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Comment by benevol | Hacker News Reader

Here's the main hack:

Do not eat anything that contains sugar.

To start off, try it for just 1 week. You will realize that sugar is a drug to our brain.

Once you are clean, reduce the "hidden sugar", carbs, to a minimum, and increase vegetables to reach 60% of the volume of your food.

You'll feel great again.

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For millenia the main source of sustenance for almost everyone in the world was carbs: bread in the west, rice in the east, maize in the new world, roughly. Most of the time they weren't malnourished.

The "withdrawal" and subsequent sustainable diet that people describe sounds to me just like what you would expect from someone making a major diet change.

The great feeling that people talk about having after a few weeks of low/no-carb diets sounds a lot like what people describe after switching to a vegetarian diet. It can be explained in terms of the sense of purity that restricted diets create (as seen in spiritual traditions dating into prehistory), the knowledge that you have the self-discipline to control your diet, and also the repleneshing of nutrients that your old diet lacked and are present in your new diet. Vegetarians often see health issues arise a couple years after ceasing meat consumption. Those who aren't carefully monitoring their nutritional intake, and some who are, get sick. It would be interesting to look at people who ate no-carb diets long-term.

I've seen ketogenic diets work for people close to me, but I'm skeptical that it's so much the lack of carbs that make it work as the self control that it forces people to exert. Maybe a vegetarian diet would be more productive if it achieves the same results, but is arguably more ethical, and definitely not less.

In my experience, ketogenic diets tend to work because you're basically eating the same meals, just with one-third (the starch) cut out of it. If you're eating a traditional American meat-vegetable-potato dinner, eating just the meat and vegetables without the potatoes probably cuts out 500 calories. Regardless of any metabolic benefits, that calorie reduction makes quite a difference, and then if you factor in the better satiety and more stable blood-sugar levels that consuming fat and protein gives vs simple carbohydrates, you really wind up eating considerably less food, total.

Ketogenic is too extreme. Doctors and nutritionists will agree on that. I'm an anecdotal example, but for me it caused my resting blood sugar to actually increase.

Food quality matters as much as food quantity. Yes you can lose weight on a McDonald's Diet (we've seen a whole documentary on this), but that may not improve your blood markers or other health markers.

Without modern medical intervention, the carb-rich diet most humans have been eating for the past 12 millennia causes health problems such as tooth decay. So "we've been doing it for thousands of years and it hasn't made us extinct" is not synonymous with "we've been doing it for thousands of years and it's made us healthy".

The article implies that people of low-income backgrounds are vulnerable to obesity. It wouldn't surprise me given that it's a lot cheaper to fill yourself up with soft drinks and carbs like bread/pasta/rice than it is to do with vegetables (at least, without a lot more research/effort).

It is not cheaper. The poverty tax is in knowledge, and it is paid twice - easily accessible food is expensive for its quality. With enough money to buy time or expertise to manage your diet, you can pay less money for higher quality food.

The poor don't have time for that or much cooking—they have two jobs.

Cooking doesn't necessarily take much time.

They could cook on the weekend or on their day off and try to use a crock pot or bake things as those can be done while doing other things at the same time.

It's also a lot quicker and easier to prepare packaged and ready-to-eat meals which have some scary nutritional profiles. Poor people can often have chaotic and busy lives which precludes finding and preparing fresh food.

Also: http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defi...

Also, they may simply lack access. Try walking to your nearest grocery in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Availability doesn't appear to trump culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/upshot/giving-the-poor-eas...

"Generational habits of consumers don't change overnight" seems a less than surprising conclusion for something as social as food. Even with availability + affordability + community education, I can't expect you'd be looking at less than a half-generation for diets to change.

Ergo, food deserts aren't a valid way to look at the situation, since availability isn't the fundamental problem.

That doesn't following from my way of looking at it.

Your view as I understand it: research shows that availability doesn't change dietary habits over the short term, therefore something other than availability is the fundamental problem.

My view: the research you've linked shows that availability doesn't change dietary habits over the short term, but that might still mean that availability is a fundamental problem over the longer term or still a necessary but not sufficient fundamental problem over the short term (e.g. maybe it takes availability + education).

Hell, look at canned vegetables. Most contain sugar; you have to buy more expensive frozen or fresh stuff if you want something unadulterated.

I was totally off sugar for a while. My diet shifted to consist mostly of meat. Unfortunately, my cholesterol shot up like anything.

Eating vegetarian, or white meat that's quick is very hard to do without sugar. I eat Soylent, and it's super sugary, but easy to consume. On the other hand, I've tried a bunch of protein bars / powders, and literally none of them are savory.

But, yeah, I agree with you, I would kill for an easy, pure vegetable diet.

There are low-carb alternatives to Soylent.

Keto Chow is the one I use. I definitely prefer the taste of Keto Chow to Soylent. It's more like a milk shake. Also, Soylent gave me consistent acid reflux. https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketochow/

Ah, but these flavours all still seem sweet. Once I have sweetness on my palate, I find it difficult to abstain from sugar.

The need for Cholesterol levels (or something like them) to be meaningful is stronger the evidence that lowering them is useful. You're probably better ignoring them, and just getting regular exercise instead.

Yeah, at the time, I exercised 4-5 days a week, with intense cardio and a bit of weight training. Even with that my cholesterol levels were at an unsafe level, and we were beginning to see odd side effects. Those side effects were enough for me to decide to switch.

>Eating vegetarian, or white meat that's quick is very hard to do without sugar.

No, it's not.

I feel awesome and I eat a high carbohydrate diet. 80%+ of carbs.

Some people can tolerate carbs and find them easy to process, others end up feeling terrible and end up with diabetes...

People who are overweight or obese usually end up with diabetes. It's a metabolic disorder that is separate from nutrient intake.

I'm not so sure, I bet you if you only ate candy and coke for a month or two you'd end up having something that looked a lot like diabetes.

And if you don't eat sugar or carbs at all you can't get diabetes or at least you're working on ketones presumably which means you aren't producing much insulin and when you do it works more effective.

I'd say more research is needed here to draw such absolute conclusions as you do. We used to tell everyone that low fat was the way forward but that has been repeatedly shown for most people to be harmful.

I'm drawing "absolute conclusions" but you lead with this:

> And if you don't eat sugar or carbs at all you can't get diabetes

Low fat is still the recommended diet. There are a lot of people who can't stick to a low fat diet though. People such as Jimmy Moore don't have discipline and are looking for a scape goat. If carbs are the problem that must mean that eating as much fat as possible is healthy!

There are no studies that prove that low fat is "shown for most people to be harmful." Where did you read that? Reddit?

>Do not eat anything that contains sugar.

Are you including fruit in this?

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