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Wellness Wednesday for December 21, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Slime Mold Time Mold has released the results of their Potassium Supplementation study, and I'm pretty disappointed in them. They are boasting an average of 1lb of weight loss over a month, with about a quarter not losing weight and another quarter gaining weight. A few very fat people lost multiple lbs (person with BMI over 60 lost over 10 lbs.) Some of the people writing to them stated that they were intentionally cutting calories. For example, one testimonial:

(23881640) I started a quick calorie-restricted diet before the holidays (got to fit into those festive pants!), and I’m combining counting macros, counting calories, AND adding 1 tsp of potassium chloride a day to my water, and the weight is coming off. It’s making the calorie restriction much more bearable.

That sounds like the potassium was a magic feather, not to mention the effect of joining a trial and focusing on weight for a month straight.

Despite my assessment that this study is inconclusive at best, the SMTM team is crowing about statistically significant P values and how this shows some sort of effect. They say it couldn't possibly be cutting calories, because the people eating the most calories lost the most weight. Never mind that they aren't tracking calorie deficit, and as mentioned above the biggest losers were at very high BMIs, so we'd expect them to eat the most calories and still be at the biggest calorie deficits.

Darn. This updates me majorly towards "its not the potassium". The effect size is so small as not to matter and I agree that the very fact that people are in a study will alter their behavior.

On the plus side, this majorly strengthens the case for the Potato Diet. Let's say we consider the potassium to be a placebo, and also that the potato and potassium studies were run under similar conditions. Since the potato diet should much greater weight loss, we can see that there is something real there beyond just being part of a study.

The person who critiqued SMTM's bad chemical hunger series did a quick search and found some negative RCTs on potassium. smtm bad etc

Yeah, fuck the critics. I'll take whatever SMTM is doing over the experts who came up with the food pyramid with 6-11 servings of bread at the bottom. I can understand how "real" scientists feel threatened when SMTM is doing interesting work and they are, by and large, not.

Huh? It's possible for SMTM to do bad science while most nutritionists also do bad science. Same way Ray Peat does it.

I can understand how "real" scientists feel threatened

"Natália Coelho Mendonça" isn't a nutrition scientist or anything afaict, they're just a smart person?

agree. bad science is not just limited to 'health authorities'.