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People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

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Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#421

Post by 3vidence »

Pigalowda wrote: post #375
wrfrmers wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful) because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your physiology, per nutrient intake. CICO helps explain weight ma…

What happens if I ingest 0 calories for 3 months?

To parents point your metabolism will drastically change over those 3 months and the rate at which you lose weight will change.

Additionally the distribution of your muscles and fat will also change.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#422

Post by 3vidence »

Spivak wrote: post #189
everdrive wrote: post #81

A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we n…

Oh hey, I'm the wife in this story. Having a fixed $/month budget for "things you buy at a grocery store" was doomed from the beginning. All the stuff in your house/pantry are on all kinds of weird replacement cycles that vary with usage and changes in habits. A monthly cadence also makes you sub-optimally plan around price movements. An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you…

I think this also summarizes the issues a lot for people on HN face.

Oversimplification and over confidence in estimation.

Engineers tend to do this a lot.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#423

Post by 3vidence »

tomrod wrote: post #133
lm28469 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they track absolutely everything including each trial subject microbiome, hormone profile, &co over time, I still feel it just won't cut it. Plus it doesn't even matter what is true for the statistical average, given the infinite amount of variables and outcomes one glass of wine might be statistically beneficial but absolutely terrible for your own health because you have one specific gene combination or one s…

Actually, this is why stats exists in the first place. Larger samples (including metastudies) are so powerful -- you can measure and predict causal impact of test factors even if you can't control for unobservables. The goal is to minimize type 1 and type 2 error. So long as those unobservables are not driving a selection bias, you get wonderful things like the central limit theorem coming to the rescue. No one can m…

This somewhat feels like 2 layer neural networks are a universal predictor.

It is true in the limit but not useful in practice.

When it comes to studying food / diet studies really do need to be a lot more careful about trying to control their variables.

Nutrition science as a field seems to have few absolute truths and many many overturned papers / results.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#424

Post by graeme »

derbOac wrote: post #140
everdrive wrote: post #81

A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we n…

It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat, which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to lose weight. Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value. I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think…

My opinion is the only reliable way to lose weight (other than ozempic) is to eat in such a way that regulates satiety such that you don't feel hungry when losing weight.

Intermittent fasting + lower carb + whole foods can do this. But the trick is satiety in any one person is regulated by multiple processes. I doubt there's a one size fits all and probably the problem gets harder the more satiety is dysregulated.

But I think any approach aimed at undereating in the sense of being hungry is not likely what people who lose weight successfully are doing. Or at least those who avoid rebounds. You'd instead want to find something that is highly satiating and satisfying and that also can't be overeaten.

Example: almonds may be high satiety by some technical definition. But is is very very possible to eat past hunger with them.

In my own experience it is very difficult to eat too much steak. I find it delicious but simply couldn't past a certain point. Others have reported similar results by adding lots of potatoes.

I don't guarantee success by targeting satiety but I think it's worth trying rather than calories or weight directly. At some level you need to roughly figure out macronutrients to know where you can err but anytime I've lost weight it's been by focussing on type of food rather than amount. But strictly so.

Re potatoes: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/12/lose-10-6-pounds-in...

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#425

Post by toast0 »

wnorris510 wrote: post #403
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love for developers to stop messing with most apps.

Haha, you say this until Apple does a breaking change to the barcode library or Apple Health export and things stop working. Then you probably want them to change some stuff :)

It would be nice if OS vendors would stop breaking things, too.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#427

Post by rolisz »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #294
colechristensen wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also there are ways to convince your body that it needs less, and the journey from A to B is very uncomfortable. If you do it wrong you will just endlessly be suffering from your body thinking it's starving. On top of that though is you have to get over your intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to eat.

This is so dismissive it's almost condescending. I know how much food I need to eat in order to survive and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of food, I'm still hungry . Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches, which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak pa…

How much protein were you getting on the high protein diet? For a long time I heard about "get lots of protein, it helps with satiety" and I thought I had enough protein. When I went to a nutritionist and she made me do a food journal, her first feedback was that I needed to up the proteins even more. And then indeed, I stopped feeling as hungry.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#428

Post by madrasman »

UomoNeroNero wrote: post #200
wnorris510 wrote: post #130

I've done research in this space for many years at Google AI and now at SnapCalorie. The thing I find interesting is how confident people are in their ability to estimate portion size visually, and in truth how wrong they all are. We published in CVPR (top peer reviewed academic conference for computer vision) and people are on average off by 53% and even trained professionals are still off by 40%. Basically if you w…

I have been diabetic for 20 years. I have tried every method, app, plan, and tool, including systems falsely marketed as "smart." No method works or delivers decent results except for using a scale and weighing ALL the ingredients. For a diabetic, eating "out" is always a roll of the dice. The "fun" feedback from post-meal blood sugar is always a reminder of how "eyeballing a plate" is utterly useless.

I worked at Noom and the most successful users weighed the ingredients. Many users were frustrated about not losing weight even with calorie deficit, but the issue was they weren't logging accurately or skipped logging snacks and meals that were clearly not good.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#429

Post by madrasman »

TypingOutBugs wrote: post #6

I try calorie count with My Fitness Pal and holy shit it’s a lot of effort. Eat out and you’re screwed (estimated at best). When you include sauces and oils etc it’s really hard to be accurate in the best of times, and it’s just a pain to keep on top of. Best option is to avoid any so you don’t have to count. I imagine almost everyone will add bad data in a study at some point with the best of intentions.

Yeah the best option is to meal plan and follow the plan vs letting your mind make on-the-fly decisions. But ofc, that isn't always feasible.

Re: People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

#430

Post by interludead »

foxyv wrote: post #240
UomoNeroNero wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been diabetic for 20 years. I have tried every method, app, plan, and tool, including systems falsely marketed as "smart." No method works or delivers decent results except for using a scale and weighing ALL the ingredients. For a diabetic, eating "out" is always a roll of the dice. The "fun" feedback from post-meal blood sugar is always a reminder of how "eyeballing a plate" is utterly useless.

It doesn't help that food manufacturers intentionally make it hard to measure nutrition from most of their foods. They play around with serving sizes to hide carbohydrates making you have to do math just to keep up. Sometimes they will round down on grams of macros after setting the serving size so they can claim it has zero sugar when it does in fact have tons of sugar. Tic-tacs are the worst about this. They claim…

And I think there's also a psychological angle here, for instance when people see that something claims to be zero sugar or low carb, it can trigger a sense of relief or permission to indulge.
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