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 regain the weight after they start eating other foods again: "On average, people gained back most of the weight they lost."[2]
People who successfully follow very restrictive diets will lose weight... as long as they follow it. And these "riffs" in the OP where it's potatoes and bacon, or potatoes and gummi worms, or whatever, won't change that basic observation.
I found A Chemical Hunger interesting when I first read it, but later people pointed out a whole bunch of severe mistakes (eg. [1] [2] [3]).
I don't know, I'm not a nutritionist, but the inaccuracies plus all the potato-conspiracy stuff made me doubtful of SMTM. My main takeaway was that no one, not even people in the field, really knows how food works.
> I really enjoyed SMTM's "A Chemical Hunger" series[1]. But recently they've gone into weird fad-diet territory with their potato obsession.
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.
> But their own numbers show that people regain the weight after they start eating other foods again: "On average, people gained back most of the weight they lost."[2]
Every single diet suffers from that, because you don't need a diet, you need a life style and as the name implies it, it has to be sustained for your whole life
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.
i don't understand what you're trying to say here, of course anybody who loses weight by changing their diet will gain the weight back if they go back to eating the way they were before, isn't that just common sense?
"A Chemical Hunger" has multiple inaccuracies that have never been addressed or corrected. For example, they made up the "fact" that wild animals have been getting fatter out of thin air. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...
The way I see it, the point of the very article you're replying to is to find a friendlier version of the potato diet that might be more fun or sustainable.
Maybe they'll find that people who replace one of their daily meals with french fries end up losing weight over time. Who knows. I think it's good to be positive.
Once you find a diet that is healthy and works, I don't think you're supposed to ever get off of it. It's kind of a tautology that the people getting off their diets gained back their original weight.
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 scientist perspective: 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, where pre-existing biases in data collection may weed out the most useful 'Riff'. Better than that, the information collected by mold_time is regularly released and discussed, in the open, on twitter/x [2].
>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 enough to generalize, but then you say it will be more valuable. Are you saying it's value is in it's non-generalizability? I.e., each person finds what 'riff' works for them? I thought the point of publishing results was, in part, to separate the wheat from the chaff so we don't all have to run a ton of self-experiments.
It's been more than a year since I alerted them of the multiple falsehoods in A Chemical Hunger, repeatedly, and they haven't done anything about them.
I think this is a more compelling idea than people in the comments are giving it credit for
> The problem is that you can easily come up with 100 different hypotheses for what’s going on. Ok, so you run 100 different studies to test each one. But studies take a long time to run — let’s say 6 months per study. Congratulations, you’ve just locked yourself into 50 years
This is a major problem with science whenever you have less of a theoretical foundation. Compared to physics or chemistry, we know very little about nutrition or sports science. Because of this, the search space is very large. One could argue that given the number of surprising results (and difficulty reproducing those results), medicine and psychology also fall into this category.
> A riff trial takes advantage of the power of parallel search. Some riffs will work better than others (or at least differently), and parallel search helps you find these differences faster, especially if the differences are big.
What if we did more to encourage people to track and report their personal experiments? If even 10% of everyone on a diet (any diet) just tracked what they ate, what exercise they did, and how much weight they lost, and reported it to a centralized database, scientists could then look for patterns in that data and do formal studies based on suspected patterns.
We could do similar things with longevity/happiness. Look at the "Harvard Study of Adult Development" but imagine it was spread out over 10s of thousands of diverse people instead of just 300 upper-class American men? The data quality wouldn't matter much if all you are doing is searching for patterns to do follow-up studies.
The main issue with this riff trial is that it doesn't test the most likely reason the potato diet works: that it's a very restrictive diet. Testing several different hypotheses barely helps at all if you don't test the overwhelmingly most likely one.
I remember Kevin Smith talking about his first stab at dieting, following the instructions of the "guru" that got Penn Jillette lean: basically, he ate nothing but potatoes for something like 3 months.
The point wasn't that potatoes were particularly good for you, but to "reset" one's attitude towards food, eating only when hungry rather than for pleasure or to deal with stress - because after a few weeks, one is so tired of potatoes that they'll forego unnecessary eating.
In this sense, the potato diet is probably useless in itself, but might work in that "reset" role.
> I remember Kevin Smith talking about his first stab at dieting, following the instructions of the "guru" that got Penn Jillette lean
Penn's a very good writer and hacker (this is a temporary diet hack, after all), and if you're interested you can read more about this here: Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales: https://www.amazon.com/Presto-Pounds-Disappear-Other-Magical...
