What this articles says is any diet which says you can eat the same number of calories and lose weight is lying. Some diets may make you want to eat less calories, but you cannot eat the same number of calories and lose more weight without doing more exercise.
In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
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Re: In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
#22This is taking dieting completely out of context. It's akin to saying that 1 gallon of fuel will result in the same amount of distance driven no matter how you drive. There are advantages to cutting out high GI carbs, since they lead to a spike in insulin which results in food cravings, tiredness and hunger. Switch the sugary cereal for the oats in the morning and you'll experience this first hand.
Citation needed.
Re: In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
#23We should eat well balanced diets that are tailored to each of us as individuals. I tried high fat high protein before and it didn't work very well with my metabolism, to spare you some details. Listen to your body, and give it what it needs. Experiment a bit. That's what I learned after trying fad diets. The realization is we are individuals each with our own metabolism that is slightly different. What I found is th…
> We should eat well balanced diets that are tailored to > each of us as individuals. vs. > What I found is that low carb diets are a big sham. ?
by "low carb diet" I am specifically referring to carb-restriction type diets like atkins that advocate eating an extraordinarily low amount of carbohydrates.
carbohydrates are an important macronutrient. the problem is not with carbs, but with bad carbs.
go visit some third world countries where they eat primarily carbs and find me the obese people. (hint: you won't find any)
Re: In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
He says that he can explain away the difference in calorie burning as an effect of the measuring method later in the article.
One thing is calorie burning (metabolism) and the other is weight loss (weight measurement), I don't think he would mix up the two naively
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Re: In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
#25We should eat well balanced diets that are tailored to each of us as individuals. I tried high fat high protein before and it didn't work very well with my metabolism, to spare you some details. Listen to your body, and give it what it needs. Experiment a bit. That's what I learned after trying fad diets. The realization is we are individuals each with our own metabolism that is slightly different. What I found is th…
You are contradicting yourself by stating that diets should be tailored to our needs but at the same time you slag off a diet that might fit someone else.
I am referring to extreme diets like atkins. My contention is that most "fad diets" aren't tailored to anyone's metabolism. What they're tailored to is profit.
Each of us needs to figure out a healthy ratio of carb/protein/fat.
Re: In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
#26The human body is the most complex piece of machinery in the history of the known universe, and is highly variable from one person to the next, with all sorts of evolutionary cruft and random aberrations. I understand we all need actionable information to maximize our odds at life, but any attempt at science journalism that doesn't start from that premise and instead tries to tell you "X good, Y bad" can probably be…
This particular article doesn't try to tell you "X good, Y bad", it's saying eat less, exercise more, or more specifically, if you want weight loss, as long as your diet leads to a caloric deficit, it doesn't matter _what_ you eat.
Re: In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
#27We should eat well balanced diets that are tailored to each of us as individuals. I tried high fat high protein before and it didn't work very well with my metabolism, to spare you some details. Listen to your body, and give it what it needs. Experiment a bit. That's what I learned after trying fad diets. The realization is we are individuals each with our own metabolism that is slightly different. What I found is th…
My great-grandfather ate white bread regularly from before 1910 and stayed thin all the way into his 90's. He spent his last ten years or so living with my family starting about when I was in middle school, so I remember it well. AFIK, he'd been eating the same kinds of stuff for 50 years -- cornflakes and whole milk for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and meat and potatoes with a few veggies for dinner.
Especially when looking at my own ancestors (all of whom were thinner than me 3 generations back), I tend to discount any sort of "oh they were just genetic freaks" kinds of arguments. None of them really dieted or deprived themselves, but they were used to pretty bland monotonous diets. I clearly remember ordering pizza in high school and they tried eating it with forks and knives and said they weren't big on "Italian food". The truth is it's the more recent generations who are the freaks. We're used to access to pretty much any kind of tasty, convenient food whenever we want it.
Re: In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We should eat well balanced diets that are tailored to > each of us as individuals. vs. > What I found is that low carb diets are a big sham. ?
by "low carb diet" I am specifically referring to carb-restriction type diets like atkins that advocate eating an extraordinarily low amount of carbohydrates. carbohydrates are an important macronutrient. the problem is not with carbs, but with bad carbs. go visit some third world countries where they eat primarily carbs and find me the obese people. (hint: you won't find any)
The problem isn't with carbs, protein, fat or subcategories of those, the problem is with more calories being eaten than calories being burned.
caloric intake > caloric burn -> weight gain
caloric intake = caloric burn -> weight stabilises
caloric intake weight loss
You can alter your caloric intake by changing the amount and type of food you eat. You can alter your caloric burn by changing the amount of exercise / labor you perform.
Re: In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
#29"Dr. Rudolph Leibel, now an obesity researcher at Columbia University, and I took people who were of normal weight and had them live in the hospital, where we diddled with the number of calories we fed them so we could keep their weights absolutely constant, which is no easy thing. This was done with liquid diets of exactly known calorie content."
Wow, how much does one get paid for agreeing to take part in something so terrible sounding?
Re: In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
#30Oh come on Yes, a calorie is a calorie (as long as dietary: macro/micro nutrients needs are supplied), still there may be advantages to the diet, as it is pointed in the article "They report that people on the Atkins diet were burning off more calories. Ergo, the diet is a good thing." (it's not necessarily all good especially if you think low-carb diet==eating bacon at will, still) Also, there may be other advantage…
"Ergo, the diet is a good thing" is what the proposers of that diet say. On the contrary , Dr. Hirsch says that "when carbohydrate levels are low in a diet and fat content is high, people lose water. That can confuse attempts to measure energy output" ergo, the measurements were mistaken and there is not advantage from a low-carbs diet (as proved from Dr. Hirschs's experiments in a controlled environment).
I think the snarky response would be that "in dieting unproven criticism of published scientific studies is no substitute for research."
I think it's fine to come up with such criticism as long as it leads to looking at and questioning the result and defining further studies, but......
One of my hobbies is history and archaeology. It's what I studied mostly in college (computing was just a hobby). One of the fascinating things is that diets where the primary calories come from carbs is associated in the archaeological record with both more dental problems (due to changes in the bacterial flora of the mouth) and shorter life expectancy than are lower carb diets.
So a diet where your main sources of calories are essentially a curdled milk, and dried fish with butter, and where your primary source of carbs (and use of grain) is from beer has a longer life expectancy, and a much lower dental problem rate than a diet where grains and breads are the primary source of calories.
One of the interesting things you can watch in the Scandinavian archaeological record is that during the conversion, grain production went up, life expectancy went down,and dental caries became far more common. Moreover the spread is sufficiently high that it cannot be accounted for by infant mortality. Average life expectancy at birth in the Viking Age (according to Else Roesdahl) was approx 45, though this probably did not include infanticides which poses some selection problem. But in France at the same time it was 20. Moreover the average life expectancy at age 20 in France at the time was only 35.
This doesn't mean that there weren't other factors involved such as changing standards of hygiene, or population changes that might not have had some impact. However I don't think one can say that diet had nothing to do with it.