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Comment by DeWilde | Hacker News Reader

> It sounds like a dumb gimmick that could never work, but there are a surprising number of people out there saying that they tried it, it worked for them, and they kept the weight off for months or even years after.

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.

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> Losing weight isn't causal to being healthy.

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.

Excess dietary fat or do you mean obesity?

I don't think OP was suggesting that being overweight was healthy or that losing weight was bad.

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.

> an intentionally deficient diet

Aren’t all diets whose goal is weight loss “intentionally deficient” ?

There's a difference between "slightly too few calories to sustain current weight level" and "total absence of certain essential nutrients meaning the body can't grow or indeed adequately replenish cells regardless of the mass of food consumed"

So, yes?

There's nothing inherently unhealthy about being in a temporary state of negative energy flux (unless you are already underweight or deficient in an essential mineral or something)

That being true, it could well be that a "Potato Only Diet" is effective for weight loss not because of the reduced energy intake, nor because of some subtlety in how our gut or our metabolism deals with an only starch diet for a while, but instead because potatoes lack micronutrient X or inhibit its absorption and a symptom of X deficiency is losing weight. That could be unhealthy.

I don't have an opinion either way and I don't think this is a likely reason, but it is a possibility.

pretty remote possibility, unless you have a deficiency in mind that manifests pretty quickly and causes rapid weight loss and doesn't cause systemic disease.

If you eat only potatoes you will only ingest the nutrients found in potatoes so you will risk becoming deficient in all other nutrients, not found in potatoes. I don't know what those are, but for example you'd risk running out of all the stuff that vegans have to take supplements to replenish, like B12, iron, zinc, etc.

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.

At that point you are just kinda throwing spaghetti at the wall in an 'anything is possible' kind of sense, neither of those are very parsimonious explanations.

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.

I don't understand what you're trying to say because the derision in your comment is taking up all the space that would normally be dedicated to clarity.

To be fair, your reply wasn't very helpful when I was asking about specific causes of rapid weight loss induced by micronutrient deficiency that wouldn't manifest as other disease states that could make this scenario remotely plausible. But no derision intended, I was noting the possibility that you could well be correct.

Fair enough. Sorry for overreacting.

I wonder if it is useful for flushing PFAS and other forever chemicals from the body?

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?

This will very quickly devolve into a definition of an unhealthy diet, or healthy vs unhealthy in general, none of which is well defined.

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.

At first approximation, sure, a diet that can be sustained and keep you alive indefinitely is better than one that would eventually lead to your demise due to insufficient calories or essential nutrients.

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.

It seems even flying at high altitudes can contribute to chronic hypoxia in fatty tissue! (particularly problematic with fat deposits in the liver)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12030379/

Adopting a diet that deprives an overweight person of necessary vitamins and nutrients will not improve their health but will deteriorate it as now alongside all of the health problems they had their body can't function properly.

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).

Sorry but this is not compatible with the clinical evidence base: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/files/docs/guidelines/ob_gdlns.pdf

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)

I wasn't arguing that being overweight is healthy. I was just saying that losing weight will lead to bad health if the way you lose weight is by depriving yourself of nutrients needed for your body to function properly.

Potatoes lack a lot of vitamins and nutrients needed in order for them to be the sole food you can eat and stay healthy.

Ah, that’s fair, I thought you were arguing that the health benefits seen from weight loss can be attributed to healthier diets alone.

"Losing weight isn't causal to being healthy."

Strictly spoken, true, but being overweight definitely is causal to decreased health.

I think the important point in the context of this diet is: it may help you lose weight, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll become more healthy. I guess it's very dependent on individual circumstances, and "healthy" is a fairly broad term.

> being overweight definitely is causal to decreased health.

Even that is not necessarily always true. I imagine being oevrweight is generally much healthier than going through famine.

It does not help that we are colloquially using the "overweight" label as an euphemism for morbid obesity, because we do not want to offend anyone including ourselves. I have never met a person who claimed to be merely "overweight" and wasn't actually massively obese.

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.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/99/4/875/4637868

There is at least one case where your argument is clearly false: sleep apnea is often directly mechanically caused by bodyweight, causes health problems when untreated, and is strongly associated with being fat and/or muscular.

They never said being overweight is healthy, so this isn't really a counterargument.

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.

Fine, to be extremely pedantic I'm replying to the assertion "Losing weight doesn't help you stop being unhealthy" which I invented; what they really said was "Losing weight isn't causal to being healthy".

AFAIK sleep apnea isn't reversible by losing weigth (which doesn't mean that overweigth isn't at least one of the cause)

Obesity is the most prevalent causal factor for obstructive sleep apnea and in weight loss is the most effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnea in overweight patients. Weight loss can be (but is not always) an effective cure.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/weight-loss-breathing-de...

The term 'healthy' is thrown around too easily and conflated with 'low calorie food'; I try to call out people who call food healthy too easily.

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.

Exactly this. I lost 34Kg without resorting to eating just potatoes or some other ridiculous fad. Just less input than output with a balanced diet.

Lost 50 pounds once eating Chef Boyardee. Smart, no. But it was measured portions. So counting calories was trivial.

You can gain weight on a diet of "healthy" foods. It's the amount of calories. Being overweight is bad for your health even if you only eat healthy foods.

Sure, but healthy foods contain more nutrients, that’s why they can be called healthy. So fueling your body to excess with a lot of nutrients will lead to a much better functioning body than doing the same with garbage

>fueling your body to excess with a lot of nutrients A commonly held myth about eating is that fueling the body with an excess of (micro)nutrients is healthier than fueling the body with an adequate amount of micro nutrients. It is not healthier, it is exactly the same (and then becomes toxic again in excess!)

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.

I don’t think it’s quite as rare as you think. I don’t have sources to back this up at the moment but some common deficiencies include vitamin D, b12, magnesium, zinc, sulphur. Our modern practices have denuded the soil, plants and animals of a lot of their nutrients so nowadays it’s indeed hard to be at good levels of nutrients from diet

Losing weight isn't causal to being healthy.

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.

It is still causal. You can't add sum of components that "eating x is overall worse than y because it is better in one thing but worse in another". It's hard to compare two axis and specially if one axis is unscientific land of hormone disturbance.

Replacing obesity with malnutrition will still leave you unhealthy but with different health problems.

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).

> Losing weight isn't causal to being healthy

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.

If you're obese you have increased risk of lots of health problems. No matter the diet that got you there.

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.

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