[HN Gopher] How food powers the body's metabolism
___________________________________________________________________
How food powers the body's metabolism
Author : gautamsomani
Score : 202 points
Date : 2022-10-28 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| [deleted]
| greggeter wrote:
| mikotodomo wrote:
| > An atom is like a little solar system, with a nucleus at its
| center.
|
| What if each atom _was_ a little solar system?
| hazrmard wrote:
| I loved reading the article! How the body breaks down food into
| energy. Looking at life as energetic electrons finding a place to
| rest. I got goosebumps reading about mitochondrial membranes
| producing electric fields akin to lightning waiting to strike.
| The clockwork machinations of the human body as it breaks down
| complex organic matter into protons and electrons restless for a
| reunion, and then into a common currency of energy.
|
| I have a disinterested high-schooler's understanding of biology.
| My field is electricity and physics and computers. So seeing this
| complex process explained thus was very, very engaging. Very well
| done!
|
| Also, using metabolism to explain cancer was very enlightening.
| yx827ha wrote:
| I would recommend you read: PEMF - The Fifth Element of Health
| - https://www.amazon.com/PEMF-The-Fifth-Element-of-Health-
| audi...
|
| It talks about how our cells are little capacitors and the
| earth's pulsed EMFs actually help energize your cells. I
| recommend skipping the first chapter though.
| krinchan wrote:
| The physicality of the proton pumps (I can never remember which
| ATPase it is) was new for me. My intro chemistry and biology
| classes in college really didn't get too far past "proton goes
| through tube and an ATP appears!"
| rawgabbit wrote:
| It is called ATP Synthase.
|
| My go to source is libretext. Glucose is transformed to
| pyruvate then Acetyl CoA. The Krebs or Citric Acid cycle
| creates electron carrier molecules. These donate electrons
| and power four proteins which slowly pump protons into the
| mitochondria space between its inner and outer membrane. This
| creates a proton gradient or imbalance as the protons want to
| diffuse back into the mitochondria. This flow or river of
| protons power the ATPsynthase which is like a wind turbine
| and creates ATP for the cell to use.
|
| What is interesting is that plants create glucose in their
| leaves. But plant cells also consume glucose at night. Or in
| parts of the plant that cannot create its own energy.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Here is a video animation explaining the electron transport
| chain. https://youtu.be/LQmTKxI4Wn4
| krinchan wrote:
| Thanks. Keeping this in a pinned tab till I have a chance
| to watch it all (I scrubbed through it just now). I love
| getting to see how things work visually like this.
| krinchan wrote:
| Oh I went through the wringer with memorizing the Krebs
| cycle. It's just every time you got to ATP Synthase it was
| literally just a tube, a few arrows, some comicbook-esque
| POW shapes, and "ADP" and "ATP" on both ends of the POW.
| Lmao.
|
| So "oh it's a water wheel that the proton pushes that then
| pushes the phosphate onto the ADP" is like, "Oh.
| There's...a whole physical machine and not just magic
| 'energy transfer'". I just thought it was really cool,
| though obvious in retrospect.
|
| (I am not a clever man.)
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| "mitochondrial membranes producing electric fields akin to
| lightning waiting to strike."
|
| Just leaving this here for anyone who is interested; EMFs and
| their effects on the Mitochondria. This includes ELF-EMF from
| household wiring.
|
| Manmade Electromagnetic Fields and Oxidative Stress--Biological
| Effects and Consequences for Health
| https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/7/3772
|
| DNMT1 and miRNAs: possible epigenetics footprints in
| electromagnetic fields utilization in oncology
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12032-021-01574-y
|
| Cellular stress response to extremely low-frequency
| electromagnetic fields (ELF-EMF): An explanation for
| controversial effects of ELF-EMF on apoptosis
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cpr.13154
|
| Involvement of mitochondrial activity in mediating ELF-EMF
| stimulatory effect on human sperm motility
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bem.20602
|
| Role of Mitochondria in the Oxidative Stress Induced by
| Electromagnetic Fields: Focus on Reproductive Systems
| https://www.hindawi.com/journals/omcl/2018/5076271/
|
| Extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields affect
| proliferation and mitochondrial activity of human cancer cell
| lines
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09553002.2015.11...
| bitwize wrote:
| "What causes the Black Shakes? THIS causes it, THIS causes
| it, THIS causes it. Information overload! Technological
| fucking civilization."
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Prophetic.
| [deleted]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is a great writeup and Lane's book looks pretty interesting.
| One thing I'd add is that knowledge of the Krebs cycle (aka,
| 'tricarboxylic acid cycle') helps people understand why some
| dieting approaches seem a bit unwise to biochemists. A simple
| explanation of the Krebs cycle is that it is a kind of engine
| that sits at the center of metabolism, but metabolism is not just
| the breakdown of molecules for energy, it's also the construction
| of molecules for various cellular needs. Take this quote as a
| beginning point:
|
| > "...we were told the monstrous names of its component parts--
| succinate, pyruvate, Acetyl-CoA, cytochrome c--while, on the
| blackboard, we counted NAD+s and FADH2s, and followed "redox"
| reactions as they "oxidized" or "reduced" elements."
|
| From a biochemist's point of view, there are about three classes
| of foodstuffs - carbohydrates (which break down to simple
| sugars), proteins (which break down to amino acids), and fats and
| oils (which break down to fatty acds). All those breakdown
| products are fed in one way or the other into the Krebs cycle
| (for amino acids, the nitrogen is stripped off and excreted as
| urea). These energy-producing (i.e. NADH / ATP generating)
| reactions are grouped under the heading of catabolism. If you
| entirely exclude any of these three classes of foods, such as by
| ingesting only protein, the Krebs cycle and affiliated metabolism
| starts doing some funny stuff. This is the basis of 'eat a
| balanced diet' advice.
|
| Note that the Krebs cycle also sits at the center of your body's
| biosynthetic system, which is continually manufacturing the non-
| essential amino acids, as well as sugar and lipid synthesis,
| which then form the basis of hormone and neurotransmitter
| synthesis. The molecules in the above quote are, in various
| cells, exported out of the Krebs cycle and into these
| biosynthetic pathways. Unbalancing the Krebs cycle by depriving
| it of essential feedstocks can thus throw a lot of your body's
| fundamental systems out of whack. Since the Krebs cycle is highly
| regulated and somewhat malleable, it can respond in various ways
| to account for this, but problems can arise over time.
|
| Hence, the best dieting approach for losing (adipose, i.e. fatty
| tissue) weight is most likely intermittent fasting with a
| carefully balanced (carbs/proteins/fats) diet, just less food
| overall. Under such fasting conditions, the fatty tissues get
| converted to things like ketone bodies and hence to glucose (the
| brain's primary fuel). Here's a collection of abstracts on how
| this works in intermittent fasting (it's also related to diabetic
| issues):
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biolog...
|
| Note that regular exercise is also good for your health, but
| that's not necessarily 'burning fat' so much as it is improving
| your circulatory system, and flushing your lungs with plenty of
| air, as well as improving muscle tone.
| 323 wrote:
| Why do you think we don't have ATP running in the bloodstream
| instead of requiring each cell to produce it's own ATP?
|
| As in, why don't we have an "energy organ" which runs the Krebs
| cycle and outputs ATP for the whole body?
|
| Removing the Krebs cycle from each cell would be a ultra-
| fundamental change, so hard to evolve, but adding the ability
| to supplement ATP from the bloodstream seems doable.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Lifetime is the issue. ATP and its cousins, and similar
| energy-transmitters like creatine phosphate, are hot
| potatoes. The phosphate group rapidly transfers its energy to
| other molecules in the cell, and exporting it to the
| bloodstream just wouldn't work, it'd break down in transit.
|
| > "In human beings, for example, the amount of ATP recycled
| daily is about the same as body weight, even though the
| average human being only has about 250 grams of ATP. Another
| way to look at it is that a single molecule of ATP gets
| recycled 500-700 times every day. At any moment in time, the
| amount of ATP plus ADP is fairly constant. This is important
| since ATP is not a molecule that can be stored for later use.
| "
|
| https://www.thoughtco.com/atp-important-molecule-in-
| metaboli...
|
| Most of energy biochemistry can be viewed as a system for
| trapping energetic short-lived species (such as high-energy
| electrons produced by cytochrome oxidases or the
| photosynthetic reaction centers) into slightly longer-lived
| systems (such as protein gradients across a cell membrane)
| which in turn are converted to somewhat more persistent
| species (ATP and NAD(P)H) which circulate within cells), and
| then into the most stable energy stores, like glucose,
| lactate, etc. which circulate through the bloodstream and
| transfer energy between cells (with glucose eventually being
| stored as glycogen in the liver, and eventually, as fatty
| tissues, or in plants, starchy roots). The times go as
| nanoseconds -> milliseconds -> seconds -> minutes/hours/days.
