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Comment by yarou | Hacker News Reader

I think it's important to note that every individual is different. I'm surprised that gene therapy has not made any inroads into weight loss management and diabetes/hypertension prevention. In an ideal world, diet and exercise should be tailored to your genetic makeup, instead of the "one size fits all" brute force approach.

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You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. You are an ugly bag of mostly water, with mostly the same DNA as everyone else.

Diet and exercise should be tailored to what actually works (as should everything else; feedback loops are awesome). You don't find out what works uniquely for you by having some expert guess based on what your DNA makes very slightly more likely, you find out by trying and seeing if and how your results differ from what's typical or what you expected.

> You are an ugly bag of mostly water, with mostly the same DNA as everyone else.

And yet, BMI is highly heritable (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=weight+OR+BMI+heritabili...) so the 'mostly' is a pretty key qualifier.

The question is are you inheriting genes or memes?

Or bacteria?

I agree that there is some consensus on what works for exercise, but livestock breeders readily breed strains of animal to enhance he efficiency at which they convert food to weight on the hoof.

If pigs or cows can vary as to how much weight they put on for the same input of food, surely humans can too?

Why can't we use gene therapy and proven methodologies? For example if one diet works 5% better for people with condition X use that as opposed to another diet. It's not all or nothing.

Why would an expert have to "guess" when they have piles and piles of data? I think it's 100 years too early for you to reply to me.

Those of us in the Keto community (who have our heads screwed on straight at least) willingly admit this.

I have seen people try high fat ultra low carb diets and fail badly despite following all best practices. I have also seen the exact same diet completely turn lives around restore hope to people.

There is a lot we do not know about nutrition yet. Why some people respond to certain diets and not others is one of those large unknowns.

what were the details of the failures?

i'm doing keto right now and steadily losing weight.

> what were the details of the failures?

I had a friend who, after 3 weeks, never got over the keto flu. He didn't lose any weight, was constantly sick and ill, and just had no luck on Keto at all. It was his second time trying it, he had the same experience on his previous try as well.

His Macros were spot on, and he was doing everything right, he just felt awful.

I've read anecdotal reports of other people having similar problems, though since they aren't first hand I cannot personally speak as to the accuracy of their experiences.

This seems to be one of the few failing points in keto: failing in keto-adaptation rather than getting through keto-adaptation and then failing to derive benefits medium or long-term. It would be great to have more data points on why people fail to keto-adapt (gall bladder dysfunction? other metabolic disorders?)

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