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"randomly assigned to one of five different low-fat diet types" - so most combinations weren't tested at all?
These studies are nutty. You can't separate diet from activity; you can't treat wide categories of food so indiscriminately; you can't use BMI or weight instead of body composition, and get definitive results. Just for example, raw foodists tend to have low-protein diets that may be low OR high-glycemic index, and tend to be very thin. Without a comprehensive listing of specific meals, I would guess that people in ce…
The study is impressively well done, as are most articles in the New England Journal. Other researchers will be studying their methods as much as their results.
> Without a comprehensive listing of specific meals
Actually, they did better and developed local indexes for all foods for each center and had the patients keep food diaries.
> Further, gaining a pound of fat over a period of 6 months works out to less than 20 extra calories per day. This is essentially noise.
First, this is why we enroll more than one patient. The noise averages out. Two: the unit of measure was kilograms, the average arm gained more than 1 kg. Three, see figure 2B in the article: they quite nicely demonstrate sufficient granularity to appreciate signal.
> Keeping your blood sugar in check is a major factor in preventing binge eating and fat storage
> people engaged in sustained cardiovascular exercise must eat high-GI foods or their performance drops
Your liver has glycogen stores on board that will keep your blood sugar rock steady for the first 20 miles of a marathon. Unless you are exercising at a heart rate of 160-180 for 2.5 or more hours, this is useless trivia.
> Riders in the Tour de France chow down on every sugary snack and drink known
> Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day while training.
Some of the most over-cited factoids on the Internet. I swam competitively for 7 years and raced bikes competitively for four, and still ride. I'm also a doctor who spent a fair amount of a surgical internship with the bariatrics unit. These facts about elite athletes do not bear on anyone who has a BMI of 34 (Patients are generally ineligible for bariatric surgery below a BMI of 35)), the average human, or, almost certainly, you. A far more useful factoid is that your glycogen stores are depleted overnight, so a 2-3 hour cardio session in the morning will force you to burn fat. The body has no other choice. (No, it won't burn muscle).
> if you are completely sedentary, if you are engaged in a mentally taxing task, your brain is burning through a lot of glucose
Normal adult human brain uses, 120 g to, maybe, 220 g of glucose per day. At the outside, that's 750 Calories.
> sucrose means half glucose and half fructose, and only the glucose can be metabolized immediately. Fructose can be stored by the liver and converted, but if the liver reserves are full (e.g. late in the day, as opposed to waking up from fasting during sleep), fructose will end up as fat. Fructose has a low glycemic index,
True. Unfortunately, your implicit conclusion . . .
> guess which sugar is more likely to be included in a low-GI diet
Is what? Are you saying they loaded these cats with fructose? If they did, then these results are even more impressive, because we would expect a high fructose diet to promote fat gain. Are you saying they loaded them with glucose? That would make no sense, because glycemic index measures "blood glucose".
> Finally, without body composition analysis, they haven't shown anything about fat loss.
See Table 2 of the study.
Holy cow. It's a small world! One of the main guys behind this is actually a great friend of mine. I've known him since kindergarten and he's now amongst the top researchers in the world. I wish I had something to do with it! He recently moved back to Canada from Copenhagen. He has no clue what Hacker News is, but I'll email him this thread, perhaps he'll chime in if any of you have questions.
"randomly assigned to one of five different low-fat diet types" - so most combinations weren't tested at all?
Maybe it's just overzealous copywriting, but it seems like all they figured out is that a low GI, high protein diet is better than the other combinations they tested, and are far from solving anything rigorously.
Calories in - Calories out = calories remaining How is that a riddle?
Calories in - Calories out = calories remaining How is that a riddle?
My experience tends to fly in the face of the pronouncements such studies make, so I just have a really hard time taking it seriously that you can come up with a generic suggestion for diet that will work equally well for 6 billion people.