| oifjsidjf wrote:
| "Just less food overall" never works. There are 2 diets that
| work for weight loss: 1) High-fat, low carb. 2) High-carb, low
| fat.
|
| Stick to one of those and keep the fat-to-carb ration in a 1:6
| or 6:1 ratio based on what you pick (this ration comes from the
| eg Japanese eating 6x carbs for each 1g fat).
|
| This is why opposing diets like carnivore or the potato diet
| both work, despite them being on the opposite extremes of the
| high fat vs high carb spectrum.
|
| But god help you if you mix fats and carbs in the same
| amount...
|
| The randle cycle is the likely explanation.
| mattwest wrote:
| Very wrong.
| evilos wrote:
| You should be careful with phrases like "never works" because
| it makes it trivial to refute your argument.
|
| For example, the only way I've ever lost weight was to simply
| eat less with no set diet at all. I lost 30lbs this way.
| sdze wrote:
| Each and every hypocaloric intervention study disagrees with
| you.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| How do I avoid getting fat on my torso/face!
| mattwest wrote:
| The only answer to this is lowering overall bodyfat percentage.
| Each individual is predisposed to store fat in different areas
| across their body.
| maksimur wrote:
| And if that's not enough, increasing muscle mass to balance
| it out.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Eat less, do more exercise. Then you'll start to eat more. Just
| keep up with the exercise part.
| astura wrote:
| You can't control where your body stores fat. Some people just
| have more rounder faces. My friend is extremely skinny, but if
| you saw a photo of just her face you'd think she was a little
| chubby.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's no such thing as spot reduction:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spot_reduction
|
| That being said, there are a bunch of liposuction and fat
| freezing/vibrating/electocuting etc. methods for body/face
| sculpting.
| ddorian43 wrote:
| You can't target fat loss. You should just lose fat.
| mudil wrote:
| This whole discussion missed the central role of oxygen molecule
| as the ultimate energy source.
|
| Why we need oxygen:
|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsomega.9b03352
|
| https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b00333
| twawaaay wrote:
| I have slowly gained 30kgs over 20 years. That's 1.5kg a year, or
| about 4g per day.
|
| 4g per day is almost insignificant amount and yet it is enough to
| make you fat over long periods of time.
|
| I challenge anybody to accurately measure their daily calories
| intage to within 4g of a target (forgetting for a moment that the
| target can't be measured accurately either).
|
| This suggests that while I was technically overeating -- by just
| couple of grams per day -- the problem lies entirely somewhere
| else -- in our ability to self regulate.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| The problem is people eat by habbit, or by social rules, not by
| hunger. Naturally we tend more to 2 or 1 meal a day
| freemrkt8 wrote:
| ravenstine wrote:
| You can't accurately measure "calorie" intake. Calories are
| units of heat, and don't represent how the human body utilizes
| energy from food. The number of calories you'll find attributed
| to a given food are determined by how much heat is emitted by
| the available macronutrients if they were set on fire in a bomb
| calorimeter. Humans don't work like bomb calorimeters. This is
| why calories as a measure of nutrition are nearly useless.
|
| I'm not exactly speaking as an armchair scientist, though I
| don't have a Phd. I spent over 9 months this last year
| developing my own tech to measure human metabolic activity and
| did extensive research into the broader subject, and quit my
| job in part to focus on it.
|
| Whether you were overeating or not hardly has anything to do
| exclusively with eating a couple of extra grams. What you were
| eating and your individual physiology is primarily what
| dictates how your body will ultimately respond to your food.
| The vast majority of people in our industrial societies are
| eating diets that our species barely or never adapted to, and
| the prevalent macronutrients of said eating creates this
| illusion that the problem is calories. Our bodies are actually
| extremely good at self regulating. Problems enter when we get
| the fuel mix wrong, which is what we're doing when we're eating
| carbohydrates 3+ times every day.
|
| A good (though imperfect) analogy is the fuel you put in your
| car. Modern fuel injected cars can actually start on different
| fuels. You can, for instance, put E85 ethanol fuel in a non
| flex-fuel car and it will probably start, and there's a chance
| it will be able to continuously run on it, albeit poorly. The
| reason for this is a standard car isn't configured to run on
| ethanol. While it probably _can_ run on it, it 's specialized
| for one particular fuel, which is gasoline. Maybe you can run
| your gasoline car on E85, but you'll have to step hard on the
| gas pedal and you will eventually suffer the consequences of
| poor engine performance. (Ironically, many modern cars can run
| fine on E85 with a mere software update, but that's a different
| story)
|
| I would challenge you to gain any meaningful amount of fat mass
| on a diet of pure animal protein, let alone hold on to existing
| fat. It's a lot more difficult than most people believe. The
| satiety signal that follows eating meat, which is a _hormonal_
| response, is more powerful and sustaining than a diet based on
| carbohydrates. Glucose, what most carbs ultimately become, is
| _poisonous_ to cells, while protein isn 't. A diet based on
| protein means the body doesn't need to use or store the
| _supply_ of glucose because the necessary glucose can be
| generated from protein on _demand_. The way your body responds
| to these different macronutrients is very different. People
| counterintuitively lose a lot of weight eating lots of fat
| because, unlike carbohydrates, fat has little to no insulin
| response on its own.
|
| Things also get messier when fat and carbs are eaten
| simultaneously, but I feel like I've mentioned this on HN a
| bajillion times already.
|
| All this to say that the calorie model for human nutrition
| should no longer be taken seriously.
|
| Calories _might_ only mean anything as a measure of energy
| expenditure, but even that measure has little utility to anyone
| who isn 't in the process of _dying_. Some people succeed in
| losing weight by restricting the amount of "calories" they are
| consuming and offsetting the "calories" they eat by performing
| exercise. Where this falls apart is taking the same exact
| energy intake and activity level, replicate it in another
| person, and fail to see the same fat loss results. Below a
| certain point, yes, you'll see every participant lose weight,
| but you may also find them to be _wasting_ muscle. Eventually,
| the effects of "calorie" restriction and carbohydrate intake
| _will_ catch up with a person and they will suffer for it
| because neither "calorie" restriction or frequent carbohydrate
| intake are things that humans are adapted for.
| cwhite44 wrote:
| Can you provide any papers or sources relating to this? Would
| be an interesting read
| ravenstine wrote:
| Oh, one thing I forgot to mention is that even if intake of
| "calories" meant something from a physiological standpoint,
| the calorie counts on food packaging can be wrong by a
| significant margin. They're allowed to be as wrong as 20%,
| which can mean hundreds of calories.
|
| https://www.insider.com/calorie-labels-arent-accurate-how-
| to...
| ttoinou wrote:
| All this to say that the calorie model for human nutrition
| should no longer be taken seriously.
|
| There was no reason to take it seriously in the first
| place... The people who did that won't be convinced by
| scientific arguments
| [deleted]
| gniv wrote:
| > Glucose, what most carbs ultimately become, is poisonous to
| cells,
|
| Do you mean excessive glucose? I doubt glucose is poisonous,
| seeing how simple and basic the krebs cycle is.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Glucose _is_ toxic. Granted, even water is toxic at some
| level, but that threshold for toxicity is much higher than
| that of glucose. Glucose is a fundamental part of the Krebs
| cycle, yes, and is not a problem _if_ that glucose is
| managed and regulated. By default, the human body manages
| glucose very well. When that system is disrupted either by
| consuming exogenous carbohydrates as well as consuming
| carbs and fats together simultaneously, said system begins
| to fail and that 's what can lead to all sorts of problems
| involving blood sugar.
|
| See Table 1 of "Glucose Toxicity":
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK278934/
|
| Unmanaged glucose is toxic to every tissue in the body.
| [deleted]
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I found trendweight.com super helpful. It would be able to show
| you the trend overtime. It does something like a moving average
| overtime of your weight and calls it 'actual weight' whereas
| day to day fluctuations it treats a bit like noise it's
| extracting a signal from.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > the problem lies entirely somewhere else -- in our ability to
| self regulate.
|
| Of course we have a problem with self-regulation. A billion-
| dollar industry exists whose main goal is to make certain foods
| more addictive, and yet as a society, the onus always falls on
| individuals to figure out how to overcome millions upon
| millions of dollars in research into chemically perfected food
| that we can't say "no" to.
| dlkmp wrote:
| Yes we can say "no", no matter the billions of dollars some
| companies may invest in their product.
|
| I can relate to this kind of excuse in case of fat children
| who don't fully control their eating habits and rely on
| whatever food their parents make available to them. For self
| --sufficient adults, it's a pathetic opinion to have about
| your own level of control.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| This is the exact same kind of moralistic thinking that
| created the opioid crisis. 40% of adults in the US are
| obese. Not overweight, obese.[0] Not to mention, that study
| was conducted before the pandemic, it would be interesting
| to see where the figures are now. At what percentage of
| aggregate obesity would you consider the issue to no longer
| be about self-control? And what makes you think we aren't
| going to hit that figure in the future?