Penn credits Ray Cronise for literally saving his life. You can read his 2014 paper The "Metabolic Winter" Hypothesis: A Cause of the Current Epidemics of Obesity and Cardiometabolic Disease, here: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/met.2014.0027
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.
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 restriction is stopping sugar/HFCS.
And it also explained the rebound effect - e.g. after the extreme restriction, the participants start re-introducing sugar and HFCS back into the diet, and since that's the real culprit, weight goes back up.
No taking away from this super cool citizen science - deep kudos on testing things like this out! I'm tempted to participate in something like this. Self-experimentation is a lost art.
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.
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.
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, potentially, useful to do these kinds of things as an isolation diet (gradually add back foods and pay attention to effects). It's also useful to just break bad habits by doing weird stuff sometimes.
I'm Irish. I love potatoes. They do not have magic dietary powers. The potato doesn't explain anything. You can get similar results with toast, bacon or bananas. The results do not mean anything specific for longer term fat loss, health, etc.
It just proves that bodyweight fluctuates in response to radical diet change. That is known.
Same for a lot of the "water tricks" that thankfully have started to die down. They use bodybuilder tricks to eventually dehydrate themselves for a perfect look on stage day. It's sold as a weight loss trick.
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.
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.
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 diet does anything special. People can do that with almost any diet.
SMTM's potato diet study found exactly that - 10 to 20 lbs of weight loss for most participants. This should be strong evidence that it's not a silver bullet. SMTM is pretending otherwise.
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.
I feel like the only reason people are losing weight is because eating 20 potatoes in a day is insane and no one on this diet is hitting their BMR. Of course they will lose weight and they will with any variation that keeps them under their BMR.
Ever since food inflation has gotten so crazy, I've been buying bags of potatoes and nuking 3 at a time for a meal/snack. Like 3 potatoes leaves me feeling stuffed, but is only maybe 300 calories. So not only am I healthier, but I feel full longer, and am almost back to my college wrestling weight.
For people saying any diet works, I think the interest here is the rules of "eat as many potatoes as you want" are very easy to follow, it's unambiguous if you followed it properly, simple to buy the ingredients anywhere and when eating out, it's cheap, is meant to work fast, and you aren't going to feel hungry which helps a lot. Most fad diets don't tick as many boxes.
Feels obvious to me that it works via “calories in, calories out” though. 2kg of potatoes a day is about 1500kcal so it's hard to overeat.
For the participants it didn't work on, surely the most likely cause that should be controlled for is how many potatoes they ate or how much oil/butter (some of the most calorific ingredients we use) they had on top?
And not if participants avoided tomatoes ("Tomatoes are our top bet, but other possible blockers might be: wheat, bread, grains more generally, maybe meat.")?
What’s interesting about the diet isn’t the mechanism for weight loss (you’re right, you don’t eat enough calories, that part is simple enough.) The interesting part is the intense appetite suppression that the diet produces. From my brief experience, it’s like after a couple of days you lose interest in eating - even when your body is sending you signals that indicate you’re likely starving. It’d be really interesting to figure out what causes this and then (preferably) reproduce it in a form that doesn’t require potatoes or injections.
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.
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 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.
I just read thousands of words about a potato-based diet on that website. Didn't think my Tuesday was gonna start that way, but here we are. HN is amazing.
This concept of a Riff Trial is new to me. Sounds like it would serve as a great pre-trial method to hone in on designs for more serious trials, one with controls and blinding. Is this already the case? Or are riff trials generally only performed in citizen research?
I love the half-mad, half-hilarious, Ben Franklinesque quality of this enterprise: “Some people think the potato diet causes weight loss because it is bland. We think this is wrong too. First of all, potatoes are delicious. Second of all, this doesn’t make any sense. Why would that happen.”
I'd participate if I hadn't already tried the potato diet before.
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.
I imagine anyone who is researching diets this heavily and is willing to sign up for a weird one may have lost weight regardless of if they used the potato diet or not - they committed to serious lifestyle changes that caused them to lose weight. Maybe it’s potatoes, maybes it’s everything the person changed in their and potatoes didn’t offset those.
And also, they're not eating out. This is a 100% vegetarian home cooked diet. At least for most Americans, even if there's literally no other mechanism in play, that's an absolutely massive change.
I agree, restriction-based diets (restricting food choice, amount, or timing) virtually always yield positive results initially. If that phenomenon is a given, then digging deeper into the variations could help us understand why that is the case.
