Too much fructose can damage your liver, just like too much alcohol

Wheat Belly is not a diet book, it’s a summary of the science out there on grains with 100s of scientific citations. Yes it has diet recommendations at the end of it.

Congrats!

Yes that’s also true. But cutting grains also fixes your sense of satiety. Ever had a piece of bread and then next thing you knew the whole bread basket was gone? Many people feel like they can’t control themselves when eating bread. No one does that with steak. And even other high-carb foods like potatoes present less of a problem for people (in terms of whether they feel full and stop eating vs continuing to eat past the point of satiety).

IIFYM is very effective at fat loss BUT (and I know I’m going to get shit for saying this) it requires a very specific personality type that can be very mechanical about eating. Most people don’t have the time or interest to count their macros, and even if they did they still have difficulty overcoming the urges that come with consuming junk food such as modern grains in the U.S.

I don't think it's grains in particular that mess with satiety - it's carbohydrate-heavy diets (particularly simple carbohydrates) vs protein/fats. Protein in particular is known to be highly satisfying, and it tends to be less calorie-dense than carb-heavy foods. Carb-heavy foods are everywhere, because they prepare easily and keep for a very long time, and provide a lot of calories in a small package. Sugar + fat together make our brains super happy and trigger the "put all of that in my face now" response. In the right form, even starchy carbohydrates can be really easy to put down - consider a big bowl of mashed potatoes or white rice for example!

I actually agree with you about IIFYM needing the right personality type. http://physiqonomics.com/fat-loss/ is probably my favorite "how to be not fat" page in existence and it outlines that issue quite well - if you can be disciplined to stop eating, then IIFYM works great. If you can't, then full abstinence is pretty necessary. I find that I'm much more successful on an IIFYM diet than an abstinence diet, because on the latter I find myself craving the "forbidden fruit" and it eats at me until I crack, then I feel guilty, and it spirals from there. On IIFYM, I can let myself have whatever I'm craving, knowing that I just have to make up for it with the rest of my intake that day. The actual mechanical part of counting macros is pretty trivial once you've learned how to do it (MyFitnessPal learns your dietary habits quickly, and trivializes the process).

Not every approach works for everyone, but I have a lot of frustration around a lot of the diet fads that are constantly looking for the "magic bullet" - no fat! no sugar! only specific carbs! lots of carbs! 3 gallons of coconut oil daily! Only eat every 6 days! - when, IMO, the only magic bullet is self-discipline to find out how to keep yourself from overeating, and my experience has been that that can be different for each person based on their psychological tendencies.

> It is really, really surprising that this is discovered so lately. We should be knowing this for 30 or so years. I have a strong guess that this article is overpresenting how new this is. Otherwise something really weird is going on.

1) You're right, it's not that new. I'm pretty sure I've read it at least once before on _HN_ itself.

2) Nutritional science is a mess not because something weird is going on but because it's really, really hard. It's difficult enough to study the short and long term effects of substances on the body when you're taking about a drug but when you're trying to do it for something like food. Food is intimately tied to culture, habit, social settings, and mood, which makes it hard to fully regiment what your test subjects are taking. Nutrients also both appear and are metabolized in extremely complex arrangements that we still don't fully understand (even something as basic as calorie counts use a pretty ridiculous, roundabout measurement technique), which makes it hard to accurately track. It also is something that everyone has to do all the time, so (unlike drugs), we have to go with "best current understanding" recommendations, which create their own political and reputational effects on scientific study when they're contradicted.

We just this year upended decades of public health consensus on the effects of low sodium on blood pressure. This isn't "something weird" going on, it's par for the course for the field.

Fruit juice is no better than soda pop.