The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts:
1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule.
2. The vast majority of calories come from carbohydrates.
People overeat because food is easy to access, and it provides a short-term, immediate chemical reward. External rewards often need to be introduced to break this vicious cycle. Hobbies, relationships, career achievements, etc. can function as alternative rewards. Perhaps there is a way for technology to provide short-term rewards in lieu of eating?
Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false.
Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly.
Your second and third points however are scientifically supported, but do not confuse this with "obesity is complicated." It is not how many calories you eat, it is where they come from.
I used to weigh 340 pounds, I went strictly Paleo, did not increase caloric burn, did not decrease caloric intake in any meaningful way, hit 214 in a year, and then continued dropping; roughly 2000 calories a day and not a lot of exercise (was afraid of joint damage due to weighing so much).
You've provided almost no information, but at 340 lbs it's possible your TDEE was more than 4000 calories/day, meaning it's possible you went on a reduced calorie diet with your bacon strategy. Without more information, your anecdote is useless, and even with more information it's still just an anecdote.
Also, Paleo, like any similar structured diet, is just a trick to get you to ingest fewer calories.
And I'm going to piggy back on the [citation needed] about calories in/out being scientifically disproven.
While not the OP, there is research demonstrating that the blood glucose and insulin response to various carbohydrate sources is highly specific to the individual. In the study I'm thinking of, some people were given cookies, others were given bananas (among other things). The responses weren't consistent at all.
As for calories in/out being a simplification, while it is mostly true, the tricky bit is that calories out actually varies wildly with the foods you eat. Your body's hormonal milieu changes very significantly with what you eat, and that has a massive impact on your biochemistry. Additionally, the microbes in your gut have certain food preferences, and they can metabolize a significant fraction of the calories you eat. Thus, hormonal shifts and rate of microbial metabolism can spike your "calories out" far above what would be predicted by BMR and activity level (and the reverse is unfortunately true as well).
I think this is what people are missing. The laws of thermodynamics are not being violated with these various diets, and like you mentioned, for certain individuals their metabolism is being increased.
This suggests something tech could actually help with.
Since each person has a different gut microfauna, if we had a system to measure my gut and compute what foods would be good for me, we could design custom diets for each person.
I agree with you to an extent. However, none of this changes the fact that consistent exercise increases the rate of metabolism significantly and generally leads to better mental and physical health. It also doesn't change the fact that eating at a caloric deficit will always lead to weight loss. A caloric deficit alone is not enough for one to reduce to a healthy weight as they may also be losing large amounts of muscle mass. Conclusion: Consistent exercise and a well-balanced diet are still the best ways to become healthy and maintain health.
But it's not that simple -- "eating at a caloric deficit" isn't a constant thing. You can eat less, but your metabolism might drop even further, so eating less calories can lead to weight gain, or a loss of muscle mass that is more than made up for by a gain in fat. And plenty of research shows that exercise is, for most people, counterproductive for weight loss because they wind up eating afterwards than the calories they burn. Yes, exercise leads to general better health, but that's a very different goal from losing weight.
>"eating at a caloric deficit" isn't a constant thing. You can eat less, but your metabolism might drop even further
This exactly why I mentioned consistent exercise. Exercise will speed up your metabolism as it causes the breakdown of muscle mass and other tissues which then need to be repaired and improved by your body. You can push exercise even further by buying into linear progression and training your body to rebuild itself in order to adapt to your training regimen.
>research shows that exercise is, for most people, counterproductive for weight loss because they wind up eating afterwards than the calories they burn
This is not an argument against my position. This is caused by a lack of discipline. Also, eating after exercise can be a good thing. The effects of a heavy weight lifting session will linger for several days and burn far more calories than the actual session itself. The muscle that was damaged during the training session needs high quality nutrients to be rebuilt. I, for one, usually eat a philly cheese steak or hamburger if I have a really intense training session because I know I need the fat and protein. People seem to think that exercise is a means to burn calories. It is not. Exercise is a means to an end. For some people, it's strength, for others it may be rock climbing. For others still, it may be for general health.
>Yes, exercise leads to general better health, but that's a very different goal from losing weight
My argument is that losing weight is a means to becoming healthy. You cannot become healthy without a well balanced diet AND consistent exercise. If your goal is simply to lose weight, exercise will aid you in that endeavor AS LONG AS your diet is in order.
Becoming healthy is not a diet. It's not going to the gym once a week. Becoming healthy is a lifestyle choice and not everyone has the foresight and discipline to do it. If someone doesn't have that discipline and self control, that's fine. Just done blame it on genetic issues or confusion. Say it like it is, you're(general you) just lazy. And that's OK.
Robert Lustig[0] and Gary Taubes[1] are excellent places to start to understand that obesity is not simply about 'calories in/calories out'. Lustig has a now-infamous talk that surveys the research.[2]
Relevant short video from the Documentary "FatHead" that talks a little bit about what Gary Taubes is talking about in his book. The effects of carb/sugar and the insulin response that causes fat storage.
https://youtu.be/mNYlIcXynwE
It's free on Amazon Prime Video if anyone wants to watch it. I'm still only halfway through it though, so if he suddenly says we should just eat helium at the end I'm sorry. :P
Well...as of today it's no longer part of prime video. :/ But you can sign up for a 7 day trial of the extra subscription for documentaries that allows you to watch it and then cancel.
There's nothing special about Paleo except that for some people it's easier to restrict total calories by cutting out the things that Paleo cuts out.
By that logic, I consider Paleo to be a trick. Not in the dishonest "deceive" sense, but rather in the card trick sense, or the "one neat trick" life-hack sense.
To add on to this, my understanding is that technically "calories in, calories out" is correct in the sense that weight gain/loss depends on the net caloric intake for your body. But your base metabolic rate, and as a result your daily energy expenditure, is affected by many different things, including the composition of the calories and the timing of the consumption. Insulin plays a major role in weight gain/loss, and simple carbohydrates have a tendency to spike it.
This is the hard thing about the "calories in/calories out" statement, it's accurate for a specific thing: the calories of energy in a burnable form available to your body/the direct burned calories as a combination of RMR and exertion.
The issue of course is that we use it in the context of different kinds of food and a simplistic assumption about how effective we are at converting a calorie in each into a burnable form.
2000 calories of energy from custard will be processed, stored and used differently than 2000 calories of energy from chicken.
No thermodynamics needed to disprove it, but we probably need something more complicated than thermodynamics to get a good picture of the real balance.
Nothing more complicated than a scale in your bathroom is needed. Check daily and see if you lose weight with whatever combination of food/activity/metabolism you have going on. If you somehow gain or lose weight, eat accordingly.
Using the scale is great if you understand proper nutrient timing and partitioning. What if you don't know the basics of nutrition though? Where do I cut from? What can I add in that will assist with satiety but still reduce overall energy absorbed? Where do I go to understand that these are questions that need to be asked in the first place?
I agree. I think the problem stems from how we determine the caloric content[0] of a food stuff. We add the known caloric content of its ingredients, which we determine by burning them. This is probably just not a good model for how the body uses food.
> Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false.
That's an extreme statement you definitely need to provide source for. I read a lot of scientific journals on the subject and have never heard anything like that.
We know there is conservation of mass and energy in nature. Any chemical engineer can write mass and energy balance equations that represent this conservation.
Calories in = Calories out is an simplified form of a more complex energy balance equation that looks something like this:
... plus a few more equations that represent component energy balances.
