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Comment by aldarion | Hacker News Reader

"generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other"

Well, that is obviously the wrong idea. Even basic logic speaks against it: people lose weight on keto diet, people lose weight on vegan diet... so neither protein, fat nor carbs can be causing obesity. But what do foods that we know are obesogenic have in common? 1) They are highly processed and/or 2) they combine fats and carbs into single package.

But it is true that we don't know for certain. What we do know is that this dietary experiment we have had going since 1970s at the latest has failed completely. As I tend to say: paleo diet should be the basis of any diet, and then you further adjust it based on how your body responds.

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People lose weight, temporarily, on all sorts of diets, restricted or not. It is the nature of specific diets that they tend to reduce appetite, and simply following a diet tends to reduce snacking - by virtue of selection bias, mostly (that is, people who are successfully following a diet are by definition people who aren't overeating).

Very traditional diets also tended to include lots of foods that are both highly processed and contain both sugars and fats, like cheese or sweet nut cakes. Paleo diets are a modern invention, and have little in common with the concept of what our ancestors ate. They often have deeply anachronistic ideas, like favoring raw foods, when the use of fire has been a core part of our ancestors consumption since way before Homo Sapiens existed.

I haven't found any paleo dieter that promotes eating solely or even primarily raw foods. That idea seems to be more common in carnivore and vegan communities.

Traditional diets however are still diets that came after the advent of agriculture.

That is not correct.

People lose fat on calorie restricted diet. How will you get to it, either by counting them or by improving metabolism or by changing insulin levels, is a different thing.

Vegan or keto diet can both be calorie restricted, as much as any macronutrient mixture. However, it doesn't mean its sustainable. If you are hungry all the time, you can stay on the diet for some time, but not forever. Since insulin is the primary storage hormone, reducing it will make you less fat (just look at type 1 diabetics). We now know that carbs are the highest promoters of insulin, that fat has 0 influence, and protein some. We have drugs like metformin or GLP-1 that brute force some of it and they are working.

So, we know that sugar is mostly bad and that fat and protein are not. Ofc, some fats are bad for other reasons (by promoting inflamation) but that has nothing to do with obesity.

Thing about the keto diet is that "hungry all the time" simply... doesn't happen. In fact, bigger problem for keto dieters tends to be being satiated all the time and consequently undereating.

"Hungry all the time" is actually vegan thing, but plants have so few calories and pass through so quickly that vegans end up being skinny despite eating literally all the time.

I think it's an adequate-good-quality-protein-consumption thing rather than a keto specific thing.

It is definitely not protein. I tried carnivore diet for a while (had massive issues tolerating carbs lol), and the higher my protein intake was, more hungry I felt. Reducing protein and increasing fat also increased satiety.

Turns out, it is fats that produce satiety signals, and the effect seems to be by far the strongest with saturated fats, weaker with monounsaturated fats, while polyunsaturated fats actually induce hunger as strongly or even more strongly than carbohydrates do. The idea that "protein induces satiety" is a side effect of the fact that most (though not all) protein foods tend to be quite fatty.

> plants have so few calories

You mean leafs, not plants? Cereals, beans, fruits and some roots have plenty of calories but your true fatty friends are all sorts of seeds and nuts. You also can buy their fat extract: oil.

It is not just issue of raw calories but how much body can absorb. Fruitarians for example tend to be corpse-skinny despite fruit being full of sugar, because most of that sugar simply passes through. So effective calories are less than what sugar content would indicate.

But grains and seeds do seem to be quite obesogenic, yes.

I add the word "obesogenic" to my toolbox, love how it sounds!

I don't know Fruitarians but what you describe makes sense. However the vegans I know aren't "Hungry all the time". Some are skinny and some fatty but I wouldn't say the average are skinny, you wouldn't stare at their size if you don't know their diet. Might be a personal bias though, I don't know studies about vegans hungriness or BMI.

The big question with such foods is are they worse for you just in and of themselves, or do they tend to promote obesity through inducing people to eat more? For the most part, research seems to suggest that as far as weight gain is concerned, calorie is a calorie (whether from fat, carbs, or protein), but some foods seem to induce people to eat more in general, compared to others. (highly processed and high-sugar food seeming to be some of the worst in this regard, but it's not clear exactly what it is about highly processed food that promotes this).

From what I have gathered (through research and by using myself as a guinea pig), there are two things about highly processed food that promote overeating: 1) high carbohydrate content 2) lack of nutrients

High carbohydrate content causes sugar spikes, which leads to insulin spikes, and insulin spikes both a) cause hunger and b) promote storage of energy in the form of body fat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3894001/

Second issue is as I said lack of nutrients. Your body needs nutrients, and will force you to eat until nutritional requirements had been satisfied. Since processed foods have very few nutrients, your organism compensates by increasing dietary intake... which means increasing caloric intake.

I'm skeptical that paleo diet would be healthy for long term. There are studies where they find atherosclerosis in pre-industrial hunter-gatherer remains. It's called HORUS study.

From what I've managed to find in the newest research, it apppears that diet does not appear to have any impact on atherosclerosis itself. But, as they say, more data needed.

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