Like, they crow that the potato mono-diet "works," in that the people who successfully followed it lost weight. Well, sure -- all of those 70s fad diets "worked" in that sense! Grapefruit and popcorn? Sure, you can lose weight on that!
But their own numbers show that people regain the weight after they start eating other foods again: "On average, people gained back most of the weight they lost."[2]
People who successfully follow very restrictive diets will lose weight... as long as they follow it. And these "riffs" in the OP where it's potatoes and bacon, or potatoes and gummi worms, or whatever, won't change that basic observation.
[1]: http://achemicalhunger.com/
[2]: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/26/smtm-potato-diet-co...
I don't know, I'm not a nutritionist, but the inaccuracies plus all the potato-conspiracy stuff made me doubtful of SMTM. My main takeaway was that no one, not even people in the field, really knows how food works.
[1] https://nothinginthewater.substack.com/p/contra-smtm-on-obes...
[2] https://basedprof.substack.com/p/smtm-mysteries
[3] https://someflow.substack.com/p/criticisms-of-a-chemical-hun...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...
SMTM have never responded to it, and they have lost my confidence for that reason.
I wanted to enjoy that series because exploring alternate factors in obesity is interesting, but the series similarly went into a weird obsession with lithium as an explanation for everything. He almost immediately started ignoring evidence that didn’t fit his theory and obsessively focused on cherry-picked evidence that was favorable to the story he wanted to tell.
Others have posted links to various debunking articles of the series, but the part that made me lose interest was even earlier: He has a section where he acknowledged that caloric intake was up over the same period of increased body weight, but then tried to dismiss this as irrelevant. I can’t take anyone’s writings on obesity seriously if they don’t believe increased caloric intake is correlated with increased obesity.
The series is written in a rationalist style that appeals to many people, but the content and logic within were not very scientific or even representative of the sources he cited at times. It’s a good example of how the right prose can be very convincing.
Every single diet suffers from that, because you don't need a diet, you need a life style and as the name implies it, it has to be sustained for your whole life
The difference between a fad diet and a good diet is that a good diet is designed to be sustainable from the start. The goal of a good diet is to reset your eating habits into a healthier set of foods that you can still enjoy and continue eating regularly indefinitely.
> In a meta-analysis of 29 long-term weight loss studies, more than half of the lost weight was regained within two years, and by five years more than 80% of lost weight was regained
Or, to offer some anecdata, I lost 60 pounds in early 2012. I started working out. In 2015, I hiked every weekend, totaling more than 400 miles of distance covered, and more than 20 miles of elevation gain. And in 2016, while training for a trek in Peru, I injured myself and was unable to exercise for quite a while. I gained about 20 pounds back, but then stabilised -- until COVID, when high stress and a forced change in dietary habits (I couldn't go to the grocery store easily, and many foods were routinely out of stock) means I ultimately gained back the remainder of my weight, some eight and a half years after losing it. In particularly extreme examples,
Generally speaking, weight loss as a goal is destined to fail. Even when significant habitual changes are effected, the reality is that people's metabolism is hugely impacted by their early life. Furthermore, weight loss has often been found to increase levels of hunger[1], which makes it incredibly difficult to sustain. And in extreme cases -- such as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment[2] -- low-calorie diets (in this case, actually about 1600 calories a day) can cause persistent decreases in both basal metabolic rate and satiety, which means those who have lost weight will not only find it harder to maintain the weight due to a decreased caloric requirement, but also because of increased hunger.
The tl;dr here is that sustained weight loss may be possible, but the best bet is probably weight loss which occurs over a period of a decade or more, because any faster and you start to risk some paradoxical outcomes which will make it increasingly difficult to maintain.
0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/ 1. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/weight-loss-le... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experimen...
This is part that keeps this potato diet stuff interesting to me is that they've been extremely open with the numbers, from the very beginning. Most fad diets you have no idea how many people participated or the particulars of their habits during the participation period and there was no follow-up at all beyond the participation period.
I don't think SMTM has "cracked" anything with the potato diet yet and I don't expect to see useful "answers" from SMTM, but they've been good so far at some of the raw bits of science: finding ways to ask interesting questions and recording as much data as possible about it, publishing that data, and then finding interesting new questions from that.
Sometimes I feel rather cynical that we'll not see any answers in my lifetime, but I appreciate a blog asking interesting questions and then trying to data science what they can around them to find more useful questions.