Calories in = Calories out makes some naive assumptions and neglects all the internal biochemical reactions, and hence presents a skewed picture of the thermodynamics.
But when you state it like you did, there's an implication that the left hand side are the causal factors and that(Change in internal energy/accumulation) is the effect coming out of those causal factors. The problem is that there are many people with deranged metabolisms where their bodies are hormonally imbalanced to increased internal energy accumulation, which then by necessity disrupt the rest of the equation by either raising food intake or reducing energy expenditure.
>> Most people believed that fat is converted to energy or heat, which violates the law of conservation of mass. We suspect this misconception is caused by the “energy in/energy out” mantra and the focus on energy production in university biochemistry courses.
Enthalpy (note, not energy) is an extensive property, and is proportional to the mass/size of the system, so mass is already accounted for. CO2's enthalpy can be represented in the same equation.
The energy balance equation is a fundamental thermodynamic equation. It is inherently coupled with mass balance equations. If we didn't get this right, we wouldn't have been able to design chemical reactors all these years.
Unfortunately because enthalpy is a more abstract concept, it isn't very appealing to folks who like simplifications like calories in = calories out. It is, however, the correct concept.
Basically it says that the metabolic mechanism of fructose is different from other forms of nutrition. Our bodies have no good ways to break it down without harming ourselves. The long term effects of eating fructose are comparable to long term alcohol drinking. I assume nobody would say that calories from alcohol are the same as other food sources?
Based on all of the responses to this comment I can see how someone would be completely confused on what they need to do to lose weight.
While admitting the rest of this thread is bonkers, I'll explicitly list the formula you should follow right now (science is always evolving):
Change in Body Stores = (Actual Calories In - Calories Not Absorbed) - (Resting Metabolic Rate + Thermic Effect of Eating + Physical Activity + Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis)
This is the more nuanced formula of calories in, calories out. Changing one variable in that equation can have an effect on the rest of the equation, which is why it appears calories is not equal to calories out. You can read about each variable here: http://www.precisionnutrition.com/metabolic-damage.
"Calories Not Absorbed" really got me thinking. While a food is labeled with their potential calories - the amount actually extracted from the food by your gut will vary significantly based on the composition of the food. The bioavailability of calories for example in a cookie versus some fibrous raw vegetable are going to differ significantly, being absorbed at different rates and to differing degrees of completeness.
Here is an interesting article with an important take away: "In general, it seems that the more processed foods are the more they actually give us the number of calories we see on the box"
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-hidden-t...
I found this recently [1] suggesting that 15-18% of calories from peanuts are excreted. It's probably more for me since they give me digestive problems and that's what made me curios about the subject too.
So I guess eating processed food vs food that's hard to digest actually matters a decent bit if you're counting calories (10-15% of your calories is not insignificant - that's almost half of what you're trying to cut on a calorie restriction diet)
Calories not absorbed has also made me think about diets like the raw food diet. Eating raw uncooked vegetables is going to reduce the calories you absorb while taking up more volume in your stomach.
I think it's really obvious that you can eat even 5000 calories a day, and under certain circumstances, not gain weight.
However, if you eat 1000 calories or less, it's impossible not to lose weight. Unless you know someone who can synthesize energy to live and move out of thin air......
That lethargy you feel when you diet is your body's metabolism slowing, and it also results in you being less active. If your metabolism totally crashed and as a result you felt so bad you didn't do much other than sit around, you might not lose weight on a 1k cal diet.
Sure, but there is a point where you are taking in less than you are using. Maybe I should have said 500kcal instead. It doesn't matter if your boby absorbs 100% of that, or 20%, or if it's all organic veggies or potato chips or straight up lard - it's just not enough to live on, and you will lose weight.
1.) You will underperform in work and life in general. You will be constantly tired, appear lazy to employer (practically speaking be lazy) and will make slower stupider decisions. You may end up weighting less, but will have hard time to keep up at work.
2.) Your body will adapt and become much more efficient in extracting calories from food - people who lost weight through fasting tend to gain weight very quick. Most of them can not keep the weight long term. That practically means you gain weight first time there is longer stressful period in work or life - when all your focus goes to project you are working on o family care or whatever.
3.) You do not eat just for calories - you need also various proteins, vitamins and what not. You are damaging your body by not giving it what it needs more then by being slightly overweight.
Yes, people who don't eat at all loose weight, but there is price to pay on their health and performance. It is true that western people tend to eat way more calories then necessary, but "just eat small portions till you have target weight" advice does not work long term.
You'd think that if it has been scientifically proven false, it'd be one of the biggest discoveries of the century - The Human Body, A Perpetual Motion Machine! Energy from Nothing!
It isn't so much that calories in/out is false, as the equation of "calories eaten - (activity + bmr) = weight change" that is false. The food you eat has a massive impact on your biochemistry (and thus your metabolic rate), and microbial metabolism also varies significantly depending on the substrate you provide them.
The beginning of the article linked says "if you usually consume 2,500 calories a day and then cut back to 1,600 calories, you’re going to lose weight from that 900-calorie daily deficit — even if all you ate was potato chips. But you won’t be healthy and you most likely won’t be able to keep the pounds off."
I went from 245lbs to 185lbs by eating 1500 a day every day for 5 months, that was over a year ago and I still weigh 185lbs, all I did was when I hit my target weight was make sure that over a week my diet averages out to 2500 a day, some days I go over by a few hundred, the next day I just under eat by a few hundred so that it balances out.
Yep, eating a balanced, calorie reduced diet for a period of time will let you lose weight in a healthy manner - assuming no other issues. Thankfully, most people don't have issues beyond being overweight so loosing weight for most people is just stop eating so much.
Calories in, calories out is indeed how it works, but people also need to realize that your body is not a static machine, it reacts to its environment. Restrict caloric intake too much and you hit a point where your body enters a 'starvation mode,' it holds back on as much work as it can and holds everything it doesn't use. If you have problems absorbing foods due to problems with your GI tract, you might find that you don't need to restrict too much before that happens because you weren't getting all the calories you thought you were before.
Of course, reducing calories will cause your body to change some of what it does even if you have no other issues, so for maximum benefit, you should pair it with exercise.
I've also restricted myself to 1500 calories a day for the past month or so and have lost about 10 lbs so far and am on track to lose a similar amount in a similar time as yourself. My wife did the same thing at the same time, it's not going anywhere near as smooth for her, but she has GI issues.
>> Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly.
I had a soccer teammate in college do something similar. He was a central mid and was constantly getting beat by guys faster than him. He felt he was too fat and needed to drop a few pounds so he could compete better.
He went on what he called a "beer" diet. He would wake up and drink a beer to curb his appetite in the AM. Then at lunch, he would have a 12" subway sandwich, chips and pop. Once he got hungry again, he would drink another beer to curb his appetite until practice. After practice, he would have another beer. He would still drink water throughout the day to stay hydrated.
He dropped some 25lbs in like 45 days.
After he lost the weight, he realized that while he did lose the weight, he also suffered a ton of muscle loss. Before he was getting beat because he was slow, now he was getting beat because he was too weak to either fend off other players, or not strong enough to slow other players down, even though now he could keep up with them.
Afterwards he said he wouldn't do again, and started doing more weight training and interval cardio to maintain a healthier weight. After another six months, he said he finally found a happy median between being fast and being strong and stable on his feet.
