Biohacking Lite • Hacker News Board

Re: Biohacking Lite

#241

Post by JoeAltmaier » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:27 AM UTC

metrokoi wrote: post #172

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live near a college town, with food from dozens of nations. I can have crepes for breakfast, Vietnamese for lunch, good Italian for dinner. Tomorrow: steak and eggs at a diner for breakfast, sushi for lunch then dinner at a nice Czech place with cabbage and sausage. All cooked by immigrants or descendants of those heritages. But no, not typical. Most Americans buy all their food at the Dollar Store, and its everyth…

Most Americans buy their food at the grocery store, and there's nothing in them that wouldn't be found in any other country. Most Americans make their own meals with their families, which usually consist of meat, pasta, potatoes, and/or vegetables.

You're right - there are 40,000 grocery stores in America, and only 30,000 Dollar Stores and their like. So less than half of Americans buy from Dollar Stores, if patronage equals frequency of the store.

Buts Dollar stores are growing fast. That won't be true for long.

I wonder at the "make their own meals". Maybe from packets or reheating frozen stuff. But the meat counter sure isn't the largest section in the grocery store, not by a large margin.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#242

Post by ryeguy » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:31 AM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #195

RealityVoid wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am totally not convinced by this argument against sugar. Yes, sugar is calorie dense. Yes, it's easy to eat a lot of calories from sugar. But in the end, even eating NO sugar, if you eat a ton of things, you'll get fat. An then you go on to recommend honey as though there is something magic about it and not pretty much the same thing with sugar.

Not quite. Sugar spikes your insulin, insulin provokes fat storage. This does not happen with fat, so it is harder to get fat by eating fat. If you want to get fat, like a sumo ringer, simple carbs are the way to go.

Insulin is not required for fat storage. Insulin spikes do not create energy out of nowhere and don't suddenly make the same number of input calories multiply. Also, insulin spikes are nearly unpredictable anyway. Carbs aren't necessarily the trigger, protein and fat can be too. Sometimes foods are synergistic and spike insulin together more than eaten separately. Insulin spikiness is also determined by food in your stomach, further complicating things. For example, having fiber with a meal can "smooth out" an insulin spike.

I summarized some articles that dispel insulin voodoo here, if you're interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/j853z/insulin_an_u...

Re: Biohacking Lite

#243

Post by ryeguy » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:34 AM UTC

virtualritz wrote: post #233

RealityVoid wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am totally not convinced by this argument against sugar. Yes, sugar is calorie dense. Yes, it's easy to eat a lot of calories from sugar. But in the end, even eating NO sugar, if you eat a ton of things, you'll get fat. An then you go on to recommend honey as though there is something magic about it and not pretty much the same thing with sugar.

> But in the end, even eating NO sugar, if you eat a ton of things, you'll get fat. Not really. Try a ketogenic diet. You can eat tons food (including tons of fat) and still loose weight.

Yes really. Keto still follows calories in/out. Low carb diets are just a way of restricting calories without counting them. People naturally restrict calories when eating low carb -- this is the sole reason it works. You can eat twinkies and mcdonalds and still lose weight if you eat little enough. You can eat no carbs or sugar and still gain weight if you eat more calories than your body needs.

Every diet that doesn't involve directly counting calories tricks you into restricting them in some way, putting you in a caloric deficit. Period. This is how every diet works.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#244

Post by dialamac » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:39 AM UTC

gdebel wrote: post #216

dialamac wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We did not evolved to eat processed sugar, which is not easily found naturally in the environment The flour you make French bread with is not found any more or less naturally in the environment than the sugar you get from cane or beet. This whole thing about evolution and nutrition is entirely pseudoscientific woo. If humans had to eat the same way as our ancestors (ie actual paleo, not some hipster fad diet) human…

I respectfully disagree. Flour is basically crushed wheat. Refined sugar is not crushed beet, and you would have to eat a lot of beet to eat the same amount of sugar that you eat in a typical "industrial food" diet. I would not take paleo food as a reference, but rather look toward what our grandparents had for lunch when they were kids. I don't think they were doing so badly. And I don't cook like Bocuse everyday, t…

Well sugar beets excluding water content are about 85% sucrose. Sugar production and consumption dates to antiquity, long before mass western obesity epidemics, a luxury item. It essentially became a staple food in the North American diet in the 20th century.

Anyway, honey has a higher concentration of fructose so it has a lower GI than table sugar, but this difference is quite moderate (a few percent) - it seems to get overstated a lot on the web. Honey is basically refined/processed fuel produced by bees - and on evolutionary time scales it has been in use by humans about the same as sugar. Don’t get me wrong, it has chemical and physical properties that make it a beneficial sugar alternative - probably most of which is earlier satiety and therefore less consumption. If consumed in similar quantities it’s still going to make you fat. TANSTAAFL.

My grandparents are probably older than average... but the life expectancy was a fair bit shorter just 100 years ago. Most didn’t even get the opportunity to live long enough to have gastric cancer (smoked meats) or a second MI.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#245

Post by bsder » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:49 AM UTC

txcwpalpha wrote: post #97

gdebel wrote: post #51

I'm French (and incidentally a doctor,and my post is not judgemental in any way, this is not the point). Everytime I travel to the USA, I'm puzzled by how difficult it is to "eat normally" (= by my own standards). You can find really good junk food everywhere, or pay a really high price to eat in high-level Italian restaurants for example, but it is very difficult to eat standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-add…

The US has its issues with food (in particular, lower class individuals have trouble finding cheap food that isn't junk food), but I'm surprised to read the rest of your comments. I travel all around the US a lot for work (or did, pre-covid) and all the way down to your fast food restaurants all the way up to fancy $500/plate places, I've never once found it difficult to eat a "standard meat-with-vegetable-without-su…

> I've never once found it difficult to eat a "standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-added".

