The recent study Taubes critiques here was covered in several articles posted to HN.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10061426" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10061426</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068486" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068486</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058472" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058472</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050278" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050278</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058190" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058190</a>
The facts of that study brushed aside: the participants diet was based on potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni. Notice, not enough protein to maintain lean body mass. This is a bad idea.<p>Also, over 24 weeks the group lost 25% of their body mass.<p>Look at pictures of the participants: <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25782294" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25782294</a> These look like frail bodys that, indeed, can sustain on 1600 calories per day, which explains slowed weight loss.<p>If you're an individual looking at how to seriously lose fat and recompose your body, don't look at popular media, but look at those with vested interest in effective results. E.g. athletic trainers in sports where weight management is a key point of the sport, like bodybuilding, wrestling, MMA, powerlifting. The science is quite clear, you just have to figure out how to filter out popular articles. (Lyle McDonald's site is a great start.)<p>Calorie restriction, with adequate protein intake, works. Also, any diet or lifestyle change that works creates a caloric deficit, and will also work if you count this deficit.
A 6 day study on diet in 19 people somehow generating meaningful conclusions about weight loss in general is <i>absurd</i>. It does seem like you could learn something about rates of change - are we speedboats or supertankers - but that's about all.
More diet fad posts.<p>Again, I have no idea what diet fads have to do with the stated relevance of this site. This is an opinion piece with little to no information beyond harping on one particular vein of diet ideology. I really hope these types of ideological off topic posts begin to be penalized and flagged soon.
24 week study sounds brutal, would never happen today in politically correct society.<p><pre><code> participant: I want to chop of my fingers and eat them, or kill myself, please let me go.
"doctor": You signed a waiver, now shut up and eat your turnip!
</code></pre>
Anecdote: There was a Polish Survivor edition in 2004, ran out of ideas halfway thru the series and started starving contestants out. They did things like an hour long swimming/running race culminated in holding item over your head in full sun until you collapse, all for the prize of small bag of sugar, while losers got small portions of white rice instead. Ordinary men got turned into stick figures. Last program was recorded one month after the contest, all previously super skinny guys sported huge beer bellies, when asked said they couldnt stop eating.
Why has the simplistic traditional advice worked for some? Is there big variation in the extent to which different humans are affected by macronutrient ratio and food quality? Are nuanced dietary dos and don'ts a domain reserved for the unlucky?
Taubes breezily dismisses the Hall paper, which is, methodologically speaking, pretty conclusive. If you're curious about the paper and its implications for Taubes's obesity-insulin hypothesis, I'd recommend these two blog posts by Stephan Guyenet, an obesity researcher:<p><a href="http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-new-human-trial-seriously-undermines.html" rel="nofollow">http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-new-human-tr...</a><p><a href="http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/more-thoughts-on-recent-low-fat-vs-low.html" rel="nofollow">http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/more-thoughts-...</a>
So many problems with the interpretation of the starvation study here.<p>Quantity of food (in caloric terms) not type, is the single biggest predictor of weight loss. In fact unless your body magically defies the law of conservation of energy; it's impossible to lose weight in a caloric surplus regardless of food choices.<p>The subjects in the study stopped losing weight despite staying at the same caloric consumption BECAUSE THEY LOST A LOT OF WEIGHT ALREADY. Therefore, their maintenance caloric requirements were lower than when they started. To assume that this is because of anything other than their body mass lowering is ridiculous.<p>The second study had too small of a population and was too short in duration to try and extrapolate anything to a longer term diet.<p>Taubes is a vehement believer in the low carb movement and has sold a lot of books on the topic. His opinions are heavily biased and he has a lot invested in interpreting the data in a way that's favourable to him.<p>The fact remains, it's physically impossible to lose weight when not in a caloric deficit, so sorry Taubes, you really do have to either "eat less" or exercise more (hopefully both).
It appears Taubes has been bitten by a meme. The subjects in the NIH study consumed isocaloric diets and were put in a chamber that measured all of their thermodynamic outputs -- it turned out thermogenesis was a tiiiiiiny amount higher on one diet. Why is that? Well, the "loading" (pre-test) diet was mostly carbohydrate, the low-fat diet was also, but the low-carbohydrate diet was mostly fat. After only six days, the subjects' metabolisms were still adjusting to the diet. Where did I get that idea? <i>It's in the study abstract:</i><p>> Mathematical model simulations agreed with these data, but predicted that the body acts to minimize body fat differences with prolonged isocaloric diets varying in carbohydrate and fat.<p>Even some of the <i>media stories</i>, like the one in your first link, quote the author of the paper saying this:<p>>Indeed, Hall's mathematical modeling predicts that in the long term the body acts to minimise body fat differences between diets that are equal in calories but varying widely in their ratio of carbohydrate to fat.<p>>"Over the long term it's pretty close," says Hall.<p>You'll recognize Hall as the first author of the study. Let's be clear: the lead author of the study said in plain English that there was probably not a significant long-term difference in energy usage resp. composition.<p>Why is the media blowing this up? Because they just want a story. They want nutrition to be an argument, rather than a gradually developing science with occasional surprises.<p>Their goals are at odds with researchers who want to make useful information about nutrition available to consumers. That includes the New York Times. Keep that in mind.
Just a trawl through old diet advice, but what stood out to me was the crappy advert (something about how many triangles I see). I cannot for a moment image the published paper accepting some crappy trawling / phishing ad for its sunday edition - even if they ponied up the cash.<p>How has advertising got so bottom-feeder and no one seems to care - this is your brand guys !