First of, congratulations for losing significant weight, albeit in a non-conventional way. Eating two pounds of bacon a day takes a lot of determination.
I am glad it worked for you. However, most people need to start with a basic rule and go from there.
I think it is mainly calories in / calories out. While there seems to be evidence that the source of calories and diet composition do play some role in weight loss, that is what I would call "expert mode".
You can't exercise away a bad diet. One hour of very hard cardio, can burn up to 1,000 calories, depending on your weight and exercise intensity. A big mac meal with a medium drink and fries is more or less that as well. Exercise is great, and is an excellent supplement to a diet, but if you don't watch what you eat, it will be difficult to exercise away the extra calories.
The base rule is you have to watch what you eat. You can play with the composition, but concentrate on the calories. I can not say this enough. If you have extra pounds that you want to lose, and you have not yet found a way to do it, stay away from gimmicks.
Losing weight involves eating less, not eating more.
Regarding different types of calories, it's important to note that fats, proteins, sugars, and carbohydrates are digested in different ways. If you ingest 500 calories worth of sugar your body will be able to use almost all of that for its energy needs. Meanwhile, digesting protein is more complicated, and your body will be able to extract fewer of those 500 calories for its own needs.
From reading diet boards, a lot of people find that their weight loss efforts are more successful with a compositional approach than just Eating Less. "Eat less" might be a simple rule, but implementing it is not so simple. Compsitional diets remove that problem, and appear to work for a lot of people.
I know there are a lot of HN readers who have used the Keto diet with considerable success, for example. And there are a good number of other diets that work for many people too whilst allowing an ad libitum approach to eating.
Energy in, energy out sounds pretty basic to me. I would be interested to know where you think your energy intake comes from, unless it is from food?
Or is it just the caloric measurement you think is irrelevant for human energy intake? While obviously imperfect, I'm skeptical it could be an order of magnitude off for example.
The problem here is people equate calories in/calories out with the equation "calories eaten - (calories burned from activity + basal metabolism) = weight loss". While energy in/out dictating weight loss is basically true on a biochemical level, that equation is false because your biochemistry undergoes massive changes as a result of what you eat, and gut bacterial metabolism also depends on the substrate provided.
The problem with the 'energy in-energy out' model is that energy is rarely what we need more of. Food cravings persist for the nutrient one needs most, not just the amount of energy needed. Eating less of a conventional diet does reduce the amount of energy one takes in, but also reduces intake of whatever nutrient the subject was craving in the first place. That's why compositional diets work better for so many people, if the subject gets all the nutrients they need, they won't feel the desire to eat more than that, and consequently won't take in more energy than they use.
TL;DR: Total energy in matters, but watching energy-to-vital-nutrient-ratios in one's food is a better way of ensuring the proper levels of both.
Perhaps "calories in calories out" is still the golden rule for startups that want to make money instead of helping people to lose weight in the long term. I can't see any startup going against this deeply entrenched popular belief.
Weight isn't the only issue. Eating such a high-fat, high-protein diet, with little to no other sources of important nutrients, probably did horrible things to your kidneys, liver and arteries.
That's absolutely awesome, congratulations. You probably were running a lot of other risks besides joint damage, and all or most of those are now substantially less.
Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false.
It's not exactly correct, but it's a pretty good first approximation. As simplified heuristics go, it's much better than:
It is not how many calories you eat, it is where they come from.
If only because we don't actually understand the where & mechanisms very rigorously (notwithstanding all the violent handwaving surrounding many flavor-of-the-decade diet proponents)
About the best we can do with current science is (a better worded version of): How many calories you consume is important, and so is the nature of those calories, and when you consume them. Also something in there about calories being reductive, and other things matter.
In fact you can (and man do) do much worse for advice than Michael Pollans' summary: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.[1]" - but "food" is doing extra work here and human health is not the only consideration.
I was fascinated to see how much bacon 4000 calories really is. A quick Google suggests about ten rashers, which, I guess, spread over a day wouldn't seem all that bad (in comparison with, say, Michael Phelps' reputed diet - he really put the "eating" into "competing"...).
Still, that's a pretty epic diet, and could be very popular in developer circles. You should maybe consider patenting it.
It's a lot more than 10 rashers. It's about 1kg or 2lbs of bacon (around 100 rashers). Completely nuts to eat that much, if nothing else, the amount of salt consumed would be enormous.
It's not that it's wrong really. It's just that it's not particularly useful for weight loss.
If I eat mainly sugar and starches I can easily wolf down 4000 calories a day. If I eat a low carb diet it's a struggle to eat 2000 calories a day, the feeling of hunger isn't the growl in my stomach but a kind of mild headache, and after a couple of days my cravings for sugar subsides. The idea that some foods are more "satiating" than others is important, and involves many factors from calorie density to palatability.
Our bodies also regulate our desires for energy input and output. If I am depressed, exhausted or do not get enough sleep I will crave carbohydrates. If I eat certain foods I will feel lethargic and be more inclined to sink into the couch for the evening.
"Eat less, move more" to lose weight is true, but not useful. How you encourage people to do that that is the domain of biology and psychology, not physics.
Makes me wonder how much of the weight loss was more due to water loss rather than body fat. I remember reading something about people who are on the verge of starvation lose weight after getting access to food again due to water loss from the water required to digest food.
The meaning of that rule is generally "if you consume less calories than you use, it is physically impossible not to lose weight". Which is definitely true.
You can eat more than you use and not gain weight if you are not metabolising the food efficiently, but you can't eat less than you use and not lose weight. The former is limited by how badly you are able to mess up your body, the latter is limited by the fundamental laws of physics.
If you're at a calorie deficit, you will lose weight no matter what you're eating or what state your body is in.
That would still be losing weight(mass). The problem in this thread is that people are considering fat loss and weight loss to be the same thing. They're not. The simple truth is that a caloric deficit will always result in a net decrease in mass. This is fundamentally true of any system. Energy being removed from a system always results in a decrease in mass of that system. This is physics 101. Eating a caloric deficit will always cause a reduction in mass, though it may not be the mass you want to reduce. Eating at a caloric deficit without providing the body with the proper balance of macro-nutrients and exercise could lead to reductions in muscle, bone, and connective tissue mass. Reduction of carbohydrates in one's diet generally has a net positive effect in a caloric deficit due to the fact that there is essentially "more room" in the diet for higher quality nutrients such as proteins and fats. That said, cutting carbohydrates out entirely is a terrible idea as they are the body's primary source of short term energy.
I'm not sure it does. He said he weighed 340 pounds when he did this. His daily break even calories might be well above 4K. IIRC 2500 is recommended for the average male, who certainly does not weigh 340 pounds.
This is what happens all the time when calories in/calories out comes up, it becomes an exercise in pedantry. "It's just calories in/calories out" is not read by any normal person to mean "I should just cut my calorie intake by 500 for the day, and then drink that as olive oil 'cause that's easier to measure" It's there to convey "you can still eat french fries: just not as many."
> Also, hilarious adventure I went on once: I ate 4000 calories of bacon a day and nothing else for a month... ended up cutting it off a little early because I was losing weight too quickly.
That sounds like an extreme form of a ketogenic diet [1], or Atkins diet [2]. Very effective, but with only bacon you'll miss some important micronutrients.
Your bacon excursion is perfectly compatible with calories in calories out (you burned some of the calories, others took a different exit).
