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Potato diet community trial

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Re: Potato diet community trial

#231
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing inherently unhealthy about being in a temporary state of negative energy flux (unless you are already underweight or deficient in an essential mineral or something)

This will very quickly devolve into a definition of an unhealthy diet, or healthy vs unhealthy in general, none of which is well defined. From the perspective I took where a healthy diet is a sustainable one with sufficient nutrients and long lifetime expectancy, a weight loss diet is unhealthy and unsustainable, but there to negate a different issue and improve long-term health.

At first approximation, sure, a diet that can be sustained and keep you alive indefinitely is better than one that would eventually lead to your demise due to insufficient calories or essential nutrients.

However, a diet that varies in how 'fed' you are over time is very likely healthier than one where you are constantly taking in nutrients. During that post-prandial state, insulin and growth factors are elevated, and autophagy and other important pathways for 'tidying up' sick cells are turned off. That is why I don't think it is fair to say that fasts or restrictive diets are inherently unhealthy, I reckon 'whether this can be sustained steadily forever' should not be the bar. Similarly, the 200% of normal diet consumed after marathon is healthy that day and probably more healthy than eating normally since it is going to allow for repair and replenishment of depleted substrates, but would not be healthy if eaten every day.

For someone with health issues stemming from obesity, a potato-crash diet could immediately improve health, and continue to for a good while.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#232
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I am one year on mostly keto and lost all excessive fat and gained a lot (!) of muscle. And I seem to be burning fat and gain muscle at the same time. One thing to note, I am not sure why would you suggest to remove olive oil. All the research (I’ve seen) suggests that olive oil is really good for humans

Did you start sedentary and with a bit of extra weight? It would make sense if you started strength training at the same time and benefited from 'noob gains' Also the other fellow might be referencing EVOO's low smoke point, it's true there isn't much point using it for high heat cooking.

I am 175cm. Went from 80 kg to 66 in 6 months or less. Then I plateaued and was around 67kg. Still had excessive fat tissue, but not a lot. Was sedentary, couldn't even do 1 pull around March 15. No I am ~70kg, with less fat tissue and doing 5/5/5 pull ups with 5KG added.

So def. noob gains. But I also see that fat tissue is burning (slowly but surely) and muscles are growing. Lifting, no cardio or HIIT.

Yeah, I meant EVOO in general. Great for salads, maybe not so much for frying :)

Re: Potato diet community trial

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a cecum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecum And we can digest plants just fine without having to ferment them. All those fantastical ideas about how the human body works, they keep cropping up in this kind of thread again and again. Where do they come from, I wonder? I am really curious. Who comes up with those things? The other day some guy was saying we can't digest plants. Like, at all. A vegetarian once…

Yes, we have a cecum by name , as do other hypercarnivores including cats, but its design in no way suggests that humans developed to primarily eat plants or even digest them in an efficient way. Even the article you cited states explicitly that the function of the human cecum is different than that of herbavores, and it's dubious whether it should even be referred to as a cecum. If you look at the digestive tract of…

Will you listen to yourself speak for a moment? What you are saying is completely mad! We are "entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material"? The majority of the food eaten by every human culture throughout history consisted of plants! "Staples" they're called: cereals, roots and pulses, the three bloody sisters, wheat, rice, barley, potatoes, taro, cassava and yams. People have subsisted on diets that were for their vast majority only plants for thousands of years but we are entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material?

Why? Why is it that whenever the subject is food all the deranged nonsense of the internets comes out of the woodwork? One group of looney tune characters wants to eat nothing but plants. Another wants to eat nothing but meat. One insance clown posse says meat is bad for you. The other says plants are bad for you. You people are all stark raving mad! You're bananas!

> Yes, we have a cecum by name, as do other hypercarnivores including cats,...

Listen to yourself! We are like cats? Humans? Or are we talking about Thundrecats now? Because unlike Lion-O, humans are nothing like cats:

A hypocarnivore is an animal that consumes less than 30% meat for its diet, the majority of which consists of fungi, fruits, and other plant material.[1] Examples of living hypocarnivores are the grizzly bear (Ursus horribilis), black bear (Ursus americanus), binturong (Arctictis binturong), kinkajou (Potos flavus), and humans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocarnivore

You want a "credible source", really? I mean you can't even spell "herbivore" correctly but can you tell me which "credible source" is it that told you all this nonsense, that we are "hypercarnivores", like cats, and that we are "entirely ill-adapted to digesting plant material"?

