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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

#91

Post by WorldMaker »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #64
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

All weight loss is because of a calorie deficit; that isn't (or shouldn't be) controversial. 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 defici…

> All weight loss is because of a calorie deficit; that isn't (or shouldn't be) controversial.

It's very controversial, which is part of why the SMTM blog exists in the first place. If running a calorie deficit were sufficient then any diet in the world should work, and we have so much evidence of obese people struggling with quality of life even living on extreme calorie deficit diets. It's not willpower, not all calories are equal, and there's a lot of questions about how useful calories are as a metric in general.

(I'm of the opinion food calories are the last bastion of Phlogiston Theory in any of the sciences. The Standard Calorie Model was invented at the bizarre Sanitarium at Battle Creek by vegetable-hating vegetarians who religiously thought grains were the one true food from God, and were designed to sell more cereals [Dr. Kellogg and his brother that founded the Kellogg Company], crackers, and even cookies [Dr. Graham who helped found Nabisco]. Food Calories are a poor metric of chemical content. Exercise Calories are worse metric of human energy output: The human body is not an ideal spherical furnace and the moments of highest heat output are dangerous conditions better known as "fevers" and "strokes". The Standard Calorie Model is "replicated science", but most of the replication studies were done by German scientists in the 1930s and 1940s and any replication crisis that involves possible war crimes makes other sciences' p-hacking crises look positively quaint. There is a lot of unsolved controversy around Food Calories.)

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

#92

Post by derbOac »

corry wrote: post #22

Does anyone remember a meta study that showed ANY even slightly reasonable restrictive diet works because they almost by definition dramatically reduced sugar and HFCS in the diet, and if you just controlled for that, the individual types of restriction didn't matter? I can't find it on PubMed or in my bookmarks. If memory serves - high/low fat, high/low carb, high/low protein, etc - didn't matter as long as the rest…

Yes, there was at least one meta-analysis several years ago that compared different diets to each each other and to exercise. I think there were actually two meta-analyses that came out about the same time, with slightly different foci, and came to similar conclusions.

What I remember was that diets didn't differ from one another in efficacy once you controlled for caloric restriction, and that dieting was more effective than exercise, although exercise did have a small but quantifiable effect.

I also think one of the meta-analyses compared atkins-style diets to others and concluded that there was some slight evidence for their superiority (in terms of weight loss) in the short term but that after a few weeks they didn't differ from the others.

I've worked in bariatric surgery units and my personal sense from that and reading some of the literature is that a lot of what works best is highly individual-specific due to all sorts of reasons, including personal food preferences, genetics, microbiome, etc etc etc. The standard explanation for diet working better than exercise is that the extra caloric expenditure of exercise gets washed out by excess intake; I think this is undoubtedly true but after having worked clinically in obesity settings, I also think it's really astonishing how little exercise some people get. That is, again, I think some people who start adding a modicum of exercise are likely to see huge gains from it simply because their caloric expenditure is starting so low; conversely, most people who take up exercise probably exercise within a certain range, so it doesn't say a lot about the expectable weight loss of someone who is really exercising intensely.

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

#93

Post by pr0zac »

corry wrote: post #22

Does anyone remember a meta study that showed ANY even slightly reasonable restrictive diet works because they almost by definition dramatically reduced sugar and HFCS in the diet, and if you just controlled for that, the individual types of restriction didn't matter? I can't find it on PubMed or in my bookmarks. If memory serves - high/low fat, high/low carb, high/low protein, etc - didn't matter as long as the rest…

The thing that fully convinced me over a decade ago that all effective methods for weight loss are just "calories in, calories out" underneath was the dude that lost 27lbs in 2 and a half months on a diet of mostly twinkies with occasional other junk food for variety. https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor...

Yes, there are other variables like hormone levels (thyroid adjacent ones particularly), genetics (defines base metabolic rate), drugs/chemicals (some effect metabolism), and dietary macros (too much sugar causing diabetes) which factor in to weight loss or gain, but its pretty clear at the end of the day all they are doing is modifying the numbers each individual needs to use in the same old calorie calculations, and very often not to a high degree.

I get its fun to play with theories and edge cases, but I don't understand why so many people find this simple, well established explanation unsatisfying and hard to accept.

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

#94

Post by pr0zac »

dalbasal wrote: post #75
tomxor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You will probably lose a lot of appetite 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.

Even ice cream or French fries have a decent shot at working.

Over a decade ago a dude proved you can lose weight eating mostly twinkies if the calorie math works. I don't think theres any food it wouldn't work with. https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor...

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

#95

Post by pr0zac »

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.

The problem is SMTM seems obsessed with finding some explanation for why the diet works other than it being an easy method to reduce calories and generally appears convinced theres a non-CICO explanation for obesity and weight loss/gain that these potato diet experiments will be able to discover.

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

#96

Post by bumby »

beanjuice wrote: post #84
bumby wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 'tra…

>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

I don't know that I agree. Because the world has an infinite number of variants to "the potato" but an individual has a finite amount of time to try them. So while I agree that there are a lot of confounding factors in biology, we still need some way to triage our efforts. Analyzing the results of controlled studies seems like the best way to do so, even if it's not guaranteed to work for a specific individual.

What I suspect will happen is that people will end up wasting too much time on endless "potato" variants that don't work, and they would have had better results on focusing on those controlled studies that show promise.* For every person that finds a diamond in the 'riff', there's probably countless people that found nothing (or worse, detrimental effects). We also have other tools, like meta-analysis, to help. That seems more effective that "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks".

* you can see this in the supplement space. There are people who are constantly spending money searching for the secret new supplement hack when they'd be better off focusing on the things that science has shown to consistently work. They end up majoring in the minors, as it were

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

dminor wrote: post #81
lawlessone wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by bscphil »

dminor wrote: post #81
lawlessone wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He also had congestive heart failure and his arteries were 30-40% blocked a year before his death. After he fell, he died during surgery to remove a blood clot in his brain. It's hard to say conclusively what caused his fall and ultimately his death, but we do know for a fact that he had heart problems.

I don't believe this matters either way, though. You shouldn't be basing your understanding of what a healthy diet looks like on the outcome for one individual. Experts in the field of human health do not believe that Atkins' diet was healthy, and that should suffice (though of course there are plenty of other unhealthy diets, some of which have problems that Atkins avoids).

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

#99

Post by bscphil »

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.

> I can easily eat a pound of potatoes mashed with a fork with olive oil and salt for example

1 pound of white potatoes + 2 Tbsp olive oil is only about 550 calories, and about half that is the olive oil. You've got a long way to go for the day if you're not on a starvation diet.

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

#100

Post by beanjuice »

bumby wrote: post #96
beanjuice wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 'tra…

> 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 I don't know that I agree. Because the world has an infinite number of variants to "the potato" but an individual has a finite amount of time to try them. So while I agree that there are a lot of confounding factors in biology, we s…

You're correct on all accounts, save for my optimism. Maybe the Riff can only work for something of this style when data feedback losing 10 lbs is large, compared to supplements, and the confines of the experiment are relatively limited (30 days). In hindsight, my comment was supposed to be 'its exciting that random people can get together and try to figure something out', and less about the difficulties of biology in science.
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