The mystery would be if you gained weight over a long period of time while consuming food at a calorie deficit. People do make this argument against calorie counting...
The fundamental lesson of calories in calories out is that someone who wishes to lose weight should seek to reduce their calorie intake to a level where it happens. It probably isn't all that useful a lesson, estimating calories consumed is hard, as is reducing them.
Calories-in, calories-out is the golden rule, but what a lot of people forget (like you have here) is that what kind of calories you put in affects calories-out (along with lots of other things.)
This is keeper, I'm at 350+ ideal weight around 230-240lbs (6'7") and looking for something to shake up my consumption that makes sense. I regularly exercise (20hrs/week low-medium impact) but eat fast foods
Isn't an ideal weight a complex function of things like occupation and personal taste. A brick-layer probably needs to carry more muscle, than people in other occupations; some people probably prefer to look more muscular/toned (etc.).
Surely there's not an objective ideal weight for any particular person?
Paleo is a fad diet, it can be healthy, yes, and many people with unhealthy diets try it, make a success and then the circle of anecdotal evidence reinforces the fad.
The easiest diet is a diet filled with starchy vegetables and fruits. It fills you up insanely, it's low on calories, and is extremely hard to overconsume.
Try eating a cup of beans, try eating two cups of beans. Practically impossible to do at one sitting. Try eating 10 bananas, extremely hard to do all at once.
People just don't realize how much calorically dense foods they eat and how little their physical activity is.
The paleo label might be a fad but I'd argue the diet itself isn't. Avoiding highly processed foods and limitng grain intake simply forces you to eat higher quality/healthier food and is a great way to clean up your diet to lose weight and improve general health.
The issue with the simplifying "calories in == calories out" is that conservation of energy is being applied over the wrong system. Our bodies are not 100% efficient at extracting energy from food, and to GP's point respond differently to different types of foods.
Your posts stood out (e.g. as rapid, aggressive, and unsubstantive) on a flamewar-prone topic. It's possible that others did worse and we didn't see it; we don't see everything or even close, so that's always the likeliest explanation.
When accounts do that, we sometimes rate-limit them. It's not great but it's one of the few tools we have for protecting HN from the destructive effects of such discussions. If people want not to be rate-limited and are willing to commit to posting civil, substantive comments only in the future, they're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.
Well, I would have deleted my "rabid," "aggressive," and "unsubstantive" comments, but apparently you've decided your users don't deserve the right to retract statements when they get off topic.
HN's window for comment deletion is fairly short because the threads are shared by the community. Letting people go back and delete comments after the fact would destroy the context necessary to understand them. So HN's policy has always been to leave most history intact even when the thread was regrettable. (I say 'most' because we do occasionally delete a comment when a user is worried about getting in trouble from it.)
Thermodynamic laws certainly apply, but you just can't measure all the variables properly. Trying to apply that kind of input/output calculations on such a complicated bio-chemical model like human body is just a naive over-simplification. First you would need to calculate the caloric value of your complete excrements (including sweat), before you even know what the actual energy input is. Than you would need to measure precise oxygen used by body and the heat produced to be able to know how much of it is used by body. Not to mention that you even don't know the exact caloric values of the food that you eat. Guesstimates of this whole process that we have in a form of calorie tables and calculators are only a rough guidelines, not exact science, and that's why in real-life numbers never add up. Not because human body somehow breaks the laws of physics, but because popular calculations completely ignore a lot of biochemical nuances. How efficient is your guts in digesting different types of food, which pathway is used to turn that food into the energy and how efficiently due to levels of specific enzymes, does your body (due to the current hormonal levels) prefer to store the calories or to burn them, how efficiently you muscles are using that energy (depending on you height, weight, age, sex, health), and many, many other little details that all count.
The only problem is that calories in = calories out assumes a steady-state where there is no change in internal energy (dU/dt), which is not a good assumption.
The change in internal energy is negligible. The only exception is medical disorder.
If you want to lose weight and you are not, eat less. If the amount you eat goes below say 1200 calories and you're still not losing weight, go to a doctor.
The person who does the eating is the one who gets fat, yes. But if that person is eating low quality, highly processed foods with ingredients that are far more likely to cause metabolic dysfunction, then it's not just an issue of portion size (and yes, eating too much is definitely an issue too).
And I was saying for the _same_ caloric amount, regardless of density. Never mind though, pretty clear you're a troll.
I probably should have added more comment, but the point is the "Calorie is a calorie" argument as applied to diet was pretty thoroughly debunked over decade ago. Calorie counting is a poor predictor of weight, while source of calories is a much stronger predictor. However, plenty of other people have commenting with more detailed explanations as to why, so I won't go on.
This "calories in, calories out" idea is dangerously wrong.
I have problems with my weight and my wife is anorexic. We live day-to-day with the fight against obesity (for years) and that's hardly a rule, much less golden.
The only constant I see on this whole food/nutrition industry is how little information is accurate. Millions of diets and nutrition "experts" saying whatever they hear works without testing anything. The classic "worked for me, must work for everyone".
I agree the obesity problem is there to be solved, but don't oversimplify it to 3 bullet points. That's irresponsible to say the least.
Actually barring some metabolic disorder, calories in calories out IS correct. Not only is it correct, I find that bodies are quite mechanical in that nature. I wrote about my experience losing weight and gaining abs a couple of years ago (complete with statistical analyses of what matters and what does not): http://blog.chewxy.com/2015/12/02/holy-crap-ive-got-abs/#350...
I've since maintained (and gained more visible abs :D ) with careful tracking on MyFitnessPal. I also find that if I do not track and weigh the food I eat (I get lazy and just "eyeball" the weight), I very rapidly get out of practice and put on weight. It turns out humans are terrible measuring tools.
And the best part is this doesn't only work for me. Everyone I know who has followed me into methodically measuring food (sample size of 6 friends, and a couple has PCOS and one has hypothyroidism but is taking pills) has had their data analysed by me and the results agree with one another - CICO IS true. I should really write up the analyses one fine day.
the "calories in, calories out" thing is not wrong at all. not "believing" in it is just like disregarding global warming or evolution.
of course it's not a simple addition. age, genetics and a lot of other factors come in.
what is dangerously wrong is thinking that changing your calorie intake is easy. it may be very difficult to gain or lose weight depending on which side you are, because changing the way you eat durably is freaking difficult.
I'm surprised no-one (including OP) is talking about the gut microbiome and how the variations in that can affect the absorption of calories. Twins can have very different results with the same "calories in / calories out" due to differences in the microbiome. This seems like a ripe opportunity.
> This "calories in, calories out" idea is dangerously wrong.
You don't see a lot of overweight people in famine prone areas. Calories out - calories in = your weight curve. That's the easy part for losing weight.
Sport does not burn a lot of calories. So it is better to cut on the intake. Which is the hard part: food can be a comfort drug which is easily available. Worse when your entourage is full of overweight people as crab mentality can set-in and they'll try to sabotage your weight loss.
This, unfortunately, is not true. Unfortunate cause I think great things would happen if it were that easy. It's also super simple to understand, which is at least part of why people cling to it so tightly.
There is a huge amount of scientific literature (see summaries by Gary taubes, for example) that show that calorie counting is not the whole picture when it comes to health or obesity. It's also definitely not a golden rule.
