Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

The interesting questions are why a diet produces a caloric deficit, and how difficult that deficit is to maintain.

The "don't eat anything and drink nothing but water" diet produces a caloric deficit through a very obvious mechanism, but it isn't something people can adhere to long-term.

Semaglutide produces a caloric deficit by turning off the mechanisms that make people want to eat, and appears to be sustainable long-term (assuming you can financially afford it).

With the potato diet, the question isn't exactly "why did they lose weight?" but more "why did participants reduce their calories?" Were they so sick of goddamned potatoes that they couldn't bare to shove another one down their throat? If so, that indicates that the diet is unsustainable. On the other hand, if people were enjoying the diet and reduced their calories because the potatoes left them feeling fuller, longer, that's a mark in the protocol' favor.

Weight loss studies aren't about finding ways to reduce calories, they're about finding ways to reduce calories that people will comply with. And based on how often diets fail, and how often people regain all (or more) of the weight lost once they stop dieting, I would argue that we actually haven't figured out the answer to this yet.

This, probably almost any natural food that is not too sweet will work.

Overeating manufactured "food" devoid of nutrition, pumped full of sugar and refined carbs has become the default in the western diet... That a potato-only diet is an improvement highlights just how bad it has become.

I wanted to enjoy that series because exploring alternate factors in obesity is interesting, but the series similarly went into a weird obsession with lithium as an explanation for everything. He almost immediately started ignoring evidence that didn’t fit his theory and obsessively focused on cherry-picked evidence that was favorable to the story he wanted to tell.

Others have posted links to various debunking articles of the series, but the part that made me lose interest was even earlier: He has a section where he acknowledged that caloric intake was up over the same period of increased body weight, but then tried to dismiss this as irrelevant. I can’t take anyone’s writings on obesity seriously if they don’t believe increased caloric intake is correlated with increased obesity.

The series is written in a rationalist style that appeals to many people, but the content and logic within were not very scientific or even representative of the sources he cited at times. It’s a good example of how the right prose can be very convincing.

My guess is that it probably works, at least to an extent. The reason I used the word "probably" is I didn't stick with it long enough to lose over 10 lbs. This is because it's probably the least pleasant weight loss technique I've tried. No joke, I'd rather eat nothing the whole time. Eating potatoes seems awesome at first, but I began to really hate the taste and texture after just a few days. This is of course my opinion. Some people have had great results on it. It's just not for me. I know the author of this article doesn't agree on this at all, but I beg to differ. Almost every other technique is more comfortable for me. Though I'm sure it'd be fine if I added lots of fat and ketchup. I just wasn't going to do that and risk gaining a bunch of fat.

Off the top of my head, here are all the possible ways that a monodiet of potatoes can result in weight loss:

- Potatoes are a highly-satiating food, one of the highest in satiety

- Potatoes get boring without lots of added fat, salt, and spices.

- Potatoes may contain some "resistant" starch, though I've seen a few people self-experiment with resistant starch and conclude that it's no different than consuming glucose.

- A potato diet mostly engages the metabolism of glucose and not so much with fat (unless you're adding a ton of fat), so the Randle cycle is engaged much less, hypothetically. Though this is supposedly contradicted by people eating potatoes with heavy cream.

- Potatoes only cause a small increase of uric acid in the blood in contrast with other foods, uric acid having a correlation with fat mass. Then again, there are people who eat diets that cause a higher increase in uric acid and remain lean and muscular (carnivore diet is an example).

- Sarcopenia from a lack of dietary protein can cause some net weight loss.

Most other ideas I've seen are pure hypotheses that either aren't that plausible, or are untested, or are mechanisms only demonstrated in vitro.

Some things I'd like to note about this crowd study and what I'm reading in this proposal:

- Allowing participants to choose their own adventure is a poor design. There's definitely value in testing different combinations of adjunct foods along with the potato diet, but this should be controlled based on how many participants sign up. The cohort might otherwise become lopsided towards a certain preparation, adding sour cream, etc. Instead, candidates should be assigned an adjunct and be allowed to accept or reject the challenge.

- The part about "If you can’t get potatoes, eat something else rather than go hungry, and pick up the potatoes again when you can" really reduces the potential value of this experiment. This may add too much noise. It's already bad enough that people are bad at self-reporting, but now you're giving people permission to just do whatever.

- Participants should record their physical activity. This will of course be full of statistical noise, but it might as well be recorded in case it's helpful. Have them record their activity for at least a month prior to the trial and record it during the trial. The reason I think this is a good idea is that, when dieting, people may have a tendency to put themselves into an "I'm getting healthy" mindset which encourages them to also get exercise, which is a confounding factor here.

- Day-by-day body weight data is mostly worthless. I would explicitly encourage participants to not record their weight at all except at the beginning and end of the trial. Daily weight checks can have a psychological effect that may encourage the participant to perform actions that confound the trial, such as walking more or eating less than they otherwise would in order to make sure they get the intended result. This can happen unconsciously.

Otherwise, I think this idea is awesome and that more crowd "riff trials" should be done.

Does anyone know of a site dedicated to riff trials? If there isn't one, it should definitely exist.