Pay heed: your friend Napoleon Bonaparte doesn't count. He's not who you think he is.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but healthy foods contain more nutrients, that’s why they can be called healthy. So fueling your body to excess with a lot of nutrients will lead to a much better functioning body than doing the same with garbage

>fueling your body to excess with a lot of nutrients A commonly held myth about eating is that fueling the body with an excess of (micro)nutrients is healthier than fueling the body with an adequate amount of micro nutrients. It is not healthier, it is exactly the same (and then becomes toxic again in excess!) And as you know, fueling the body with excess macronutrients is unhealthy. Indeed, eating a diet poor or abs…

I don’t think it’s quite as rare as you think. I don’t have sources to back this up at the moment but some common deficiencies include vitamin D, b12, magnesium, zinc, sulphur. Our modern practices have denuded the soil, plants and animals of a lot of their nutrients so nowadays it’s indeed hard to be at good levels of nutrients from diet

Re: Potato diet community trial

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a kidney patient and no nephrologist, or any other health worker, has ever advised me not to eat potatoes. I'll tell you what they all advised me to drastically reduce: salt. How do you feel about salt consumption? Excess salt consumption, typical in western and Asian diets, is a major risk for cardiovascular disease and for kidney disease (not kidney stones... kidney disease ). Are you similarly cautious of a hi…

I didn't mention anything about oxalates and general kidney health or kidney disease, only kidney stones. I haven't seen a reason for avoiding oxalates unless you're at risk for kidney stones, so I'm not sure what point you're making. > For stone prevention, a reasonable goal is below 100 mg of oxalate daily. An ideal would be about 50 mg daily if that can be accomplished. > POTATOES These are Trouble! I put them int…

My point is that people who avoid entire food groups, or foods that have one particular nutrient usually have very strange reasons to do so, that border on the metaphysical and are routinely misguided. Like the carnivore diet, or the various macrobiotic diets, for example.

But strangely those weird diets never center around cutting salt out (and some of the meat-only diets are also deliberately heavy in fats). My intuition is that this is because salt is almost addictive, because it is so tastey, and it is very, very difficult to get people to reduce salt in their diet, despite the damage it can cause.

Anyway it's still the case that none of my doctors or nurses have advised me to cut down on oxalate-heavy foods to avoid kidney stones, so I don't think you need to worry that much. If there is a risk, it's a risk only when considered at a population level and probably very low at an individual level.

Not that it will harm you to eat fewer potatoes. They're mostly starch anyway and I think at this point everyone agrees that too much starch can be a problem (because gaining weight is all too easy even without excess starch).

Re: Potato diet community trial

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mention anything about oxalates and general kidney health or kidney disease, only kidney stones. I haven't seen a reason for avoiding oxalates unless you're at risk for kidney stones, so I'm not sure what point you're making. > For stone prevention, a reasonable goal is below 100 mg of oxalate daily. An ideal would be about 50 mg daily if that can be accomplished. > POTATOES These are Trouble! I put them int…

My point is that people who avoid entire food groups, or foods that have one particular nutrient usually have very strange reasons to do so, that border on the metaphysical and are routinely misguided. Like the carnivore diet, or the various macrobiotic diets, for example. But strangely those weird diets never center around cutting salt out (and some of the meat-only diets are also deliberately heavy in fats). My int…

> Anyway it's still the case that none of my doctors or nurses have advised me to cut down on oxalate-heavy foods to avoid kidney stones, so I don't think you need to worry that much. If there is a risk, it's a risk only when considered at a population level and probably very low at an individual level.

Again, are you a kidney _stone_ patient? The vast majority of people don't form kidney stones, so there's no reason to expect being told to avoid oxalates if you're not talking specifically about them. I have received explicit advice from my doctors to avoid oxalates in order to minimize kidney stones (ditto for people I've known) so I will continue to follow my doctor's advice rather than an internet stranger, no offense.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An easy counterpoint is that Japan is a very healthy society with the lowest obesity rate in the developed world, and they actually have a mantra that says "eat 30 different foods every day". Japanese people directly attribute their health to the diversity and variety of their diet.