IMO, there's a psychosomatic angle for restrictive diets that is similar to a placebo.
Maybe they'll find that people who replace one of their daily meals with french fries end up losing weight over time. Who knows. I think it's good to be positive.
From a chemist/material scientist perspective: Whether the results of the Riff trial may ever have a p value suitable for nature/science, likely not. When it comes to the human body and our biology, a mass trial like this may even be more useful than traditional studies, where pre-existing biases in data collection may weed out the most useful 'Riff'. Better than that, the information collected by mold_time is regularly released and discussed, in the open, on twitter/x [2].
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476
Can you explain this further? I'm curious about it, because at face value it seems like it is somewhat contradictory. On one hand, you're saying it won't likely be demonstrably significant enough to generalize, but then you say it will be more valuable. Are you saying it's value is in it's non-generalizability? I.e., each person finds what 'riff' works for them? I thought the point of publishing results was, in part, to separate the wheat from the chaff so we don't all have to run a ton of self-experiments.
It's been more than a year since I alerted them of the multiple falsehoods in A Chemical Hunger, repeatedly, and they haven't done anything about them.
> The problem is that you can easily come up with 100 different hypotheses for what’s going on. Ok, so you run 100 different studies to test each one. But studies take a long time to run — let’s say 6 months per study. Congratulations, you’ve just locked yourself into 50 years
This is a major problem with science whenever you have less of a theoretical foundation. Compared to physics or chemistry, we know very little about nutrition or sports science. Because of this, the search space is very large. One could argue that given the number of surprising results (and difficulty reproducing those results), medicine and psychology also fall into this category.
> A riff trial takes advantage of the power of parallel search. Some riffs will work better than others (or at least differently), and parallel search helps you find these differences faster, especially if the differences are big.
What if we did more to encourage people to track and report their personal experiments? If even 10% of everyone on a diet (any diet) just tracked what they ate, what exercise they did, and how much weight they lost, and reported it to a centralized database, scientists could then look for patterns in that data and do formal studies based on suspected patterns.
We could do similar things with longevity/happiness. Look at the "Harvard Study of Adult Development" but imagine it was spread out over 10s of thousands of diverse people instead of just 300 upper-class American men? The data quality wouldn't matter much if all you are doing is searching for patterns to do follow-up studies.
The point wasn't that potatoes were particularly good for you, but to "reset" one's attitude towards food, eating only when hungry rather than for pleasure or to deal with stress - because after a few weeks, one is so tired of potatoes that they'll forego unnecessary eating.
In this sense, the potato diet is probably useless in itself, but might work in that "reset" role.
Penn's a very good writer and hacker (this is a temporary diet hack, after all), and if you're interested you can read more about this here: Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales: https://www.amazon.com/Presto-Pounds-Disappear-Other-Magical...
Penn credits Ray Cronise for literally saving his life. You can read his 2014 paper The "Metabolic Winter" Hypothesis: A Cause of the Current Epidemics of Obesity and Cardiometabolic Disease, here: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/met.2014.0027
I can't find it on PubMed or in my bookmarks.
If memory serves - high/low fat, high/low carb, high/low protein, etc - didn't matter as long as the restriction is stopping sugar/HFCS.
And it also explained the rebound effect - e.g. after the extreme restriction, the participants start re-introducing sugar and HFCS back into the diet, and since that's the real culprit, weight goes back up.
No taking away from this super cool citizen science - deep kudos on testing things like this out! I'm tempted to participate in something like this. Self-experimentation is a lost art.
Yes, there are other variables like hormone levels (thyroid adjacent ones particularly), genetics (defines base metabolic rate), drugs/chemicals (some effect metabolism), and dietary macros (too much sugar causing diabetes) which factor in to weight loss or gain, but its pretty clear at the end of the day all they are doing is modifying the numbers each individual needs to use in the same old calorie calculations, and very often not to a high degree.
I get its fun to play with theories and edge cases, but I don't understand why so many people find this simple, well established explanation unsatisfying and hard to accept.
Because when people try to put it into practice in a form that's not dangerous they struggle, and when humans struggle at something they feel compelled to theorize the struggle. "There must be a reason this isn't working for me," they say, "one that doesn't ultimately reflect on my morally culpable lack of capacity to exert my will." [To be clear, I don't think people are to blame for lacking willpower, I'm just identifying the logic here.]
