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Thoughts on the potato diet

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Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#401

Post by iudqnolq »

bee_rider wrote: post #86
toolz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it does sound that way, but it's amazing how many anecdotes there are of people who eat exclusively 1 type of food and thrive on it. I don't think modern intuition about nutrition is likely to stand the test of time.

The conclusion I have come to is that humans, when starting from an over-fed modern baseline, are robust enough to eat a totally shit diet for a couple months. This is also long enough to convince us it is worth blogging about.

The subculture of long-distance hikers who optimize by going fast and light (maybe 1-3 lbs food per day plus 10-20lbs of gear). They'll go for months on extremely weird diets that optimize for calories per gram while doing more exercise than they've ever done and generally be fine.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#402

Post by TillE »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #381

While I love the idea of only eating one food for money and practical reasons... Potatoes are so utterly boring. Diets only work if you can stay on them without being miserable, and I know if all I could eat was potatoes I would be pretty miserable about that. Also, any diet that requires supplements(Vitamin B12, probably some other vitamins that are fairly low in potatoes, and whatever essential amino acids are miss…

> only eating one food for money and practical reasons

"One food" is a little silly, but "one meal" is something I've always been trying to achieve on a low carb / keto diet.

My latest thing: chicken wings. They're something I can buy in small quantities for fairly cheap, and they taste great completely unseasoned, which makes limiting my sodium intake far easier.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#403

Post by matthewdgreen »

billjings wrote: post #148
exolymph wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...

Thanks! I'm not completely sold on the lithium hypothesis, either. But I find their arguments for some kind of environmental contaminant compelling, especially for the ways in which they refute some of the other major hypotheses for the increase in body weights (e.g. food variety, processed food, etc) Note that the SMTM folks recently published an article responding to the TDS data referred to by "It's Probably Not L…

We now have FDA-approved GLP-1 receptor agonists like Semaglutide that produce sustained weight loss of a magnitude similar to the weight gain discussed in that article. So the idea that something similar could be messing with this or a similar pathway hardly seems shocking to me, even if lithium perhaps isn’t the culprit.

(As an aside: we’ve also learned that proteins produced by certain gut bacteria have a similar effect on the same pathway, so it’s not crazy to imagine that gut dysbiosis could have an effect on weight gain. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00880-5)

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#404

Post by nikkwong »

trentgreene wrote: post #285
diordiderot wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be much much more than CICO. If you want to read an epic saga on modern obesity and it's theories check out https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

It seems like everything in that article reinforces CICO. Is there something that diverges from the CICO model that I might be missing? E.G. it’s examples of the Maasai and Inuit eating higher calories make a lot of sense when you consider their exposure to temp extremes and additional cal burn coming from thermoregulation (along with probably elevated levels of daily activity). Most of the nuance I’ve seen around CI…

CICO may be scientifically valid but it's useless in practical terms. People who tend to be constipated absorb much more energy from their food and those with fast digestive tracts absorb much less. Everyone is somewhere on that spectrum, so, from person to person, you would never have a practical way to assess what the CI or the CO is in the CICO model.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#405

Post by nikkwong »

friedman23 wrote: post #51
safety1st wrote: post #30

There's actually some science behind this diet. Potatoes are the highest scoring food on the satiety index. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/15-incredibly-filling-f... Basically they're the most filling food per calorie. So if you subscribe to the idea that losing weight is mainly about how many calories you consume, a potato heavy diet should be effective. And an all potato diet, while monomaniacal, even more ef…

I wonder where the misinformation that potatoes were unhealthy / fattening came from? Was it from french fries and fried starches?

Potatoes tend to be unhealthy via the methods that most people use to cook them [1] because of the formation of acrylamide, a potent carcinogen [2]. In fact potatoes are the food that delivers the highest amount of acrylamide in the American diet through the consumption of chips and french fries. But other methods of cooking like baking, frying, or even microwaving are also prone to forming acrylamide.

If you want to avoid acrylamide when cooking potatoes, you must cook them below 250F (pressure cooking or steaming, I think)?

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18320571/

[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-contaminants-food/acrylami....

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#406

Post by shigawire »

rootusrootus wrote: post #359
bergenty wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I went to the Irish potato famine museum in Ireland they said the average person needed a basketful of potatoes per day . That doesn’t seem like it’s high in the satiety index.

I can find claims that people were eating 14 pounds a day. That seems implausible. They'd have been really fat on nearly 5000 Calories per day.

Athletes or active teens could eat that much easily

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#407

Post by seadan83 »

emmanuel_1234 wrote: post #257
seadan83 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the debunking that fats are not bad for you, though, not all fats are equal. The rule of thumb is that fats that remain liquid at body temperature can be considered "dietary fat". The only problem with "dietary fat" is they have a load of energy on them and that can blow your calorie budget for the day quite easily if you overdo them. Fats though that stay solid at body temperature arguably should be com…

I'd be curious to understand where you get that information from. Fat that stays solid at room temperature is generally high in saturated fat (except for margarin, but let's keep it out). Fat that stays liquid is generally vegetable oil (e.g.: canola). I don't think there is strong evidence that vegetable oil is good for you whereas saturated fat is not. If so, I'd really like to read about it.

For fat vs sugar (ie: carbs), this was a very informative reading: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co...