One suggestion: give participants an "IDGAF LOL" option where the experimenters tell them what protocol to follow, and randomly assign some leading contenders.
That way people can do what they want, but we might also get some well-identified estimates :)
> The diet worked — people lost 10.6 lbs on average over only four weeks — and we had basically no idea why
I do fasting a lot. Doing diet for weight loss is a huge red flag. Human body gains and loses water very easily. Change of 10 lbs (in any direction) is rounding error, after changing a diet.
Major reason to do potato diet are health benefits. It decreases inflammation, and gives your gut chance to heal. It may improve sugar digestion, liver and so on. Basically any junk and toxins you eat normally, go away on potato only diet.
AFTER you become healthy, you may try to lose weight.
>It decreases inflammation, and gives your gut chance to heal. It may improve sugar digestion, liver and so on.
Are there clinical trials that show these outcomes in patients? (To clarify, I don't mean studies that show potatoes have potential chemicals/mechanisms related to those outcomes, but actual trials with patients that saw a scientifically meaningful difference in those outcomes after a potato diet.
Taikonerd|2 years ago
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 regain the weight after they start eating other foods again: "On average, people gained back most of the weight they lost."[2]
People who successfully follow very restrictive diets will lose weight... as long as they follow it. And these "riffs" in the OP where it's potatoes and bacon, or potatoes and gummi worms, or whatever, won't change that basic observation.
[1]: http://achemicalhunger.com/
[2]: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/26/smtm-potato-diet-co...
n2d4|2 years ago
I don't know, I'm not a nutritionist, but the inaccuracies plus all the potato-conspiracy stuff made me doubtful of SMTM. My main takeaway was that no one, not even people in the field, really knows how food works.
[1] https://nothinginthewater.substack.com/p/contra-smtm-on-obes...
[2] https://basedprof.substack.com/p/smtm-mysteries
[3] https://someflow.substack.com/p/criticisms-of-a-chemical-hun...
Aurornis|2 years ago
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.
lm28469|2 years ago
Every single diet suffers from that, because you don't need a diet, you need a life style and as the name implies it, it has to be sustained for your whole life
WorldMaker|2 years ago
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.
yungporko|2 years ago
axiomaticdoubts|2 years ago
alecst|2 years ago
Maybe they'll find that people who replace one of their daily meals with french fries end up losing weight over time. Who knows. I think it's good to be positive.
merpnderp|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
beanjuice|2 years ago
From a chemist/material scientist perspective: 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, where pre-existing biases in data collection may weed out the most useful 'Riff'. Better than that, the information collected by mold_time is regularly released and discussed, in the open, on twitter/x [2].
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM
[2] https://twitter.com/mold_time
bumby|2 years ago
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 enough to generalize, but then you say it will be more valuable. Are you saying it's value is in it's non-generalizability? I.e., each person finds what 'riff' works for them? I thought the point of publishing results was, in part, to separate the wheat from the chaff so we don't all have to run a ton of self-experiments.
axiomaticdoubts|2 years ago
It's been more than a year since I alerted them of the multiple falsehoods in A Chemical Hunger, repeatedly, and they haven't done anything about them.
scottrogowski|2 years ago
> The problem is that you can easily come up with 100 different hypotheses for what’s going on. Ok, so you run 100 different studies to test each one. But studies take a long time to run — let’s say 6 months per study. Congratulations, you’ve just locked yourself into 50 years
This is a major problem with science whenever you have less of a theoretical foundation. Compared to physics or chemistry, we know very little about nutrition or sports science. Because of this, the search space is very large. One could argue that given the number of surprising results (and difficulty reproducing those results), medicine and psychology also fall into this category.
> A riff trial takes advantage of the power of parallel search. Some riffs will work better than others (or at least differently), and parallel search helps you find these differences faster, especially if the differences are big.
What if we did more to encourage people to track and report their personal experiments? If even 10% of everyone on a diet (any diet) just tracked what they ate, what exercise they did, and how much weight they lost, and reported it to a centralized database, scientists could then look for patterns in that data and do formal studies based on suspected patterns.
We could do similar things with longevity/happiness. Look at the "Harvard Study of Adult Development" but imagine it was spread out over 10s of thousands of diverse people instead of just 300 upper-class American men? The data quality wouldn't matter much if all you are doing is searching for patterns to do follow-up studies.
axiomaticdoubts|2 years ago
toyg|2 years ago
The point wasn't that potatoes were particularly good for you, but to "reset" one's attitude towards food, eating only when hungry rather than for pleasure or to deal with stress - because after a few weeks, one is so tired of potatoes that they'll forego unnecessary eating.