Looking around, they observe that some people have more success on a diet where they restrict some particular type of food X. This success comes from playing a trick on the brain, making it think that it is not in a position of deciding to eat less every day, but is being forced to eat less. Some restrictions manage to play this trick on the brain successfully for some people some of the time. People promoting diets that are not just "calories in, calories out" are hoping to take advantage of this effect. When these diets become popular, it's because the logic I identified allows people to say "it's not that I failed to force myself to eat less, it's that I didn't stop eating carbs" - or what have you.
One reason it's hard to eat less that you didn't bring up is that the body reacts to you eating less by reducing your metabolism. I don't mean this in a magical fashion where the body has a high efficiency mode or that you can somehow gain weight while eating fewer calories than you consume, but in the simple ordinary sense that people dieting tend to be tired and more lazy. Your body does not want to stay at the same level of activity while dieting, and so you lose less weight than you'd expect with a simple metabolic rate calculation. You can allow for this of course, but it means you have to cut even more.
So I don't know that many people reject the basic physics of calories in, calories out per se. Most reasonable people talking about this are more interested in why attempting a pure "eat less food" diet tends to fail, and what tricks can be employed to achieve appetite reduction. The various individualized factors can be overwhelming, especially when you consider that many people don't have access to adequate nutrition and healthcare.
What I remember was that diets didn't differ from one another in efficacy once you controlled for caloric restriction, and that dieting was more effective than exercise, although exercise did have a small but quantifiable effect.
I also think one of the meta-analyses compared atkins-style diets to others and concluded that there was some slight evidence for their superiority (in terms of weight loss) in the short term but that after a few weeks they didn't differ from the others.
I've worked in bariatric surgery units and my personal sense from that and reading some of the literature is that a lot of what works best is highly individual-specific due to all sorts of reasons, including personal food preferences, genetics, microbiome, etc etc etc. The standard explanation for diet working better than exercise is that the extra caloric expenditure of exercise gets washed out by excess intake; I think this is undoubtedly true but after having worked clinically in obesity settings, I also think it's really astonishing how little exercise some people get. That is, again, I think some people who start adding a modicum of exercise are likely to see huge gains from it simply because their caloric expenditure is starting so low; conversely, most people who take up exercise probably exercise within a certain range, so it doesn't say a lot about the expectable weight loss of someone who is really exercising intensely.
First, radical dietary changes cause rapid fluctuations in weight regularly. Not fat, weight.
Second, if you eat only one thing or are generally restrictive... You will probably lose a lot of appetite.
It's no good going off on some theory about pottasium. Occam's razor suggests that this also works for the been soup diet, fruit diet, etc.
It is, potentially, useful to do these kinds of things as an isolation diet (gradually add back foods and pay attention to effects). It's also useful to just break bad habits by doing weird stuff sometimes.
I'm Irish. I love potatoes. They do not have magic dietary powers. The potato doesn't explain anything. You can get similar results with toast, bacon or bananas. The results do not mean anything specific for longer term fat loss, health, etc.
It just proves that bodyweight fluctuates in response to radical diet change. That is known.
Same for a lot of the "water tricks" that thankfully have started to die down. They use bodybuilder tricks to eventually dehydrate themselves for a perfect look on stage day. It's sold as a weight loss trick.
This, probably almost any natural food that is not too sweet will work.
Overeating manufactured "food" devoid of nutrition, pumped full of sugar and refined carbs has become the default in the western diet... That a potato-only diet is an improvement highlights just how bad it has become.
Depends on what diet you compare them to. If you could demonstrate people could live healthy lives on just potatoes compared to a normal Western diet, that seems like a significant finding. I don't think toast or bacon would give you the array of vitamins/nutritional value. What other foods would beat out potatoes? Beets maybe? I have also heard some dietitians questioning the "eat the rainbow" recommendation, and that having less food diversity is actually better. I am not suggesting limiting yourself to one food is ideal, but maybe limiting to just a few types foods is, depending on your genetics.
People (academic even) "demonstrate" this all the time. All meat diet. Vegan diet. Raw diet. One meal per day. The potatoes and lemons diet. Etc.
Feed most overweight western adults a restrictive diet, their health is likely to improve dramatically. That's because it's restrictive. Not because of what it is restricted to.
If you have >15kg of excess fat, you are probably reslient to undernourishment. The fat loss, lower blood sugar and such will improve your health.
