> A human body is like an iPhone with a battery pack that can grow nearly indefinitely, and with the abundance of food around us we scarcely unplug from the charging outlet. In this case, the batteries are primarily the adipose tissue and triglycerides (fat) stored within, which are eagerly stockpiled (or sometimes also synthesized!) by your body to be burned for energy in case food becomes scarce.
Incidentally, this is how/why liposuction works: if you remove fat cells from a certain area, your body can't store fat in that spot anymore. The flip side being that if you gain weight afterwards, it still has to go somewhere, but you can't/won't store fat in the lipo'd spot.
And you can't remove every single fat cell in your body because you do need to store fat to stay alive, but it's good for sculpting specific areas.
(I should add that I got a bit of lipo done ~6 months ago and I'm loving it so far. Very little in the way of pounds shed, but it made a huge difference for my silhouette, which is what I wanted.)
I am now reading _Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution_, Cat Bohannon's fascinating book on the female body from an evolutionary perspective. Only the first few chapters blew my mind a couple of times. Here is something she writes about liposuction:
> It seems that women who have liposuction on their hips and thighs do grow back some of their fat, but they grow it back in different places. [...] As it turns out, women’s fat isn’t the same as men’s. Each fat deposit on our body is a little bit different, but women’s hip, buttock, and upper thigh fat, or “gluteofemoral” fat, is chock-full of unusual lipids: long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, or LC-PUFAs. (Think omega-3. Think fish oil.) Our livers are bad at making these kinds of fats from scratch, so we need to get most of them from our diet. And bodies that can become pregnant need them so they can make baby brains and retinas.
> Most of the time, female gluteofemoral fat resists being metabolized. As many women know, these areas are the first places we gain weight and the last places we lose it. But in the last trimester of pregnancy—when the fetus ramps up its brain development and its own fat stores—the mother’s body starts retrieving and dumping these special lipids by the boatload into the baby’s body. This specialized hoovering of the mother’s gluteofemoral fat stores continues throughout the first year of breast-feeding—the most important time, as it happens, for infant brain and eye development. Some evolutionary biologists now believe that women evolved to have fatty hips precisely because they’re specialized to provide the building blocks for human babies’ big brains. Since we can’t get enough of those LC-PUFAs from our daily diet, women start storing them from childhood forward. Other primates don't seem to have this pattern.
> Meanwhile, we found out just a few years ago--again someone finally asked the question--that a human girl's fat may be one of the best predictors for when she'll get her first period. [...] That is how important this fat is for reproduction. Our ovaries won't even kick in until we've stored up enough of this fat to form a decent baseline.
Cryolipolysis (commonly referred to as “fat freezing” where the area is cooled down to the temp that kills fat cells but not surrounding cells) has the same effect.
Interesting (to me at least): the process was borne from the inventor theorizing that their child’s dimples were caused by the child keeping popsicles in their mouths.
Evolution indeed gave us fat storage which is one of those traits becoming unnecessary in the post industrial world of abundance. The problem is our body is more adapted to the too little rather than to the too much. E.g: fasting comes with a flurry of benefits (autophagy, mitophagy, ketones, microbiome reset, inflammation control....) in the absence of which our overall metabolism slowly poisons itself - you know the story, obesity, diabetes and so on.
BTW keto (fast mimicking) diet was invited in the 20s in the Mayo clinic to cure epileptic children. I encourage people to have a look at the fascinating "Brain Energy" book from Chris Palmer (or watch him on youtube) to see what's underneath it and how metabolism and brain efficiency are linked
The Mifflin-St Jeor equation equation for working out Base Metabolic Rate, as stated in this post, is for males. The original subtracts a different constant for females (-161 instead of -5). It is a 1990 paper. And it subtracts these arbitrary constants independent of the other variables, makes me think its limited in its usefulness.
I believe that weight training, maybe even cardio, increases this BMR for many hours after the workout, so I dont agree with the "not a major contributor to losing weight" argument if its done regularly.
I think it's probably based off the empirical observation that in studies of free-living individuals, moderate increases in exercise output simply don't result in weight loss.
The thinking is that our bodies are very good at recognizing a calorie deficit and respond very effectively by increasing spontaneous intake to balance the calorie budget. It often only takes very small increases in intake -- so low they can easily go unnoticed (or that people deny they could have happened, again why metabolic ward studies are so vital) -- to obliterate the calorie expenditure of moderate exercise.
yeah, it's a bit strange. generally, most papers say exercise isn't a huge contributor but at least in my case it makes all the difference. theoretically muscle mass burns few additional calories (see https://www.strongerbyscience.com/calories-muscle-burn/) and you have to a lot of cardio to significantly push the envelope.
as soon as i start weight training 3 times a week or endurance training 5 times a week (i'm bad at combining the two) i have to up my intake significantly just to keep my weight at the same level and gaining often means eating more than i'm comfortable with (considering my dietary preferences).
where they conclude ".. vigorous exercise for 45 min resulted in a significant elevation in postexercise energy expenditure that persisted for 14 h. The 190 kcal expended after exercise above resting levels represented an additional 37% to the net energy expended during the 45-min cycling bout"
How does the paper you posted, about post exercise oxygen consumption, relate to weight loss as we have been discussing here?