Hey, sorry I do not, but it was the first thing I saw with Gary Taubes' name on it so I figured it would probably be good. He has a few books out, and other articles online, that I recommend looking up (that does, in fact, have examples of studies that indicate that factors other than calories play a very important role in weight control)
Relevant short video from the Documentary "FatHead" that talks a little bit about what Gary Taubes is talking about in his book. The effects of carb/sugar and the insulin response that causes fat storage. https://youtu.be/mNYlIcXynwE
Not to say it's not a useful diet method. Just that there are a lot of factors that go into "calories out"-- what calories are being used for energy and what are stored as fat. How fast are you burning calories? Hormones are a big part of that. You can see this very clearly in hyper/hypo thyroid patients.
Last time I checked hormones were around the 400 calories per day level. Which is less than 2 small hamburgers.
Hormones only can not explain the percentage of overweight people in western countries. 50% of the population does not have hormones fucked up enough to not lose weight.
People in famine prone areas are considerably more sicker and live shorter (even when they don't die from famine) then western overweight people. Being overweight is healthier then living there.
Also, famine makes you passive, tired and well, less bright. There is a reason why famine prone areas dont produce tech hubs and nobel prize winners.
But you don't see a lot of overweight people there. Even if they don't do anything so don't use a lot of energy I guess calories in are less than calories out so that's why they can't store any fat.
There are other health problems due to this "extreme diet" but being overweight is not one. So if you want to lose weight do like them and eat less than what your body needs.
This is mostly due to malnutrition and not calorie restriction as far as I know. Calorie restriction has many positive health effects. Even then, comparing overweight people to famine struck people is an unfair comparison, it's like comparing a morbidly obese person to someone who is just underweight.
Of course it's more complicated than this, but in terms of a general rule calories in/out is pretty darn accurate. Saying it is 'dangerously wrong', is dangerously wrong.
It's true, but in an unhelpful way. We've been telling fat people to eat fewer calories for many years, and we're not seeing fewer fat people.
It reduces a complex problem into a simplistic slogan that's then used by many people to hate and judge fat people. "You're fat, just eat less stupid fatty".
It ignores "satiety". It ignores all the psycho-social stuff going on around food.
It ignores changed metabolic pathways (one of the reasons people who take antipsychotic medications are overweight is because of the changes to their metabolism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC487012/)
The things you're focusing on are _mostly_ micro and not macro, for 99.999% of obese individuals, CICO would help them lose weight. There are exceptions to every rule tho.
>Fat people can't manage to do that for more than a few weeks.
That's the problem. Lack of self control. Generally a result of psychological issues such as comfort eating or straight up food addiction. Doesn't change the fact that if those people were disciplined enough, they could still become healthy.
No, that is the basis of weight loss.
Focus should be on introducing better eating habits (better as in lower calories and better macronutrient composition), education and finding the reason behind their overeating habits since it's usually psychological one.
Yet another fact: altering the composition of calories, more protein and fewer carbs, seems to help overweight people eat less and/or burn more calories.
You're right, it does seem unhelpful (just eat/smoke/<insert vice> less!).
What is the proposed alternative though? Most people need a general rule they can follow to help them (read: can't afford a nutritionist/doctor). If it's a willpower issue, then we need to solve that, but just saying "Oh eating less won't help me" is just as bad.
We've been telling people lots of things and haven't seen [insert expected improvement from awareness campaign].
The matter of fact is that telling people about things they do wrong tends to not be very effective in general. It's not an indictment of a particular topic.
"Dangerously wrong" may be incorrect, but it tends to ignore things like thermic effects of food sources, intake vs. absorption, nutrient timing, and efficient gut microbes.
How much calories your body extracts from food and subsequently stores is not a constant. The thermodynamics argument basically ignores how human body works, but hey, it is simple.
Imagine we study you for a year. We put you in a box, we control your food intake; we strictly monitor the amount of exercise you get.
The first six months you stay the weight you are now. We then introduce a single change: we put you on antipsychotic medication. Nothing else changes: you're eating the same type of food and in the same quantities.
You will gain weight.
Is that because thermodynamics is broken? No.
Is it because you're "undisciplined"? No.
Is it because the antipsychotic medication is full of delicious calories? No.
It's because your carbohydrate pathwathway has been altered, and you now process carbs differently to how you used to.
Dopamine antagonists shift patterns toward favoring fat storage over muscle building/maintenance. They don't just reduce the amount of calories burned, they screw up the low-level regulatory mechanisms. AFAIK you basically have to starve yourself to bring blood sugar down to normal levels, and of course that's unsustainable.
The fact that your body can change the number of calories it burn disproves nothing. For example, the more weight you lose the fewer calories you burn, thus your calorie intake must lower to sustain the same deficit.
And yet control of the food supply is dominated by a tiny number of slow-moving, conservative companies who appear to spend most of their efforts engineering crops to behave like biological instantiations of intellectual property. Yield is the primary objective, not nutritional quality. Farmers integrated in this system have given up a huge amount of their autonomy and also influence over the breeds of crops and animals that they raise. Crop and livestock genetic diversity has plummeted, and we have removed the local experts from the breeding process.
I am shocked by the amount of effort going into fixing health problems post-hoc relative to efforts aimed at improving the foods we eat. In fact, we seem to be going backwards. The intellectual vanguard is pushing organic + non-GMO produce, heirloom foodstuffs, artisan food practices, and other regressive (if high-quality) patterns that won't encourage nutritional improvement for the majority of people.
We should be applying ourselves to improving food. It's completely overlooked because it's seen as a solved problem. I can completely understand why, but I think it's pretty clear, given the health problems in the west, that there is more to be done.
"1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule."
Yes, but I'd argue it's not a very helpful rule. As it has been said before, it's pretty much like saying that the golden rule to get rich is "money in vs. money out". Correct, but not very helpful.
How is it unhelpful to be told what you need to do?
Are you saying you need more specifics?
If you want to improve your financial position, either earn more money (get a side job, take a higher paying job with more responsibility), or spend less money (buy beans and rice in bulk, prepare your own meals, sell your luxury car to get rid of the payments and drive a paid-for beater, take public transit and read a book on your commute instead of driving a car).
Similarly, to lose unhealthy weight, either reduce calories in (stop drinking sweet sodas and eating candy bars, order 500-800 calorie items from appetizer menus instead of 2000 calorie entrees) or increase calories out (exercise, take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk instead of ride, lift weights to improve resting calorie burning.)
But it's hard to come up with specifics that apply to everyone, since everyone is different. That's why we just say the general rule, instead of assuming people have an expensive car to sell or go through a 2 liter of Coke a day.
Sure, you're right. I just meant that the real challenge is how to skew (and keep) the balance in the direction you want, in a sustainable, significant and achievable fashion.
That is the worst analogy I think I've ever heard. A better analogy is, if you want more hard drive space, stop installing stuff and/or delete more stuff than you install.
This is not complicated. The calories are listed on everything you eat. Eat fewer of them until you start losing weight.
I realize this is a US-centric view, but since so many startups are US based, i'll present it anyway...
Health and medicine startups are really difficult. Not impossible, but the forces are all stacked against you. I hope and pray some startups can succeed, but the system in the US is set up to perpetuate the broken healthcare system. Sometimes, I feel efficiency and health are almost not a goal.
I realize this is vague, but I've learned this lesson the hard way. I'm on year-3 of a health startup full-time. We actually moved overseas to trail the product in a single-payer nation. The single-payer system offers incentives generally aligned across all parties. In the US, many incentives are antagonistic, making it difficult to sell products. Please the insurer and you piss off the hospital. Please the hospital and you piss off the doctor. Lower costs and you piss off the hospital and doctor. Ect, etc.
