Sweden becomes the first country to reject low-fat diet dogma
healthimpactnews.com
healthimpactnews.com
The nutrition information we were given in school is mostly a load of baloney, and puts me in mind of the cargo cult science Richard Feynman discussion from the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791 . It's interesting how much of this nutrition information passes without being scientifically proven.
And a lot of people are terrified of consuming 5 grams of fat, but think nothing of consuming 400 carbs in the form of bread, pasta, and sugar. I'm advocating an approach based on whole foods, less sugar, carbs only from wholesome sources like oatmeal and whole grains. I'm just trying to say people focus too much on fat.
tl/dr; Guy eats 5800 kcal every day of fat for 3 weeks, gains 1.3 kg and loses about an inch from his waistline, same guy eats 5800 kcal from carbs every day for 3 weeks, gains 7.1 kg and about 10 cm on the waistline. Exercise is supposed to be the similar in both cases.
Yes, it's just an anecdote, but an interesting one. And imho a reason to be a little humble about the things we think we know about how the human body responds to different kinds of foods. More research is needed.
That's a myth.
My once-inflamed pancreas says otherwise. :-) I guess there's no one-size-fits-all solution to that.
We both have also noticed that we just feel more mental clarity, more energy and no cravings for junk food. It is amazing. I hope this message gets through in the U.S. eventually.
The problem with that is that the consumption of animal products is unethical. You should consider switching to a vegan low-carb diet to decrease suffering.
Unethical is a strange term of eating animal products. I don't think this "ethical" diet is going to work for me.
I don't know.
'How well does this diet work for someone like me who needs 3400 calories to build muscle?'
Well.
'Unethical is a strange term of eating animal products.'
I don't find it strange to call the slaughter of animals and mistreatment of animals unethical.
However one thing I've always wanted to ask a vegetarian, these animals I'm eating would not exist without demand for them. So so long as I make more efforts to buy organic and well treated animals - is this still unethical? If I had a choice, be born as a chicken on an organic farm or not exist at all I'd definitely pick the chicken option.
Consider all the sperm or eggs you're "wasting" by waiting for the right moment to be a parent -- you are consciously choosing to not give life to many such entities.
Surely those entities, if they had the chance, would try to convince you to create them?
(My point is that this kind of "bad existence vs. no existence" thinking is rather absurd.)
Here's a couple of discussions on the topic.
http://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/1kkn05/as_a_non_vegan... http://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/ikg34/can_eggs_ever_b...
Keep your moral proscriptions to your self.
My point is that the person above me suggested it's also unethical to eat plants because they are also living organisms. I'm pointing out the mistreatment of animals (obviously) is far less ethical than mistreatment of plants.
> Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.
If you're suggesting it's better to exist than not exist, it depends. I'd rather not have existed at all rather than exist in a torturous and hopeless existence.
> Keep your moral proscriptions to your self.
You don't know me. I eat more meat than most people. It's just that people are in my opinion overly dismissive of the ethical problems with eating meat and it's hard to discuss these ethics because a lot of people are overly dismissive or retort with silly counterpoints such as "plants are also living organisms".
Unless the livestock is grass-fed or something... I don't think anyone is that concerned with the life of grass.
The treatment of the animals our food comes from is an issue that, as we get richer, we will begin to have the luxury to care about and the tools to fix.
You can go to jail for being especially cruel to your dog (and rightly so), but somehow the treatment of chickens packed in cages without room to move their entire lives is only recently becoming a concern.
And I say this as someone who eats meat and doesn't feel that it's wrong. If I live long enough maybe I'll change my mind.
I fail to see why it is unethical to eat animals or how your comment adds anything to the discussion.
It's just your opinion, not some moral standard in our society.
I've been losing weight through simple calorie tracking. When I hit my daily limit I stop eating. I eat whatever I want. I've lost 22 pounds and feel great.
EDIT: Here's a nutritionist who improved his health markers eating nothing but junk food - http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/
It's great if you feel good with your diet, as it's your body. But it's a single data point. Trying to build a diet that works for everyone is like trying to find a single programming language for everyone. A diet that works for you over a few months isn't enough time to discover its true benefits, just as a terrible diet's effects aren't obvious potentially for much of a lifetime.