I don't mean this to be flippant, I just don't have time to do a deep dive on this paper and you didn't provide any context.
Reading the abstract is always a good start! ;PPPP
"A number of investigators in the first half of the last century reported prolonged EPOC durations and that the EPOC was a major component of the thermic effect of activity. It was therefore thought that the EPOC was a major contributor to total daily energy expenditure and hence the maintenance of body mass. Investigations conducted over the last two or three decades have improved the experimental protocols used in the pioneering studies and therefore have more accurately characterized the EPOC. Evidence has accumulated to suggest an exponential relationship between exercise intensity and the magnitude of the EPOC for specific exercise durations.
...
Notwithstanding the aforementioned, the earlier research optimism regarding an important role for the EPOC in weight loss is generally unfounded. This is further reinforced by acknowledging that the exercise stimuli required to promote a prolonged EPOC are unlikely to be tolerated by non-athletic individuals. The role of exercise in the maintenance of body mass is therefore predominantly mediated via the cumulative effect of the energy expenditure during the actual exercise."
> Avoid sugar like the plague, including carbohydrate-heavy foods that immediately break down to sugar (bread, rice, pasta, potatoes), including to a lesser extent natural sugar (apples, bananas, pears, etc - we’ve “weaponized” these fruits in the last few hundred years via strong artificial selection into actual candy bars), berries are ~okay.
This is not an evidence-based approach. I swear all these nutrition grifter folks on YouTube and Twitter melted certain people's brain.
Avoiding sugar and fat is evidence-based, but wayyy too broadly applied. Depends on the person, the condition, and the rest of the diet. Some people who shouldn't be eating broccoli are... some people who should be eating fats are avoiding them... some people who should be eating sucrose are avoiding it because they think it's the same as taking in glucose and fructose independently. Lots of people replaced butter with margarine, which was worse.
Another comment claims: "I recall andrej walking around the office at this time (tesla), bad-mouthing all the sugar products that came into his view, claiming they are weaponized; and very pleased if he saw any nuts." [1]
This advice would actually kill me fairly quickly if I didn't know any better.
The internet is full of prescriptions without qualifiers, and desperate people, (feeling very ill without answers from their doctors, or no access), willing to believe whatever opinions they find because it fits their current perspective without deviating too much. It might be better to just give people the tools they need to understand what's happening [2], and let them listen to their own symptoms to make changes, if they're willing and capable...
Yup. Negotiating any writings on nutrition is like walking through an endless minefield of hearsay and bullshit. Otherwise a pretty good article though I thought.
I recall andrej walking around the office at this time (tesla), bad-mouthing all the sugar products that came into his view, claiming they are weaponized; and very pleased if he saw any nuts. haha good times :)
I’ve known a few people like that. They think they figured out the proper way to live, and they love to judge everyone else’s bad choices. It gets old real fast.
I can't be bothered to read the article, but I recently discovered I can lose weight fairly easily by, wait for it... just eating a little bit less of everything I already eat. Other than that, the only conscious change was to sometimes substitute a chocolate snack with an apple.
There has to be something like Dunning–Kruger effect but for situation where you try to improve something, learn a convoluted (and rarely scientifically confirmed) solution, apply it for like a month only to then crash back to the start and realise there is no workaround to eating less calories for example
Instead of accepting that big, sustainable changes are not achieved through shortcuts, my brain needed some convoluted or painful solutions (like extended water fasting) which also makes you think like you "cracked the code" and you are better than your mum who told you to just not eat sugar
> Avoid sugar like the plague, [...]including to a lesser extent natural sugar (apples, bananas, pears, etc - we’ve “weaponized” these fruits in the last few hundred years via strong artificial selection into actual candy bars), berries are ~okay.
If you need a sweet treat, some fruit is fine. If you're just starting to work on your diet and health, and you're trading fruit for chips or cake or any other "hyper-palatable" foods, great! Fresh fruit is undeniably a better choice.
But, fruit juice is approximately as good for you as any soda, and as you try to optimize your diet more and more, you'll want more fibrous fruits, less sugary fruits, and eventually a little bit less fruit overall.
But by then you'll already be pretty familiar with your goals and diet and how various foods fit in to them.
Yes - fruit juice that you buy in the store is typically pH balanced with ascorbic acid and heat pasteurised, which removes a lot of nutritional value. And in some cases an apple base is added to give sweetness (with lots of sugar). And depending on the degree to which the juice is juiced, you change the degree to which sugar and other nutrients are available to your metabolism before passing through.
There is a substantial difference in health value between a berry based smoothie you make at home and an apple juice from the store.
