jm2721

Not really, it just means that vegans/vegetarians are more likely to post comments on an article about Quorn, which makes complete sense. You won't see many top level comments from meat eaters because most of us don't eat Quorn.

> Making some people wealthier at the expense of killing the planet is a bad plan.

Reminds me of this quote: "When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."

> overshadowed by plants

When? Only in the last 10,000 years of agriculture, I guarantee you hunter gatherers did not get the bulk of their calories from plants. Also, it's heavily dependent on what culture you're talking about. Some cultures relied heavily on animals, others on plants.

Do you have any sources for how important fiber is? I usually eat keto, and when I tried adding fiber to my diet I got stomach cramps, felt like I was hungry all the time (which never happens), and grew extremely irritable. Over the next few days I had two or three massive, green bowel movements, which was also unusual since I generally only go twice a week. Previous times I've tried taking some psyllium husk and even that seemed to lead to hunger pangs and bowel movements.

I'm always interested in improving my health, so I'll definitely try it again, perhaps more scientifically this time. That said, I don't want to struggle through the annoying symptoms if it turns out that fiber doesn't do anything.

I wouldn't say HFCS is more harmful than regular sugar, it is chemically about the same (at least the kind of HFCS used in most foods and sugary beverages). Both are equally bad. When we talk about the leading causes of obesity in the US, we shouldn't differentiate HFCS from sugar, because that just gives food manufacturers an easy out: they can add labels saying "No High Fructose Corn Syrup!" and use sugar instead, rendering the product equally toxic but making it look healthier. They're already doing this, which is why most people understand that HFCS is a problem but are ok with regular sugar.

Not really for the masses, since it wasn't cheap or plentiful. The wealthy that consumed high quantities of sugar did have the same illnesses that are so prevalent today.

You know what would give you even MORE energy? COCAINE! Try it out!

I think sugar is really what pushes societies from healthy and slightly stout to obese and diabetic, since those diseases are issues of insulin resistance. If you eat too much sugar, your insulin resistance will go through the roof because excess fructose (which makes up ~50% of sugar) leads to a fatty liver, which leads to insulin resistance. The liver is the only organ that can process fructose. Bread, on the other hand, will get metabolized into glucose (oversimplifying a bit here) and every muscle in your body can use glucose for energy, so it's a lot more evenly distributed.

If you're in the "I'll never give up bread!" camp, I would encourage you to try and find sugar-free bread. I tried doing that, and let me tell you, it is extremely difficult. Even your healthy looking whole grain, multi-seed, organic superfood bread usually has a ton of sugar. But it can be done :)

CICO is not 'false', per se, but it's fundamentally misleading and tautological. Yes, people will lose weight on a calorie restricted diet of just twinkies. However, their bodies metabolic rate will decrease gradually to the point where continuing to maintain a caloric deficit will be unsustainable (i.e. a 500 calorie deficit if your basal metabolic rate is only 750 or 1000), at which point they'll stop losing weight, but still be 'skinny fat'. They'll also cause potentially irreparable harm to their liver and pancreas, and if they do manage to sustain it for longer periods, be on the express track for diabetes and heart disease. The difference between eating equivalent calories of twinkies or a salad is that one is a toxic substance and the other isn't. In the same vein, as another poster mentioned above, you can say that a milligram is a milligram, but a milligram of cyanide will kill you while a milligram of water is harmless. That's why more and more people are challenging CICO; it gives you the false sense that replacing meat and vegetables with coke and doritos is harmless as long as they're equivalent calories.

Nobody is suggesting that CICO and the insulin theory are mutually exclusive; what the author is saying is that CICO is a profoundly unhelpful statement for people looking to lose weight, improve their health, or reverse diabetes/heart disease.

> Taubes would be hard pressed to explain how those subsisting on high carb, low fat, low protein diets that fail to meet their caloric needs in famine-afflicted regions remain thin.

Thin doesn't mean healthy. We're talking about disease, not necessarily weight, and you can have metabolic syndrome even if you're considered 'thin'. Most people who are thin with a poor diet have visceral fat (fat around the organs) which is far worse than subcutaneous fat (as a risk factor).