There are plenty of people around the world's whose diet is not high fat, low carb (the Mediterranean for one) but still remain healthy so that isn't a great indicator that there is strictly one way to eat.
I took enough biochemistry and nutritional chemistry classes in college to know how complicated our processing of food is, and how difficult it is to make guidelines for how people should eat.
> Sweden has become the first Western nation to develop national dietary guidelines that reject the popular low-fat diet dogma in favor of low-carb high-fat nutrition advice.
Where is the evidence that Sweden has developed "national dietary guidelines"? All the sources link back to the paper [1][2] entitled "Dietary Treatment for Obesity". Clearly, dietary treatment for obesity is not the same as national dietary guidelines, and the conclusions of a paper are not the same as government policy.
Further, the paper found low-carb diets more effective for weight loss only in the first six months. Long term, it found no difference in the effectiveness of low-fat vs. low carb. To quote from google translate:
> In the long run there are no differences in efficacy between weight loss tips on strict and moderate carbohydrate diet, low-fat diets, högproteinkost, Mediterranean diet, diet focuses on low-glycemic load diet or a high proportion of monounsaturated fats.
Further, on the "diet doctor" website, under the section "Warnings Against LCHF Dismissed" [3], it quotes the study criticizing some studies that concluded low-carb diets are unhealthy for not adequately distinguishing between different classes of low-carb diets, specifically those high in fast-food and those not. This may be a valid criticism, but is not the same as endorsing the long-term health of a low-carb diet. The "diet doctor" concludes "We simply don’t know" about the long-term effects of various macronutrient compositions on health, which is fair, but this is a long way short of the national government of Sweden endorsing high-fat low-carb diets as unequivocally healthier than high-carb low-fat diets.
It may appear that I'm against low-carb diets; I'm not. I just think this is a very poor and misleading article.
[1] [pdf warning] http://www.sbu.se/upload/Publikationer/Content0/1/Mat_vid_fe...
[2] [google translation of conclusions] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=sv&tl=en&prev...
[3] http://www.dietdoctor.com/swedish-expert-committee-low-carb-...
They also provide national dietary guidelines, found on the site.
I hope that http://nusi.org/ is as honest and openminded as they claim to be when it comes to researching what kind of food is the most healthy to eat.
It surprises me that we don't have more solid knowledge in these questions.
Occasionally I relapse (hmm, chocolate), and every time I do for any substantial period, I see the effect on my weight. So long as I stick to low-carb, I don't have to worry about what I eat... just eat as much as I feel like, whenever I feel like - but low carb.
My typical day I eat 3-4 eggs, half avocado, 1/2lb of red meat/chicken/fish, 2 servings of greens, 1 serving of vegetables, 2-3 servings of cheese.
Never felt better. It is frustrating because people never believe me and just tell me that I have a fast metabolism.
Are 2 little sweetener pills in my coffee really worse than two cubes of sugar?
As for can it be harmful, maybe so:
"A Duke University study[35] funded by the Sugar Association found evidence that doses of Splenda of between 100 and 1000 mg/kg, containing sucralose at 1.1 to 11 mg/kg (compare to the FDA Acceptable Daily Intake of 5 mg/kg), reduced the amount of fecal microflora in rats by up to 50%, increased the pH level in the intestines, contributed to increases in body weight, and increased levels of P-glycoprotein (P-gp).[36] These effects have not been reported in humans."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose#Other_potential_effec...
On serious note, evidence is there it's time to at least tell people they have a choice. Low carb did wonders to my family members (fat whole life, skinny and feeling great now) and when I keep at it (instead of succumbing to sugar addiction) I fell way better as well. It's safe, many (maybe even most) people function much better while eating this way and there is no way you get fat on it.
Show 895 The Great Cholesterol Myth
http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2013/03/09/895-the-great-chol...
Further recent discussion on Wisconsin Public Radio:
http://www.wpr.org/shows/peoples-pharmacy-special-pledge-dri...
