I Hacked My Diet with Science | Hacker News Reader

I Hacked My Diet with Science

thras.blogspot.com

34 pointsthras54 comments

I'm not sure if following a low-carb diet qualifies as "hacking" (Atkins published his book in 1972 afterall), but congrats on the weight loss.

Oh, I thought it was much more of a hack than the "Hacker's Diet" -- which is just low-calorie eating, after all. I've done low-calorie, and this is so much easier that it's not even funny. Plus, it appears to be a hell of a lot healthier.

And I designed my diet after reading Gary Taubes -- "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is very much not a diet book.

I read GCBC about two months ago; although I've been interested in health & nutrition for several years now, it's amazing that I never understood how badly science has been mistreated by nutritionists & health experts.

Moreover, because this advice runs so contrary to conventional dietary wisdom, many in the community are fascinated by reviewing studies for strengths & flaws (in the similar spirit of code-reviews); consequently, I've learned more about both human physiology and the scientific process in the past few months than my entire life (which is beneficial regardless of whether or not I continue down the low-carb path).

For example, compare the quality of minds at work in the following post (it takes off in the comments): http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-are-the-inui...

Here's another example: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/saturated-fat/abcs-big-me...

If it takes a link bait title to get this message across, then I'm all for it. This diet is essentially Primal, similar to the Paleo Diet (http://www.thepaleodiet.com/ ). I've been doing it for a while now, and have nothing but good things to say about eating this way.

An introductory link: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/definitive-guide-primal-bluep...

An index into most of the content: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-101/

FAQ, and comparisons to other diets: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-book/references/questions...

I seriously doubt any cavemen or any human other then modern man, ever had regular access to THIS much animal protein and fat. During peak times, migratory season, sure, but not all the time.

And I don't think the diet as described, most calories from meat, cheese and eggs, is the most healthy. Perhaps healthier then any diet high in processed sugar, depending on individual physiology. I certainly agree sugar is bad for you, but I think a "mostly plants" diet, is still better for most people.

Paleolithic people practically ONLY had access to fat and protein. The only non-domesticated edible plants in most places are available for, like, three months, and aren't nearly abundant enough to live on.

Go take a walk in practically any ecosystem and find edible stuff that's not an animal. There's barely anything. Primitive man clearly ate mostly animals and fish.

I believe this is false. The traditional Bushman diet depended more on vegetables than meat, and they lived in a place where vegetation is about as far from lush as you can find.

Not sure what a traditional bushman is. Are you refering to the san bushmen who eat a lot of mongongo nuts? That is a strange exception, and those people are hunters who eat a lot of meat anyway.

There are abundant written accounts of native north americans. There were those who grew corn and squash, which means they have little in common with paleolithic humans who had no such crops. And there are those that did not grow crops and ate mostly game and fish.

Anywhere away from the equator there is virtually no gatherable plant food for most of the year. Before domesticated crops, people clearly ate mostly animals, fish, and insects.

2 Things

- I'm not sure how much it matters what we ate 20,000 years ago. For example, lactose tolerance is assumed to have developed very recently in most places. People are opportunistic omnivores and it would make sense for them to be able to adapt quickly (several generations) to new eating habits.

- Guessing what people ate is tricky. If all we have to go on is modern evidence, we have a huge level of disparity. Also, just because (for example) New Guineans were primarily hunter gatherers in modern times doesn't automatically mean they were similar in every other way to pre historic Europeans.

San = Bushman. The reason I mentioned them is that they preserved their hunter-gatherer culture till a few decades ago, and anthropologists were able to measure what they actually ate, which was mostly vegetables.

You respond to this contrary evidence by simply restating your claim. There was "virtually no" plant food, and people "clearly" lived mostly on meat. Do you have any evidence at all?

I pointed out the San are a rare exception. You were trying to make a general case from this. The other ethnographies and historical accounts show high meat consumption. I also suspect the san you are talking about are stunted and trying to get by on marginal land without much game, and so not a good sample.