|
| Products are being developed to intentionally surpass our
| ability to self-regulate, whether they be food, medication,
| etc. People get paid really good money to sit in labs and
| figure out how to make their product more addictive, and
| we're just expected to just be able to say "no" because
| free will?
|
| 0: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-
| communities/articles/...
| lubesGordi wrote:
| Right, it was moralistic thinking that created the opioid
| crisis.
| iwouldargueatoz wrote:
| I would like to point out that the deep marketing/priming
| is what drives you to the product to begin with. The
| ability to self-regulate our minds and inherently our
| decision processes is closer to the root of the issue.
| That requires a fundamental shift in our education which
| doesn't see any incentives on the horizon to reform
| itself as long as low attention mindless caffeine/sugar
| driven zombies are needed to buy all the stuff we are
| presented with. We already have a deep seated bias
| towards comfort in our mental architecture. It's quite
| easy to piggy back on that for marketers to condition our
| minds. For someone to constantly be aware of this before
| making a decision is a bit of a stretch especially in our
| GO culture. The incentives are simply not there yet, the
| churn of getting fat and losing weight is too profitable
| to go away. Just like oil derivatives and other friction
| profiting cycle products.
| pocketarc wrote:
| I think that's just a political question with no "right"
| answer. Some people will believe the government should
| intervene and control some of these foods, and some
| people will believe it shouldn't, that people should be
| free to make their own choices.
|
| There's very good arguments to be made on either side,
| and neither side is the "right" side, it just depends on
| what your values are.
|
| Personally, I like being strict with my own diet and
| fitness, but being free to take a break and pig out on
| whatever junk food I feel like. A world without Coke and
| McDonald's would be sad to me, even if it is ultimately
| healthier for the population in general.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Well, the other conversation to have that doesn't just
| cash out into personal consumer choice is who a society
| lets line their coffers with the vices of others.
|
| I find it harder to argue for why you should be able to
| enrich yourself at the expense of others while singing
| "But personal choice!" to wash your hands of it all.
| kipchak wrote:
| I think the problem is the conflict between the two isn't
| symmetrical. Those who are trying to convince you to eat
| Coke and McDonalds aren't playing fair or accurately
| portraying what they're selling. and will promote
| research that indicates that lack of exercise[1] or
| fat[2], and will specifically advertise to children.
|
| Comparing it to tobacco or alcohol for example, I don't
| think it's wrong to let people chose to consume them, but
| I don't think it's a bad idea to restrict them being sold
| to young people or restrict their ability to advertise.
| Imagine for example a cigarette ad for children. The
| tactics used are fairly similar.[3]
|
| [1]https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-coca-cola-
| disguised-its...
|
| [2]https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2016/09/13/493739074...
|
| [3]https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/soft-drink-companies-
| copy-toba...
| adalacelove wrote:
| > it's a pathetic opinion to have about your own level of
| control.
|
| The first step to improve is to know your weakness. Our
| strength is intelligence.
| asciimov wrote:
| T2 Diabetic that keeps a fairly strict keto diet here.
|
| Food is terrible these days. It's hard to get stuff that
| isn't loaded down with sweeteners, never mind salts and
| fats. All to make food taste better and to get you to eat
| it more.
|
| The insidious part about this food though, you can't
| directly taste the part that makes it addicting. If you
| stay away from it for long enough you can feel it. You'll
| eat something seemingly mundane, and suddenly you'll
| notice, not only does this food taste really good, it
| tastes absolutely wonderful in every way. If you pay close
| attention you can feel some deep parts of your monkey brain
| light up informing you that you best eat as much of this
| splendid food as possible. Weirdly the food itself doesn't
| actually taste that good, but some of those deep sections
| of your poor old monkey brain believes it does.
|
| I hear you, well just eat fresh food, plenty of veggies and
| fruit. That is the where food science has gotten down right
| diabolical. Over the past bunch of generations we have
| modified our own produce, apples are sweeter and tastier,
| so are pears and watermelon, and things like corn, carrots,
| tomatoes, onions even potatoes and lettuce.
|
| There is no escape from the things that tells your stupid
| monkey brain, hey eat this you fool!
|
| ---
|
| Before you dog pile on me, I'm diabetic thanks to the
| genetic lottery, not for a lifetime of bad eating habits.
| But thank you for your concern.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| You've staked out some pretty high moral ground, and a
| position that can be argued against any personal challenge,
| so I really hope you're perfect in every way or else karma
| is coming back hard!
| paulpauper wrote:
| yes, hard to self regulate when so much food is so calorie
| dense and addicting
| sva_ wrote:
| The way you say it makes it sound like you only just noticed
| that you've become fat over 20 years.
|
| I usually force myself to start counting calories again once I
| go off a weight I'm happy with (readjust my intuition.)
|
| And that means counting calories going in (food) and out
| (normal resting use per day + potential exercise)
| twawaaay wrote:
| That was a long time ago. I lost most of it about decade ago
| and turned most of the rest into muscle. Running daily.
|
| Don't count calories. Read this book:
| https://www.amazon.com/Mini-Habits-Weight-Loss-
| Suffering/dp/...
|
| Calorie counting does not work (that's exact point of my
| post). What you need to do is to teach yourself to eat and
| behave as if you were healthy and this gets down to building
| right habits and displacing bad food with good food. Notice I
| am not saying dieting -- removing food you like and leaving
| void in your diet is a recipe for frustration and breaking
| your promise. Instead, learn to embrace healthy food and
| slowly include more of it in your diet and you will naturally
| start eating less of the bad ones.
| TheCapn wrote:
| As someone who has maintained his weight for roughly 15
| years... calorie counting works fine. You're looking for an
| external source to blame for your internal shortcomings.
| twawaaay wrote:
| How is trying to build right habits trying to blame
| external source?
|
| It literally starts with observation that current habits
| are wrong and need to change.
| watwut wrote:
| His suggestion is actually healthy lifestyle.
| sva_ wrote:
| > Calorie counting does not work
|
| Works for me. And yes, you shouldn't eat garbage. In other
| news, water is wet.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Additional 30kg increases your resting metabolic rate, and
| likely activity calorie surplus, sometimes solution is also as
| simple as fasting a day / skipping a meal once a week to
| maintain.
| sedeki wrote:
| I lost 35 kgs since February this year, up until now in
| October. I want to lose 10 kgs more, then I'll have 10% body
| fat and will look fit.
|
| Yes, it's all about ability to self-regulate.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I don't think 10% body fat is going to be achieved through
| self-regulation/calorie cutting alone.
|
| 10% body fat is an EXTREMELY low %. I don't think that is
| realistic for most people outside very athletic folks.
| Reducing to 10% body fat requires a significant change in
| diet, not just reducing consumption, but actively changing
| your macro mix AND keeping a fairly strict regimen of
| strength training and cardio to keep the fat off.
|
| I think losing weight as most folks (including yourself I
| think) agree with is reduction of calories. Then optimization
| of calories / lifestyle / workout regimen seem to be the next
| areas.
| gilbetron wrote:
| How do you self-regulate? My wife is able to, I'm not very
| able to. She can just decide to lose weight and does it. I've
| only successfully lost weight during times when I was so
| stressed I couldn't eat.
| criddell wrote:
| Are you able to fast for an entire day?
| notyourday wrote:
| > How do you self-regulate?
|
| You are not hungry. You are bored. Purge snacks from your
| house. Purge sodas from your house. Purge sugary anything
| from your house. Never buy treats in sized over one
| serving. Only buy one treat at a time.
| mattwest wrote:
| This isn't meant to sound to flippant, but try to increase
| physicality to the point where you don't have to think as
| hard about calorie intake. A brisk one hour walk on hills
| can easily burn 600cal. At the same time, your BMR will go
| up due to increased fitness
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> A brisk one hour walk on hills can easily burn 600cal
|
| This is optimistic to the point of being close to a lie.
| Most people walking for an hour are going to burn closer
| to 250-300 cal. At the pace and terrain to double this
| you're not really "walking" anymore, and it's certainly
| not "easy". The idea of "exercising your way out of
| overconsumption" is entirely flawed and disproven.
| mattwest wrote:
| A 250-300cal/hr walk is a casual stroll. Don't move
| goalposts here. Perceived effort will change from person
| to person. Besides, I meant the number goal is easy, not
| the effort. But you knew that and wanted to twist my
| statement to fit your view.
|
| A quick google search results in a range from
| 400-600cal/hr for brisk, hilly walks. You could also use
| the word "hike" but that requires nature which some
| people don't have access to.
|
| >The idea of "exercising your way out of overconsumption"
| is entirely flawed and disproven.
|
| Obvious one would still be attempting to reduce calorie
| intake throughout this scenario. But for the people who
| say "exercise just doesn't make a difference in my weight
| loss" - that is indeed flawed. You can absolutely
| exercise your way into a deficit. Perhaps you haven't had
| that experience. To that, I would say your workload is
| probably not high enough to experience it.
| watwut wrote:
| I cam tell you, that idea works pretty well. With added
| bonus that you gain stamina and strength.
|
| Exercise is proven to improve your health results.
| rollo wrote:
| Just get used to being hungry and your stomach being empty.
| You don't need to do anything when you're hungry, you won't
| starve.
| mattwest wrote:
| I completely agree with this, yet people have a hard time
| accepting it because hunger evokes so much emotion.
|
| Eating food with a focus on satiation helps with this.
| It's normal to feel hungry, but you can offset it to a
| degree with proper food choice. Hell, I'm hungry right
| now
| sniglom wrote:
| You trying to lose weight isn't self-regulating, that is you
| manually regulating your weight.
|
| The fact that you have 30kg excess weight to lose shows that
| there is an issue with self-regulation.
| orzig wrote:
| Maybe the root cause is different for different people?
