
A Massive New Harvard Study Shows Which Diet Burns the Most Calories - cpncrunch
https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/a-massive-new-harvard-study-shows-which-diet-burns-most-calories-heres-why-itll-change-everything-you-know-about-losing-weight.html
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darawk
I've always found this aspect of the low carb debate to be mostly irrelevant.
The benefit I get from eating a low carb diet isn't that I burn more calories
(as in, i'm not expressing an opinion either way on that). It's that I have a
desire to eat dramatically fewer calories on a low-carb diet, and the weight
loss effects come from that, not higher metabolism. I don't understand why so
many studies want to focus on metabolic rate, when it seems clear to me that
the most material benefit is the blunted calorie-adjusted hunger.

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bootsz
> It's that I have a desire to eat dramatically fewer calories on a low-carb
> diet

Precisely my experience as well. While it’s true that really no one type of
nutrient is universally bad or evil and _technically_ weight loss comes down
to calories in/out, there is a huge difference in how satisfied you feel after
eating X amount of calories in various forms. I can eat an entire loaf of good
bread or a big bag of chips without even thinking about it. Fats are tasty too
but I don’t find myself wanting to gorge on them to the same extent.

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AstralStorm
Unless you're carefully measuring you're probably fooling yourself.

Alternatively you're eating highly not satisfying foods on the other diets.
Which most of the low fat foods are, especially ones marketed for dieting,
which are laden with sugar - which means those calories come at the expense of
carbs that are slower to absorb.

Then there's the effect of added protein uptake which is known to reduce
appetite. It is easy to end up with a meaningful difference in this value,
what with low carb diets increasing meat intake.

The difference is real though and about what I have noticed in burn rates. The
actual question is, as always, whether the about 10% faster weight loss is
worth any health consequences.

Additionally, whether the normocaloric variant is safe is still up in the air
- with some big metastudy showing increased total mortality without CHD and
stroke morbidity. No idea what's up with that, perhaps some sort of reserve
missing or nutrient lacking...

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arkades
Summary:

Diets that replaced carbs with fat burned an average of 250 calories a day
more, in a study whose methodology wasn’t described or skeptically analyzed
whatsoever. Author then goes on to repeat “not all calories are identical”
repeatedly.

~~~
lucas_membrane
Simple question is, "Where did the energy go?" First guess would be that the
bodies of the fat eaters produced more heat, perhaps on account of a less
efficient metabolism of fat. Couldn't that be measured directly with a
thermometer? Other guess would be that the fat eaters were more active,
producing more mechanical energy. That would be a very interesting possibility
to explore. A few decades back, my reading led me to think that conventional
wisdom was that fat-burning exercise was aerobic, ie requiring oxygen and
breathing. Could burning fat require more exertion to acquire the oxygen?

Does the “not all calories are identical” assertion reduce to "the number of
calories of heat obtained when a food is burned in a flame outside the body
(the number of calories on the label) is not equal to the net number of useful
calories obtained when the food is metabolized?"

250 calories per day is only about 1 kg per month of weight loss. This is not
trivial compared to typical weight loss results, but it is quite a bit less
than what people searching for diet advice would consider a game-changer. And
it is not clear if there are other consequences of changing the composition of
the diet over the long term of steady weight loss that most dieters need.

~~~
masonic

      only about 1 kg per month
    

That's 26 pounds in _one year_. For most people, that's a game-changer.

~~~
Fire-Dragon-DoL
I'm on a diet (fine tuned for me by a professional), and I'm decreasing 1.2 kg
_per week_. 1 per month is not that much of you want to lose a lot of weight.

I do eat carbs within my diet, but it's selected on purpose:

\- 80 calories worth of cereals (I use cereals for diabetics, so I can eat 30g
of those) \- Up to 800g of fruit (some of it is excluded, like grapefruit)

The fruit is the real trick: it makes you feel satisfied, when you eat it with
right timing, even if you are on 700 calories/day (which is basically
starvation.

First 3 days are terrible, then the body feels resigned and you feel like you
can deal with it.

After 6 weeks that's roughly 10kg lost...

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dnhz
Already reported and discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453665)

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akeck
I want to see a massive diet study that's pure math analysis: start with
calories going in and calculate all the different ways the energy leaves the
body or gets stored in each case.

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jml7c5
Unfortunately "calories going in" is not easily obtainable, as absorption is
affected by cooking, what foods are in the gut together, individual variation,
and how the foods are physically composed together (mashed, whole, blended,
etc.). Unfortunately protein and carbs = 4kcal/g, fats = 9kcal/g is only
useful as a rough guide in practice.

Look up studies on the accuracy of the Atwater method for more detail.

~~~
moltar
Plus caloric content is measured by incineration. Which our bodies aren’t
doing.

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tsumnia
It's carbs.

Please stop clickbait.

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sys_64738
This is all fluff.

There are a few simple rules I followed for successful weight loss (15 lbs in
the last 5 months.

1) Burn more calories than you consume. 2) Losing more than a pound per week
means you'll gain it back again. 3) If you like the taste of the food item
then it's unhealthy.

~~~
lhl
Sure #1 is what it all comes down to, but how much are you in control of the
calories that you burn? You can find scientific studies as far back as the
Minnesota Starvation Experiment that shows that your body tries to maintain
homeostasis when calories are reduced via regular caloric restriction, or with
extreme overfeeding.

Weight, like much of the bodies processes is a strictly hormonally regulated,
the the biochemistry/process of fat burning is actually pretty well
understood. Oxidation of fatty acids competes w/ glucose (which is generally
preferred), known as the glucose-fatty acid, or Randall cycle (doi:
10.1007/s10545-010-9061-2, PMC2950079).

The easiest way to increase FAO is therefore to reduce availability of glucose
(don't eat carbs, or simply don't eat). This also lowers insulin levels, which
independently inhibits lipolysis. (doi: 10.2337/db08-0281)

What's also interesting is that as you fast, your ghrelin levels (hunger
hormone) goes down (as does insulin, cortisol spikes) - doi:
10.1210/jc.2004-0604

I know everyone's an expert here on HN and I'm glad you were able to lose some
weight, but #2 has no scientific or statistical basis, and #3 is prima facie
laughable and its hard to imagine any animal surviving if that were the case.
(Just stick to tasty natural, minimally processed, real food and you'll be
fine).

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beobab
I like the Hacker's Guide to weight (and hair) loss through stress and
malnutrition.

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/)

An engineer's take, and most entertaining.

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ohiovr
Carbohydrates are also the cheapest calories.

~~~
mjevans
I was actually just lamenting how difficult it is to get a "real" (no lettuce)
salad this evening.

Making them at home isn't /really/ an option for me, not unless I want to eat
it literally every day. The greens would go bad in about half a week; the
other semi-perishable things would need to go shortly after.

It's so much easier to go out and get something fresh and variety from a
common kitchen (restaurant) that services many others all day.

However, because carbs are cheap, and because meat is popular, those are the
two things every restaurant has a focus and spin on.

Eating healthy is too expensive.

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tropo
You can get single-serve fruit salad cups without any lettuce.

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orev
When people say “salad” they don’t mean fruit salad, and I think you know
that. Salad almost always means something with lettuce and other kinds of raw
vegetables, sometimes with sprinklings of other things in there.

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maxpupmax
Article is a massive pain to read without paragraphs.

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malkia
I had massive attack while reading it, ... playing in the background...

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mdekkers
unquittable autoplay video? What a horrible website.

