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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4828 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.)

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.

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