It is easy to make products, but difficult to find buyers even when there is obvious value. Perhaps this will change with ACOs. Most successful startups in healthcare I've seen operate on the periphery or actually mold to ease the broken system itself (e.g., Castlight Health)
We moved [temporarily] to Qatar. We tried to sell our solutions in the US for a year w/o any success. We have spent the past two years in Qatar and have achieved far more traction and government-level engagement. The market here is small, but large enough to prove out concepts.
The obvious angle would be to prove efficacy and then try again to sell in the US (both my co-founder and I were both and raised in the US so we'd love to move back.) Another angle might be to try and sell in the UK or other single payer systems that are closer to home.
The problem is very much political with a move away from highways design focusing on strategic mobility, the movement of people and goods over long distances, to sustainable mobility, the movement of people over short distances (0-5 miles) and the provision of systematically safe infrastructure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aNtsWvNYKE
It's a really really hard political problem to solve as the impacts are measured in decades but the returns are huge.
From a technology point of view, the solution is the bicycle.
Focusing on the bicycle, there is huge effort going into electric bicycles around battery and powertrain technology Ebikes enable people that would not cycle in 'hilly' cities to use bicycles as a way of getting around.
The key problem however always comes down to the perception that the roads are too dangerous and this is a political in nature usually requiring the re-allocation of road space from parking.
> 2. The vast majority of calories come from carbohydrates.
Yes. Sugar is the enemy. It's ironic that so many substances are regulated or flat-out prohibited and not sugar or sodas. HFCS should be outlawed, and sodas regulated like alcohol (no sales to minors, bulk sales limited, etc.)
Also, the obsession with fats and the whole industry of low-fat food needs to be dealt with, as, obviously, when the proportion of fat decreases, the proportions of the other components rise.
Sugar is not the enemy, sugars are just a highly efficient mechanism for providing easily assimilated biochemical energy.
The problem is over-consumption of refined sugars. This is a problem because the results of sugar metabolism (particularly fructose) are highly reactive (which is why they are so easy to metabolize), and can mess up your biochemistry by reacting with proteins and other macromolecules. The phytochemicals in plant sugar sources seem to reduce the biochemical side reactions of sugar metabolism which is probably why the plants synthesize many of them in the first place.
Refined sugars tend to spike the concentration of sugar in your body, leading to more possibility for reactions. Secondly, without the phytochemical stabilizers, the incidence of side-reactions is greater.
The body is a complex system, we need to stop trying to analyze it as if it were linear and reducible.
Agreed; it seems that we are not, as a species, capable of withstanding the lure of sugary sweetness. The problem is compounded by our culture of instant gratification.
The theory that the problem is sugar – and not fat – does line up pretty well with available evidence.
I don't think the answer to the DEA's misguided paternalism is more paternalism. The inconsistency you've hit on is real, but the solution we should be fighting for is to make more things legal, not illegal. I don't want the government dictating how much I'm allowed to enjoy myself or how fast I'm allowed to die (nothing should be outlawed solely because it has a chance of shortening my lifespan). I deserve the right to choose what I put in my own body. I deserve the right to be as healthy or unhealthy as I want to be.
The technology to help with obesity is hilariously bad.
I'm not obese in the meaning that I am very unhealthy. I am mostly okay but I can definitely lose 15kg and feel much better (done it before).
But when I tried using some tech, what happened? Yes, sure, scour an app full of thousands of meals to say what exactly I am eating every time? Sure! (Especially having in mind it's not at all tuned to Bulgarian cuisine.) It's comical and it's so bad. Motivational reminder apps? Gosh, I want to smash the head of the people who thought this was a good idea. I guess they work for many others, definitely not for me and a whole large group of humans though. It's annoying and corny and nothing else.
If I can put a bracelet on my wrist and it can track my pulse, sleep and maybe scan my veins for the chemicals coursing through my body, and if I get a smartphone app that can photograph my food and do precise automatic calorie counting, then I am in. (Also if the bracelet can detect my workouts.)
Before that, forget it. It turns something that you should feel good about, into a series of awful menial chores. The current state of affairs is, as I mentioned in the start, straight out hilarious. The tech is primitive.
I think the obesity issue exposes capitalism to some extent. Businesses stand to make money from gyms, from activewear, from diet books and pills and so all of these advertise heavily. No company stands to make loads of money if people eat less. No restaurant succeeds by advertising their medium meal or their one slider and fries or their soda without refills.
Can't speak to your calories comments, but I do think that hobbies and distractions and habits and apps can help move people in the right direction.
I saw one other comment mentioning healthcare, so I'll both to share my opinion as of 2017.
The next (or after the next) Microsoft-Google-Apple-Facebook size tech company will be a healthcare company.
There is no reason access to healthcare can't be as streamlined and cheap as calling an Uber. In addition to diagnosis AI should be able to strip out nearly all of the administrative & clerical layer. Self driving vehicles + drones can reduce the need for large complex hospitals. All of this could not just be a convenience, but mandatory in a post-antibiotic world.
Because of regulatory issues, while this may be an American company, it would be available for Americans for quite some time.
I read this obesity ascription to carbs a lot and it beats me. I am from an African country where carbohydrate dominant meals are the staple. It is not uncommon to see a families eat 3 square carb laden meals yet obesity is extremely low!
So my question is why isnt obesity prevalent in this part of the world?
It's complicated - humans can thrive on a very wide variety of diets. However snacking on sugary stuff seems quite a big thing in the USA and probably not in most of Africa.
but how is this an untapped opportunity when there are already tons of products and companies trying to solve it? short of building an app that evaporates body fat?
some of these apps do work. i know a lot of people who had success counting calories with MyFitnessPal. but you cant force everybody to count calories. you cant force people to count their steps. so i just dont understand what opportunity you see here.
I would like to see some over the counter take home device that lets you figure out what spikes your blood sugar, and then creates a diet tailored to. I'd be okay with some finger pricking device.
Yes, decreasing caloric intake can cause weight gain - I want to know what the most effective ones to cut are, and replace them with less potently delivered ones.
The problem is that eating well and in reasonable amounts does not offer much.
It is like that old joke about taking cold shower every morning for 100 years.
You know that cheesecake is not very good for you, but what is the alternative? You eat that celery stalk but where does it get you?
The best case scenario - raw food eating Jack Lalanne dead at 96. His death heavily shook my belief in healthy eating.
Worst case scenario his brother Norman Lalanne and everyones favorite Jeanne Clement neither of which were much for exercise and Jeanne indulged in smokes and chocolate.
Sure those are anecdotes but we do not have any healthy 150 year olds.
Obesity kills, but non-obesity kills just slightly slower. Slower I define as 10-70 years slower.
We need meaningful progress with other aspects of aging (telomere shortenings, cancers etc) before we can tackle obesity.
Regardless of how long your life is, I would argue that an obese person's life is probably lower quality than a healthy persons life. I'll take quality of quantity myself.
I agree this would be a very important Problem to solve. However I think that the root cause of this problem is that the food industry has the incentive to maximize profit. Since sugar ist cheap and tasty for a lot of people the obvious thing to do is to sell as much sugar as possible. Of course sugar is just an example here, the same logic could be applied to other products (cheap fat, fast food).
