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Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#41

Post by jader201 »

halpert wrote: post #38
ericmcer wrote: post #19

I feel like you almost need some kind of eating disorder these days. Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural and mass produced, there is a massive amount of sugar in everything. If you aren’t actively monitoring your food intake and making deliberate decisions to not eat your gonna be unhealthy. I like the quote: “keep whatever addictions kill you the slowest”. I think a minor eating disorder is preferable to eating 1…

It’s true, but an eating disorder doesn’t mean eating scantly, or even throwing up after every time you eat if that’s a choice you make. Eating disorders are compulsions, and those that suffer from them aren’t able to choose not to do them. This is similar to how alcoholism doesn’t mean drinking a lot. Alcoholism is a complete dependence on alcohol, making it nearly impossible to stop.

> or even throwing up after every time you eat if that’s a choice you make

I think that’s a misleading statement to make.

While this could be theoretically true, I imagine, in practice, no one would choose to throw up after every meal without having a disorder.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#42

Post by halpert »

jader201 wrote: post #41
halpert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s true, but an eating disorder doesn’t mean eating scantly, or even throwing up after every time you eat if that’s a choice you make. Eating disorders are compulsions, and those that suffer from them aren’t able to choose not to do them. This is similar to how alcoholism doesn’t mean drinking a lot. Alcoholism is a complete dependence on alcohol, making it nearly impossible to stop.

> or even throwing up after every time you eat if that’s a choice you make I think that’s a misleading statement to make. While this could be theoretically true, I imagine, in practice, no one would choose to throw up after every meal without having a disorder.

Sure, but the point is that if you choose to do it, then your behavior is not a disorder, it's just a weird choice that you're making. Just like drinking heavily doesn't automatically make you an alcoholic.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#43

Post by bluecalm »

Why would it? Most people eat too much or way too much. Eating disorders resulting in eating too little are rare in comparison and they stem from well known mental issues. Like, I don't even know how you could come up with a hypothesis that counting calories increases risk of eating disorder.

The argument that most anorectic people count calories so there is correlation doesn't even work because most obese people don't so if anything "not counting calories increases risk of eating disorder" is a lot plausible observational hypothesis as there is way more obese people then anorectic people among those who don't count calories and way more obese people who don't count than anorectic people who do (both % wise and in absolute numbers).

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#44

Post by NoPicklez »

uninstantiated wrote: post #6

It's not surprising that merely counting calories has no effect. The idea that all calories are the same is flawed. In fact, obesity is the result of the wrong types of foods i.e. sugars which are metabolised differently by the body than other types. Sugar triggers the insulin response which leads to overeating and detrimental fluctuations in cognitive capacity and concentration. What would be more beneficial than ca…

The study is looking at whether it has an impact on mental health outcomes or the development of eating disorders. Not if calorie counting has an effect on weight loss.

Regarding sugar, simple refined sugars consumed on their own causes large fluctuations in energy levels, but not all sugars. Complex carbohydrates/sugars consumed with fibre are much more preferred overall, unless you're doing heavy exercise where your body needs more glycogen.

Triggering the bodies' insulin response is normal and isn't necessarily a bad thing, afterall it is always being triggered. Unless you continually eat highly processed simple sugars that isn't accompanied by movement (e.g. chocolate bars and lollies), you wont have a problem. A good example is moving from eating white breads to multigrain or rye breads which reduce the glycemic index of food, in combination with appropriate toppings.

I 100% agree that dietary education is extremely important, having been lucky enough to study nutrition in high school it has helped me greatly in life.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#45

Post by [deleted] »

smegsicle wrote: post #34
joe-collins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass production isn't inherently bad, and you're explicitly making an appeal to nature of questionable worth. There's plenty to find fault with in the modern food industry: toxic or carcinogenic pesticides, antibiotic-resistant pathogens created by human abuse, contamination of water supplies and oceans with runoff, the role of government in creating various health crises by subsidizing high-carb/high-glycemic index…

> Mass production isn't inherently bad Mass production is inherently corner-cutting, and, given that nutrition is an unsolved problem, natural is inherently wholesome in a way that artificial can, at best, only attempt to duplicate.

[deleted]

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#46

Post by rimunroe »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #33
armchairhacker wrote: post #15

This may be a hot take, but I think the obesity crisis and that most people are overweight actually increases the prevalence of eating disorders. People don't know what a genuinely healthy body and diet/fitness regimen look like, and thinness (even extreme, unhealthy thinness) is popularized and praised as a sign of beauty and willpower because so many people are trying to lose weight and so few are trying to gain.

