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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4823 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 18, 2022

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Bari Weiss had a podcast with Dr Casey Means about Means new "Levels" diet.

https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/d0186220/eating-ourselves-to-death

(Bari Weiss does not really interview, in the sense of pushing back on her subject and making them take tough positions. I guess that is podcasting world.)

The tl:dr is to not eat anything processed at all. There is some kind of biofeedback which shows you getting better by not eating processed food. The episode's arguments about why there is no support for this range from extremely reasonable to conspiracy theory stuff.

Is there any follow-up research on how well her diet works?

(I do not want "her ideal diet is wrong, follow my ideal diet instead." I just get this sinking feeling whenever I ask questions about a specific diet that people see it as a chance to talk about their own, and that the proponents of the diet in question will say that any problems with it are from not following it closely enough.)

Unprocessed foods produce a lower glycemic spike, generally but not always have greater nutritional content, and contain fibers that promote a healthy microbiome which may in turn lead to greater satiety.

Wouldn't a glycemic spike have to do with the carbohydrate/sugar load? If you look at a glycemic index chart you see plenty of unprocessed foods at the very top which will spike your blood sugar - such as white rice.

Absolutely, but I think that’s what processed codes for in America.

I think any type of diet like this ends up being effective just like any other diet - calorie restriction. Processed foods are frequently high calorie. Replacing them with other similar foods will frequently be less calorie dense, therefore healthier.

Another factor is costs. Speciality foods cost more, so people will buy less to follow a particular diet, causing them to eat less and lose weight. Gluten fanatics eat less carbs which tend to be calorie dense. Etc.

Basically if any diet replaces high calorie low nutrition foods with low calorie high nutrition foods its probably going to be effective. If someone wants to do that with eating no processed foods and it works I think they should be empowered to follow the diet, even if they misunderstand how the diet is benifitting them.

I think any type of diet like this ends up being effective just like any other diet - calorie restriction.

This is my main issue when people start talking about healthy diets. I've never had a problem with eating the correct amount of calories, so my main interest in comparing the health of diets is wrt increasing longevity through non-weight related factors. Obviously weight has a huge impact on health but if that's not something one struggles with then a lot of talk about what diets are healthy becomes useless because often the main thing people use to compare the health of a diet is wrt how effective it is at helping people lose weight. So some diets termed unhealthy may become healthy when removing the weight factor, and vice versa. I'm not sure how often this happens or what other factors i should be looking at in order to evaluate what is the healthiest diet with weight factor removed though. Probably at the minimum diets with less burnt stuff and maybe less glycemic spikes? I don't know. Are processed foods statistically unhealthy because of calories or other reasons? How big of a difference do non weight related factors even make? Is worrying about them worth the cost of worrying about them or is it pretty resonable to eat what you want so long as weight is managed?

Like /u/EfficientSyllabus below, I am not at all surprised if the diet "works" for people who try it, for whatever reason, because they are at least thinking about their food for more than a few seconds.

I would still like to know what kind of follow-ups this stuff gets, though.

The quality of a diet, in terms of only weight loss, is a tripod of calorie deficit, satiation, and motivation. The calories are what actually make it work, the satiation and motivation aspects help people follow it.

The "twinkie diet" is a low-satiation low-motivation diet. It totally works, thermodynamically speaking — just eat TDEE - 500 calories worth of twinkies and you'll reliably lose one pound per week — but no human being is going to stick with it.

The keto diet is a high-satiation high-motivation diet. "Meat-based" diets like this have enjoyed wide popularity because people love eating chicken and steak, they're filling, and as a result most dieters stict to it.

This Levels diet seems like a high-satiation low-motivation diet. It will work very well for a few weeks, since unprocessed foods are filling and stop you from pigging out, but eventually people will (a) rebel against preparing and flavoring all their food from scratch (b) actually want to eat some dopamine-triggering processed foods, at least in moderation.

at least in moderation.

That is my instinct on exactly where it might go off the rails. If you have to be 100%, then it does not matter, you will never achieve that. Like never ever drinking unfiltered water, sooner or later you are at a restaurant or friend's house for some reason.

sooner or later you are at a restaurant or friend's house for some reason.

That's what sticking with it looks like. Never being at a restaurant or a friend's house. Or roll like peak A-Rod and just bring your own food to the restaurant.