I thought that traditionally they ate rice as their main food and everything else was more or less a topping for the rice.

Yes, that's one of the big mindfucks in the nutrition world, which is that arguably the healthiest society on the planet has a diet high in sodium, refined carbs, and fried foods.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#238

This title is fairly disingenuous considering the test subjects are using vitamin supplements to make up for the obvious deficiency. The weight loss bits are just silly. Any sustained caloric deficit will cause one to lose fat, regardless of the source. This just seems to be rediscovering the already well-known fact that complex carbohydrates (which potatoes provide) keep you better satiated than simple carbohydrates…

Tbf, last time I was shown this blog it was to highlighy on their detailed arguments to the effect that eating less in general and less processed food in particular and exercising more wasn't an answer to obesity (a remarkable piece of analysis which concluded that the average American eating 20% fewer calories than a time when Americans were less obese was no big deal and couldnt possibly be causal) Quite why they h…

If the miracle cure for the obesity epidemic was “eat any food you want until you’re not hungry, just as long as you don’t eat processed food” then we wouldn’t have a mystery or a problem. We'd just have one set of people who knew how to prepare unprocessed food, and one set of people who chose to continue to eat processed food (and thus remained obese.) We could then deal with the obesity epidemic the same way we dealt with smoking.

But things are not that simple. There is no evidence that simply removing processed food is an effective enough diet to produce the sustained 10-20% weight loss (or more) that many obese Americans would need to experience in order to weigh the same as their grandparents. And in fact there is overwhelming evidence that this modest intervention (and several more extreme calorie restricted versions) tend not to produce durable weight loss in anywhere near that amount.

PS Don’t take this the wrong way. I really really wish that that diet did work. I would pay you literally thousands of dollars to make it work. Because our grandparents ate a very filling and diverse diet, and that diet would be effortless to follow.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that people who avoid entire food groups, or foods that have one particular nutrient usually have very strange reasons to do so, that border on the metaphysical and are routinely misguided. Like the carnivore diet, or the various macrobiotic diets, for example. But strangely those weird diets never center around cutting salt out (and some of the meat-only diets are also deliberately heavy in fats). My int…

> Anyway it's still the case that none of my doctors or nurses have advised me to cut down on oxalate-heavy foods to avoid kidney stones, so I don't think you need to worry that much. If there is a risk, it's a risk only when considered at a population level and probably very low at an individual level. Again, are you a kidney _stone_ patient? The vast majority of people don't form kidney stones, so there's no reason…

No offense and you shouldn't follow advice of internet strangers, but who gave you any advice in this thread?

Also, you never said you are a kidney stone patient. Just to be clear, are you? Is that why you're staying away from potatoes? Because you didn't say you are and I figured you were avoiding potatoes as a precaution against developing kidney stones.

Re: Potato diet community trial

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyway it's still the case that none of my doctors or nurses have advised me to cut down on oxalate-heavy foods to avoid kidney stones, so I don't think you need to worry that much. If there is a risk, it's a risk only when considered at a population level and probably very low at an individual level. Again, are you a kidney _stone_ patient? The vast majority of people don't form kidney stones, so there's no reason…

No offense and you shouldn't follow advice of internet strangers, but who gave you any advice in this thread? Also, you never said you are a kidney stone patient. Just to be clear, are you? Is that why you're staying away from potatoes? Because you didn't say you are and I figured you were avoiding potatoes as a precaution against developing kidney stones.

You wrote:

> I don't think you need to worry that much. If there is a risk, it's a risk only when considered at a population level and probably very low at an individual level.

If you want to be pedantic, then you didn't technically offer advice, just your opinion, in response to which I offered my opinion that your thoughts are irrelevant to me when I have direct advice from my doctor

> you never said you are a kidney stone patient. Just to be clear, are you?

As I stated, my doctor told me to avoid food high in oxalates, like potatoes, to avoid developing kidney stones. I try to spread the knowledge of oxalates and their impact on kidney stones because I only learned that information myself through others who shared with me. If you're not concerned about kidney stones, then that's great

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