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Potato diet community trial

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Re: Potato diet community trial

#171

Post by cheese_goddess »

bambax wrote: post #168
cheese_goddess wrote: post #166

Anecdotally, that kind of thing sure works. Back in the day my aunt turned from plump and boring to thin and elegant in a couple of months by eating only chicken and rice. However, I think those diets only "work" because they make you starve while filling your belly. I guess what they do to your body is that they deprive it of the vast majority of the nutrients it needs. It makes sense that you'd lose weight then, in…

> However, I think those diets only "work" because they make you starve while filling your belly Another way they could work is because eating the same thing all day every day is extremely boring and makes you not want to eat at all. It would be the case for the most delicious dish, but it's even truer with bland food.

Yeah, maybe. That could be the reason, or an additional reason.

I think if I had to eat only one kind of food that I really like (not cheese because there's such a huge variety that it wouldn't really count as "one") I could just about manage to eat only that for two weeks. After that I think I'd be craving something else.

Of course, that could also cause me to over-eat to try and make up for the craving. Anyway I don't think this is such an easy diet as the article here makes it sound like.

Anecdotally again, the only time I went on an "eat-only-x" diet was during a heatwave when I spent a week or two eating only teaspoonfulls of peanut butter and drinking milk kefir. The reason being that it was so hellishly hot that I couldn't stand the thought of cooking or eating anything more. I think I lost a few pounds during that time.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#172

Post by doubleunplussed »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #49

Bad title. They are actually trying to do a study. They have arguments for taking kind of "a fad diet" seriously enough to do a study based on existing anecdotal evidence that this might not be a crazy fad diet.

And they have a whole other post [1] about why science needs to actually check stuff like this, because reality is full of complexity that prevents us from drawing conclusions as rapidly as we'd like.

[1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-wei...

Re: Potato diet community trial

#173

Post by cheese_goddess »

kuhewa wrote: post #161
Mordisquitos wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That being true, it could well be that a "Potato Only Diet" is effective for weight loss not because of the reduced energy intake, nor because of some subtlety in how our gut or our metabolism deals with an only starch diet for a while, but instead because potatoes lack micronutrient X or inhibit its absorption and a symptom of X deficiency is losing weight. That could be unhealthy. I don't have an opinion either way…

pretty remote possibility, unless you have a deficiency in mind that manifests pretty quickly and causes rapid weight loss and doesn't cause systemic disease.

If you eat only potatoes you will only ingest the nutrients found in potatoes so you will risk becoming deficient in all other nutrients, not found in potatoes. I don't know what those are, but for example you'd risk running out of all the stuff that vegans have to take supplements to replenish, like B12, iron, zinc, etc.

Anyway the diet described in the article doesn't make any assumption about calories. If you're taking enough calories to maintain your weight but losing weight, then it's very likely there's something else you're not getting enough of.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#174

Post by zikduruqe »

samatman wrote: post #149
zikduruqe wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for all your bro-dieters out there eating a "paleo" diet, realize that our Paleolithic friends ate mostly plants. The Hadza tribe is one of our last living examples and their gut biome is amazing. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/24/5456315... https://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-micr...

The only thing we know Paleolithic people ate a lot of is meat. Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher. Paleolithic teeth have little of the damage associated with eating grit from ground grains. We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls. The Hadza are a modern people, and modern hunter-gatherers have been…

> The only thing we know Paleolithic people ate a lot of is meat.

> Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher.

That's only because all the archaeologic evidence is preserved in bones and tools. All if not most of the plant based evidence has been reclaimed by nature. There are some new discoveries surrounding preserved pollens that are showing how early hominids had plants in their camps.

> We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.

That's because all the wooden based structures didn't survive. We should quit calling it the Stone Age and call it the Wood Age, because their stone tools were used to build wooden structures (along with butchering critters).

Re: Potato diet community trial

#175

Post by kixiQu »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #117
keyle wrote: post #18

One word of caution on these "only this diet". Your gut bacteria is a jungle with many species of microbes, trillions of them. They basically fight for territory and some subspecies will die if you stop injecting . So if you are not lactose intolerant and get off lactose for 6-9 months, don't expect that your belly will react well to a glass of milk in a year. I'm all for _reducing_ X and Y. But completely going pola…

I'm a big believer in the idea that diet can influence the microbiome but current science does not support the above statements. While diet can induce a shift in the gut microbiota, these changes appear to be temporary. Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950569/#:~:tex... I am unaware of dietary induced lact…

https://www.thecut.com/2018/02/i-accidentally-made-myself-la...

quoted "gastrointestinal specialist Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego"

> “To some extent, our ability to handle lactose is a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon,” Barrett says. The body digests lactose — a disaccharide — by using lactase, an enzyme in the small intestine, to break it down into the monosaccharides glucose and galactose, which can then be absorbed. “If you don’t have the [lactose] substrate in the diet, you start to reduce the synthesis of the lactase enzyme to digest it,” Barrett explains. “After a period of completely excluding lactose from the diet, you may not have any of those digestive enzymes present.”

