Nutrient Density and Other Stupid Magic Words | Hacker News Reader

Nutrient Density and Other Stupid Magic Words

exfatloss.com

The continuous use of "tautology" and painting everything as circular kind of fell flat for me.

"Earthquakes are bad because they shake your house, and they shake your house because they are earthquakes."

It's not much different than

"processed foods are bad because they make you fat, and they make you fat because they are processed"

Not that it's true necessarily, but there's nothing wrong with idea, just the tortured phrasing. A implies B, B is bad, therefore A is to be avoided.

So I'm confused by a big chunk of the article dismissing dietary trends (which are likely ridiculous!) based just on a weird way of describing them. And saying "tautology" .

If the issue is that A and B reinforce each other (e.g. insulin resistance and obesity) then just say that - just say it's an indicator or symptom not a root cause.

There are hundreds of chemicals we now know you need to eat or you get horribly sick, thousands of chemicals we now know you can’t or you get horribly sick, and hundreds of products we know perfectly well you shouldn’t eat but do anyways because we like it. (Sorry coca cola. Also sorry milk of opium). The author mentions none of these, implicitly arguing that they are obvious because we worked them out so they don’t count as nutrition science, and then complains that science hasn’t worked out anything about nutrition that wasn’t obvious.

> Clearly, humans need energy. If there is a certain amount of energy we need daily, why would it matter if we consumed a calorically dense food (say, butter) or if we consumed the same food + a bunch of non-food with high volume or mass?

Because hunger isn't just caused by the calorie bar maxing out, it's caused by your stomach's sensations.

If I could take a 2000 calorie pill and never eat, it would be uncomfortable for weeks and months, and I doubt it would ever be comfortable (though my stomach would adjust and shrink, this has its own negative effects).

I don't know a ton about nutrition, but I know for certain that when I eat foods that are less calorie dense, I feel full for longer, which helps me avoid cravings

I also fail to see the author's evidence against CICO, at least when it comes to weight loss. Sure, I won't go defining it as good or bad circularly, but I can say with certainty that calories determine your weight change, and if you eat fewer calories than you expend, then you *will* lose weight.

I made it through a few paragraphs before noping out because of how terrible this article is. Your comment made me go actually look to see what they could possibly be arguing against CICO. Turns out it’s nothing because this author has no idea how science or biology works.

We can all argue about what makes a calorie “good” or “bad” but CICO is basic thermodynamics. A calorie is a unit of energy. If a cell doesn’t have enough energy, it dies.

Sorry for mildly ranting at idiocy on the internet via your comment, sodality2.

Yeah, I too struggled to get through it. If I tilt my head and squint, I could almost vaguely see an argument about how most major markers of nutritional health are just defined by the fact that they’re already found in unhealthy people. And if I mash and mangle the words together quite a bit, I could see an argument for why CICO is reductive and harmful to use in cases where people know exactly what to do but struggle to do it (yelling “just CICO bro” does nothing for these people). But that doesn’t just make CICO meaningless. It’s still rooted in thermodynamics and true, all things considered.

CICO is true, but it misses that some sources of calories are more satiating than others. So the desire to consume more calories will be higher with the less-satiating foods. The thermodynamics work fine, but to create a long-term behavioral change you also have to prevent the discomfort of hunger.

For some people hunger isn't particularly uncomfortable (e.g. I often barely notice it and have to set calendar reminders to remember to eat), for other people it's actively painful and nearly impossible to ignore.

CICO is true, but it's only solving the easy half of the problem.

Satiation is only relevant in the short to medium term, while you're adjusting to the diet. It's been tested with super low volume foods way back. And unfortunate starvation experiments, people literally stop feeling hunger just go weak.

Ultimately the system is feedback based.

I think a 2000 kcal single meal would work, but good luck making it a single pill, absorption would suck.

Maybe an advanced liquid, like for parenteral nutrition, and even then the volume would be pretty big and it would have to be eaten slowly. Unless you want to go straight for the mainline and bypass the gastrointestinal system via a banana bag, which has some risks.

Such a diet would be extremely boring though.

CICO is true but has the absorption and metabolism caveat.