I’ve never seen anything marketed as fruit juice that did not consist of only fruit. If there is sugar added, it’s a different kind of drink and the label does not say that it is fruit juice. It might contain fruit juice, but it’s not called fruit juice. But I live in the western hemisphere so maybe the standards are different where you live.
Italy, and they're not called "Fruit juices" of course they're called "Succhi di frutta", of which fruit juices is the literal translation.
Yes they have always been called "succhi di frutta" even if filled with sugar and other stuff, I had no idea that in some countries those are not called fruit juices.
Yes, at least in my country (in Europe) I'm pretty sure that it's a recent trend to favor 100% single-fruit juices.
And I've seen the traditional juice fruite producers come up with increasingly comical/tragic ways to address it:
HUGE 100%, miniscule "natural ingredients" below it (so no motor oil at least xD )
HUGE name of a specific fruit, such specific fruit all over the box, big "100% fruit" and label saying 99.9999 apple, 0.0001 specificfruit powdered extract
You can safely eat 200 grams of tomatoes as the sugar and calorie amount is pretty low but it will make you feel satiated.
Meanwhile 100 grams of banana will have 5 times the sugar and calories of tomatoes (for 100g) but still is pretty fine if you restrict yourself at that 1 small banana.
200 grams of an apple is also pretty safe and is a nice snack.
The point about artificial selection is not far off, there was some news about a zoo having to switch to other food because today's fruits were starting to rot the animals' teeth [0].
But in moderation and ideally sourced locally it's probably fine.
I’d say in general no. Show me any unhealthy person that is that way from eating lots of fruits. When you dig deeper, it’s always the Little Debbie snacks they have in the cabinet and the fast food.
Avoiding fruits only comes after cutting out all processed sugar, or added sugar on the label. Then you should cut out all processed grains. Flour is basically powdered carbohydrate, which spikes your insulin in a manner not much different from table sugar. Then you can look at sugar. I would still include berries, they're low cal and the antioxidant content is insane.
Basically, you need to earn your carbs. Sugar is fine if you burn it off, that's why athletes drink Gatorade mid workout. If you eat an apple before a walk/jog/swim/etc, there's no issue. If you eat a pile of bananas while doing nothing, that glycogen has to go somewhere.
Probably not, unless your diet is already very good. Fruit is high in fibre and micronutrients relative to the average diet, is reasonably satiating, and is difficult to eat too much of without shoving into a blender or juicing.
If you're a biohacker, fruit's your biggest remaining problem, you've replaced the micronutrients with other sources, and you don't need fast burn energy, sure.
There is almost nothing in fruit worth taking. Especially not a tremendous amount of sugar. One apple can have amounts of sugar similar to Coca-Cola. Furthermore, a lot of it is fructose, which is basically a poison to the body. The sole purpose of human adaptations to fruit seems to be fattening, which makes evolutionary sense for survival in the time of scarcity, but not when you have food in abundance all the time. Note that it's also true that todays fruit is 'weaponized' by long-lasting preference to sugary variants so it contains much more sugar then in historic times and a lot less of other things like vitamins and minerals.
One other important reason is that such amount of sugar will block vitamin C as they are absorbed via the same mechanism (GLUT2). Blocking vitamin C absorption leads to all sorts of bad things, slowly, like lower immunity, higher cholesterol, fragile blood vessels.
The third important aspect is cancer feeding (which mostly relies on sugar, so even though the body makes it, you certainly do not have to ignite it) and effects on insulin which dysfunction is tied to both cancer and diabetes.
You should replace them with vegetables.
As a personal anecdote, my family and I almost never eat fruit (in last 20 years or so) - at most a couple of times per year. We all seem very healthy.
There is plenty of good stuff in fruits other than sugar. They are a great source of fiber and vitamin C, for example. Your overall point is worth reiterating, which is that fruits are not automatically "healthy", and may contain large amounts of calories and sugar.
No, there is not. Apart from some berries (particularly raspberry and blueberry) most of it is junk food that makes you fat, rises triglyceride and damages the liver.
Fruit is not a great source of vitamin C for the reason I mentioned. Red paprika is way better source for example, then any fruit. You better take a supplement too, liposomal variant if possible and/or film tablets.
You can get fiber from other, way more healthy foods, like quinoa seeds. Many people also remove fibers by juicing fruit, which is particularly unhealthy.
The fact that other foods can supplement or replace fruits is obvious. Most humans, however, are not surviving on quinoa and vitamin supplements. Therefore, your extreme position on fruits is misguided, because the average person is better off having a glass of orange juice than Coke, despite the calories being similar.
You were the one comparing apples to Coke. You also wrote this clearly incorrect statement: "There is almost nothing in fruit worth taking". When I pointed out that this is not the case, you misdirected the conversation to saying that other foods are equally or more nutritious than fruits.