Btw, in 19th century ireland, poorhouses published guidelines for the all potato diet. Their clients were undernourished. Their guidelines based on observing individuals who would deteriorate quickly if the diet was insufficient.
Their dietary minimum was 3-4kg of potatoes + 1 pint of milk or one portion of sardines or mackerel. You need to eat a lot of potatoes to make this diet sustainable.
A modern Irish man is much heavier, and much, much fatter than our great grandfathers. We also do less physical work. In that context, we can survive just fine on a lot of insufficient diets for a very long time.
The flip side, of course, is that losing 10-20 lbs from a diet shouldn't be taken as proof that the diet does anything special. People can do that with almost any diet.
SMTM's potato diet study found exactly that - 10 to 20 lbs of weight loss for most participants. This should be strong evidence that it's not a silver bullet. SMTM is pretending otherwise.
That’s radically different from other diets.
Feels obvious to me that it works via “calories in, calories out” though. 2kg of potatoes a day is about 1500kcal so it's hard to overeat.
For the participants it didn't work on, surely the most likely cause that should be controlled for is how many potatoes they ate or how much oil/butter (some of the most calorific ingredients we use) they had on top?
And not if participants avoided tomatoes ("Tomatoes are our top bet, but other possible blockers might be: wheat, bread, grains more generally, maybe meat.")?
"Satiety value is the degree at which food gives a human the sense of food gratification, the exact contrast feeling of hunger ... Foods with the most satiation per calorie are often:high in certain proteinase inhibitors that suppress appetite - eg potatoes"
Potatoes are well known to be the most satiating food by a wide margin.
> you don’t eat enough calories, that part is simple enough.
The articles doesn't seem to agree though? They seem focused on things like how tomatoes might significantly block the weight loss of potatoes.
Well, ok, it’s calories, but why even bother to have any sort of study about this?
Of course people who don’t know about calories would think they invented a whole new idea and methodology on scientific research
1. 40% of US adults are obese, which is insanely high for a willpower issue (gambling addiction is 1-2% for example)
2. The vast majority of weight loss attempts fail miserably long term, with success rates somewhere between 5-20%
3. There is precedent for this type of idea with stomach ulcers. We thought they were a psychological cause but the main cause turned out to be H Pylori bacteria
The problem is that even if they are right, it is very difficult to detect a difference between directly eating less calories and not eating a contaminant that makes you hungry so you indirectly eat less calories.
The interesting questions are why a diet produces a caloric deficit, and how difficult that deficit is to maintain.
The "don't eat anything and drink nothing but water" diet produces a caloric deficit through a very obvious mechanism, but it isn't something people can adhere to long-term.
Semaglutide produces a caloric deficit by turning off the mechanisms that make people want to eat, and appears to be sustainable long-term (assuming you can financially afford it).
With the potato diet, the question isn't exactly "why did they lose weight?" but more "why did participants reduce their calories?" Were they so sick of goddamned potatoes that they couldn't bare to shove another one down their throat? If so, that indicates that the diet is unsustainable. On the other hand, if people were enjoying the diet and reduced their calories because the potatoes left them feeling fuller, longer, that's a mark in the protocol' favor.
Weight loss studies aren't about finding ways to reduce calories, they're about finding ways to reduce calories that people will comply with. And based on how often diets fail, and how often people regain all (or more) of the weight lost once they stop dieting, I would argue that we actually haven't figured out the answer to this yet.
It's very controversial, which is part of why the SMTM blog exists in the first place. If running a calorie deficit were sufficient then any diet in the world should work, and we have so much evidence of obese people struggling with quality of life even living on extreme calorie deficit diets. It's not willpower, not all calories are equal, and there's a lot of questions about how useful calories are as a metric in general.
(I'm of the opinion food calories are the last bastion of Phlogiston Theory in any of the sciences. The Standard Calorie Model was invented at the bizarre Sanitarium at Battle Creek by vegetable-hating vegetarians who religiously thought grains were the one true food from God, and were designed to sell more cereals [Dr. Kellogg and his brother that founded the Kellogg Company], crackers, and even cookies [Dr. Graham who helped found Nabisco]. Food Calories are a poor metric of chemical content. Exercise Calories are worse metric of human energy output: The human body is not an ideal spherical furnace and the moments of highest heat output are dangerous conditions better known as "fevers" and "strokes". The Standard Calorie Model is "replicated science", but most of the replication studies were done by German scientists in the 1930s and 1940s and any replication crisis that involves possible war crimes makes other sciences' p-hacking crises look positively quaint. There is a lot of unsolved controversy around Food Calories.)