Are you serious? Most of the plant substitutes for meat are based off nutrient-devoid grains, soy, and corn. It's also not at all an inefficient way to get calories; fat packs the most calories per gram, and fat (especially saturated fat) is not easily available in plants unless you're making a concerted effort to eat avocados, olives, and coconuts. I'd rather eat a fatty steak and be satiated for hours, than have the same calories from quinoa (or some other 'healthy' grain) and be ravenous 2 hours later when my insulin levels drop.

That article is missing point. The point of eating local food is that you eat what's in season and what's available in your area. Obviously if you live in Canada you won't be able to find 'local' Avocados, but the idea is you would forfeit eating Avocados in favor of eating whatever is locally produced, instead of shipping those Avocados from Mexico.

"Eat less meat" is not a good solution since industrialized monocrop agriculture has tons of problems on its own like topsoil erosion and air/water pollution. The problem doesn't lie in any one single food, but in commercial food production in general, be it livestock or agricultural. If you want to help against that, the best option would be to support sustainably raised meat and vegetables from local farms by going to farmers markets or eating out at farm-to-table restaurants. If possible, plant your own vegetables, raise your own chickens or hunt. Avoid buying from the big food producers, like Kraft, Tyson, PepsiCo or ConAgra

I agree that there is a ton of misinformation floating around on the internet. Even legitimate nutritional research is notoriously difficult to conduct well. As you say, almost every diet has its benefits and supporting evidence. You will have people who claim that mostly vegetarian diets are best, and cite the Okinawans. Then you'll have the paleo crowd, who claims that you don't need fruits/vegetables at all and cite the Maasai. I think this comment pretty much sums it up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14813840.

If I were you, I'd steer clear of any sites that talk about 'toxins', 'detox', 'cleanses', or anything else like that as it's likely to be junk science. Juice cleanses can be particularly hazardous (I am honestly baffled that anybody would think drinking a ton of sugary juice is healthy). I was going to say look for articles that cite their sources, but even the medical literature can be cherry picked to support any hypothesis.

We still have a long way to go before we have nutritional advice that 1. Is actually correct, meaning it's heavily supported by scientific research and has been shown to work and 2. Is accepted mainstream. Until then, I think everyone can at least agree on a few things:

1. Don't eat sugar. Yes, natural alternatives like honey or agave are also sugar.

2. Don't eat refined, processed carbohydrates.

3. Don't eat trans fats.

I think correcting those will eliminate the majority of most peoples diet-related health issues. Everything else pales in comparison.

Do you understand that you're commenting this on an article that literally disproves what you're saying?

I feel like you're omitting some key points here. You say they ate meat and dairy every day. Practically everybody eats meat and dairy every day, but not everybody has high cholesterol or an increased risk of heart disease (note that those are separate concerns, as CVD happens in people with low cholesterol as well). If I have a glass of milk with cereal in the morning, and a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch on white bread, I've already had two servings of dairy and a serving of meat. But I've also had one or two servings of a sugary breakfast cereal and two slices of white bread (both of which are about as nutritionally void as candy). Those are the really harmful factors here.

I believe you when you say they lost weight on an all plant diet. But I think you're probably attributing their success to the wrong thing. Correlation != causation. People on a diet would never dream of having refined carbohydrates or too much sugar, because those are universally understood to be bad for you (even if it's just the 'empty calories' argument). They just so happened to also stop eating any animal products. So I don't think you can target the meat and dairy and just claim that removing them is "probably the healthiest option for the majority of the population". Rotten thinking like this is what got us into this catastrophic obesity epidemic in the first place.

The Okinawans got their carbohydrates primarily from vegetables with a low glycemic index, primarily the imo sweet potato (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-buettner/okinawa-blue-zone...). They also consumed a decent amount of Omega-3 fatty acides, since they ate fish three times a week; fish that was likely not contaminated with mercury or factory farmed. It's worth noting that once sugar and refined carbohydrates were introduced into their diet, they went from having the highest longevity out of 47 prefectures in Japan to the 26th (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/3342882/Japanese...). That article came out 10 years ago, and the situation is worse now (haven't been able to find any written sources for this, but it's explained in the documentary 'Sugar Coated').

As a counter to the Okinawans, we can look at the Maasai people of northern Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people#Diet, who exclusively ate meat, milk and blood from cattle yet had no incidence of heart disease, cancer, tooth decay, or obesity.