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| But that's an average. You may have gained much more in one
| year vs the others. Plus you don't need to notice 4g a day even
| if that is the level, once you have gained about 1Kg then you
| know that on average you need to decrease.
| Retric wrote:
| Except it isn't really 4g per day in a vacuum. As you gain
| weight every kg needs an additional ~20 calories per day to
| sustain its basic processes. So by year 20 you are eating an
| extra 600 calories per day to sustain that weight plus an extra
| 4g (~36 calories) to continue to gain weight which is a quite
| noticeable amount of food.
|
| At this point cutting the equivalent of 50+ oz of coke or a
| little more than a Big Mac per day would leave you feeling
| hungry, but that food slowly crept in over time.
| swarnie wrote:
| > 50+ oz
|
| Sorry just need to convert that to real units for the rest of
| the world - 1478.68ml
|
| Nah bugger off, literally no one is drinking 1.5 litres of
| Coke a day, absolute madness.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Nah bugger off, literally no one is drinking 1.5 litres
| of Coke a day, absolute madness.
|
| I know people who have done that in the past - it's one
| bottle or 5 cans or 3 medium bottles or 2.6 pints (easily
| done if you're spending 8 hours a day in the pub as we did
| at uni.)
|
| (I'm pretty sure I've had periods where I've drunk the
| daily equivalent in coke, coffee, redbull, etc.)
| evandale wrote:
| Anecdotally, I have a family member that drinks nearly 4L a
| day. He gets two 64oz big gulps from 7/11 every day. Not
| even diet - it's regular Coke.
| buescher wrote:
| If only that were true. A day? Try: in one sitting.
| Convienence stores in the USA have sold 64 oz cups of soda
| for decades. https://www.delish.com/food/news/a39120/super-
| sized-beverage...
| dekhn wrote:
| yes, plenty of people are drinking that much
| zython wrote:
| 600 kcal in other terms is: a sandwich and 2 small pieces
| of chocolate
|
| 2 sausages and two eggs
|
| Coke isnt really more energy dense than orange juice but
| getts a worse rep, my point being is that if you dont pay
| attention to the actual energy contained in your food 600
| kcal can be inhaled in a whim.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> 600 kcal in other terms is: a sandwich and 2 small
| pieces of chocolate
|
| That's a pretty small sandwich, with none of the fun
| toppings.
| jragoon wrote:
| I'm an American, and I usually consume about 48oz of Coke
| Zero a day.. So definitely believable.
| swarnie wrote:
| Like.... Why?
|
| That sounds horrendous
| ndlzk wrote:
| If you drink it with meals I don't see why not. Or even
| as a snack. Coca Cola is delicious.
| swarnie wrote:
| Its sugary cancer water, why not have... water?
|
| How much is insulin in your geo?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I think as you age you want to eat more food not less,
| certainly with the standard American diet. I really haven't
| yet found a solution apart from doing up a house myself, 8
| solid hours of DIY per day and you'll lose weight no problem.
| I lost about 10kg during that time without even thinking
| about it.
| mattwest wrote:
| One part of that is higher caloric demand, but the other
| part is your capacity to burn calories. As you become more
| fit, your body can draw on more calories in a given moment.
| Fit people can burn more calories per hour, usually by a
| large margin
| vsareto wrote:
| An extra 600/day is incredibly easy to get with American food
| and habits
| rootusrootus wrote:
| As fun as it is to make fun of Americans, many European
| countries aren't that far behind. It is a universal
| problem.
| NoBreakfirst wrote:
| I was about to pick up some frozen bar for 550 calorie
| yesterday. I used to eat two on a whim. Never realized that
| it's basically lunch.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I think this is a key point. Not just for weight control
| but for so many things.
|
| It is agonizingly simple to destroy near constant
| mindfulness with a few moments of mindlessness.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| This is why I love trading. You cannot falter. It has
| changed my personality as well.
| angrais wrote:
| Do you mean training or trading as in stock trading?
| e12e wrote:
| Presumably trading meat stock for vegetable stock? ;)
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Stock
| Raidion wrote:
| Poker has the same vibe. You need to consistently made
| good decisions, even in the face of adversity, with the
| hope that the long run is long enough for those decisions
| to pay off.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Yep
| m12k wrote:
| Gaining 4g of fat requires an intake of quite a bit more than
| 4g of food.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Well, not necessarily true. Your body is not composed of 100%
| fat. Actually it is composed mostly of water and when you
| gain 4g of mass most of this gain is from water, too.
|
| I unfortunately can't tell you how efficient body is at
| digesting various types of foods including digesting pure
| fat.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Very short-term fluctuations in weight are usually caused
| by retention and flushing of water. Gaining 30kg over the
| course of 20 years is not water weight. If you were
| retaining that much water, you'd be so arthritic feeling
| I'm not sure you'd able to stand up. Unless you've been
| very serious and consistent about weight training that
| entire time, that 30kg is virtually all fat.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| How much exercise were you doing during that period? I ask
| because the same thing happened to me and I wasn't doing any
| exercise most months.
|
| Overeating becomes much less of an issue if you're doing
| exercise (as an extreme example look at how much strongmen need
| to eat to maintain their weight).
|
| A key insight is that muscle requires more calories to maintain
| than fat reserves, even if they weigh the same.
|
| If you're fat you're probably building decent muscle on your
| legs just by carrying more weight around all day, but the upper
| body is a different story and requires training no matter what.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| I don't find exercise very helpful. They burn too little
| calories compared to the effort. I find it way easier to eat
| less: not doing something is easier to spend effort, and the
| effect multiplier is bigger.
|
| I should still exercise for other reasons, but not for losing
| weight.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| The calories burned during the exercise matter less than
| the higher metabolism resulting from having more muscle
| mass. Especially if we're talking about strength and
| hypertrophy exercise and not just cardio.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| How does this work? I have way more muscle than my wife,
| but she can eat way more than me without gaining weight.
| It can't be _just_ muscle mass?
|
| How many calories does extra muscle mass burn daily?
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| There could be a lot of factors: your body size, muscle
| to fat ratio and body comp, total exercise in a day, the
| actual caloric amount of the food you are eating (you can
| eat a lot of low calorie food compared to a single high
| calorie item for instance), mitochondrial function in
| your muscles and your ability to clear lactate from your
| bloodstream. Controlling for all of the variables is
| actually very difficult.
|
| Most people that eat a lot and don't seem to gain weight
| are simply not eating that much calorically or exercising
| a lot. When a more sedentary lifestyle kicks in they
| generally begin to align more with the general
| population.
| ayewo wrote:
| Perhaps the difference comes down to body type
| (Ectomorph, Endomorph, or a Mesomorph)?
|
| https://www.gq.com/story/body-types-explained-ectomorph-
| endo...
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| It's definitely not just about muscle mass. But you
| should compare yourself to yourself only when it comes to
| self-improvement, since you can't borrow someone else's
| metabolism. Having more muscle mass is better than not
| having it for both health and appearance.
|
| When we're talking about slowly gaining weight over time
| as the OP did, even if muscle only burns a little more
| energy than fat that could be enough to tip the balance.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I don't find exercise very helpful. They burn too little
| calories compared to the effort.
|
| Exercise help in much broader ways than just the amount of
| calories burned on the spot. Take weight lifting for
| examples, it increases your lean mass, which means it
| increases your metabolic rate, which means you can eat more
| and not gain fat. You also spend more calories on your
| resting days to rebuild your muscles, &c. exercising also
| tend to curb appetite
| voisin wrote:
| I suggest not focusing on what calories it appears the
| exercise is burning. My experience is that something else
| is occurring which helps to lose weight and keep it off - I
| suspect something to do with the microbiome and increasing
| basal metabolic rate to feed an exercise-trained microbiome
| (more active? Different makeup for sure).
|
| I struggled for years to get my weight down. Then just
| walking every day to ensure I was at 10,000 steps managed
| to move the needle in a meaningful way. Over a few years
| that turned into running a few times a week, which turned
| into running daily. In the beginning I had already been
| counting calories and the calories I was burning walking
| whatever it took to get from my normal amount to 10k
| (varied each day) was not enough to justify the weight
| being lost when compared to calories consumed. It should
| have been much slower.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I've observed that moderate aerobic exercise often tends
| to temporarily suppress appetite for some people, myself
| included. Doesn't work for everyone, though.
|
| My partner swears their caloric cravings increase
| disproportionately after workouts and feels strongly that
| reducing food intake has helped them maintain weight far
| more than exercise. There are probably some genetic
| components to this (according to our 23andme data, we
| have very different genomes).