It bears repeating the simple fact that most places don't have wild plant food for most of the year. Pick up the army survival manual. It's mostly about how to fish and trap in many different ecosystems, because, as it explains, there isn't much wild plant food out there most of the time.

I always like to see a little more science in articles that use the word "science" in the title.

Ditto for "hacking." I mean, good on you thras for losing the weight but it seems to me that what you're really hacking here is the global food economy. An all meat-and-horticulture diet is completely economically infeasible for a great number of people, to say nothing of environmental impact or sustainability.

Regarding the environmental impact and sustainability: http://www.westonaprice.org/mythstruths/mtvegetarianism.html...

Here's another take: http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarian.html#link1

One missing piece regarding the idea of sustainability of ruminant farming versus grain farming is that the former tends to rejuvenate the soil, and can be performed in areas unsuitable for crop growth. The latter, on the other hand (unless performed in concert with ruminant farming), encourages deforestation (to locate healthy, nutrient dense soil), using up the nutrients in the soil, maintaining the soil via petroleum fertilizers, and then abandoning the land once depleted/eroded.

Ruminants are a key piece to the puzzle in sustaining the fertility of the soil when growing crops.

Oh I'm all about eating meat, just not exclusively. Both of those links advocate grazing livestock, which I 100% support and think it also tastes better. Better than the grain-fed meat that is so cheap and plentiful in the US (I think that's where thras is.) But meat raised that way is more expensive, which makes it difficult to eat only meat and greens (the latter of which are likely to be trucked halfway across the country.) This is how he's "hacking" the food economy: taking advantage of agriculture subsidies that distort the price of meat.

Exclusively eating local produce, grass-fed beef, free-range chickens and their eggs is not only seriously expensive, but in many parts of the US (like where I am) nearly impossible.

Whole grains and legumes, however, are pretty healthful and easy to grow, AFAIK.

Of course I was simply addressing the sustainability comment, not the economics involved.

Regarding economics, I suppose the unanswered question is how would a reallocation (or reduction, depending on your political bent) of government subsidies affect the feasibility/availability of grass-fed beef compared to the CAFO variety? What would happen if grass was subsidized instead of/in addition to grain?

Even now, it's possible to buy sustainable meat at comparable prices (http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2006/12/13/how-to-buy-a-si...) if you go in for a half or quarter cow. However, this involves quite a bit of work (if only it were as simple as logging into buymycow.com and ordering 200lbs to be vacuum sealed & delivered at your doorstep!).

> 200lbs to be vacuum sealed & delivered at your doorstep!

You're making me hungry.

In passing, weightlifting is mentioned. I think this is perhaps as relevant to the story as diet. Even if weightlifting has always been a part of the story, boosting protein and the resulting increase in muscle mass, can account for dramatic fat loss, as well. Muscle burns more calories than fat, so it is self-reinforcing.

This idea that resting muscle burns calories is a bit of a popular misconception. The fat loss advantages of strength training come from boosted testosterone and growth hormone, which simply direct the body to become leaner. Idle muscle mass doesn't really burn calories.

Muscle mass also soaks up insulin and glucose, before it accumulates as fat.

That could be a good theory.

That is if I hadn't been out of the gym for three months starting at the end of January due to a wrist injury. :)

I'm also doing a low-carb diet, for a month and a half. No exercise of any kind. 6 kg lost, and counting.

While I'm sure this approach has general merits, I'm also fairly certain that different dietary approaches will work with varying levels of success for different people.

Eggs (yolks) have a load of cholesterol. Watch out for that. IIRC, they're about 200mg each, where a sensible daily limit is 300-400mg.

EDIT: If you want to go all crazy-health-nut, the whites are 100% protein calories (~50/50 fat/protein in the yolks), have no cholesterol, and taste pretty much the same.

EDIT again: But I guess you don't really have much else in the way of fat sources, cheese aside. If you do this long-term, you might want to make sure your blood cholesterol levels don't go nuts.

If you read the book mentioned in the article, he also talks about how the whole "eating cholesterol is bad" is also a myth and bad science.

