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Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

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Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#81

Post by dminor »

lawlessone wrote: post #79
kbelder wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, though, an extreme diet to lose weight can allow you to make some lifestyle changes (such as exercising regularly) that do have lasting impacts. Being significantly overweight can really make physical activity difficult and demoralizing. I agree that it they often aren't sustainable and need to transition into a more sensible long-term diet.

We really need multiple words for diet. It means at least two different things: It can refer to specific planned period of eating a certain way to achieve a certain end. e.g. Atkins diet(please look up how he died before considering this), fodmap diet , low GI diet, potato diet It can also refer to the normal way a particular person at particular place and time in history eats. e.g The Roman diet, Celtic diet, Americ…

Atkins died of a head injury when he slipped on some ice, FYI

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#82

Post by pja »

elil17 wrote: post #28

I'm so disappointed by SMTM's trajectory. One of their key initial insights was that you don't need control groups for diet trials because essentially no one loses more than 10-20 lbs on a diet. You can just run the treatment group and, if you get lots of people losing more than that, you know you've got something. The flip side, of course, is that losing 10-20 lbs from a diet shouldn't be taken as proof that the die…

The difference is that people report that the potato diet is /easy/. No cravings, no endless hunger & having to force yourself to calorie count and stop eating when you hit your target. Eat as much as you like, when you like.

That’s radically different from other diets.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#83

Post by isk517 »

kbelder wrote: post #76
Taikonerd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I guess I'm saying a "good" diet is one that can be sustained indefinitely. The fact that an extreme diet produces good results in the short term isn't surprising or interesting, because virtually nobody can (or should) follow an extreme diet for the rest of their life.

Sometimes, though, an extreme diet to lose weight can allow you to make some lifestyle changes (such as exercising regularly) that do have lasting impacts. Being significantly overweight can really make physical activity difficult and demoralizing. I agree that it they often aren't sustainable and need to transition into a more sensible long-term diet.

I would imagine extreme diets are for viable for those that require extreme weight lose. Someone looking to lose 100+lbs would be able to use it to lose enough weight to become active again and start to make lifestyle changes that will support long term weight management. People looking to drop 10lbs though are very likely to gain it back once they start eating like a normal human again.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#84

Post by beanjuice »

bumby wrote: post #78
beanjuice wrote: post #10

Beautiful. We are in a golden era of citizen science, where access to knowledge, tools to connect, tools to process data, and the ability to communicate this is at an all time high. The kind of stuff you see on Youtube is amazing: people like AppliedScience achieving incredibly things in the garage, or recently NileRed took a nature paper [0] 1 step further and published it on youtube [1]). From a chemist/material sc…

> Whether the results of the Riff trial may ever have a p value suitable for nature/science, likely not. When it comes to the human body and our biology, a mass trial like this may even be more useful than traditional studies Can you explain this further? I'm curious about it, because at face value it seems like it is somewhat contradictory. On one hand, you're saying it won't likely be demonstrably significant enoug…

p values are meant to relate whether or not 'some' hypothesis is statistically relevant versus a control study. For something like biology, human nature, dieting, weight loss, in a world where you can't really control how stressed someone is, how far they walk to work, among 100 other things... if you're trying to find out how 'the potato' works, safe citizen science (a Riff trial) may be far more effective than 'traditional' proofs to get to the bottom of something that works, and then someone can do a controlled study.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#85

Post by ragazzina »

basisword wrote: post #67
bee_rider wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand how people could feel anything but love for potatoes, they are so perfect. Especially with a little salt and rosemary. And they have the perfect mouth-feel.

If I remember correctly you were allowed potatoes with no seasoning. So no butter, salt, pepper etc. The point was for it to basically be boring so that when you eventually have a bit of lettuce or a tomato you can’t help but love it. You no longer need sugar etc to really trigger your senses.

The link says:

- Seasonings are ok. Do what you can to keep yourself from getting bored. - Oil is ok.