IMO the general aproach to maximize money is broken as it incentiveses crminal behavior (banks, volkswagen come to mind immediately). This problem would be really interesting to solve, but I don't think that's doable by a single startup as it is a political or social problem.
To everyone saying "calories in vs calories out" is not the golden rule: it simply is. Your body obeys the laws of physics. If you consume less energy than you use then your body will be forced to use up its stored energy.
"Calories in vs calories out" is not wrong. It's just a small part of a much bigger picture.
If you go into a caloric deficit your body will give a hormonal response. This response determines if your body will start using your fat reserves, your muscles or will just shut down. This hormonal response is dependent not only on how much you eat, but also on what you eat.
Eating a diet low in carbs enables your body to use up stored fat more easily and will leave you less hungry then a low fat diet. This makes it MUCH easier to stick to your diet.
Totally disagree with that being the golden rule, firstly not all calories are the same. Plus calories from protein, carbs and fat are all treated differently by your body and that is further affected by your activity levels and stress.
It's not just not the golden rule, it's actively misleading.
"Fats make you fat" is a flat-out lie.
The effects of carbs - especially carbs with plenty of refined sugar - are the developed world's number one health care expense. They don't just cause obesity and diabetes, they also create inflammation which leads to heart conditions, strokes, and other life-changing disorders.
Unfortunately the food labelling industry has been promoting falsehoods for most of its existence. Labelling carbs more clearly, licensing sodas and diet sodas to limit access, and starting health programs to educate the population about carb abuse would do more to improve public health than anything else.
It is untrue that >90% of cardiovascular deaths are attributable to overweight. In fact, if you look at the Framingham model for predicting heart attacks, obesity is not a feature (other than its indirect effects on blood pressure and diabetes).
The main cause of cardiovascular disease is hypertension, which is 100% treatable at very low cost and with very high safety. I haven't checked the numbers lately, but it's not too far off to note that only 50% of hypertension is diagnosed and only 50% of patients take their medications.
So, the lapse is not in medical science -- we know what to do -- but in healthcare delivery.
Another thing that would help solve this is more regular exercise, and this is indeed a solvable issue, but probably not by the private sector; the government could prioritize support for modes that are healthier (walking, biking, even transit since that usually involves walking too) than driving. The Netherlands would be a leading example here, their rates of walking and biking for transportation are very high.
Yes people can exercise as its own thing too, but realistically it's way easier to get most people consistently exercising if it's something they're doing as a part of their regular daily activities.
Lot's of folks have rebutted with the various ways this is an oversimplification, I won't recap them here.
I will however add another overlooked factor that most folks don't know about: Our gut bacteria is responsible for a lot of pre-processing, and their efficiency varies a lot depending on the mix of strains you happen to have.
So, identical twins, with identical lifestyles and diets, can still have very different experiences with weight gain and loss.
Fortunately, this is actually something that (once the mechanisms are better understood) can be fixed quite simply with a fecal transplant.
The problem is NOT that SIMPLE. We go out with friends drink beer / eat pizza, who does not like pizza! we grow up with this stuff. Not so easy to just give up carbs, it's everywhere. Takes a LOT of mental effort , actually you may need to stop hanging with friends who eat to many carbs! lol
Gary Taubes wrote this, can't find the source.
Far from being an inert dumping ground for excess calories, fat tissue operates as a reserve energy supply for the body. Its calories are called upon when glucose is running low – that is, between meals, or during fasts and famines. Fat takes instruction from insulin, the hormone responsible for regulating blood sugar. Refined carbohydrates break down at speed into glucose in the blood, prompting the pancreas to produce insulin. When insulin levels rise, fat tissue gets a signal to suck energy out of the blood, and to stop releasing it. So when insulin stays high for unnaturally long, a person gains weight, gets hungrier, and feels fatigued. Then we blame them for it. But, as Gary Taubes puts it, obese people are not fat because they are overeating and sedentary – they are overeating and sedentary because they are fat, or getting fatter.
Can't say I'm an expert, but I don't think hobbies or other such activities can replace eating too much and/or shitty food. I mean, the typical stereotypes show the opposite: playing console with friends, going out to the movies or to a party, even programming (solitary or "hackathons"), often involve the consumption of loads of sugary soda and other crap. BBQs and similar social meals are often the same.
Hobbies involving exercise may be an exception, but when you're already overweight, these often aren't so much "hobbies" as ordeals, and unlikely to function as any kind of reward.
As someone in the market, it'd help quite a bit if there were healthier and tasty alternatives. Unfortunately, the current offers seem to be expensive and hard to get (if you have to order a whole box over the 'net, forget it).
The problem is tasty is a conditioning effect. The reason healthy food is not as tasty as junk food is that it has a lot less of the substances that used to be much rarer, like fats, salt, sugar. It makes sense that those are so tasty because they used to be rare.
To be able to eat healthier requires weaning yourself off high salt/sugar foods to get reacclimitized to food that has those substances in proportions that we've evolved to handle.
While I don't disagree, at least around here (I live in a Western European country) the problem is deeper: there simply aren't healthier alternatives easily available at reasonable prices. For example, most nuts you find at groceries are loaded with salt. Finding unsalted versions requires a trip to a megastore or specialised shop.
There's no point in making technology for something we don't even have the science down for. Unless, that technology can be used to improve the science...hm.
That might be the best thing to do right now, for startups - how can you build technology such that it improves the science behind obesity research?
I couldn’t agree more. Excess body fat is a problem throughout the world. Well, it significantly increases the risk of a number of chronic diseases, such as type-2 diabetes, insulin resistance, and hypertension. It is estimated that approximately 20% of people are overweight and that close to 300 million are obese. At https://www.aidlab.com we are aiming to spread awareness of the impact that body fat lead to our organism. That’s the clue of our efforts since we started to build personal assistant in 2014.
Secondly, exercise can help promote weight loss, but it seems to work best when combined with a lower calorie eating plan. If people don’t curb their calories, however, they likely need to exercise for long periods of time or at a high intensity to lose weight.
The hormonal system, speaking as a non-expert of course, seems to have much greater impact than is generally recognized. For men, increasing testosterone has a huge impact on muscle mass, ability to burn fat, etc.
I recently found Dr John McDougal on YouTube who has the solution to obesity based on history, current societies, and science. There seem to be two rules: 1) Base your diet around starchy vegetables (potato, wheat, oats, rice, corn, etc). 2) avoid fats, especially refined fats, and protein. 3) salt and sugar are not health foods, but are allowed to help you stick with rules 1 and 2. People, and societies, that eat like this are thin and healthy.
As someone who works out daily; the point at which I was in the best shape of my life was when I was consuming large amounts of fats. Peanut butter, olive oil, etc. I also find it really really hard to believe that protein would cause obesity; I've heard the exact opposite.
* so long as they are biologically adapted to such a diet.
People have been posting similar studies of Indian and Asian countries, basing their recommendations for everyone off that subset of the population, and then completely discount that of traditional European, African, and American diets.
I'm the Director of Online Marketing for KingFit Preventive Health & Wellness and I would be remiss if I didn't at least drop a line in on this thread.
We're currently developing a mobile app + clinician dashboard combo working towards a preventive health solution. Our main focus is diabetes right now but cardiovascular disease, prediabetes, and type 2 diabetes are all in our sights here early on.
Many of the apps functions revolve around simple dietary and exercise solutions to combat these illnesses. We also plan on using IBM's Watson to improve suggestions for the patient and the doctor.