In this sense, the potato diet is probably useless in itself, but might work in that "reset" role.
CharlesW|2 years ago
Penn's a very good writer and hacker (this is a temporary diet hack, after all), and if you're interested you can read more about this here: Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales: https://www.amazon.com/Presto-Pounds-Disappear-Other-Magical...
Penn credits Ray Cronise for literally saving his life. You can read his 2014 paper The "Metabolic Winter" Hypothesis: A Cause of the Current Epidemics of Obesity and Cardiometabolic Disease, here: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/met.2014.0027
ForkMeOnTinder|2 years ago
bee_rider|2 years ago
corry|2 years ago
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 restriction is stopping sugar/HFCS.
And it also explained the rebound effect - e.g. after the extreme restriction, the participants start re-introducing sugar and HFCS back into the diet, and since that's the real culprit, weight goes back up.
No taking away from this super cool citizen science - deep kudos on testing things like this out! I'm tempted to participate in something like this. Self-experimentation is a lost art.
pr0zac|2 years ago
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.
ForkMeOnTinder|2 years ago
derbOac|2 years ago
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.
tekla|2 years ago
dalbasal|2 years ago
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, potentially, useful to do these kinds of things as an isolation diet (gradually add back foods and pay attention to effects). It's also useful to just break bad habits by doing weird stuff sometimes.
I'm Irish. I love potatoes. They do not have magic dietary powers. The potato doesn't explain anything. You can get similar results with toast, bacon or bananas. The results do not mean anything specific for longer term fat loss, health, etc.
It just proves that bodyweight fluctuates in response to radical diet change. That is known.
Same for a lot of the "water tricks" that thankfully have started to die down. They use bodybuilder tricks to eventually dehydrate themselves for a perfect look on stage day. It's sold as a weight loss trick.
tomxor|2 years ago
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.
francisofascii|2 years ago
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.
elil17|2 years ago
The flip side, of course, is that losing 10-20 lbs from a diet shouldn't be taken as proof that the diet does anything special. People can do that with almost any diet.
SMTM's potato diet study found exactly that - 10 to 20 lbs of weight loss for most participants. This should be strong evidence that it's not a silver bullet. SMTM is pretending otherwise.
pja|2 years ago
That’s radically different from other diets.
rabbits_2002|2 years ago
merpnderp|2 years ago
seanwilson|2 years ago
Feels obvious to me that it works via “calories in, calories out” though. 2kg of potatoes a day is about 1500kcal so it's hard to overeat.
For the participants it didn't work on, surely the most likely cause that should be controlled for is how many potatoes they ate or how much oil/butter (some of the most calorific ingredients we use) they had on top?
And not if participants avoided tomatoes ("Tomatoes are our top bet, but other possible blockers might be: wheat, bread, grains more generally, maybe meat.")?
matthewdgreen|2 years ago
ulizzle|2 years ago
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
tobiasSoftware|2 years ago
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.
thomascgalvin|2 years ago
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.
tech-historian|2 years ago
ctz|2 years ago
sedivy94|2 years ago
broast|2 years ago
broast|2 years ago
tomcam|2 years ago
ravenstine|2 years ago
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.
hoseja|2 years ago
bsuvc|2 years ago
Does anyone know of a similar riff trial related to irritable bowel syndrome and gut health?
unknown|2 years ago
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soared|2 years ago
coffeefirst|2 years ago
sedivy94|2 years ago
voidee|2 years ago
ajmurmann|2 years ago
setgree|2 years ago
That way people can do what they want, but we might also get some well-identified estimates :)
tekla|2 years ago
lm28469|2 years ago
swader999|2 years ago
tech-historian|2 years ago
Taikonerd|2 years ago
throw932490|2 years ago
I do fasting a lot. Doing diet for weight loss is a huge red flag. Human body gains and loses water very easily. Change of 10 lbs (in any direction) is rounding error, after changing a diet.
Major reason to do potato diet are health benefits. It decreases inflammation, and gives your gut chance to heal. It may improve sugar digestion, liver and so on. Basically any junk and toxins you eat normally, go away on potato only diet.
AFTER you become healthy, you may try to lose weight.
bumby|2 years ago
Are there clinical trials that show these outcomes in patients? (To clarify, I don't mean studies that show potatoes have potential chemicals/mechanisms related to those outcomes, but actual trials with patients that saw a scientifically meaningful difference in those outcomes after a potato diet.