I have a daily intake of 400g of carbohydrates. According to you I'd be overwheight and dying of diabetes, cancer, metabolic syndrome and whatnot.
Exercise daily, provide adequate protein intake and watch out the calories. That's it. No need to blame food but yourselves.
The P90X diet program is based on this idea, with 3 phases of the diet with very low carbs in the first phase, medium carbs in the second phase, and more carbs in the third phase.
So maybe you're both right...
Nope, not sure where you get that idea from.
> Exercise daily, provide adequate protein intake and watch out the calories. That's it.
So I can eat a few chicken breasts a day, and then 1,500 kcal of mars bars? Sounds great!
Alternatively if you're trying to lose weight, you can simply cut out the sugar. Exercise is of course important for a host of reasons, but for weight loss it's probably just about the hardest way to do it. I'm in despair when my severely overweight friend relays the advice from her doctor and nutritionist:
"Eat less calories, and get on the treadmill".
Doesn't sound fun, or easy at all. There are other ways.
You'd think, with the title of this webpage, that most would be interested in ways of elegantly and easily solving problems that are important to themselves. But it seems that the constant chanting of no pain no gain has left a lot of people with the conviction that, when it comes to health, things should not be easy nor simple.
Is it impossible to find any enjoyment in challenging your body as well as mind?
Don't try to generalize my argument into absurdity. Simply not doing math because it is difficult doesn't solve the underlying problem, which is probably to become proficient at math. Now if there were easier ways to become proficient at math than what you were already doing, that would be more in line with my argument.
The key thing is solving problems. Simply giving up on learning math, or reading, solves no problem.
> Is it impossible to find any enjoyment in challenging your body as well as mind?
Challenging your body and maintaining good health are distinct goals, though they may be satisfied through the same processes. If you want good health, and a certain diet makes that easier, then I will say that it is no sense in maintaining whatever old diet you had simply because that would make it harder. If you want to challenge your body, and simply maintaining good health is not challenging enough, there are endless possibilities. Recreational sports, for example. Gymnastics. Parkour. But personally I would not choose to do things that were clearly suboptimal for my body solely because it would be more challenging. I might do it because I gain other things, such as eating tasty but unhealthy food, but I wouldn't choose to do it if the goal was only to make things harder for myself.
Being challenging also doesn't imply an activity is unenjoyable or unrewarding.
> But personally I would not choose to do things that were clearly suboptimal for my body solely because it would be more challenging.
What things?
You assert that exercising and changing your diet have the same end result when they clearly do not, unless you are using "healthy" as a euphemism for "lose weight" or something similar. Do you have a factual basis for asserting that changing your diet and exercising result in the same end results?
Thank you for clarifying that you do not find exercise enjoyable, I was curious if that was the case. I find exercise to be rewarding in it's own right - it's unfortunate that you don't experience it the same way.
"No pain, no gain" can be interpreted as saying that sometimes it is worth enduring discomfort or pain in the short term for a longer term reward. It's more a comment on dealing with delayed gratification than a description of whether an activity is enjoyable or worth doing.
I have NEVER said anything remotely similar to that. My argument has been that assuming (I've always said assuming or some variation; it's a premise, not an assertion) that low-carb is superior to some other method, like a more generic diet, AND it is easier to follow, you should do that. Nowhere have I said ANYTHING about exercising and dieting being the same. The argument is more general; given that doing some thing (ANY thing, exercising, standing on one foot, low-carb, etc.) is easier AND yields better results compared to another thing (AGAIN, any one thing; standing on one foot, exercising, etc.), you should do the former.
My argument does not rely on low-carb actually being better than something (anything) else; that was simply the premise.
> Thank you for clarifying that you do not find exercise enjoyable, I was curious if that was the case. I find exercise to be rewarding in it's own right - it's unfortunate that you don't experience it the same way.
