong. E.g. only carbs, no carbs at all, only meat, only plants.
Eating mostly carbs absent fat or fat absent carbs means engaging the Randle Cycle to a much lesser degree, given that fatty acid and glucose aren't competing fuel substrates.
I think the real tick is not eating highly processed food. Eat highly nutritious whole foods.
(And I'm not affiliated or suggesting join, just read)
I'll tell you what they all advised me to drastically reduce: salt. How do you feel about salt consumption? Excess salt consumption, typical in western and Asian diets, is a major risk for cardiovascular disease and for kidney disease (not kidney stones... kidney disease).
Are you similarly cautious of a high-salt diet as you are of a high-oxalate diet? I'm really curious.
> For stone prevention, a reasonable goal is below 100 mg of oxalate daily. An ideal would be about 50 mg daily if that can be accomplished.
> POTATOES These are Trouble! I put them into their own separate group even though they are vegetables.
> From french fries to baked potatoes they are very high oxalate items.
https://kidneystones.uchicago.edu/how-to-eat-a-low-oxalate-d...
To your question, yes. I drink tons of water and avoid salt as much as I can.
But strangely those weird diets never center around cutting salt out (and some of the meat-only diets are also deliberately heavy in fats). My intuition is that this is because salt is almost addictive, because it is so tastey, and it is very, very difficult to get people to reduce salt in their diet, despite the damage it can cause.
Anyway it's still the case that none of my doctors or nurses have advised me to cut down on oxalate-heavy foods to avoid kidney stones, so I don't think you need to worry that much. If there is a risk, it's a risk only when considered at a population level and probably very low at an individual level.
Not that it will harm you to eat fewer potatoes. They're mostly starch anyway and I think at this point everyone agrees that too much starch can be a problem (because gaining weight is all too easy even without excess starch).
Again, are you a kidney _stone_ patient? The vast majority of people don't form kidney stones, so there's no reason to expect being told to avoid oxalates if you're not talking specifically about them. I have received explicit advice from my doctors to avoid oxalates in order to minimize kidney stones (ditto for people I've known) so I will continue to follow my doctor's advice rather than an internet stranger, no offense.
Also, you never said you are a kidney stone patient. Just to be clear, are you? Is that why you're staying away from potatoes? Because you didn't say you are and I figured you were avoiding potatoes as a precaution against developing kidney stones.
> I don't think you need to worry that much. If there is a risk, it's a risk only when considered at a population level and probably very low at an individual level.
If you want to be pedantic, then you didn't technically offer advice, just your opinion, in response to which I offered my opinion that your thoughts are irrelevant to me when I have direct advice from my doctor
> you never said you are a kidney stone patient. Just to be clear, are you?
As I stated, my doctor told me to avoid food high in oxalates, like potatoes, to avoid developing kidney stones. I try to spread the knowledge of oxalates and their impact on kidney stones because I only learned that information myself through others who shared with me. If you're not concerned about kidney stones, then that's great
Fruits could, but its really a good idea to quantify the chemicals in each and their subsequent response, because the phrase "trigger an immune response" is so vague its like trying to quantify legislation.
Shame he study is all google based.. :(
However, I think those diets only "work" because they make you starve while filling your belly. I guess what they do to your body is that they deprive it of the vast majority of the nutrients it needs. It makes sense that you'd lose weight then, in the same way that it would make sense that you'd lose weight during a bout of serious illness, or after invasive surgery, or an accident etc. It's a sudden shock to the system, you know?
So I would be really careful with following one of those diets. You risk losing weight for reasons really deterimental to your health. I would only do this if I had a doctor I could trust that could monitor me regularly.
Another way they could work is because eating the same thing all day every day is extremely boring and makes you not want to eat at all. It would be the case for the most delicious dish, but it's even truer with bland food.
I think if I had to eat only one kind of food that I really like (not cheese because there's such a huge variety that it wouldn't really count as "one") I could just about manage to eat only that for two weeks. After that I think I'd be craving something else.
Of course, that could also cause me to over-eat to try and make up for the craving. Anyway I don't think this is such an easy diet as the article here makes it sound like.
Anecdotally again, the only time I went on an "eat-only-x" diet was during a heatwave when I spent a week or two eating only teaspoonfulls of peanut butter and drinking milk kefir. The reason being that it was so hellishly hot that I couldn't stand the thought of cooking or eating anything more. I think I lost a few pounds during that time.
> Calories 161
> Protein 4.3g grams
Let's do some math here. 2500 calories of potatoes works out to 2500/161x4.3 = 66.77 grams of protein. If you don't understand immediately why that might be a bit of a problem, then you're probably the target audience for this Dunning-Kruger Diet. Sure, you'll lose fat, along with what little muscle you have, and probably even some bone mineral density.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/nutrition/when-it-comes-to-pr...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630101/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_Daily_Intake#Dietary...
Your own sources admit uncertainty around adequate intake, and even then, that's just for most people. Most people aren't actively trying to build muscle, or actively trying to lose weight. Ignore the studies demonstrating the benefits of high (upto 2g./kg., or a roughly 1g./lb.) protein diets on body composition at your own peril.