Overall, I don't know of a lot of good science regarding which fats are better for you and which are actually bad. After all it was not until recently that it was admitted that the relationship between cholesterol in the blood and cholesterol is uncorrelated and not at all understood. Similarly even for calories, just because a food has X calories, does not mean you actually absorb all of those calories, let alone how the body uses them.

For the rule of thumb, I have no specific references and it is general knowledge I've picked up reading on nutrition. It could very well be wrong. I believe there is something to it, for example, coconut oil is relatively good for a person and has a low melt point, where-as bacon grease and steak gristle are pretty certainly terrible for a person.

Trying to find some references, I was not able to find the original reading where I stumbled upon that idea. This was a decent read though that I just came across: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/healthy-vs-unhealthy-fa... (YMMV)

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#408

Post by trentgreene »

nikkwong wrote: post #404
trentgreene wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like everything in that article reinforces CICO. Is there something that diverges from the CICO model that I might be missing? E.G. it’s examples of the Maasai and Inuit eating higher calories make a lot of sense when you consider their exposure to temp extremes and additional cal burn coming from thermoregulation (along with probably elevated levels of daily activity). Most of the nuance I’ve seen around CI…

CICO may be scientifically valid but it's useless in practical terms. People who tend to be constipated absorb much more energy from their food and those with fast digestive tracts absorb much less. Everyone is somewhere on that spectrum, so, from person to person, you would never have a practical way to assess what the CI or the CO is in the CICO model.

Au contraire, it's very useful. If you want someone to lose weight, calculate their BMR + their rough activity based cal burn, and give 'em a 15% deficit. They'll lose weight. Not just water and glycogen. They will burn fat.

If you want someone to gain weight, do the same calc, tell 'em to eat 100 more calories. Not gaining? 200. Really not gaining? Wow, fast metabolism, shock 'em with 500 extra. Anecdata, but the only time I saw someone not slowly gain on 200 extra, there ended up being a lot of walking we weren't accounting for in our maintenance cal calculation. Our O in CICO was off. For reference, 200 cals is like a 16 oz of coke, or 2-3 apples. Decently precise.

The variance between a fast and slow metabolizer isn't 20% of daily calorie burn, maybe 10% on the high end. Guesstimation, probably more like 5%. Well within the tolerances that are used for weight modulation (up or down).

If it weren't the case, why are so many body builders (natty or enhanced) able to run repeated bulking and cutting cycles? Are they genetic outliers?

Can you calculate it 100%? Nope -- so many variables, probably tons we don't even know about yet. But it's accurate enough to be very effective, and very simple to implement.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#409

Post by com2kid »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #388
com2kid wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thousand calories of peanut butter is one cup , 8oz, of peanut butter. Maybe 4 or 5 good spoonfuls. I'm willing to bet that almost any healthy adult could down 4 spoons of peanut butter w/o issue, and that most people would end up being way over their calorie limit for the day as their body wouldn't go "yup that was lunch and half of dinner! All good now!"

The quantity given was in calories, about 1/2 of what you need in a day. Yes PB is heavy, yes that amount should register.

Drink a glug of olive oil. You'll probably be very regular on the toilet the next day, but your body will still ask for more calories, despite the 500+ you just consumed.

4 spoon fulls of peanut butter may or may not register. That many calories in a very short time frame often does not.

Re: Thoughts on the potato diet

#410

Post by seadan83 »

autoexec wrote: post #255
seadan83 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My unsupported personal belief is that the human body processes different carbohydrates in very different ways. Carbs that come from starch are not equivalent to carbs from cane sugar, and yet again not equivalent to honey, and again not equivalent to high fructose corn sryup, and again different from breads & pasta. Ratio of fiber to carbohydrate and how that carbohydrate is processed by the body is also important a…

> Unrelated, and unsolicited 2 cents, IMO it's all about eating as many fibrous and leafy greens as possible. At that point, a moderate side of lean meat, potato, carb, practially whatever - does not matter so long as the fibrous and leafy greens are the majority source of calories. If you eat a meal with a small steak and a baked potato, how many pounds of salad would you need to consume to get the majority of your…

Don't forget those broccoli stalks! But I think you make the point though, it's a lot of veg if you are going to be getting half of your calories or more from veg alone. Which also means you are going to feel pretty satiated and full from eating all that low calorie density food.

I was a bit curious about the actual answer here. 1 oz steak has about 70 calories, 1 cup broccoli has about 30 calories. Seemingly you then need about a 3:1 ratio of servings veg to steak to hit that majority threshold.

A whole potato has about 110 calories (about 150g), and broccoli by the same weight has about 50 calories, so about 2:1.

Lettuce is known for having almost no calories in it, similar to tomatoes and cucumbers... There are lots of veg's out there, so don't just compare lettuce calories to the steak calories. "fibrous" greens include asparagus, brussel sprouts, bok choy, peppers, etc.. etc..

So.. to get that majority calories, two servings asparagus, one serving broccoli, a large salad, a small potato, and a tiny steak every third day or so or even less often would do it. There are also beans, lentils, whole-grains, plenty of sources so it's not just meat-potatos and leaves alone.

On another front, that majority calories from veg means you are getting a ton of nutrients and are actually eating quite a lot.

The idea of 'low calorie density' comes from this video by "Dylan Thomas" a professional cyclist and coach that produces a lot of data-based videos (and in the video, he goes into the studies and the science): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPVHGt3Nf9U (minute 9:00 is where he talks about having a majority veg diet)

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