Maybe. I've heard a couple people with similar diets wonder why their plasma cholesterol is so high, whether or not it's from the dietary cholesterol. YMMV.

Your anecdotes don't match the research. Consumption of animal products is not much correlated to serum cholesterol. Serum cholesterol in turn is not much correlated to mortality. If anything it's been found that low levels are of greater concern than high levels.

Cholesterol is not really worth measuring. Triglycerides and insulin levels/sensitivity are maybe worth measuring.

Avoiding egg yolks is stupid. All the vitamins and minerals are in the yolk.

Your body makes more than 60% of the cholesterol that you need daily. 500mg of cholesterol are about 1/3 of what you need every day.

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/NCR332.pdf

Then again, there is evidence that dietary choices affect your blood cholesterol levels and your expected life span. For example, see North Karelia project: http://www.ktl.fi/portal/english/research__people___programs...

These are not contradictions. The best evidence is that eating cholesterol doesn't matter. It's your diet that controls how much and what kind of cholesterol is generated by your body, and that's what may or may not be a problem.

As I understand it, it hasn't been terribly well demonstrated that simply lowering cholesterol, usually with drugs, actually reduces any risk either; this remains conjecture despite the amount of cholesterol-reducing drugs in use. The "bad" and "good" cholesterols we've heard about seem to be fairly firmly correlated with bad heart health, but causation has not yet been established, unless there's been some fresh research I haven't heard about, which is very possible.

I generally choose the fattiest cuts of beef and pork that I can find. My triglycerides have gone down and my HDL has gone up, as one would expect given the link between carbohydrate intake and serum cholesterol. I'm planning to get retested in January.

As for the link between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol? Here's an ACN meta-study:

http://www.jacn.org/cgi/content/abstract/16/6/530

"The misperception that dietary cholesterol determines blood cholesterol is held by many consumers in spite of evidence to the contrary...10 clinical trials (1994 to 1996) of the effects of dietary cholesterol on blood lipids and lipoproteins indicate that addition of an egg or two a day to a low-fat diet has little if any effect on blood cholesterol levels."

While the article does not go into specifics about the "Science" involved, it is not hard to find hard science that show unequivocally that only lowering calories lowers weight, eg. this one from the New England Journal of Medicine: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/360/9/859. Why is the first law of thermodynamics so hard for people to internalize? Shall we start measuring the energy in stars in terms of grams of fat too? One expects this kind of thing on Oprah, not on HH.

At any rate, let's assume for a moment that the blogger is still eating the same number of calories, and doing the same amount of weight lifting (that is, still burning the same number of calories), but he is still losing weight. To be consistent with the 1st law of thermodynamics, it will mean he has made his body less efficient at absorbing the calories in food. So he has successfully shocked his metabolism into being less efficient. Will he stay on this diet forever? Because as soon he starts eating bread again, presumably his metabolism will emerge from the state of shock he induced. When that happens, while he will feel as if he were eating the same amount of calories, he will effectively be eating much more since his metabolism will no longer be so inefficient.

Why is the first law of thermodynamics so hard for people to internalize?

The first law of thermodynamics stablishes a relation between energy input, energy output and energy storage. It does not say which variables are independent, ie, the direction of causality. The theory of low-carb diets is that carbs affect energy storage via insulin first leaving a constraint bewteen energy in and out, not the reverse.

Also note that in the article cited the lowest amount of carbs was 35%, which still is a moderatelly high amount. And the result seems to be very modest (about 4kg lost only).

Different nutrients are processed differently by the body, fully in line with thermodynamics.

Take 100 Calories of sawdust (cellulose). If you eat this, how many calories did you consume? Did consuming these calories contribute to fat accumulation? Because the answer to this is no, does this cause a violation of the 1st law?

Your body doesn't merely "absorb calories" from food. It absorbs and transforms chemicals, and directs these chemicals through various pathways. Eating a low carbohydrate diet doesn't "shock his metabolism" into being less efficient, it simply uses different pathways for nutrient absorption.