First we're trying to master the food suggestion part of that equation. We want to encourage people to eat the healthiest thing they have available. This means our tool doesn't try and punish you if you aren't shopping perfectly. By using an "SOS" button, we are going to work with what our users have access to and make suggestions for certain plates at restaurants near the user.
There are some emerging IOT products (like smart cups) that we plan on interfacing with that may aid in this process.
In short my answer is not yet. But interfacing with IOT health tracking products is a huge part of our platform.
I don't think that's a problem that is solvable with technology. It's a social problem. Less social inequality and better education, taxes on unhealthy food, less working hours. That would be necessary to tackle the problem. Obesity is just a symptom.
I love the SV mindset: Let's not get to the reasons of something, let's just build an app and everything will be good.
While I agree that there are some underlying social and economic issues that contribute to obesity, that doesn't mean technology can't help. There are plenty of ways even simple apps can be used to improve people's awareness of what they're eating, help them make better choices, and provide incentives to eat better and get more exercise.
To address a couple of the things you mentioned:
Better education: It's true -- when it comes to health and nutrition, there's a lot of misinformation out there and a general lack of knowledge of even the basics. Most people are not great at determining how many calories are in a meal, whether something is good for them, or even just remembering what they've eaten on a given day. There's a huge opportunity for technology to help people figure this stuff out and learn to make better choices (full disclosure: I work on an app in this space [1]).
Taxing unhealthy food: While we can't levy taxes, there are ways to provide similar incentives, for example by automatically giving people cash rebates when they purchase healthy food [2].
Can the tech industry solve obesity on its own? Maybe not. But I'd argue that trying to address what we can is a better option than throwing up our hands and saying it's a social problem.
> trying to address what we can is a better option than throwing up our hands and saying it's a social problem
I totally agree that we shouldn't throw our hands up. However, the consequence is not to do just some stuff just because you know web development, but to think on a larger scale.
It seems like a big trend of our time that no one wants to do politics. With politics I don't mean being a bureaucrat, but to express your opinions and trying to change something on a normative level. Effective Altruism, tackling injustice by consuming "fair" products, social entrepreneurship: All these things seem to be just for soothing our consciences.
What we miss is to actually change something. The current political situation is the product of this individual politicising.
My gears are turning.. an app that tells you the viability of solving a given problem using an app. It would be powered by AWS array on the back end using google's latest AI, TensorFlow, and it would also be community driven like Yelp. We'd make our profits by taking advantage of platform network advantage to connect cofounders, investors, and customers for the startups who use us and move forwards.
Yep, I think something like this is the correct response, though I would prefer to see vegetables that have super-desirable test profiles that trick the body into thinking its getting the high calorie foods it's evolved to crave rather than drugs that alter the humans to want to eat less in general.
Humans are driven by biology, and psychology is only a thin abstraction on top of that. The amount of self-discipline any single individual can deploy is very limited. If that discipline threshold gets used up on other things, it's not going to be available for food and diet.
Consider on top of this that most of us have been socialized and trained for decades to prefer unhealthy options, and the already-steep incline of resisting the body's physically preferred options becomes treacherous.
Most fat people aren't fat becomes they're snarfing down platters that are meant to feed six in every sitting. They're fat because the foods they eat provide low nutrition and high calories, and candy bars aren't the only food with such a profile. Most packaged foods that you can buy at a regular, non-niche grocer are that way, even the ones that are touted as healthy. Food companies do this because they know people like foods with more calories more than they like foods with fewer calories, and they want you to buy their foods more often.
Technology got us into this mess by creating an easily-accessible supply of hyper-caloric foods, an amount of plenty that our bodies, built for scarcity, are not at all equipped to handle. Technology should be employed to fix it. Whether it's human-side or food-side, something needs to be developed that can blackhole the excess calories with no noticeable impact on the eating experience, either in taste or chemical reward.
The other alternative is to revert to a food supply where artificial contrivances such as candy and foods injected with sugars and other unnatural taste-improving formulations are very rare. This is not possible while we live in a society of abundance. It will only be possible if there is famine, hardship, war, etc. So it's not a good option.
"Just try harder" is never going to be a real answer to this problem, and the stats clearly bear that out. People hate being fat. They spend billions of dollars every year desperately trying to find someone who can fix it for them. We should try to address that in a reasonable way.
This requires that you actually want to lose weight and do something about it.
Obese people often have a low socio-economic status [1]. If you are marginalized, eating may be an outlet for frustration. You won't buy special stuff to lose weight.
Everyone here was surprised when Trump got elected (except Peter Thiel). "Nerd nation" [2] is a huge bubble -- the majority of our society is different. The won't buy any drugs or apps.
Totally incorrect. People spend billions of dollars every year trying not to be fat anymore. [0] I also contend that while more liberal places often have less obesity, it's not like the problem is non-existent there; they still have ~20-25% obesity, which is 1 in 4, which is A LOT of obese people everywhere. Don't pat yourself on the back too hard there.
It's not that obese people don't care or don't know, or that they enjoy living an unhealthy lifestyle. There's a lot of complex factors that are involved, but the basic factor is this: humans are evolved to strongly prefer high calorie foods, and we've made high-calorie foods available in unprecedented quantities while also requiring less physical energy expenditure than ever before. Our bodies don't know how to deal with that.
It's been thoroughly proven over the last 30 years that self-control can't be relied upon to prevent this. When you throw someone into a situation where all of their biological functions are pushing them toward acquiring a biological reward that is so abundant they have to actively avoid it, the options are very limited. That person is going to have a lot of difficulty refraining from acquiring the reward. That's true for everyone, and the issue is generally only avoided if your body has never learned the reward in the first place or if you've trained your body to forget the reward (and in both of these situations, as soon as your body learns to desire that reward, you're back at risk).
We need a solution that a) constrains the supply of hyper-caloric foods, which is not practical, because again, if it's available, good luck keeping it out of peoples' hands; or b) modifies either the foods or the consumers of said food so that the excessive calories are neutralized and the same neurological rewards are obtained.
This looks like an app for the quantified self crowd. It seems to just collect all the various body-tracking devices normal people don't use into one dashboard. How's it going to help with the obesity epidemic?
The fact that you manually have to log your food intake seems like a hurdle though. It's an important part of the puzzle and it takes a lot of discipline to log every single thing you eat.
But automating food intake logging sounds difficult…
Oh god. You just turned a thread about startup opportunities into one about diet fad wackos. You even got the ball rolling with your silly carbohydrates comment. Ugh
Yes, it went seriously off-topic (and we've marked it as such, which sends it to the bottom of the page). But you made the thread even worse by posting this. Your interest in high-quality discussion and startup opportunities are quite positive motivations. Please express them in a way that makes HN better, or at least doesn't harm it.
One thing people can do in a case like this is email us at hn@ycombinator.com to let us know that the top subthread has veered off-topic. We intervene when we see that but we need your help to see everything.
1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule.
2. The vast majority of calories come from carbohydrates.
3. Carbohydrates activate addictive dopaminergic pathways (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/pdf/nih...)
People overeat because food is easy to access, and it provides a short-term, immediate chemical reward. External rewards often need to be introduced to break this vicious cycle. Hobbies, relationships, career achievements, etc. can function as alternative rewards. Perhaps there is a way for technology to provide short-term rewards in lieu of eating?