Here's some stuff I have learned about diet:

1. I lose weight when I add half-and-half or heavy cream to my coffee instead of the usual whole milk.

2. Eating cooked spinach (or other green leafies such as kale) at least every other day helps my ability to concentrate. Green beans are separately good, too.

3. My wife's eldest son is a newly minted doctor from a good school and prestigious residency program and told me that they had a whopping FOUR HOURS of nutrition education in med school. So, when I say doctors don't know sh*t about nutrition as disease prevention, it's straight from the horse's mouth. Of course, when you understand that the medical system is about treating disease, as opposed to preventing it, it makes perfect bassackwards 21st Century sense.

4. I don't know much at all about Ayurveda, but their concept that "everything we ingest is either a medicine or a poison" seems to have a fundamental truth to it. And, of course, dosage must be carefully considered, too.

All that said, that article was off-putting, to say the least. Dude's diet doesn't seem to be helping his mood, however else it is benefitting him.

1. It requires extensive metabolism and absorbs quite poorly alone. That and you're probably running on ketone bodies when doing it, rather than sugar, which has different metabolic properties.

2. I love N=1 experiments. That said, I also like spinach.

3. Most terrible state of things, since bad nutrition makes everything worse, and then there are diseases which are heavily dependent on what you eat.

4. Were it so. It so happens that barely anything people usually eat as food has serious other effects, and when it does, it's low to very low effect size. They don't even exactly add up.

Author might have had a point but it's lost in the overly antagonistic and try-hard to be funny writing.

Reading this kind of stuff is so tiring.

It's interesting they argue that protein in excess is bad.. If anything the consensus seems to be among the 'health influencers' (if there can even be one on this topic) is that protein is good and you need more than the RDA if you want to maintain/build muscle.

The most effective diet I've tried is "Rabbit Starvation". Basically the idea is that if you are in the wilderness, even if you can trap endless rabbits and squirrels - no amount will sustain you, our bodies can't turn enough of it into energy. It's one of the few cases where a calorie is provably not a calorie. You can leverage this by just making lean protein and vegetables most if not all of your diet. 100% is definitely not a long term diet but it's a knob you can play with.

Increased protein has been indeed a staple of dieting. Requires more energy to process into sugars, and is filling.

That said you won't starve on rabbits, but you will go low weight, akin to Walford's. Assuming you eat most of the rabbit, not just the meat.

That said, make sure you don't have gout or kidney stones or other similar problems, or you will be in a world of hurt.

Fun read but not terribly useful. The author slams just about every idea I've ever heard come from nutritionists.

If you take their word, we know nothing about anything.

I might be missing some crucial context, or maybe it's because I’m not well-versed in the diet and nutrition world, but it seems like the author is creating straw men to easily tear them down.

On the other hand, I do agree with the author that there’s no clear consensus on the basics. Saying that “everyone knows what’s healthy” either shows a lack of knowledge or plain dishonesty.

> [Embedded image] Satiety per calorie? I get it, you're retarded.

I must've missed the part where this aspect got addressed.

> There are, of course, tons of “processed” foods that people have eaten for a very long time without getting sick. The French Paradox is just one example, people used to eat white flour, white sugar, butter, heavy cream, and fatty meat, and combine them all.

> If you can’t explain why those people were thin & healthy, there’s a hole in your theory.

Because they don't eat a lot? Sure a croissant is just butter and white flour, but if you eat only one with a bit more butter and a black coffee that's like 250 calories for breakfast.

Despite the (frankly approximative) "excess" section, in my opinion that's truly the crux of the issue. If you eat smaller portions you get fewer calories. I never tried it but I would bet that you can eat fries every day as long as it's in the McDonald "small" format.

If you eat smaller portions you actually get more calories out of them due to improved absorption. Some small percentage, it can be found.

But the total can typically be smaller without causing distress.

Standard American diet is equal carb protein and fat? What’s your source?

Nutrient density is real.

As you age your body will become increasingly sensitive to your consumption. A day will come when you will taste nutrient density, and other things will be as cardboard or iceberg lettuce.

Rarify. Shit in, shit out. Take some f-ing responsibility dudes.

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