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > I struggled for years to get my weight down. Then just
| walking every day to ensure I was at 10,000 steps managed
| to move the needle in a meaningful way.
|
| Part of this might also be about how exercise generally
| leaves you feeling pretty good, usually better than after
| a day that is spent entirely sedentary in my experience.
| A lot of people crave the instant satiating feeling of
| eating. Eating often feels good. The exercise might then
| help by replacing the "make me feel better" feeling that
| food might give you, leading to you swapping out
| "unnecessary" feeding and lowering your caloric intake in
| the process.
| voisin wrote:
| I would agree with this thought generally as it certainly
| happened when I started running, but in the days of just
| getting my steps in, my use of MyFitnessPal showed that I
| was eating the same diet with essentially no change to
| the average daily caloric intake. I did increase my water
| intake.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Exercise is key. The problem is people expect exercise to
| directly burn your fat which is completely false and broken
| way to look at it.
|
| Then what happens when they don't see results is they
| proclaim it does not work and drop exercising altogether.
| What they did not do is stick long enough to actually see
| the results.
|
| Exercise is to keep your healthy and to improve your
| internal regulation. It is to keep you feel well so that
| you don't feel compulsion to eat more just to feel well.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There are two only tangentially related issues here. One
| is, given you're already overweight or obese, can exercise
| help you change that? The answer seems to be yes, it
| definitely can, but it seems empirically that it very
| rarely works over any appreciable long-term, other than in
| people who find they enjoy it sufficiently to become at
| least recreationally serious endurance athletes or at least
| very active people for the rest of their lives. If your
| only motivation for exercising at all is to lose weight, it
| very likely isn't going to work over any meaningfully long
| span of time.
|
| But the other issue is, given you're a normal-sized,
| metabolically healthy 10 year-old, will developing a
| lifelong habit of regular exercise and a generally active
| lifestyle keep you from ever getting fat in the first
| place? I don't know that we have any kind of long-horizon,
| longitudinal research to demonstrate one way or another
| empirically, but mechanistically, it sure seems like that
| should be the case, and you can look at manual laborers in
| developing countries, the Amish, any serious lifelong
| athletes in sports where being maximally large is not
| advantageous on its own, as existence proofs that this
| should help.
|
| I think the comment you're responding to was really asking
| about the latter scenario. It's not, okay, you spent the
| last 20 years gaining 30kg, well how active are you now?
| The question is how active were you over the entire course
| of the last 20 years? Because it's likely that if you were
| sufficiently active, you wouldn't need to lose weight at
| all, and the question of exercising for losing weight would
| be irrelevant.
| j_mo wrote:
| I agree that moderate amounts of exercise are not helpful
| in losing weight at all. I fluctuate all year between 73kg
| and 80kg (with a brief stint at 84kg the other year while I
| wasn't doing any cardio for 6mo and eating way too much
| takeaway).
|
| In school I used to go to the gym every day for 45mins at
| lunch, and box 5/6hrs a week, from 14y/o. The last 3/4yrs I
| climbed 3/4x a week and the last 2 of those I also ran 3/4x
| a week up to ~40km/wk, albeit inconsistently around my 9-5
| and part time uni course.
|
| Every time I cut out one of the sports I enjoy, I am
| drastically less hungry. Yes, a 5km run might burn
| ~300cals, but if I'm so hungry I eat a whole extra meal,
| I'm generally more likely to gain weight. Same for lifting
| weights, but even moreso - if I go and hit a 200kg deadlift
| PR I'm going to be hungry the next day, but that 1-2hr gym
| session maybe burned 100 calories at most. Exercise for
| weight loss is only useful if "calories in" stays the exact
| same, and even then it would be way less effort to reduce
| "calories in" and _not_ exercise (if weight loss is the
| only goal).
|
| The point at which this stops applying is _excessive_
| cardio, ie running 40km+ in a week. That will pretty much
| always result in a caloric deficit for me, because at that
| point I 'm forcing myself to eat enough food to recover
| (rather than having to force myself not to overeat). Most
| people exercising to lose weight (rather than for
| enjoyment, to push themselves/prove something, or to win a
| race) don't _want_ to exercise. If you have to commit 6hrs
| a week to cardio to see any effect, 99% of people aren 't
| interested, so I'd imagine they fit into the "not
| excessive" category where exercise might make them want to
| eat disproportionately more than they burned.
|
| Controlling "calories in" (which will guarantee weight
| loss, as far as the laws of physics are concerned) is
| always going to be the easiest path to weight loss.
| garganzol wrote:
| Here is what's very helpful in loosing weight: ketogenic
| diet. Just try it for fun and see for yourself.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes exercise helps, and has benefits besides burning more
| calories. But unless your calorie surplus is small, it's not
| going to be possible to "burn off" overeating by exercising.
|
| If you need to burn 3,500 excess calories to lose a pound of
| fat, that means you need a 500 calories per day deficit for a
| week. A single fast-food burger such as a Big Mac is more
| than that.
|
| Generalized, you can't make up for bad diet with more
| exercise.
|
| And, you need a calorie surplus to build muscle. So if you
| are trying to get strong, you need to eat.
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| Get a fitness tracker.
|
| Seriously.
|
| People always use these online calories calculators. And they
| can be off my more than 500kcal a day.
|
| That's more than the recommended calorie deficit.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Fitness trackers, while sometimes useful, are considerably
| overhyped IMO. They're mostly about gamification and the UX
| inspiring (often inflated) confidence in the results they
| report, not about yielding fundamentally higher-quality
| information than online calculators or your bathroom scale or
| how well your pants fit.
|
| Also, people put too much stock in the 500 kcal/day thing.
| It's more an example that makes the math work out neatly than
| it is necessarily something any given person should adopt as
| a target.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> This suggests that while I was technically overeating -- by
| just couple of grams per day
|
| I doubt you've hit this average, as it's unlikely you live in a
| completely controlled vacuum. It's more likely you've had far
| more noticable and extreme periods of change in both
| directions, while trending upward as you age and change your
| lifestyle.
|
| To put it another way: I've gained 6g per day over my entire
| life. That's not much more than your 20 year example but
| there's a pretty obvious difference between me as a newborn and
| present day me.
| mizzao wrote:
| It's such a stark contrast to compare the boring memorization of
| high school biology, to
|
| the amazing efficiency of our metabolic and respiratory systems
| and how they sustain us on so little energy.
|
| Why don't they teach this stuff in context?
| oifjsidjf wrote:
| Because modern education is trash.
|
| This article truly is briliant, the opposite of how 99% of
| modern teachers teach.
| garganzol wrote:
| This article has a huge flaw: it only talks about glucose
| metabolism but completely ignores the fat metabolism.
|
| For reference: fat metabolism is equally important, or maybe even
| more important than the glucose part of it. It should not be
| ignored, it should be taught.
|
| Otherwise a reader may get a wrong impression that glucose is
| _the_ energy and then will go to a shop to grab the usual candy,
| thinking that sugar + oxygen is what makes cellular ATP. But this
| is only one half of the story. The full formula is:
| sugar + fat + oxygen = energy
|
| But there is a trick. Sugar suppresses fat metabolism and vice
| versa. This suggests that eating sugar + fat is a bad idea, and
| it is. But what the average Joe does not know is that:
| fat + oxygen = even more energy
|
| For example, 1 molecule of glucose leads to production of 32 ATP
| molecules, while one fatty acid molecule produces 48 ATP
| molecules. ATP is the energy currency in our bodies, so the more
| we have it the more healthy and energetic we can be.
|
| The catch with fats is that they are slow to get going. Glucose
| action is instant while the fats need tens of minutes to be
| engaged in energy production.
|
| Another catch is that fats can be relatively easily damaged
| rendering them unhealthy. For example, the production of refined
| vegetable oils uses high temperatures to "squeeze" the oil out of
| the seeds. This process inevitably damages long chain fatty acids
| breaking them into shorter pieces and oxidizing them along the
| way. Such trans fats cannot be consumed by our bodies: their
| chains are too short to be correctly processed and are too big to
| pass the mitochondrial membranes. This will gradually lead to a
| metabolic dysfunction while filling the cells with unprocessable
| "junk".
|
| But if you consume high-quality fats as a part of a daily low-
| carbohydrate diet it makes miracles: no belly, better cognition
| and you don't need so much food anymore. For example, the
| following products are considered as the sources of high-quality
| fats: avocado, fatty fish, extra virgin oils, nuts, European
| round cheese.