In my whole life I've known like two people with eating disorders (the not eating enough kind). Almost every single other person aside from those two eat too much, and I'd say mostly they eat way, way too much. Now, those two people definitely had a problem, but knowing them it was one I knew couldn't begin to understand, and I can't imagine that any of the pithy things people say all they time to express concern abo…

> In my whole life I've known like two people with eating disorders (the not eating enough kind).

I bet there were a lot more than two! Anorexia is extremely common. It’s also extremely easy to hide from friends and family (and to a lesser extent bulimia, at least for me).

I’ve struggled with anorexia and bulimia for about 20 years (since I was 14 or 15). I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve said anything publicly about it. Prior to me starting to talk with people other than my wife or a handful of other friends about my eating disorders, there were fewer than ten people who knew or could have possibly known that I was dealing with such things.

Anecdotally, I definitely knew more than five people who had told me about their eating disorders before I told anyone about mine, and since doing so I’ve found that a lot of other people have them.

Personally, I would like to see more discussion of this sort of thing, and would especially like if a little more attention could be paid to the occurrence of such disorders in boys/men (though it certainly doesn’t seem to affect them nearly as frequently and/or as severely). I honestly think it would have helped me get help earlier if I’d known that anorexia was something that boys dealt with too. For a long time I had myself convinced that I didn’t really have a problem, and I think that’s mostly because I’d always seen anorexia framed as something only experienced by girls/women.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#47

Post by adrianN »

smegsicle wrote: post #34
joe-collins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass production isn't inherently bad, and you're explicitly making an appeal to nature of questionable worth. There's plenty to find fault with in the modern food industry: toxic or carcinogenic pesticides, antibiotic-resistant pathogens created by human abuse, contamination of water supplies and oceans with runoff, the role of government in creating various health crises by subsidizing high-carb/high-glycemic index…

> Mass production isn't inherently bad Mass production is inherently corner-cutting, and, given that nutrition is an unsolved problem, natural is inherently wholesome in a way that artificial can, at best, only attempt to duplicate.

In Germany we mass produce bread that essentially contains exactly the same things I'd put in it if I made it myself.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#48

Post by jonex »

shusaku wrote: post #29
kixiQu wrote: post #4

doesn't increase eating disorder incidence for undergrad women "who had not engaged in dietary self-monitoring in the past year and who were at low-risk for an eating disorder" and who were willing to sign up for this

So? That seems like exactly the population you’d want to study if your worry is that calorie counting will induce eating disorders.

Not claiming that the study itself is useless, it's important to understand how interventions affect completely healthy people, but my worry would be that it triggers eating disorders in high-risk group, that would affect wether we want to widely encourage calorie counting or just recommend it to those who specifically need it. The thread OP helpfully points out the fact that this study doesn't do much to answer that question.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#49

Post by adrianN »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #25
kixiQu wrote: post #4

doesn't increase eating disorder incidence for undergrad women "who had not engaged in dietary self-monitoring in the past year and who were at low-risk for an eating disorder" and who were willing to sign up for this

Honestly, I wish there was some mechanism to somehow punish authors that title their papers like a buzzfeed piece. I'm really sick of seeing things like, "Diet has no effect on BMI" and then it turns out that what they meant was that you have a lot of freedom in what you eat as long as you stay around the same total calorie intake or whatever. There's no feedback mechanism to swat these things down and it shows.

You're not supposed to read just the title, you need to read at least the abstract. It clearly states in the abstract what the conclusions are:

"Conclusions: Among dietary self-monitoring naive undergraduate women with low-risk of an eating disorder, dietary self-monitoring via MyFitnessPal for 1 month did not increase eating disorder risk, impact other aspects of mental health, or alter health behaviors including dietary intake. The null results in our study may be due to the selection of a low-risk sample; future research should explore whether there are populations for whom dietary self-monitoring is contraindicated. "

Science is not easily summarized to sound bites that you can share as an image macro on social media. This is doubly true for something as difficult as nutrition.

Re: Calorie Counting App Has No Effect on Mental Health or Health Behaviors

#50

Post by jonex »

Based on the abstract, they did not show anything useful, they produce a null result, this just means that there weren't any effects large enough to be statistically significant for their sample. Weirdly, the still seem to draw a conclusion based on this null result which is really not correct. To draw the conclusion that they did they would have to show that the hypothesis that there is a clinically significant change can be discarded. Which is not mentioned in the abstract that they do.
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