Almost nothing worth taking that you can't get elsewhere, without all the junk. It's clearly true even for junk drinks - they usually have some low amounts of junk form of vitamins in them, but that is typically not why you drink them and you can find much better forms in higher dosages elsewhere, without the junk.
It's also logical. GLUT2 is a passive transporter and relies on diffusion. You will always have a bunch more glucose than vitamin C, so it will outcompete it.
The same transporter is used for both, as they are very similar - GULO gene transforms glucose to C.
There is a special C transporter SVCT1/2, a pump, that that doesn't suffer from this, but requires Mg/Ca for activation and is a lot less distributed than GLUT2. But then, eating modern fruit simple doesn't have much of it, and even that is lost around the conditions used. That's why no animal on the planet delegated vitamin C production to the plants, the amounts are far from enough for satisfactory workings of the body (except us, GULO mutants), alas high enough so you don't disintegrate (scurvy).
This might be one of the reasons why sugar diminishes the immunity (to be more precise, phagocytic index
) by around 50% several hours after eating it. Don't ask for study, there is Google Schoolar et al.
> your intake on fruit seem quite extreme
That means nothing to me nor anybody seriously researching this stuff. I rely on interpreting science documents. My or researcher interpretations might be wrong, but it's still the best we know so far. Contrary to that, unquantifiable "advices" like don't be extreme or that of moderation are best to left unsaid and all it does is tell me that person simply doesn't know anything about the topic and should be completely ignored.
> unquantifiable "advices" like don't be extreme or that of moderation are best to left unsaid
That wasn't meant to be advice, just my general, nonprofessional, take on nutrition recommendation until I am convinced otherwise. Which I gladly am, because I find human biology (esp. the metabolism) more and more interesting the more I know about it.
I only remember reading that vitamin c in its ascorbic acid form is the predominant way it is transported into the cells (by SVCT1,2 pathways) and DHA transports contribute only a way minor amount.
> This might be one of the reasons why sugar diminishes the immunity by around 50% several hours after eating it
Interesting, I'll try to find some reading material about that.
DHA is valuable transport since it doesn't require prerequisites and is ubiquitous, also SVCT doesn't transport DHA which you have tones of given that C is among other things ROS scavenger. Can't remember now the details, but I remember reading a paper where it was determined that DHA transport is substantial. Logically fallows that if you have to recycle C, its all you got, since you can't produce C.
Regarding immunity claim, here is something to get you started (50% claim):
> Oral 100-g portions of carbohydrate from glucose, fructose, sucrose, honey, or orange juice all significantly decreased the capacity of neutrophils to engulf bacteria as measured by the slide technique.
Great post, I had a different experience with the diet though. I lost 17kg in circa 4 months (an average of 1% body mass per week) while eating mostly carbs (240 g of pasta a day, 3 or 4 fruits) and vegetables. A couple of times a week I would eat 300g of chicken. The only physical exercise I do is running for 20 to 30 mins 3 times a week.
I have to say I'm quite happy with the diet, I basically never feel hungry and I love pasta so it's enjoyable. Obviously you can't just cover the pasta in a calorie dense sauce and expect to lose weight, you still need to keep an eye on the calories.
I skip breakfast (always did, not something that started with the diet), for lunch 120 g of pasta usually with tomato sauce, a banana and an apple. In the afternoon sometime I have a snack of some sort (between 150 to 300 kcal). For dinner either pasta with veggies, or a couple of potatoes with veggies cooked in an air fryer, or chicken a potato and veggies, again in an air fryer. I add more fruit of I'm still hungry.
I drink water only, no liquid calories.
I have a cheat meal two or three times a week (nothing crazy though, like I would eat a pizza and some cake for the cheat meal)
interesting but it doesn't touch on blood sugar and insulin. Insulin is what tells your body to store the excess glucose circulating in your blood in your fat cells. manage your blood sugar for good things.
Agree, it's a bit odd that he did not focus on this, since he is obviously aware of it. It's the reason calories in/out is totally insufficient as a guide - what you eat affects hormones, which will hugely affect what you want to eat, and how it is metabolized.
The advice about avoiding sugar is also clearly rooted in this effect, but without the explanation it it comes across as just another "mom said".
About a year ago, I did two extended water fasts (24 and 16 days, about 8 weeks apart). I wanted to do a single 40 day one (just for kicks, to see if I last) but stopped after 24 days as I wasn't feeling well.
I've lost 18 kg during the first one (102 kg -> 84 kg), then quickly regained about 4 kg, and lost about 10 kg during the second one (88 -> 78). After the second fast, I started resistance training between two and four times a week (with a brain-endowed gym coach). I'm currently down 14 kg (88 kg), but gained quite a lot of muscle.
Though I can't recommend water fasting on blanket terms, if you're like me and you prefer short-term intense stress to long-term baseline stress, you may find that it's a great way to lose a lot of weight quickly, start feeling better about yourself and what your body is capable of, and get on the path to a healthier life style.
