Sunday, May 7, 2017

SSC Review of The Hungry Brain

I thought this was really interesting from SSC's review of The Hungry Brain (which I have not read):

In 1965, some scientists locked people in a room where they could only eat nutrient sludge dispensed from a machine. Even though the volunteers had no idea how many calories the nutrient sludge was, they ate exactly enough to maintain their normal weight, proving the existence of a “sixth sense” for food caloric content. Next, they locked morbidly obese people in the same room. They ended up eating only tiny amounts of the nutrient sludge, one or two hundred calories a day, without feeling any hunger. This proved that their bodies “wanted” to lose the excess weight and preferred to simply live off stored fat once removed from the overly-rewarding food environment. After six months on the sludge, a man who weighed 400 lbs at the start of the experiment was down to 200, without consciously trying to reduce his weight.
I've written in the past about low carb [1,2,3], which I think is the way to go. But some people claim to have good weight loss results (though not necessarily good health results overall) with diets that aren't low carb, or are even high carb - such as eating only potatoes. If this works, even just for some people, a good explanation of the mechanism is that monotonous diets are also effective for weight loss.

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