Which sounds really strange - I can easily eat a pound of potatoes mashed with a fork with olive oil and salt for example, maybe more.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#86

Post by tobiasSoftware »

ulizzle wrote: post #44

So people lost weight and these people have “no idea why?” Well, ok, it’s calories, but why even bother to have any sort of study about this? Of course people who don’t know about calories would think they invented a whole new idea and methodology on scientific research

The SMTM theory is that obesity is not directly about counting calories, but more like a contagious disease due to a contaminant that causes people to be hungrier and eat more calories. Many people will dismiss this outright, but consider these things:

1. 40% of US adults are obese, which is insanely high for a willpower issue (gambling addiction is 1-2% for example)

2. The vast majority of weight loss attempts fail miserably long term, with success rates somewhere between 5-20%

3. There is precedent for this type of idea with stomach ulcers. We thought they were a psychological cause but the main cause turned out to be H Pylori bacteria

The problem is that even if they are right, it is very difficult to detect a difference between directly eating less calories and not eating a contaminant that makes you hungry so you indirectly eat less calories.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#87

Post by basisword »

ragazzina wrote: post #85
basisword wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly you were allowed potatoes with no seasoning. So no butter, salt, pepper etc. The point was for it to basically be boring so that when you eventually have a bit of lettuce or a tomato you can’t help but love it. You no longer need sugar etc to really trigger your senses.

The link says: - Seasonings are ok. Do what you can to keep yourself from getting bored. - Oil is ok. Which sounds really strange - I can easily eat a pound of potatoes mashed with a fork with olive oil and salt for example, maybe more.

Interesting (as you can tell I didn't read the article). I think the 'originator' of this diet was Penn Jilette (I listened to his podcast at the time), and when he did it I'm certain it was potatoes and nothing else.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#88

Post by francisofascii »

dalbasal wrote: post #60

Diets seriously need to be considered through the lens of Occam's razor. First, radical dietary changes cause rapid fluctuations in weight regularly. Not fat, weight. Second, if you eat only one thing or are generally restrictive... You will probably lose a lot of appetite. It's no good going off on some theory about pottasium. Occam's razor suggests that this also works for the been soup diet, fruit diet, etc. It is…

> They do not have magic dietary powers.

Depends on what diet you compare them to. If you could demonstrate people could live healthy lives on just potatoes compared to a normal Western diet, that seems like a significant finding. I don't think toast or bacon would give you the array of vitamins/nutritional value. What other foods would beat out potatoes? Beets maybe? I have also heard some dietitians questioning the "eat the rainbow" recommendation, and that having less food diversity is actually better. I am not suggesting limiting yourself to one food is ideal, but maybe limiting to just a few types foods is, depending on your genetics.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#89

Post by elil17 »

pja wrote: post #82
elil17 wrote: post #28

I'm so disappointed by SMTM's trajectory. One of their key initial insights was that you don't need control groups for diet trials because essentially no one loses more than 10-20 lbs on a diet. You can just run the treatment group and, if you get lots of people losing more than that, you know you've got something. The flip side, of course, is that losing 10-20 lbs from a diet shouldn't be taken as proof that the die…

The difference is that people report that the potato diet is /easy/. No cravings, no endless hunger & having to force yourself to calorie count and stop eating when you hit your target. Eat as much as you like, when you like. That’s radically different from other diets.

I guess it's easy on the hunger/cravings side of things but it eliminates your ability to enjoy food and enjoy the social aspect of dining. I achieved similar by swapping out white bread for whole wheat and mostly eliminating dessert from my diet. I also have no hunger/cravings/calorie counting but I still enjoy all my meals. I don't mean to say that any one diet is the answer, just that if your goals are modest you have many options that will work, and most will be more pleasant than the potato diet.

Re: Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol

#90

Post by WorldMaker »

Taikonerd wrote: post #15

I really enjoyed SMTM's "A Chemical Hunger" series[1]. But recently they've gone into weird fad-diet territory with their potato obsession. Like, they crow that the potato mono-diet "works," in that the people who successfully followed it lost weight. Well, sure -- all of those 70s fad diets "worked" in that sense! Grapefruit and popcorn? Sure, you can lose weight on that! But their own numbers show that people regai…

> But their own numbers show

This is part that keeps this potato diet stuff interesting to me is that they've been extremely open with the numbers, from the very beginning. Most fad diets you have no idea how many people participated or the particulars of their habits during the participation period and there was no follow-up at all beyond the participation period.

I don't think SMTM has "cracked" anything with the potato diet yet and I don't expect to see useful "answers" from SMTM, but they've been good so far at some of the raw bits of science: finding ways to ask interesting questions and recording as much data as possible about it, publishing that data, and then finding interesting new questions from that.

Sometimes I feel rather cynical that we'll not see any answers in my lifetime, but I appreciate a blog asking interesting questions and then trying to data science what they can around them to find more useful questions.

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