I think the point here is that we haven't really honed in on what exact macronutrient composition is the perfect one for a human body. Humans appear to adapt well to any macronutrient composition, as shown above by the diets of different cultures (I think if you took a global survey in 1900 of what different societies were eating, you would find all manner of different diets but very low rates of disease in all or most of them). What we have identified is that we're seeing unprecedented levels of cancer, obesity, alzheimers and cardiovascular disease. So the question to ask is "What changed in the past 50 years?" I would say it's a few things (ordered by severity):

1. Sugar. We don't need sugar to survive, yet we eat mountains of it.

2. Refined, high GI carbohydrates.

3. Vegetable oils. Seed oils like canola, sunflower, or palm oil (not Olive/Avocado/Coconut oil) are high in pro-inflammatory Omega-6 fatty acids and polyunsaturated fats.

4. Factory farmed meats, also high in Omega-6 fatty acids.

You can find counterexamples to any macronutrient focused diet, as we did above, but there doesn't exist a society that consumes sugar, refined carbohydrates, or vegetable oils in abundance and still lives long, disease free lives. To date, there is no counterexample that says the modern western diet is in any way healthy.

Regarding the studies you mention, I don't doubt that heavily processed meats like bacon and sausages are bad for you, though it's because of the Omega-6 fatty acids in factory farmed meats which are known cause arterial inflammation and contribute to atherosclerosis (grass fed beef, pork, or pastured chicken does not have this problem). That said, I am heavily skeptical of any studies that show 'links' to cancer. Just because two things correlate doesn't mean that one causes the other. Nutritional studies are notoriously difficult to conduct accurately, and have been plagued with bad logic (correlation != causation), bad statistics, and perverse incentives (such as the incentive to reach an interesting conclusion or risk losing government funding) or conflicts of interest (being funded by the sugar industry or big pharma). You ask for a good source (not blogposts/youtube videos) on what the OP posted; in kind, could you link to the studies that you're talking about?

From an energy point of view, it's true that 1500 calories of sugar is the same as 1500 calories of cheese. It's also the same as 1500 calories of sawdust. In a lab, you can burn each of these samples under a bomb calorimeter and they'll all read the same thing. There's no debating the scientific definition of a calorie as a unit of energy. My argument is that it's extremely disingenous to just say a calorie is a calorie when it comes to a living organism, because the metabolic pathways for each different macronutrient are so different. It doesn't really matter how much energy a food has, if your body can't use the energy contained therein.

The moment that you accept that macronutrient composition is very important for health and body composition, you acknowledge that in biological system a calorie is not a calorie. If I want to lose weight, I don't want someone to tell me that CICO so I can just eat whatever as long as I stay under x calories, because as you rightfully pointed out some foods are more energy dense than others, cause fewer cravings, and don't spike your blood sugar. With CICO, I can lose weight but get fatty liver disease, or I can lose weight but lose muscle while increasing visceral fat, since fat weighs less than muscle. These are terrible outcomes. People want to lose weight to be healthier and look better; what's the point of losing the weight if your risk factors for metabolic syndrome go up and you still look fat in the mirror?

For the anecdotal evidence you provided, I think it's not as simple as how you've portrayed it, because your body can be in two energy burning modes, glucose burning or fat burning. If you eat more fat while in glucose burning mode (which is what most people are in), it will just get stored as fat and yes you will gain as much weight as the amount of calories you ate. In so called 'fat burning' mode, your body will increase its metabolism to burn off the excess fat. Likewise, if you're in fat burning mode and you eat more carbs, they'll just get stored as fat. This is also anecdotal evidence (sources: https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/who-needs-to-avoid-fa..., https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/smash-the-fat-calorie...), because unfortunately we don't really have good nutritional studies about this.

Every time I hear the 'basic physics' or 'first law of thermodynamics' argument in favor of CICO I can't help but remember the joke about 'spherical cows':

"Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so a farmer wrote to the local university to ask for help. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, and advised the farmer, “I have the solution, but it only works in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum.”

Human beings aren't black boxes, we are living, breathing organisms, and as complex organisms we can process food differently depending on what it is. For example, cows eat grass, and can survive on a diet of 100% grass, so they must get some calories out of it. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to sustain the energy expenditure necessary to power a ~2000 pound beast, and would die early. Humans, on the other hand, cannot digest cellulose, so it will land in your stomach as indigestible fiber after which you will promptly poop it out. If you were to give a human an all grass diet, he/she would die within weeks.