|
| The thing is that people don't know this until they hit a health
| condition that makes them vulnerable and sensitive. We live our
| lives eating tons of sugar and thinking that this is the right
| diet because "sugar = energy", but it is not. Articles like this
| fuel this wrong impression. As the result, we gradually loose our
| metabolic flexibility and may become seriously sick at some point
| of our life.
| anthomtb wrote:
| The average person doesn't think "sugar = energy". They think
| "sugar = tastes good". When average Joe with his 20 kilo spare
| tire is hungry (or probably just bored if he's a Western office
| worker) and trying to satiate himself with either a small bag
| of almonds or a Milky Way, his subconscious is going to reach
| for that candy bar every time. Even having learned the good
| knowledge you describe, the little 5 year old voice that says
| "I want it!" is going to overrule the adult brain that should
| know better.
|
| I spent a summer working* a Dairy Queen in high school. EVERY
| SINGLE DAY someone, usually obese, would come in, order an
| extra large blizzard and say "I really shouldn't do this..."
| while receiving their paper cup of crack.
|
| It is good that you have knowledge and numbers to help you make
| better choices about your diet. It is unfortunate that
| knowledge and numbers don't drive better food choices for
| everyone.
|
| *I wasn't really employed there, my buddy managed the place and
| I'd hang out and occasionally work the register while he smoked
| a joint out back.
| leobg wrote:
| Very interesting. Two questions: 1. If you could only have
| three things in your fridge, which would it be? 2. If you and I
| could never talk again, what single book, article or video
| would you recommend for me to turn to in order to find my own
| way through this topic? Thanks.
| garganzol wrote:
| > If you could only have three things in your fridge, which
| would it be?
|
| It's a matter of personal taste, but for me it would be:
| avocado, high-quality cheese, high-quality meat.
|
| > If you and I could never talk again, what single book,
| article or video would you recommend for me to turn to in
| order to find my own way through this topic?
|
| Book: "Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High
| Calorie Malnutrition" by D. Longsdale and C. Marrs.
|
| Video: [1]
|
| The materials present information with the focus on specific
| vitamins, but the knowledge about metabolism is universal and
| can be applied to all similar situations.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuIhjlFYYZY
| feet wrote:
| I have a few clarifying questions:
|
| What else are fatty acids used for? What are the metabolic
| pathways involved and how do different fatty acids impact our
| cells?
|
| Can you cite sources for your claims? Research is a passion of
| mine and I would love to read some literature on the topic if
| you have any to share.
| garganzol wrote:
| > What else are fatty acids used for?
|
| Energy storage, hormone synthesis.
|
| > What are the metabolic pathways involved and how do
| different fatty acids impact our cells?
|
| Triglycerides are used as a substrate for energy production
| by mitochondria. Short-chain fatty acids with chain lengths <
| 22 can readily enter mitochondria and be turned into energy.
| Long-chain fatty acids cannot enter mitochondria; but they
| can be shortened by peroxisomes, another cellular organelles,
| to more feasible lengths which then can enter mitochondria.
| This whole "fatty" metabolic pathway is called beta-
| oxidation.
|
| Both glucose and lipids are transformed into substance called
| Acetyl-CoA which is then used by mitochondria to produce ATP.
| Acetyl-CoA is a common denominator of our energy production
| pathways.
|
| We can also imagine a software pattern when there is a main
| implementation (mitochondria working internally from Acetyl-
| CoA) and two adapters for glucose -> Acetyl-CoA (glycolysis)
| and lipids -> Acetyl-CoA (beta-oxidation) to simplify the
| whole thing.
|
| Trans fats cannot be processed neither by mitochondria nor
| peroxisomes because they belong to a different class of fatty
| acids. This causes their accumulation inside the cell and a
| gradual development of a metabolic dysfunction because
| mitochondria cannot produce enough ATP (energy) from trans
| fats. If the accumulation is large enough it starts to block
| other metabolic pathways including glucose pathway. The
| mitochondrial "hunger" increases even more. Because glucose
| cannot enter mitochondria anymore, its level is rising
| leading to a condition known as insulin resistance. What
| happens next? A person may develop quite a few secondary
| conditions such as T2DM, hyperlipidemia, neurological and
| cognitive impairment, various cardiovascular and autoimmune
| diseases.
|
| > Can you cite sources for your claims? Research is a passion
| of mine and I would love to read some literature on the topic
| if you have any to share.
|
| I would gladly do that, but the list would be enormous.
| Materials on Krebs cycle are probably the best starting
| points. The next important milestone is to read information
| about Beriberi and Pellagra diseases because those conditions
| are caused by mitochondrial dysfunction which in turn is
| caused by nutritional deficiencies. The next thing to study
| is that metabolic dysfunction can be acquired not only from
| nutritional deficiencies but from a condition known as
| oxidative stress, which in turn can be caused by viruses,
| bacteria, poisons and so on. It can be acquired from the
| pathological excess of sugar during 10-20 years. Metabolic
| dysfunction can also be caused by genetics because some
| enzymes in metabolic pathways do not work as they should. To
| get a grasp of that, you can watch "Lorenzo's Oil" movie to
| see how it happens and what kind of sufferings a person may
| have.
|
| As you can see, the amount of materials is quite enormous and
| hardly fits into a web-page-with-links format.
| feet wrote:
| I'm surprised you don't mention lipid modifications of
| proteins or membrane fluidity, are those not significant
| functions?
| curmudgeon22 wrote:
| Very interesting and thanks for the post. Any recommendations
| on good places for further reading on the subject?
| germinalphrase wrote:
| "European round cheese"
|
| This is... vague. What are the qualities of a cheese that make
| it shift into the 'high quality fats' category?
| garganzol wrote:
| Probably the best bet: naturally produced products without
| using hydrogenation and too much heat.
|
| From the formal standpoint a high-quality fat product should
| not contain trans fats or contain just a small amount of
| them.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Sure: but neither "European" nor "round" provide a
| heuristic for identifying those qualities.
|
| Edit: to expand, a quick look in my fridge shows the
| following cheese have no trans fats at all.
|
| - Tillamook's widely available industrial cheddar - Generic
| brand feta - Generic low-moisture cheddar - Dutch Gouda
|
| We should probably eat good cheese because it tastes
| better, but I would imagine that trans fat free cheese
| would encapsulate _most_ common cheese varieties.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| As an FYI, added trans fats have been illegal in the US
| since a few years ago:
|
| https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/trans-
| fat
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Kraft singles have no trans fat.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| Neither does plastic
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I find that bringing up American cheese is the single
| fastest way to establish whether someone knows anything
| about food or not. It's an excellent filter.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| American Cheese is fantastic! Kraft Singles American
| however is trash and I hate that I have to explain the
| difference or that some people think that's what all
| American Cheese is like.
| feet wrote:
| American "cheese"
| [deleted]
| infinite8s wrote:
| > Such trans fats cannot be consumed by our bodies: their
| chains are too short to be correctly processed and are too big
| to pass the mitochondrial membranes.
|
| Oxidizing lipids doesn't introduce chain rotation about their
| double bonds (which is the difference between cis and trans
| fats). This change in structure is why trans fats are solid at
| higher temperature (for the same types of lipids - think the
| difference between margarine and vegetable oil). The reason
| trans fats are bad is we can't process them as easily and they
| seems to accumulate faster than even saturated fats in our
| blood vessels, mostly because they are synthetic in nature and
| we don't have specific enzymes optimized to process them.
| qvrjuec wrote:
| > they are synthetic in nature
|
| There are natural sources of trans fats, like vaccenic acid
| in breast milk.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > We live our lives eating tons of sugar and thinking that this
| is the right diet
|
| I don't think most people think it's the right diet. I think
| most people know that sugar is potentially harmful. Nobody is
| espousing the idea that sugar is part of a balanced diet, or
| that we should be increasing the amount of added sugar in
| processed foods. Or that we should increase our consumption of
| candy.
|
| Rather, when we think of sugar, we think of obesity, heart
| disease, diabetes. Maybe even fructose toxicity?
| jjuel wrote:
| But highly processed refined carbohydrates are sugar as well.
| Or at least converted to glucose. We are told, however, that
| carbs are part of the balanced diet. While that is true the
| right kind of carbs are important. So people think they are
| being healthy while loading themselves up with poor quality
| carbs that are in fact quite unhealthy.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > We are told, however, that carbs are part of the balanced
| diet. While that is true the right kind of carbs are
| important. So people think they are being healthy while
| loading themselves up with poor quality carbs that are in
| fact quite unhealthy.
|
| I have never heard anyone, even informally, claiming that
| sugars are a useful form of carbs in the diet. Any source
| that claims that carbs should be part of a balanced diet is
| talking about long-chain carbs like starch, not sugar.