My guess is that it probably works, at least to an extent. The reason I used the word "probably" is I didn't stick with it long enough to lose over 10 lbs. This is because it's probably the least pleasant weight loss technique I've tried. No joke, I'd rather eat nothing the whole time. Eating potatoes seems awesome at first, but I began to really hate the taste and texture after just a few days. This is of course my opinion. Some people have had great results on it. It's just not for me. I know the author of this article doesn't agree on this at all, but I beg to differ. Almost every other technique is more comfortable for me. Though I'm sure it'd be fine if I added lots of fat and ketchup. I just wasn't going to do that and risk gaining a bunch of fat.
Off the top of my head, here are all the possible ways that a monodiet of potatoes can result in weight loss:
- Potatoes are a highly-satiating food, one of the highest in satiety
- Potatoes get boring without lots of added fat, salt, and spices.
- Potatoes may contain some "resistant" starch, though I've seen a few people self-experiment with resistant starch and conclude that it's no different than consuming glucose.
- A potato diet mostly engages the metabolism of glucose and not so much with fat (unless you're adding a ton of fat), so the Randle cycle is engaged much less, hypothetically. Though this is supposedly contradicted by people eating potatoes with heavy cream.
- Potatoes only cause a small increase of uric acid in the blood in contrast with other foods, uric acid having a correlation with fat mass. Then again, there are people who eat diets that cause a higher increase in uric acid and remain lean and muscular (carnivore diet is an example).
- Sarcopenia from a lack of dietary protein can cause some net weight loss.
Most other ideas I've seen are pure hypotheses that either aren't that plausible, or are untested, or are mechanisms only demonstrated in vitro.
Some things I'd like to note about this crowd study and what I'm reading in this proposal:
- Allowing participants to choose their own adventure is a poor design. There's definitely value in testing different combinations of adjunct foods along with the potato diet, but this should be controlled based on how many participants sign up. The cohort might otherwise become lopsided towards a certain preparation, adding sour cream, etc. Instead, candidates should be assigned an adjunct and be allowed to accept or reject the challenge.
- The part about "If you can’t get potatoes, eat something else rather than go hungry, and pick up the potatoes again when you can" really reduces the potential value of this experiment. This may add too much noise. It's already bad enough that people are bad at self-reporting, but now you're giving people permission to just do whatever.
- Participants should record their physical activity. This will of course be full of statistical noise, but it might as well be recorded in case it's helpful. Have them record their activity for at least a month prior to the trial and record it during the trial. The reason I think this is a good idea is that, when dieting, people may have a tendency to put themselves into an "I'm getting healthy" mindset which encourages them to also get exercise, which is a confounding factor here.
- Day-by-day body weight data is mostly worthless. I would explicitly encourage participants to not record their weight at all except at the beginning and end of the trial. Daily weight checks can have a psychological effect that may encourage the participant to perform actions that confound the trial, such as walking more or eating less than they otherwise would in order to make sure they get the intended result. This can happen unconsciously.
Otherwise, I think this idea is awesome and that more crowd "riff trials" should be done.
Does anyone know of a site dedicated to riff trials? If there isn't one, it should definitely exist.
Does anyone know of a similar riff trial related to irritable bowel syndrome and gut health?
That way people can do what they want, but we might also get some well-identified estimates :)
I do fasting a lot. Doing diet for weight loss is a huge red flag. Human body gains and loses water very easily. Change of 10 lbs (in any direction) is rounding error, after changing a diet.
Major reason to do potato diet are health benefits. It decreases inflammation, and gives your gut chance to heal. It may improve sugar digestion, liver and so on. Basically any junk and toxins you eat normally, go away on potato only diet.
AFTER you become healthy, you may try to lose weight.
Are there clinical trials that show these outcomes in patients? (To clarify, I don't mean studies that show potatoes have potential chemicals/mechanisms related to those outcomes, but actual trials with patients that saw a scientifically meaningful difference in those outcomes after a potato diet.
Potato diet is a baseline in fasting community. Before you do long water fast, you need to go on detox. Doing potato diet for couple of weeks is strongly recommended.