I tried to get my GP involved. Called the doctor's office, told the nurse about my endeavor and asked for a checkup (this was a week into the fast). The nurse basically told me that while she saw value in what I did, the doctor doesn't approve of fasting, and that it would be better to not even ask.
She gave me contact info of another doctor, who was however five years dead by the time I tried to reach her the next morning. I figured out I won't let this stop me.
My biggest problem is eating something that makes me feel full, tastes good, can be prepared easily (or at least cookable and storable in bulk) and that does not turn into fat.
For satiety you need fiber and protein. All energy above your caloric needs turn into fat, regardless of what food source it comes from.
Beans, lentils and whole grains have plenty of both protein and fiber. Meat and fish has plenty of protein. Fruits and other veggies have plenty of fiber.
Personally I track my food to stay at a reasonable amount of calorie, ensure I have enough protein an fiber (I aim at 1.6g per kg of mass and above 50g per day respectively) and try to reach recommendations for vitamins and minerals, pick a guide for those, they're all more or less the same, most tracker apps use the US FDA one.
It's really important to ramp up the amount of fiber, sudden increase will lead to bad news.
I am confident that I'm in good company when I say that I hit this sort of paragraph like a brick wall:
> Do not drink any calories (no soda, no alcohol, no juices, avoid milk). Avoid sugar like the plague, including carbohydrate-heavy foods that immediately break down to sugar (bread, rice, pasta, potatoes), including to a lesser extent natural sugar (apples, bananas, pears, etc - we’ve “weaponized” these fruits in the last few hundred years via strong artificial selection into actual candy bars), berries are ~okay. Avoid processed food.
Look, I have nothing but respect for people who can read that and think, oh, cool, I hate everything that tastes good, is easy to access and leaves me feeling satisfied.
For those of us who are still yoked in service to evil things like rice, this paragraph just makes us feel like we're fucked.
Also: even introverts who love cooking at home occasionally have to go for dinner with clients, relatives or friends. While it's true that you can just order some naked bitter greens, this often doesn't feel like a socially normal thing to do (even though norms are changing, especially in large and progressive cities).
The thing I find odd about many of these biohacking/longevity experts is that they don’t seem to look at real people that live a long time in Spain, Italy, Japan, etc. and instead just default to an over-optimized “scientific” diet that insists that over-analyzing everything is equivalent to being effective. If there isn’t a name for this fallacy, there ought to be one: analysis and results are not always correlated.
Edit: reading the linked post again, I realized what it is: an obsession with data and a total disregard for cultural practices. French people, for example, eat all kinds of things considered forbidden, and yet obesity isn’t much of an issue there compared to other Western nations. One reason why is the strong cultural rule against snacking.
>they don’t seem to look at real people that live a long time in Spain, Italy, Japan, etc
I think you're referring to 'Blue zones'[0] here. I'm certainly not an expert in longevity, but was also intrigued by these areas and their apparently above-average lifespan, and how it goes against a lot of conventional longevity advice re: diet.
One explanation I've heard is that they're simply the results of poor record keeping, and that there isn't much strong evidence to suggest people in those regions do statistically live longer than average.
It doesn’t need to be strictly based on the blue zones idea, but the basic fact that in some places, people live longer than others. That Wikipedia article criticized the Okinawa narrative but doesn’t mention that Japan still has one of the longest lifespans in the first place.
My criticism is basically this: there are places where people live longer than others, and they certainly aren’t eating bowls of green goop and 200 pills every morning. If your goal is to maximize longevity, it seems logical to imitate whatever they’re doing. Or at least investigate it.
Japanese people generally don't skip breakfast and eat rice with every meal. So they aren't doing intermittent fasting and they are constantly eating one of the foods TFA says not to eat.
I am pretty sure the benefits of intermittent fasting beyond calorie restriction are not really supported by the latest science.
I am not saying it's bad; eating fewer calories has its benefits. However, the effectiveness of intermittent fasting, especially as portrayed in the media, has been quite overblown, IMHO.
I think one of the main sources of this is from a study that suggested longevity improvements in lab mice. Unfortunately, studies involving lab mice, especially those concerning metabolism, translate poorly to humans.
That is a made up term that means nothing and everything. Washing vegetables is a process. “Cooking” is a process. Cutting is a process. Chilling is a process.
My friend who is really into these things describe "processed food" as anything that has the ingredients printed on the label when you buy it from a grocery store.
Veggies, fruits, meats, and "natural" starches (like potatoes and rice) don't have ingredient labels, so they count as "unprocessed" or "natural."
> it much different than them processing it in a factory or bakery for you.
The difference is that bakeries etc. tend to add a lot of sugars and preservatives.
> Per that definition, items like white vinegar and corn syrup are not processed foods?
Yeah, so not a perfect definition, but a good rule of thumb.
The general idea is that you don't want some big corporate to prepare the food for you, it is better to prepare it yourself. If you prepare the food yourself, you have more control over how healthy it is. This approach serves my friend quite well, he reports that he feels more energetic when he avoids "processed" foods as per his definition.