|
| I highly doubt many people are seeing carbs listed as an
| important part of a diet and then deliberately eating more
| sugar thinking that they are being healthy.
| zamfi wrote:
| I think th e poster you are responding to is making the
| point that long-chain refined carbs, which is what you
| get in e.g. pasta, breakfast cereal, oatmeal, rice, etc.
| (even if "whole grain", most of which just adds back
| fiber but has already irreversible separated that fiber
| from the carbs) are perceived by many people as part of a
| balanced diet, etc -- but they are basically sugar,
| because they are metabolized into glucose very quickly.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > basically sugar
|
| I think we should be careful here about calling glucose
| "sugar" and talking about harmful metabolic process
| because most people think sucrose when talking about
| sugar. And the potential harm from sucrose,
| glucose+fructose is quite different than glucose alone.
| Eating 100g of pasta, what you call "basically sugar", is
| not at all the same as eating 100g of table sugar.
| There's just so much room for misinterpretation and
| miscommunication around food. And in addition, so much is
| unknown.
| zamfi wrote:
| You are correct, I was imprecise. 100g of pasta is close
| to 100g of glucose, while 100g of table sugar (sucrose)
| is ~50/50 glucose and fructose, the latter of which has a
| completely separate metabolism.
|
| But both cause a huge glucose spike (ignoring fructose
| metabolism for now) and in that respect they are quite
| similar, and very different from basically any other kind
| of food in terms of metabolic response.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| carb != sugar
|
| sugar is glucose + fructose.
|
| The human digestive system metabolizes fructose
| differently than glucose.
|
| Bears eat lots of fructose prior to hibernation, birds
| eat lots of fructose prior to migrating south for the
| winter.
|
| Consuming lots of fructose, say in a large container of
| carbonated drink dosed with high-fructose corn
| syrup/sugar, sends signals to your body to stop burning
| fat and start storing fat.
|
| Ever hear someone say, "I just have to look at food and I
| gain weight". Well, those people have probably consumed
| enough fructose such that their body started storing food
| calories as fat.
|
| see "Peter Attia - #87--Rick Johnson, MD: Fructose--the
| common link in hypertension, insulin resistance, T2D, &
| obesity?"
|
| at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbSic4Oo8ME
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > sugar is glucose + fructose.
|
| That's not the definition of sugar. Not even if you meant
| sucrose there (which is different from just a mix of
| glucose and fructose). Wikipedia puts it:
|
| > Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble
| carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. ... White
| sugar is a refined form of sucrose.
|
| I know Wikipedia is not perfect but that matches what
| I've seen in the past. For example, fructose (by itself)
| is absolutely a sugar and it would be outrageous to claim
| it's not because it's not sucrose.
| infinite8s wrote:
| You are correct that that is not the scientific
| definition of sugar, which is generally any 5 or 6 carbon
| ring molecule.
|
| However when most people talk about sugar they are
| referring to table sugar, which is a molecule of glucose
| (a six carbon ring sugar) chemically bonded to a molecule
| of fructose (a 5-carbon ring sugar) - otherwise known as
| sucrose. The first thing your body does when it sees
| sucrose is split them into a molecule of glucose and a
| molecule of fructose (this happens in your small
| intestine). Glucose can be metabolized right away, in any
| cell, however fructose needs a bit more processing in the
| liver before cells can use it to generate ATP.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > ... when most people talk about sugar they are
| referring to table sugar ...
|
| What can I say? (shrug) I disagree, that's not my
| experience from talking to people in person (about diet;
| obviously it's a different matter if you're talking about
| cake ingredients). Anecdotal evidence from replies here
| on HN seems to agree with you though. Who knows what's
| more common in reality.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Hmm, perhaps you're right. I suspect that "highly
| refined" is an ambiguous term. A quick Google suggests it
| mostly refers to sugars but also refers to things like
| rice cakes and white bread that are mostly starchy; maybe
| it depends, in part, what things it is packaged alongside
| rather than just the chemical composition of the carbs
| themselves e.g. whether it is included alongside a fair
| amount of fibre.
| pcl wrote:
| I think jjuel means bread and crackers and pasta and
| whatnot when they refer to low quality carbs, not sugar
| itself.
|
| Many forms of carbohydrates are trivially converted to
| sugars such as glucose when they hit our digestive
| system, and so are roughly equivalent to eating sugars
| directly, metabolically speaking.
|
| I've been told that adding a healthy dose of fat to a
| processed carbohydrate is a good way to prevent this
| instant sugarification process, and so I eat my bread
| with lots of olive oil or cheese or butter.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Many actually do, just not in a direct way. Change the word
| "sugar" to "carbs" or even "starch", and plenty of people
| will tell you that you need "good carbs" or the like. That's
| exactly what I and many others were taught in both high
| school and college level courses on human health. It's bogus
| because, for all intents and purposes, you can treat carbs
| and sugar the same. Lactose and fructose being partial
| exceptions, of course, and not in a good way.
|
| Speaking of fructose, absolutely there are people promoting
| sugar as part of a "balanced" diet. You know what's in fruit,
| right?
|
| Sugar actually was for a time touted as energy you either use
| or excrete, and that's an idea that's been discredited to the
| extent that most people know that _sugar_ is considered
| harmful. They believe this because sugar is indefensible,
| hence the agriculture industrial complex have thrown it under
| the bus. Yet they insist that fruits, starchy vegetables, and
| whole grains are part of a "balanced" diet. What is a
| balanced diet? A diet with all the essential nutrients
| despite the presence of exogenous carbohydrates and other
| things that reduce bio-availability?
|
| A "balanced" diet successfully rebrands sugar as an essential
| nutrient. As long as it's in the form of lactose and
| galactose in your "healthy" yogurt, fructose in your
| "healthy" fruit, and glucose hydrolized from the carbs of
| "healthy" whole grains, few are the wiser. Even better if you
| can dump refined sugar into these things anyway and call it
| "dextrose" to confuse people.
|
| Yes, I know I wrap a lot of things in quotes. I do so because
| I must emphasize how incorrect these ideas are.
| fredophile wrote:
| Fructose in unprocessed foods like fruit isn't a problem.
| Show me a morbidly obese person who got that way from
| eating too much fruit.
|
| While you don't require carbs to survive that doesn't mean
| they're harmful or should be completely cut out from your
| diet.
| frankus wrote:
| Is there anything to the idea that saturated fats are less
| prone to blocking glucose metabolism? For example, this guy [1]
| argues that saturated fats can temporarily suppress insulin
| signaling to avoid overloading the cell with glucose while the
| fat is being metabolized.
|
| Anecdotally I have a much easier time handling carb-rich meals
| since mostly eliminating polyunsaturated fats from my diet. My
| previous experience was some combination of "food coma" and
| "noticeably hangry" a few hours later, but now I mostly just
| feel energetic for a few hours.
|
| Some of the most metabolically-healthy populations in the world
| eat mostly starches [2] (and maybe 1-2% of calories from
| PUFAs), so my hunch is that eating low-carb is more of a
| workaround for widespread metabolic dysfunction than a
| requirement to be metabolically healthy.
|
| [1] https://fireinabottle.net/the-ros-theory-of-obesity/ [2]
| https://fireinabottle.net/pontzers-burn-and-metabolic-rate-m...
|
| (It's worth pointing out that both of these links are from a
| site that also sells supplements, but they do link back to the
| primary sources)
| maxk42 wrote:
| Forgive me for the incomplete reply, but I looked this up last
| week and one molecule of fatty acid (in this case DHA
| soecifically) generates 136 molecules of ATP. This makes fat
| roughly 2x as energetic (from the standpoint of our bodies'
| metabolism) as the heat measured from burning it (calories)
| would suggest. Despite this fact, and the fact that I've been
| eating roughly 3500 calories per day without exercising,
| switching to a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet has lead me to
| lose 10 lbs over the past three weeks. Clearly there's a lot
| more to metabolism than is even documented in this lengthy
| article.
| feet wrote:
| Fatty acids are used for _far_ more than just energy
| freedude wrote:
| Yes, brain growth and learning/remembering stuff for
| instance.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| The article was about metabolism, not diet and food. It didn't
| deal so much with what people eat, but instead how cells
| process energy. The dynamics presented in the article are
| relevant whether you're eating a high-fat or high-sugar diet.
| garganzol wrote:
| The article says that "glucose" is the fuel for mitochondria,
| which is true. But the article does not say that "lipids" are
| the fuel for mitochondria as well while it should have.
|
| Such asymmetry of presentation may create a dangerous
| illusion about the glucose as the ultimate nutritional fuel.
| That illusion may affect nutritional choices of a reader
| because the article painted glucose as the supposedly purest
| source of energy.
| fluoridation wrote:
| I may be misremembering, but doesn't fat have to be
| processed into glycogen in the liver before being available
| for metabolic consumption?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| All this information should be included too! Obviously
| there is a limit to the article scope but it wouldn't
| harm to answer these obvious questions it leaves
| dangling.
