Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

Doc here. I'm not surprised that an adult male carrying 33.4% body fat dropped weight on an 1,800 calorie diet. Nor am I surprised that his cholesterol stayed down. If you've every seen a patient on total parenteral nutrition or g-tube feeds, they all move toward a normal BMI and then get scrawny. The switch over to skinny is due to muscle atrophy from disuse. If they survive and return to a normal activity level, they typically regain the muscle mass.

The take-away: don't eat too much.

Quiz:

1) what three food groups did he cut out of his diet?

2) What is the normal range of BMI for an adult male?

3) Fat is transported in the blood in various kinds of packets. HDL and LDL are proteins that label the outsides of certain packets. If HDL goes up during weight loss, where do you think those packets are coming from? Where do you think LDL packets are going to? If Professor Haub's weight equilibrates with his new 2100 calorie diet, what do you expect will happen to his HDL and LDL?

I'll take a stab at #1. I'd say he missed the "fish, poultry and eggs", "healthy fats/oils" and "whole grains" groups. He was eating from the "use sparingly", "dairy" (from the shake), and "vegetables and fruits". Eggs are often in the types of snacks he was eating, so it's possible you could argue he was also eating from the "fish, poultry and eggs" group.

I'm using the groups as defined in the Healthy Eating Pyramid: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-...

Upvote. I wish it was more obvious that I wasn't using food groups as a proper noun. Since he wasn't eating fruit, you can see the friction between the language of reality to the use of language in food politics. "Fruits and vegetables" are different. Compared to stems and leaves, fruits are high in sugar, low in fiber and complex carbs.

I’m going to have to plead some confusion or ignorance I here. I’m well aware that nutrition has become a political hot potato for the last few decades, but I’m trying figure out why you felt the need to bring it up in your response. What do you mean by “not food groups as a proper noun?"

Because the pyramid defines a group "fruits and vegetables". I could define any set of edible things I wanted in a small g group, but the pervasive inclination to think about "fruits and vegetables" inhibits my goal of getting people to think about them separately. Fruits are not the same as stems and leaves.

I think I see your point; when I was a kid I saw charts that handled them separately. (I think it was during Reagan’s or Clinton’s term that they got kerfuddled together.) But it doesn’t help matters that the terms “fruit” and “vegetable” are problematic, at least in English. What a layman thinks is a fruit can be drastically different than what a biologist or lawyer thinks is one, thanks to a real mess of culinary and legal tradition. (The tomato is the textbook example.)

you are correct, most junk food does contian some type of animal part be it eggs, dairy or fom animal-derived protein (i.e. l-cycten or gelatin)

Hey, doc, what about insulin and other hormonal stuff? What harm is it going to be short-term / long-term?

+1 on this. This type of diet must be destroying his insulin sensitivity and in turn his leptin sensitivity.

What's your basis for that line of thinking? He's only consuming 1800 calories spaced evenly throughout the day, so I'd imagine that he'd in no way be coming close to taxing his body's ability to process glucose or produce/respond to insulin.

The "maximum insulin load" is going to depend on factors beyond calorie count.

For example, if you consume a can of Coke, your body is going to try to process the sugar in it all at once. But if you consume a donut with equivalent sugar, the fats and oils in it slow down the digestion process. Thus your maximum insulin load(which is the largest immediate factor in creation of fat tissue) will be lower with donuts. Fruit achieves a similar load-lowering quality through fiber instead of fat.

Also note that in a single can of Coke, you consume 39g of sugar for 140 calories(source: Wikipedia). Therefore 1800 calories in sugar alone is 501g of sugar.

I don't know about you, but I usually do not feel very good if I have more than about 20-30g of "naked" sugar at one time. And this guy's experiment does three things that lower his insulin load substantially so that he probably never crosses that 20-30g boundary:

He eats pastries rather than drinking soda, thus he enjoys a nice levelling effect from the oils and doesn't actually get all of his calories from carbs.

He eats vegetables for extra fiber.

He drinks a protein shake, which induces satiety(and depending on the type of protein, may also slow digestion).

If you attempted to reproduce the experiment without these things protecting you, you would probably feel too sick to continue within a week.

> For example, if you consume a can of Coke, your body is going to try to process the sugar in it all at once. But if you consume a donut with equivalent sugar, the fats and oils in it slow down the digestion process. Thus your maximum insulin load(which is the largest immediate factor in creation of fat tissue) will be lower with donuts. Fruit achieves a similar load-lowering quality through fiber instead of fat.

You have an understandable and common misconception of glycemic index. You cannot always intuit which foods will have a higher glycemic index. For example, you incorrectly seem to believe that cola has a higher glycemic index than a donut. In fact, donuts have a higher glycemic index than do colas.

You should not conflate your subjective feeling of "badness" with the objective measure of circulating insulin or glucose (unless you have rigorously established the correlation, which is not obvious). Subjectively, I feel just as bad when I only eat a donut as when I only drink a coke.

see my response.

1800 calories a day isn't going to be a major challenge to his insulin system, no matter how high the glycemic index, even in the long term. What he might have to deal with is the increased hunger from lack of satiety signal (leptin, et al), which would then require more will power to avoid overeating, a precious commodity. Better to spend under your caloric limit by eating foods with bulk (broccoli, carrots, etc) and some strategic fats (a sprinkle of cheese on your salad, nuts for a snack), thereby maximizing the satiety signal you get for those 1800 calories.

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