At some point you have to ask if life is worth it if you have to avoid hanging out with friends or ever eating anything made by someone else.

If your entire career is being a performance athlete like A-Rod, yes. Otherwise I am quite skeptical.

My working theory on diets is that the default unconscious diet is so shit that the sheer fact that you do any diet will bring improvements because you pay attention to what you eat and you probably won't mindlessly eat the junkiest junk. The rest is window dressing to make it stick, by making it personal, important, moral, emotional, identity-forming, you-are-a-good-person-for-doing-this stuff.

This doesn't mean there are no biological differences between diets, but when a normal person picks up any diet, it will probably be an improvement. Just like there can be differences among the effectiveness of different exercises, aerobic, anaerobic, different workout programmes with flame wars between their fans, but all of them are an improvement over the default sedentary lifestyle.

Here's a competing theory:

Various branches of humanity evolved to survive quite effectively off whatever the local diet was. The Mediterranean diet is great for the Mediterranean genome, the medieval-times British diet works great for the medieval-times British genome, and so forth.

This suggests that most of us probably have a diet that works well for us - we just might not know what it is.

When "a new diet" becomes popular, a bunch of people try it, and a bunch of people discover that they've finally found the diet That Works For Them. This isn't a perception deal, this isn't a matter of paying attention, the diet really does work for them, so they talk about how it's been a miracle and try to spread it.

But it doesn't work for everyone, because no diet works for everyone.

I've seriously thought about trying to put together a Diet Book that just collects every cuisine that seems to work nutritionally for a significant set of people, then puts them all in one place, with the note "go through this book, stick to each diet for a month or two or three; if you find one that works, keep doing it".

I have considered this before, but there are two problems I ran into. What is the relevant period? Should one base his diet on what his ancestors ate 500 years ago, 5,000 years ago, or 50,000 years ago? We now know that a lot of natural selection due to changes in diet occurred during the neolithic, so maybe that is the relevant period, but my understanding is that most people had terrible diets and terrible health as a consequence. Didn't Europeans mostly just eat bread and milk and weren't they consistently malnourished? We must have some adaptations to this diet, but it is probably still not an optimal diet for us. We clearly never adapted perfectly to this diet, so maybe we should go back further and eat mostly fish, like they did in the paleolithic, or maybe we should supplement the neolithic diet with the fruit, vegetables, and meat that I understand only the rich ate large quantities of.

Two reasons this doesn't seem plausible: frequent migration and frequent changes of diet. We find wheat cultivated 10k years ago, and that's obviously just a lower bound, it might've been so before that without evidence. But - "and Germany and Spain by 5000 BC". 5k years is enough time for some evolution, but how much? And humans and ancestors, over a million years of evolution, would've had to adapt to many different kinds of food, leading to all humans today being able to survive on a wide range of diets.

There certainly are adaptations to different foods among different people - but how significant are these, and adaptations to what, and do they have much to do with modern diets? not sure.

If you look at skin colour, it is clear that, over a few thousand years, we can adapt to local conditions despite migration. We don't need to keep adaptations for conditions from millions of years ago. We can just be adapted to the conditions of the last few thousand years.

Natural selection takes a long time to bring a new mutation to significant frequency in the population, but if a genetic variant is already common in a population - as it would be if two populations have recently mixed together and the variant was common in one of the populations - it wouldn't take long to spread to nearly everyone if there is strong selection.

Yes, but - if the variant was already present, and if there was strong selection. This is going to be true for some variants - but which variants, and what effect they have, is a question! Humans lived in europe for a long time before skin color adapted. So concluding 'if you are from the mediterranean historically, then eat what they eat there' is not going to work well.

That seems pretty far-fetched to me, in that a thousand years is nowhere near long enough for human level selection effects to occur. I could perhaps buy that our gut biomes adapted to ancestral diets, but I tend to suspect old fashioned diets being better for us is more just a matter of ancestral wisdom/modern processed food being utter shit. Like, obviously a balanced meal of lean protein, grains, and mixed vegetables is gonna be better than fast food or whatever sodium loaded nonsense one picks up in the freezer aisle.

A few thousand years is certainly enough, see lactase persistance.

In 500 years americans will be svelte and healthy off of a diet of corn sugar, vegetable oil, and preserved meats.

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