> The general idea is that you don't want some big corporate to prepare the food for you, it is better to prepare it yourself
I understand that. But my body doesn’t care who prepared the food. If a big corp prepares the food the same way I prepare it at home (or vice versa), then this advice is useless.
I am sure that he placebo could improve his energy. Also, I’m sure there are ingredients that “big corp” uses that we wouldn’t normally use in the kitchen that could hurt our health. So then instead of saying avoid “processed foods” (which means nothing and everything), name the ingredients and the processes that are bad.
> So then instead of saying avoid “processed foods” (which means nothing and everything), name the ingredients and the processes that are bad.
Yeah sure, but that is quite a lot of effort. And you are going to end up avoiding most processed foods anyway. Especially if you are the sort who distrusts artificial sweeteners and preservatives. So then it is just easier to say "avoid processed foods" than to say "avoid foods that contain [...insert a long list of ingredients here]"
Meals that you only need to heat in a pot/oven and that are stuffed with preservatives and other stuff.
Some people include more in that "processed food" category, some less, but practically everyone agrees that preparing meals yourself using raw ingredients is a good idea.
The point is salting that soup and frying the chicken yourself, which avoids a lot of substances with often still uncertain long-term effects or potentially harmful effects on the environment.
Of course it's more a rule of thumb, I thought that goes without saying.
The way I see it, it's processing that you wouldn't or cannot do (in a daily basis) at home, is generally likely to either introduce stuff or break down / transform nutriments unneeded for your body that is likely to have undesirable effects.
My rule when I buy stuff all things that count as raw ingredient is ok, then to quickly imagine is there any reason that adding things
or altering the most basic way to produce it can give economical advantage, all this with a quick ingredient check.
Given that, as examples flour is ok, rice and pasta, even pre-cooked is mostly ok, basic canned food is not a no-go anymore.
Look at the ingredients list. This is such a weird hill engineers always want to die on. "Processed" is very clear on what it means to anyone that isn't being pedantic
What makes something industrial processed? The geolocation of where the food was made?
The amount of food created together? Making 1 pizza dough at home is fine, but creating 10,000 in a geolocation that isn’t in the same building where you sleep is not fine?
It’s not just engineers. Scientists are also confused what processed means.
>Making 1 pizza dough at home is fine, but creating 10,000 in a geolocation that isn’t in the same building where you sleep is not fine?
Right, because it's not just 10000x my home experience. At that scale, entirely new methodologies, ingredients, industrial chemicals, etc. all start to be used. This is very simple stuff, I have trouble believing you truly don't see a distinction
You will never produce factory food in your home. Not unless you can prepare 10,000 servings an hour of something for far cheaper than you can buy it for in a grocery store and ensure that it has a 3-12 month shelf life in the process.
You're stuck on the word "processed" as if it means anything that has been changed from its natural form, whereas it is meant to relay that a food has been industrially bulk processed and then packaged.
By your definition, cutting an apple is processing it, which is (hopefully) obvious that we're not talking about that.
The idea is to make your own food from as close to scratch as you can, to not eat pre-packaged "processed" foods like frozen pizzas and hot pockets and hamburger helper all the time.
We should name specific processes (like frying in cooking oil) and ingredients (like corn syrup) and not leave it to the consumer to define their own definitions of words.
Should we drink raw milk or should we drink pasteurized milk?
Processed food refers to items that have been altered from their natural state for safety reasons or convenience. This can range from simple processes like freezing or drying to preserve nutrients and prevent spoilage, to more complex changes such as adding preservatives, flavors, and other additives to enhance taste, texture, and shelf life. Canning, baking, and pasteurizing are also common methods of processing. While processing can make food more accessible and longer-lasting, some argue it can also reduce nutritional value and introduce less healthy elements like added sugar and sodium.
I agree this sucks and I personally struggle to follow anything this strict because I love cooking AND I love eating (the perfect storm for obesity, sadly). However I found a good middle ground is to focus on "Avoid processed food" and sticking to whole foods. Try buy things that don't have bar codes, or stick to the outside of the supermarket (where they tend to put the fresh produce), or whatever.
This is my strategy also. Do your shopping in the produce, butcher, and dairy sections. Stay away from the boxed crap in the middle, and at least for me the bakery section will likely be my eventual downfall.
Of course this requires that you learn to cook, and have the time to do it. If you are going to restaurants all the time it’s a lot harder.
> Of course this requires that you learn to cook, and have the time to do it.
True, although personally I think cooking is one of life's greatest joys! Making things from scratch that taste good and make people (i.e. your family) happy is worth the time, imo, and I try to do a couple good meals a week :)
Well, rice is also among the most environmentally damaging plants you can eat, so I suppose there's multiple arguments to be made in favor of avoiding it.