Thank you for for repeatedly misrepresenting, or even inventing, what I've said. I wonder what leads you to jump to these specific conclusions; is it the fact that I've been writing about 'challenging' things, or 'no pain no gain'? Well, exercise is not solely the domain of 'challenging'; a diet can be challenging. That was what was after all what was discussed originally, namely the fact that a person scoffed at using a specific, claimed to be easier and better diet, over another diet. Nothing about exercise, or that it replaces it. "No pain no gain"? I'd venture to say that people that are one something like "one apple for breakfast, one banana for dinner and that's it" are probably going to feel some pain while on this diet, certainly compared to someone that is on a diet actually lets them eat enough food to become somewhat sated. Exercise can be painful, but not necessarily. Nowhere have I ever said that all exercise is just painful.
My sentence about "jumping on one leg to work" has nothing to do with exercise in general. It is just a silly everyday limitation. I might like to play rugby instead, because that is a sport that I enjoy.
As for if I find exercise enjoyable or not: it depends. Lifting weights can be 'enjoyable in its own right', i.e. simply the act of doing it. On the other hand, something like high intensity interval training is often downright miserable. In fact, let me for a moment take a page out of the exercise masochists and say; if you are enjoying exercising, you are simply not exercising hard enough! Which leads me to the last point:
> "No pain, no gain" can be interpreted as saying that sometimes it is worth enduring discomfort or pain in the short term for a longer term reward. It's more a comment on dealing with delayed gratification than a description of whether an activity is enjoyable or worth doing.
...and it can be eventually be taken so far as to become and end in itself rather than something that serves a higher purpose. There are plenty of fitness-geeks that use how much pain they are in to gauge how well they are doing, but that is certainly not always the best strategy. You can bench press a weight until you are so exhausted that you could hardly lift anything, but you might be better off not lifting until failure if your main goal is to increase strength and stress your nervous system, over building muscle.
Euphemism: The substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt.
Premise: A proposition upon which an argument is based or from which a conclusion is drawn.
Your usage of "premise" is odd. An argument is made up of premises which support a conclusion, suggesting that the conclusion does not rely on the premises of that argument is false.
> My argument has been that assuming (I've always said assuming or some variation; it's a premise, not an assertion)
It's an assertion, but also a premise of your argument. Whether or not it is an assumption is irrelevant.
> If you want to challenge your body, and simply maintaining good health is not challenging enough, there are endless possibilities. Recreational sports, for example. Gymnastics. Parkour. But personally I would not choose to do things that were clearly suboptimal for my body solely because it would be more challenging.
Here is where you list examples of exercise and call them "suboptimal" (for obtaining "good health") compared to a diet.
> The original claim was that; assuming that a low-carb diet is superior to a more generic diet, it is better to use such a diet rather than simply doing something harder that yields the same end result
Since, as you say and I correctly interpreted, this is a general statement, it can also be applied to your previous conclusion that exercise is suboptimal compared to a diet and is therefore "something harder that yields the same end result". You contradict this now with a much more balanced view on exercise.
> There are plenty of fitness-geeks that use how much pain they are in to gauge how well they are doing, but that is certainly not always the best strategy. You can bench press a weight until you are so exhausted that you could hardly lift anything, but you might be better off not lifting until failure if your main goal is to increase strength and stress your nervous system, over building muscle.
Doing bench presses until failure does not mean you're in pain. Doing bench presses until failure doesn't even mean you'll feel pain the next day. I'm also curious what you think is the best way to "increase strength and stress your nervous system" if working to exhaustion is not optimal.
Maybe your arguments would be clearer if you didn't spend half of them on snide remarks and potshots. I'm tired of this so I won't be returning.
Do you know what a euphemism is? A euphemism is calling something that is undesirable, unpleasant or offensive by a word that sounds nicer or has better connotations. How is "lose weight" - which in this thread clearly is about losing excess fat and not about something like being anorexic - undesirable, unpleasant or offensive?
Yes, eating well is one facet of being health - try to find someone who thinks ones diet is inconsequential to ones health. That does not mean that it is the only facet of being healthy, just like I can't accuse you of using exercise as a "euphemism" for health since doing a lot of exercise and only eating ice cream is clearly not healthy overall (even though the exercise in isolation is).
I sincerely hope not. This is the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be interested in working hard to solve difficult problems important to the world.