Actually, I find that a simply prepared, decent (not excellent, cut of meat) steak has now become a rare thing and is ferociously expensive.

I suspect that there is too much wastage of better meat cuts and that restaurant margins are so thin that every owner immediately cuts back the expensive stuff right away.

Anything other than turkey, chicken, salmon, or shrimp is now problematic to find as a protein. And, with the possible exception of certain kinds of salmon, all those flavors are bland enough that they almost always need something in the dish to help them out (cream, butter, sugar, etc.).

Re: Biohacking Lite

#246

Post by ryeguy » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

tonystubblebine wrote: post #37

If people are looking for alternative approaches to weight loss, I would consider simply buying a blood glucose monitor. They cost about $100 on Amazon or less and test strips less than $0.50. The thing that makes it alternative is that it sets you up to be reactive rather than prescriptive. A lot of people end up rebelling against prescriptive rules for eating and then fall off the wagon in frustration. The Blood Gl…

Insulin does not lead to increased weight gain. If this approach does work, it's because it's a roundabout way of eating lower calorie foods and thus lowering daily caloric intake.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#247

Post by cbsks » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:52 AM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #228

cbsks wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McDonalds lists the ingredients in their foods here: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/nutrition-... Their hamburger doesn't look any different than what I would make at home. I don't have any grocery store bought buns in front of me, but I assume it would have similar ingredients. The pickles are not the most natural, but once again, it's not much different than what I would buy in a grocery store. T…

> The bun is white bread, just like you can buy at the grocery store > Regular Bun: Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Sugar, Yeast, Soybean Oil, Contains 2% or Less: Salt, Wheat Gluten, Potato Flour, May Contain One or More Dough Conditioners (DATEM, Ascorbic Acid, Mono and Diglycerides, Enzymes), Vinegar. Each to their own! > You can…

I just checked some hamburger buns that I bought from my local grocery store. They were in the middle price range.

Enriched flour (wheat flour, barley malt, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, potato flakes, yeast, wheat gluten, sugar, 2% or less of: salt, soybean oil, soy flour, sodium stearoyl lactylate, corn flour, extratives of paprika and turmeric, calcium propionate, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate, sucralose, natural and artificial flavor, ascorbic acid, enzymes

So not much better than the McDonald’s buns, and maybe a little worse. I’m guessing that the above ingredients are all required for a hamburger bun that is both shelf stable and cheap.

I’m not sure what the takeaway of that is. Maybe I should get the more expensive and presumably more natural buns? Either way, the McDonald’s buns aren’t any worse than what most people are eating at home.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#248

Post by reitzensteinm » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:54 AM UTC

metrokoi wrote: post #165

GordonS wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bread is sweetened > Bread sucks I spent some months working in Houston a while back, and this drove me crazy! I mean, why on earth would you sweeten bread?! Another thing that struck me was how many ingredients everything seemed to have - you could pick up just about any item in a grocery store, and it was pretty much guaranteed to contain 10-30 ingredients. Even the bread. > Basic cheese in the US This too - most…

It's expensive to make good bread. Not in terms of raw materials, but in terms of labor. A machine cannot make a quality loaf of bread, you must gently knead it and let it ride with human hands. There is also a large cost in the right-on-time delivery of "good" bread. There is still quality bread sold at my grocery store, but that kind of bread isn't a staple because people don't want to go to the grocery store every…

I haven't tried American bread, but Australian is terrible compared to what you can get for little more than 1€ in Germany.

Presumably that's made without human involvement in each loaf.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#249

Post by ryeguy » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:58 AM UTC

gdebel wrote: post #51

I'm French (and incidentally a doctor,and my post is not judgemental in any way, this is not the point). Everytime I travel to the USA, I'm puzzled by how difficult it is to "eat normally" (= by my own standards). You can find really good junk food everywhere, or pay a really high price to eat in high-level Italian restaurants for example, but it is very difficult to eat standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-add…

Calorie count _is_ the key. This is incredibly well established in studies. Weight loss does not occur without caloric deficit, no matter what you eat. Likewise, weight loss will occur in caloric deficit even when eating what people would consider "junk", including sugar. See The Twinkie Diet, for example: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

Avoiding food because "we didn't evolve to eat" is not sound science, either.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#250

Post by danieltanfh95 » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 2:59 AM UTC

A little note from a systemic biology perspective, I've tried this for great results, it's amazing that we've this focus on sugars and fats and what not when we ignore the fact that our body is just more clever than we think.

No matter what you eat and how much you eat, your body will always try to return to normalcy as soon as possible. However, this action itself, metabolizing the excess, is a very energy consuming act. As shown by multiple research, more fat and protein in your diet is harmful and counter-intuitively you need more carbs.

Here we need to view the body as a full system. In fact, just looking at the metabolic cycles should hint at the real reason why people stay fat, but it's a very subtle message.

Drink more water, and avoid ingesting cold things. Eat as normal when your body wants it.

That's pretty much it. Water is needed almost everywhere in the metabolic cycle, and yet it's really dependent on our ability to drink and absorb water. Notably, cold water diffuses slower than warm water, so our body can't absorb it as well. Drinking water solutions like Coke where diffusion favours the Coke than your body cells also hampers absorption. So TLDR: drink warm water.

Next would be eating. Sugars are easily metabolized by your body and are low investment food compared to everything else. However, eaten in excess when your body no longer needs it causes it to be stored as fat, which requires a lot of water and energy. You see where I'm going at? When your body feels hungry, most of the time it means it's processing something and it needs more energy, so we should give it something that's easier to process.

So that's what I've been trying, it actually shocked me with the results. I've been testing with some TCM tea that helps with digestive system functions and it works even faster.