Cutting drinkable calories and all added sugars is the 20% of effort that gives you 80% of the effect here. As far as going to 100% goes, cutting carbohydrates altogether has also become enough of a trend ("no-carb") that you can find lots of information on how to do it, if you feel like you need to do it. However, those diets usually require you to eat a lot of meat, which is unhealthy for a host of other reasons, and if you're stringent about it, they would also require you to cut beneficial foods like nuts, which is likewise bad.
I appreciate this reply as thoughtful and reasonable, with the powerful exception being the inclusion of "all added sugars".
I think we all get that if you can cut drinkable calories, you should because you will be far better off.
However, ditching sugar (which is an addictive poison; we get it) is the most decisively non-trivial thing on the list. It's in freaking everything.
Trust me, I can give up apples and pears tomorrow if you promise to say nice things about me. But pursuing a completely sugar-free diet is a dramatic undertaking. It requires you to drastically alter everything you probably eat.
This may be different in the US, where, from my understand, people often eat sweetened breads and so on, but at least here in Europe, added sugars are really not that hard to avoid. (Well, at least to a 99% level. For me, cutting soy sauce, which does contain added sugar, would be very uncomfortable. Other than that, I honestly don't see the huge issue - of course it would be annoying when eating out, but that's about it.)
> those diets usually require you to eat a lot of meat
You can substitute meat for eggs, to a large extent. No more expensive, easy to prepare, arguably tasty, ethical (as far as OP's arguments), and a complete protein source that rivals meat.
Traditional diet advice would caution about cholesterol, but "those diets" pretty much disregard those concerns, with pretty good science behind it.
Chicken bred for laying eggs suffer immensely during their entire (short) lifetime. The effect of breeding these chickens for the sole purpose of laying as many eggs as possible results in practically every chicken having multiple broken bones.
This affects chickens regardless of them being free range, organic or whatever.
I'm sure that's true in many places, but not all. I know people who supply eggs that are sold in grocery stores. Their hens are regular hens that live normal hen lives. Regurlar hens are very prolific egg layers anyway. The producer is also part of a strict certification program that ensures that customers know what they get.
There are no regular hens anymore! That's kinda the point. Every supermarket supplying hen is producing far more eggs than their non purpose-bred ancestors would.
The broken bones are not even visible, their behavior change is very subtle. You'd have to x-ray the hens to see the damage.
Here [0] is a report from Switzerland (in German) saying that 97% of egg laying hens in Switzerland have on average 3 broken bones, some even as much as 11.
Ethical eg farming using current hen races is simply impossible.
That report seems very high, here's a similar study in England that looks at the bones of end-of-lay hens that are culled and 14% of free range chickens have fractures, some of which they cannot guarantee were not from the transport/handling as part of the study. Assume worst case, that's 14% of hens with fractures. Conventional cages have 31% fractures. Of those fractures, keel bone fractures from bumping into the hen house furniture is the most likely reason, but also badly designed perches injuring the knees. Interestingly the reason why fractures may be increasing is because moving from conventional cages to hen houses increase bumping into things and breaking bones (point 57).
> Every supermarket supplying hen is producing far more eggs than their non purpose-bred ancestors would
The fractures seem to be mostly unrelated to the number of eggs laid in this study.
> There are no regular hens anymore! That's kinda the point.
Either way, at least there's pressure on farming bodies to avoid all fractures so hopefully this isn't an issue for long.
Your 14% figure stems from a single study, precisely the oldest study mentioned on the report linked, while three paragraphs down it mentions the newest study, quote:
"The most recent results (University of Bristol; Defra project AW0234), from a
survey of 67 flocks (not including conventional cages) were similar but even worse,
particularly because only keel bone fractures were recorded. Thirty six per cent of
hens from enriched cages had fractures (of the keel bone) and the average
prevalence in other non-cage systems ranged from 45 to 86%. In the worst flocks,
95% of hens had fractured keel bones." (Emphasis mine.)
The report I linked even says that the old results massively under estimate bone fractures because they seldomly used x-rays to find them!
And not only that, your 14% figure are the new fractures, i.e. the ones that did not occur during laying! One newer study from 2006, mentioned in your report just two paragraphs after the one you got your figure from, estimates these old fractures of free range hens at 44%!
> The fractures seem to be mostly unrelated to the number of eggs laid in this study.
Even that is explicitly contradicted by your report, quote:
"Osteoporosis is further exacerbated by the great egg output of modern
hybrids. In 1930, a hen laid around 115 eggs in a laying cycle (from about 20 to 72
weeks of age) but nowadays a hen lays around 300 eggs, almost an egg per day for
a year. A hen’s need for calcium for eggs exceeds her body reserves by about 30
times."
Please, actually be honest on offering a counterpoint.
The problem is that rice is usually grown in wet rice agriculture, where the paddy is flooded to prevent weeds from growing. Microbes in the water will decompose decaying plant matter, producing methane, a potent greenhouse gas [1].