Doesn't it?
The only issue with sugars are the null effect on satiety and promotion of binge eating. The reason some folks work so well on lowcarb diets is because sugars make it easy to overeat, but that's just a way to create a caloric deficit for them.
Now, I bet most folks here on HN are much more quantitative oriented than the average person, so why limiting yourself to a small set of foods (paleo, keto), when you can free yourself and get away eating pretty much whatever you want, as long as you track the calorie intake?
> sugars make it easy to overeat
Those are issues, for sure! And great reasons why when dieting, a good foundation is exclusion of carbs.
But that's only scratching the surface. Let me give you another downside. Eating sugar causes arterial inflammation. When your arteries inflame, your body packs it with oxidized LDL which can lead to heart problems and strokes due to constriction in your arteries. Guess what causes arterial inflammation?
There's more as well. We need to brush our teeth because of our high carb diets. It causes tooth decay and gum disease. Before high carb diets, our ancestors had healthier mouths than we do today. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/02/24/172688806/ancient...
> "You're walking around with a permanent immune response, which is not a good thing," says Cooper. "It causes problems all over the place."
More as well! It turns out that calories is an oversimplified model of dieting. Here's a recent interesting study that paints it clearly: http://www.dietdoctor.com/overeating-carbs-worse-overeating-...
But there's more! Garry Taubes explains a lot of reasons very well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vpFV6Wkl4
There are so many reasons carbs are bad for you, not just from a satiation point of view but also from long term health points of view.
I'm confident this post has actually done a disservice to the question why should we eat less carbs, but hopefully it's something you might find interesting and read more about and maybe change your opinion on. All the information, studies and evidence is out there.
People on ketogenic diets and below maintenance calorie intakes end up reporting high levels of LDL, with high levels of HDL to balance it out. Now, give them a hundred more calories above maintenance and things start to get funny.
Calories in vs calories out might be an oversimplified model, but so is blaming everything on insulin as Taubes does, as he still believes it's the only factor promoting fat storage.
> I'm confident this post has actually done a disservice to the question why should we eat less carbs, but hopefully it's something you might find interesting and read more about and maybe change your opinion on.
Been there, done that. I've been in keto for years until I crashed. Not anymore.
Perhaps Taubes is over simplifying it, but you have to admit that there are far more problems and negative health consequences with eating sugar than simply satiation which you originally asserted.
But can't blame all on sugar, since some processed foods and lean meats (!) promote that cycle as well. So the best way to avoid it is by not overeating.
I agree with you though, that since it's difficult not to overeat when abusing simple sugars, most folks will do better without them.
> Exercise daily, provide adequate protein intake and watch out the calories. That's it. No need to blame food but yourselves.
That sounds like a nice middle ground, but there's no reason to take a middle ground if something more radical works better for you.
There is way more hyperbole behind these diets than science as far as I've seen.
[1] http://www.kostdoktorn.se/aftonbladet-varnar-for-lchf-cancer
[2] http://www.metro.se/nyheter/lakare-varnar-for-lchf-cancer/EV...
Not being snarky; just legitimately curious. I would love to see some hard science and longitudinal studies behind the ostensible benefits of a vegan diet, or the drawbacks of a diet high -- but not overly high -- in animal protein.
I realize cooked animal protein and preserved/processed animal protein contains carcinogens, and that too much protein (regardless of source) can cause a variety of problems ranging from kidney impairment to gout. But plant-based sources have their costs as well (phytoestrogens, antinutrients, oxalates, etc.).
I've never felt better in my life, and my various lab stats have never looked better, than when I went on a Paleo-esque high fat, low carb diet that was quite rich in animal sources, but which also contained a healthful amount of vegetables (and no fruit). I took the diet as far as ketosis, and after breaking through the ramp-up hurdles, I settled into it and got into fantastic shape.
Anecdotal, yes. But I've struggled with "skinny-fatness" for much of my life, and this particular combination made a remarkable improvement on my physique without any changes in my exercise routine. Maybe my caloric consumption shifted a bit, but if anything, it probably shifted north.