Also, regarding the referenced study: All four diets tested were virtually identical regarding the % calories derived from fat, protein, and carbohydrate.

http://content.nejm.org/content/vol360/issue9/images/large/0...

Moreover, the low-fat diets weren't particularly low-fat, and the high-fat (low-carb) diets weren't particularly low-carb.

So what happens when you feed a group of people the same 1600 Calorie diet for two years, and then measure their weight loss? What exactly are you demonstrating?

So then there is no reason for any type of sort beyond bubble. After all it is data in data out right? The human body is a bit more complicated than sorting algorithms. When you eat a no carb. diet interesting things happen the least interesting of which is that protein takes more processing to turn into energy than sugar does. One of the most interesting,(from a dieter's perspective) is that the body enters a state called ketosis in which excess protein is expelled from the body instead of being stored as fat. This makes your body self regulate its weight. Second eliminating sugar from your diet makes you less hungry since your body experiences less blood sugar variation.

Nice success, but I am not yet convinced that weight is the only important variable to watch.

One of the points Taubes makes in his GCBC book (which is phenomenal, by the way), is that obesity is a dysfunction of excess adipose tissue (fat), not merely a problem of excess weight.

As you suggest, using only weight as the variable means that a dieter who loses 10 lbs of lean muscle tissue is considered as successful as a dieter who loses 10 lbs of adipose tissue.

Slightly off topic, but do any of you folks ingest whey protein shakes or use creatine monohydrate before workouts?

FWIW, my current diet consists of fruit, tuna, protein shakes and the occasional chicken breast.

I used to drink a whey protein shake with banana and peanut butter after workouts when I was in bulking phases, but now that I'm just maintaining, I haven't bothered. I used to do creatine drinks before workouts as well, I found that it made it easier to pump out that last few reps whereas before I did creatine my muscles would be screaming bloody murder.

Maybe it's just me, but I tried creatine some years ago and without fail it always made me really angry.

If you're using creatine to prep for weight training, that's a feature, not a bug. Being really angry helps weight training, or at least makes it feel more satisfying.

The same can be said about football. Man, I miss those days.

Tuna seems to be high in mercury:

http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/tuna.asp

You might want to substitute some lower-mercury alternatives:

http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/guide.asp

Good lookout.

I've used both, and didn't notice any difference with either. That's not to say there was no difference though.

Good for you, but ... some details would be nice. Reads like a lazy blog entry. Please inform us as to more of your specifics. Do you eat non-veggie carbs ... like, at all?

Sorry, I thought that I was clear on that: I eat meat, eggs, cheese, and green vegetables. That's it.

I suppose I do use wine, salt, and other seasonings when I cook. By "meat" I mean meat, poultry, and fish.

I don't worry about no-calorie drinks. I drink mostly tea. Sometimes diet soda. It doesn't seem to make any difference.

No eggplant, squash, onions, peppers, and such? Just greens? Sounds boring.

Also, no organ meat?

Most people in the US don't eat organ meats (other than what's in hotdogs).

That's too bad. Fried liver, delicious if they're plump and juicy. Chicken hearts, they're like little meat popcorns. I don't know if pig ears are considered organs, but they're crunchy and fun to eat.

I had fried pig ears on a salad at The Spotted Pig in NYC and they were f'ing fantastic. If I could source pig ears, I'd eat nothing but pig ears from now on.

And bone marrow. Om nom nom nom nom.

If I could source pig ears, I'd eat nothing but pig ears from now on.

You need to visit more Chinese food markets.

No, I don't avoid any of the above. I do avoid grains, starchy vegetables like potatoes and plantains, rice and beans.

Everything else is fine. I use onions and garlic more than anything else. Broccoli or asparagus when I feel like having a side dish. Green chili whenever I can. But I eat far more meat than vegetables.

I've been experimenting a little with organ meat. To be honest, except for liver, it's generally not that appetizing to me. So I don't eat it.

Gotcha, thanks. No milk?

A couple drops in my tea.

I cook with heavy cream sometimes. But I cut that out a couple of months ago. Doesn't seem to have changed anything.

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