| garganzol wrote:
| No, fats that come from the food (triglycerides) are
| directly consumable by the cells.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| > In hibernating bears and newborn humans, the turbines generate
| heat, which is stored in fat. More commonly, though, each turn of
| the wheel assembles a molecule of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP
| --the energy currency of our cells.
|
| Interestingly, there is a (very effective!) weight-loss drug
| called DNP whose mechanism of action is to interfere with ATP
| generation in this manner. Essentially it makes it so that some
| non-trivial percentage of these "proton turbines" do not actually
| generate ATP. This means you burn a lot more calories at rest to
| generate the same amount of ATP, and also generate a lot of
| excess heat.
|
| The risk is that if you take too much your core temperature
| increases too much and you can cook yourself to death. There's no
| treatment and overdoses are invariable fatal.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Drug? Or poison?
| csours wrote:
| DNP doesn't make you healthy and it doesn't reduce hunger. The
| hard part of reducing body fat and keeping it off is managing
| hunger.
| fredophile wrote:
| I don't think you'll find anyone suggesting that DNP is a
| good idea for weight maintenance or improved health. However,
| it will definitely help with short term weight loss if it
| doesn't kill you.
| igtztorrero wrote:
| Continues Glucose Monitor (CGM) are nowadays the best option to
| take care of your weight, just like Blood Pressure Monitor are to
| keep your brain out of strokes !!! Understand the importance of
| glucose in our body !
| csours wrote:
| Khan Academy MCAT overview of Metabolism. Don't be discouraged by
| the fact that it's for MCAT prep - it's pretty clear.
|
| https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/biomolecules#over...
| lob_it wrote:
| stall84 wrote:
| I've recently had the most frustrating and confusing time of my
| life diet-exercise-wise, so this article is very
| welcomed/interesting.
|
| I work out maybe 5 out of 7 days.. and I'm talking a minimum of
| 30 minutes of intense cardio, bpm's above 150.. 3 days i'm going
| to hour-long 'core-sculpt-yoga' which at 93 degrees inside is
| some of the most intense exercise i've ever done.. and end up
| leaving near palpitations every time..
|
| On top of all of that work, I *hardly eat anything at all* .. I
| might take in 2000 calories in a day, but it's typically far
| less.. a lot of it is also in liquid form, which I know isn't
| great.
|
| The point is, I've actually gained weight in the past couple of
| years. Sure, my muscle mass has increased slightly with all of
| the exercise.. but fat around my midsection has stayed and/or
| slightly increased. _AND IT HAS CONFOUNDED ME TO NO END_ .. How
| does someone hardly eat anything at all (but potentially eats
| poorly, not fatly, but poorly when he does) and who works out
| more than regularly .. manage to gain weight and maintain or gain
| fat ??
|
| So I am trying now to eat regularly throughout the day, and we'll
| see what happens.. Drinking protein shakes every few hours, etc..
| to really test this theory on myself.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| My usual response to a claim like this would be -- log it.
| Accurately, with a good scale. Defying physics is hard, and
| everyone I've ever met who claims to eat a low calorie diet
| without losing weight is usually undercounting, and usually by
| a lot.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Measuring body mass doesn't tell you how much water, muscle,
| bone too. Could be they are now better hydrated because they
| are doing a fitness regime.
| csours wrote:
| > but fat around my midsection has stayed and/or slightly
| increased
|
| Are you sure? That could be muscle too. It's hard to tell
| unless you get a DEXA scan.
|
| Don't worry about gaining weight unless you also have to buy
| bigger clothes.
| sushisource wrote:
| You should consider reducing the intensity and increasing the
| length of your cardio. You burn more fat at lower intensities.
| At high intensity, you burn exclusively carbs. Check out
| https://uesca.com/carbohydrate-vs-fat-burning-a-comprehensiv...
|
| It's not quite that simple, obviously, but if your goal isn't
| to increase your running pace but rather just to stay in shape,
| I'd definitely consider running slower. If you run regularly,
| 150bpm indicates a moderate-high level of intensity (assuming
| you're not super young), rather than an easier pace which would
| consume more fat.
| jcims wrote:
| I don't know what part he plays but Drew Berry is credited in
| some of the most compelling videos on molecular biology that I've
| ever seen. They really bring the machinery of biology to life.
| Most of them are at the WEHIMovies channel on youtube. Here's one
| on ATP synthesis:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT5AXGS1aL8
|
| Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/WEHImovies
|
| If I would have had access to these in high school back in the
| 90's I probably would have lived an entirely different adult
| life. It's an incredible aspect of nature that we've somehow just
| become accustomed to.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| An incredible story!
|
| Somewhere in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4 or
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkYEYjintqU the narrator casually
| says "... and this is why we breathe oxygen ..."
| pchristensen wrote:
| I really enjoyed "A Journey to the Center of Our Cells" by the
| same author.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/a-journey-to-t...
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| Thanks for the reference. Also at https://archive.ph/zZYNR.
| jeffhwang wrote:
| The author profiled in the piece, Nick Lane, wrote a really
| thought-provoking earlier book called The Vital Question.
| Addresses some similar points, esp the aspect where biologists
| have (understandably!) focused a lot on information theory since
| 1953 DNA discovery. But that they have neglected integrating
| understanding of energy. By integrating both perspectives, Lane
| and his collaborators have generated fascinating (and testable)
| hypotheses about how/where life began in the ocean as well as the
| sequence of steps that led to eukaryotes and eventually
| multicellular organisms. Plus has implications for why sex,
| aging, and death might have evolved! Highly recommend it.
|
| Although a pretty good HS or early college foundation in redox
| chemistry is pretty needed to get the most out of the book.
| rsync wrote:
| I have read all of Lanes books and I think Sex, Power, Suicide
| is the best - and probably the easiest / most approachable
| read.
| 725686 wrote:
| Sex, Power and Suicide is an extraordinary read. I'm a little
| frightened to buy his newest Transformer since it looks a
| little heavy on chemistry. Can anyone comment?
| pchristensen wrote:
| I'm partway through it on Audible. He doesn't pull any
| punches with the science, but he's such a good writer. A
| lot of it has been a history of biochemistry in the 20th
| century - I didn't realize that Krebs and others were so
| recent.
|
| If you were comfortable with the difficulty of The Vital
| Question, you can handle Transformer.
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| FTA: "Although "Transformer" is aimed at laypeople, it's
| not a particularly easy read: there are diagrams of
| chemical reactions alongside talk of succinate,
| oxaloacetate, and the reduction of this and that. Reading
| it, I had to consult Wikipedia and Khan Academy."
| cpach wrote:
| Did you read/enjoy TVQ? I have it on my book shelf but so far I
| haven't picked it up (:
| reubenswartz wrote:
| one of the more interesting books I've ever read. And I've
| even gone back to reread parts of it, which almost never
| happens.
| jeffhwang wrote:
| The Vital Question is the only book I've read cover to cover.
| I got through about 15% my first attempt and decided I had
| forgotten too much chemistry to truly appreciate it.
|
| A few years later I undertook an intensive chemistry self-
| study for reasons unrelated to Lane. After that, I was ready
| to tackle TVQ again; this attempt went a lot better. Truly
| loved it and got me thinking and reading related peer-
| reviewed papers.
|
| I've been thinking about which of his other books to try next
| but I've gotten to a point where I actually prefer to do
| problem sets in early/intermediate college-level organic
| chemistry! Will check back in with Lane in a year or two.
| pchristensen wrote:
| It's phenomenal. There were dozens of thought provoking
| discoveries and conclusions drawn from what I had previously
| thought was an esoteric subject.
|
| Nick Lane has also been on some good podcast interviews:
| - Long and in depth on Lex Fridman, plus it was funny because
| he is about the only guest that didn't play along with Lex's
| goofy off the dome ideas - https://lexfridman.com/nick-lane/
| - Sean Carroll - a more serious discussion - https://www.prep
| osterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/05/23/198-nick-lane-on-
| powering-biology/
| qvrjuec wrote:
| I did. I loved it, and I am only superficially familiar with
| the chemistry being discussed in the book. It's quite eye
| opening!
| ra wrote:
| That's an incredibly well written article. What an educator.
| johnnypangs wrote:
| Here's a link without the paywall
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221028111149/https://www.newyo...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| also https://archive.ph/M2VZR
| canucker2016 wrote:
| After watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbSic4Oo8ME , I
| think fructose metabolism is more important these days wrt weight
| gain.
|
| Consuming a high concentrated dose of fructose, say a large
| amount of non-diet carbonated soda, results in your body
| switching from burning fat to storing fat like bears preparing
| for hibernation or birds before they migrate south for the
| winter.
|
| Even if you avoid foods with high amounts of fructose, you have
| to be careful because under the right conditions, eating a
| sufficient amount of sodium, your body will convert glucose into
| fructose and your body could then switch from burning fat to
| storing fat.
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