I think it's a very natural American reaction. Of course if your food supply is full of preservatives and fillers, you'll find it difficult to eat food that doesn't make you fat or feel like shit.
I've been living in the EU (Netherlands) for a few years now, and I've lost weight naturally through walking more, better food, and less access to fast food. My wife and I love cooking, and love eating too. It's legitimately hard to find quality produce in the US, and it's often substantially more expensive than produce in the EU.
I actually dread going back to the US to visit family or when I have to travel for work because the food really irritates my stomach...
I find rice to be a curious thing to put on the list. I understand that it is a carb, but it’s also a question of moderation, and portion size. Prior to the introduction of western franchises like McDonald’s, the Japanese diet led to some of the longest lifespan’s in the world. A small quantity of carbs like rice seems like a non-issue to me. It’s when you sit down to a massive plate of fried rice that you’re asking for trouble.
Not contradicting, but your brain is reprogrammable. If you cut things a bit, you won't feel the need to be satisfied. The amount of sugar we eat in modern societies is mostly useless. Now I was "lucky", I fell ill, so I just couldn't eat sugar, now I don't eat pastry, or carbs (maybe 3 times a month at worst). Veggies, tea, meat, fish, nuts, yogurt, can give you a lot.
For what it's worth, my personal experience has been that I crave less of the hyper-palatable foods when I'm regularly lifting or getting some other form of moderate to intense exercise. My appetite starts to swing back towards simple meals with meat and grains and vegetables, and plain water is refreshing again.
When I'm not getting enough exercise, I start to crave sugars and yummies more.
I've gotten almost no exercise for the last couple of months due to an injury and some other circumstances and Halloween could not have come at a worse time.
It is surprisingly easy from a "feeling" perspective. Once you stop eating those, your body will become more addicted to other food.
However, a single drop of sugar during your diet will make you starve for more sugar (That is what most people experience during their day and why they think avoiding soda is impossible)
I struggle with my weight, but it made a big difference to cut out "direct" sugar. It was hard for a month or two but after that, I don't really have a strong desire for sugar anymore, and a lot of more "normal" food tastes sweeter to me now.
I'm skeptical of carnivore diets. I have tried similar diets, such as a meat-heavy keto diet, and while I agree you see a lot of weight loss quickly (mostly water weight though) I noticed a decrease in energy. For example my longer (1hr+) runs saw my mile times get 1-2 minutes longer without carbs. I looked into it and noticed the people I personally think are the fittest, that is ironman triathletes, all tend to follow the Mediterranean diet. I've come to the conclusion that's the best for me, because I've seen my energy levels increase on that diet, and from studies on life longevity etc believe it is THE best diet without starting to min-max specific things that might help individuals.
Human lost 1degree celsius of bodytemp in the last century.
Base metabolic rate dropped 10% in the last 30 years.
Modern diet are triggering torpor mechanism in human, blocking them into turning sugar to heat (thermogenesis), forcing them to store it into fat.
An american aged 20 in 1970 would have 5 times more chance to be obese in 2000 compared to a french or swiss of same age, while consumming on average 500calories less per day which represents a deficit bigger than 7millions calories over 30 years.
Estimating calories spent with the Apple Watch is not the best way. Just calculate your TDEE as an average, and in a conservative way (if you go to the gym 3 times a week and sit for your daily work you are moderately moving at best). Then use a deficit of 350 (if you are already quite fit) or 500 calories day. Make sure you don't cut too much on any specific macro especially protein while eating at a deficit, and finally lift weights while you are losing weight, to protect muscles over fat. To have the habit of doing 10k steps per day is great, I do it, but I noticed that most people struggle, so this may be something you add gradually. There is no need to complicate things too much.
Make sure to: 1. Use an app like MyFitnessPal to track your calories. 2. Never use cheat days, when you don't eat clean (but must be a rare occasion) always stay inside your calories. Remember: a cheat day may compensate 5/6 days of eating at 350cals deficit VERY easily.
I could never make 10k steps routinely until I started jogging. Download the Couch to 5k (c25k) or couch to 10k/half-marathon/marathon and follow the fairly gentle introduction to running. You will hit 5k steps from the easiest runs and get to one hour walk/runs which can be 8k+ steps after a couple weeks. It's so so much easier than trying to just walk and honestly becomes fun after a couple weeks of sucking
I noticed that on HN lately calories-deficit driven weight loss is considered controversial. I wonder what do you think about creationism VS evolution, folks.
Incidentally, this is how/why liposuction works: if you remove fat cells from a certain area, your body can't store fat in that spot anymore. The flip side being that if you gain weight afterwards, it still has to go somewhere, but you can't/won't store fat in the lipo'd spot.
And you can't remove every single fat cell in your body because you do need to store fat to stay alive, but it's good for sculpting specific areas.
(I should add that I got a bit of lipo done ~6 months ago and I'm loving it so far. Very little in the way of pounds shed, but it made a huge difference for my silhouette, which is what I wanted.)