In a similar vein, a calorie of carbs is not digested the same way as a calorie of protein, which is also not digested in the same way as a calorie of fat. For the studies that you mention, I'm certain that the macronutrient composition made very little difference when it comes to weight loss in the short term, but I am far more skeptical about whether a high carb diet is actually sustainable after your body has adjusted to a lower metabolic rate. Most studies of this type show a bounce back in weight after the initial weight loss. Furthermore, it's not and shouldn't be all about weight loss; if a calorie is just a calorie why don't you just eat 1500 calories of pure sucrose per day? Assuming you were able to stick to it, you'll quickly get fatty liver disease, diabetes, and a ton of visceral fat. The idea that the macronutrient composition is irrelevant as long as calorie restriction is maintained is too simplistic a view, and a dangerous one to spread.

Totally agree. If you look at the two parallel studies, it seems like diet had a huge effect on the outcome. The NIA study found no significant difference in both groups, and fed the monkeys varied source of protein. The UW study found health improvements in the CR monkeys but fed them 'significantly higher amount of sucrose compared to the NIA diet'.

https://www.nia.nih.gov/newsroom/announcements/2017/01/calor... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28094793 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14063

The margarine and egg-whites-only feels like the nutritional advice of the 80s...I wouldn't follow any of the advice on that website...

I highly suggest looking into a low carb high fat diet (paleo or keto), perhaps coupled with Intermittent Fasting (or even extended fasts every once in a while) if you want to reap the benefits described in this article without subjecting yourself to a life of miserable calorie counting. After a small period of adaptation, you won't have cravings, you'll have more energy and be more focused, and you won't have to count calories (although you will probably want to track your carb intake at first just to make sure you're on the right track). Eat like our disease free paleolithic ancestors did. Jason Fung is doing incredible work about this at IDM: https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/

As someone has pointed out above, it seems like the calorie restriction is not really the reason for improved health. The real reason seems to be that reducing calories happens to also reduce all the stuff that makes us sick in the first place, like pro-inflammatory vegetable oils, sugar, and refined carbohydrates. If you look at the actual studies mentioned in the article, you'll see that the NIA study didn't find any difference between the two groups of monkeys, while the UW study did. The primary difference between the two is that the NIA fed the monkeys varied protein sources, while the UW study fed them significantly higher levels of sucrose. We already know that sugar is bad for you, so it makes sense that reducing its intake would improve health. The CR is a red herring.

I also checked some of the iDiet recipes, and I'm pretty sure they will do you more harm than good. Margarine, like pretty much any vegetable oil other than olive/avocado/coconut, is really bad for you. Egg yolks are not bad for you at all and I wouldn't worry about cholesterol in food (this is a whole topic in and of itself that I won't really go into here). One of the recipes on there is oatmeal with maple syrup; that is just sugar and grains, which honestly just feels like a slightly healthier frosted flakes.

So, for your first question, no, we didn't evolve for the food we need to survive to cause inflammation. In the past, ancient humans had no diabetes or cancer, and ate mostly protein, fats (saturated and monounsaturated), high fiber vegetables, and roughly a 1:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids. So it seems more likely that our relatively recent addition of sugar, vegetable oils and highly refined carbohydrates (lacking any fiber content) has something to do with that.

I think your second question is on the money. CR seems like a red herring in this case, because it's likely that those who eat less will also eat less processed foods, less sugars, and more fibrous vegetables or filling fats that would help them actually keep their calorie intake low while still feeling satiated. In the study with the Rhesus monkeys, it said that the ones that weren't on calorie restriction were diabetic or pre-diabetic. Monkeys in the wild don't really get diabetes, in the same way that our human ancestors never got diabetes, so what were they feeding these monkeys? I looked at some of the source studies backing this bbc article. The report from the Nature magazine(https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14063) actually says that the University of Wisconsin study 'contained a significantly higher amount of sucrose compared to the NIA diet' (https://www.nia.nih.gov/newsroom/announcements/2017/01/calor...) and that the other study, the one with a diet of varied protein sources, actually did not see any health benefits in the CR monkeys. I wonder, if you fed the UW monkeys a diet low in sucrose and other easily digestible carbohydrates in order to keep their blood glucose and inflammation extremely low, would there be a big difference in the health of the CR monkeys and the others? If the NIA study is any indication, probably not.