Maybe unawareness here is a gender thing? I have heard this story too many times from women doing weird short-term restriction diets (or going vegan and trying to undo) to feel like I need "current science" to "support" the very fact that it happens. Many things can happen because of genes or other reasons.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#176

Post by s-lambert »

mrob wrote: post #170
s-lambert wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rice has a satiety index of 138 while potatoes have a satiety index of 323, almost 3 times as much. So you need to eat way less potatoes compared to rice, I don't know if it's a linear scale though but still probably brings potatoes pretty close to rice.

Satiety index affects how much you want to eat, not how much you need to eat.

But the point of this diet is that potatoes have a very high satiety so that even if you eat as much you possibly want to you won't eat enough to put on weight. Rice, with its lower satiety, is much easier to overeat (or eat enough to maintain a higher weight).

Re: Potato diet community trial

#177

Post by DoreenMichele »

kixiQu wrote: post #175
DoreenMichele wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big believer in the idea that diet can influence the microbiome but current science does not support the above statements. While diet can induce a shift in the gut microbiota, these changes appear to be temporary. Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950569/#:~:tex... I am unaware of dietary induced lact…

https://www.thecut.com/2018/02/i-accidentally-made-myself-la... quoted "gastrointestinal specialist Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego" > “To some extent, our ability to handle lactose is a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon,” Barrett says. The body digests lactose — a disaccharide — by using lactase, an enzyme in the small intestine, to break it down into the monosaccharides gl…

Maybe unawareness here is a gender thing?

If you are assuming I'm male, you are in error.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#178

Post by dayvid »

keyle wrote: post #18

One word of caution on these "only this diet". Your gut bacteria is a jungle with many species of microbes, trillions of them. They basically fight for territory and some subspecies will die if you stop injecting . So if you are not lactose intolerant and get off lactose for 6-9 months, don't expect that your belly will react well to a glass of milk in a year. I'm all for _reducing_ X and Y. But completely going pola…

I’ve found that a lot of people who advocate alternative diets have weird genetic circumstances where that’s the only diet they can function normally on.

They promote it to people not in their situation, the other people adopt it and now they have to eat a specialized diet because they sensitized their body.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#179

Post by samatman »

zikduruqe wrote: post #174
samatman wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing we know Paleolithic people ate a lot of is meat. Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher. Paleolithic teeth have little of the damage associated with eating grit from ground grains. We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls. The Hadza are a modern people, and modern hunter-gatherers have been…

> The only thing we know Paleolithic people ate a lot of is meat. > Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher. That's only because all the archaeologic evidence is preserved in bones and tools. All if not most of the plant based evidence has been reclaimed by nature. There are some new discoveries surrounding preserved pollens that are showing how e…

Thank you for confirming that "realize that our Paleolithic friends ate mostly plants" is not something we know, that we only have evidence that they ate a lot of meat, and that you knew this to be the case, so I have to ask: why did you state something you know to be untrue?

Re: Potato diet community trial

#180

Post by kuhewa »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #173
kuhewa wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty remote possibility, unless you have a deficiency in mind that manifests pretty quickly and causes rapid weight loss and doesn't cause systemic disease.

If you eat only potatoes you will only ingest the nutrients found in potatoes so you will risk becoming deficient in all other nutrients, not found in potatoes. I don't know what those are, but for example you'd risk running out of all the stuff that vegans have to take supplements to replenish, like B12, iron, zinc, etc. Anyway the diet described in the article doesn't make any assumption about calories. If you're t…

At that point you are just kinda throwing spaghetti at the wall in an 'anything is possible' kind of sense, neither of those are very parsimonious explanations.

Besides the fact the diet isn't asking suggesting anyone not supplement, a vegan diet won't lead to a severe B-12 deficiency in a matter months. But hey there is a non-0% chance you are bang on and the people losing weight when trying to eat 20 potatoes a day to meet their caloric demands are actually just noticing the weight loss once they also get pellagra and anemia, they just figured it was a coincidence.

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