Talk:Dieting

Paleolithic diet

You're only allowed to eat what you can forage or hunt down and kill with an atlatl? --Brion

There is info at http://www.paleodiet.com --Juan M. Gonzalez 19:07 Aug 29, 2002 (PDT)

As I understand it, the theory is that our digestive systems evolved before we had grains and beans to eat, so the healthiest things for us are meat, fish, fruit, nuts and whatever vegetables don't have to be cooked. (You don't have to eat them raw, but they have to be edible raw - unlike, say, a potato.) There are finer points. I'll do a page soon. zadcat 19:24 Aug 29, 2002 (PDT)

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Contents

1 What makes potato inedible raw? 1 Being underweight 2 Potatoes and raw edibility 3 NPOV Atkins ad 4 Dieting Past CAN HELP Dieting Future to Ensure Success 5 Motivation

What makes potato inedible raw?

I don't make a habit of it, but I do eat bits of them raw while I'm chopping them. -- Zoe

The classic demonstration of the contribution of smell to taste is to eat a raw apple and a raw potato while holding the nose and to not be able to tell the difference. Ortolan88

According to the data at [1] (http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-1g.shtml#potatoes), raw potatoes, even with solanine and chaconine, don't seem too dangerous. Juan M. Gonzalez 19:44 Aug 29, 2002 (PDT)

I don't think you'd want to eat very much raw potato at a sitting. I wasn't implying it was poisonous (although the green parts of a potato plant are no good for you, I seem to recall). zadcat 19:52 Aug 29, 2002 (PDT)

They are difficult to digest because of protease inhibitors, which interfere with the digestion of protein. Eating raw potatoes in significant quantity will give you gas for this reason. --Silverback 08:00, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Could be something about the starches being harder to digest. I'm on a seafood diet myself ... ;-) -- Tarquin 01:09 Aug 30, 2002 (PDT)

Being underweight

Something that often seems to be missing from these type of articles is information about weight gain for those who might be seriously underweight. Of course, those are underweight are a minority, but I think they deserve some information too.

Potatoes and raw edibility

Potatoes are edible (if not very palitable) raw, but are slightly toxic. A few people do die from eating raw potatoes each year somewhere in the world but this is usually because they have been improperly stored and have started to sprout. It is in the eyes and the sprouting parts that the toxins are concentrated.

The reason that potatoes are excluded from the paleolithic diet is that their non-domesticated ancestors are significantly toxic without cooking and they are therefore neccessarily a post agricultural food. As well as the alkaloid toxins listed here a paleo-proponent might also be concerned about the lectins in potatoes and their possible role in autoimmune disease.

You might also want to look at the Arpad Pusztai affair which involved the toxicity of potatoes. Many argued that the rats were killed merely by the natural toxins in the potatoes rather than the anything present in the potatoes due to genetic modification.

NPOV Atkins ad

I'm removing this bit: A ketogenic diet is often very effective in lowering body-fat levels whilst maintaining or even increasing muscle mass. I'm removing it because:

1. all diets that burn fat involve the biological process of ketogenesis, therefore all diets are ketogenic in nature
2. the word "often" is a prejudicial POVism
3. no diet with a calorie deficit can increase muscle mass without exercise, and every diet with calorie deficit will reduce muscle mass unless the dieter also exercises (n.b.: it is possible to keep a calorie deficit and increase muscle mass with exercise)

The sentence is an apparent attempt to promote the diet that uses ketogenesis as a buzz-word, the Atkins diet. Atkins is discussed elsewhere in the article, and its sales pitch doesn't belong in the science section. Also, Atkins doesn't just involve ketogenesis, but ketosis, or chronic ketogenesis. So this deletion will help Wikipedia avoid further muddying the meanings of those terms. Blair P. Houghton 00:45, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

All diets where body fat is lost involve ketosis as well. Not all place the emphasis that Atkins does on ketonuria, testing the urine with test strips to see if the ketosis is severe enough to spill into the urine. But if you are losing adipose weight, your body will be in the fasting state by the end of the long fast known as sleep. Fat will be mobilized from stores to the liver and gluconeogenesis will be occuring there, with ketones liberated to be used as a fuel.--Silverback 14:28, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

N.B.: when fat is released from lipocytes it comes as fatty acids and glycerol; the fatty acids can go directly to the cells and converted to ATP; the glycerol goes through the liver to be converted to glucose, then to the cells to be converted to ATP. I'll work this in somewhere, eventually, but first, it's time to declare the Atkins diet a fad. USA Today quotes Rachael Ray (rowl) as reporting that the number of low-carb dieters dropped 50% in the first 9 months of 2004, and sales of low-carb products are down 30% in the last 6 months. I'm just going to remove the demurral in the Atkins section. Blair P. Houghton 20:01, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What's your point? Yes fatty acids can also be directly utilized aerobically but, barring execize, within a few hours of a high carb mean, insulin has the body in the substrate storing "fed" state. When in the fasting state, the energy that the liver uses for gluconeogenes is is supplied by fatty acids in the liver, to use glucose would be a futile cycle. Atkins is just around in a different form, marketed a little better and called "South Beach". I didn't put the fad stuff in the article, it is not a precise term anyway. --Silverback 22:24, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I wasn't criticizing; just throwing in a detail about the liver's involvement. I guess assumed the fatty acids and glucose are being consumed by some sort of activity so you're not in a "futile cycle". One thing I might put in the article: "The only way to lose fat is to convert it to fuel and burn it". But then everyone would say oh yeah, well what about liposuction... On the other matter, the USA Today piece didn't make a distinction, it just said low-carb dieting is falling off rapidly, so I cut the "Atkins is not a fad" thing. It's all good. Blair P. Houghton 22:56, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Dieting Past CAN HELP Dieting Future to Ensure Success

I run a fairly popular weight loss site, Lose Weight 'n Feel Great. The site by no means gets a million visitors per month, but does OK. Now then. A lof of my subscribers say that they've failed at weight loss and dieting. In fact, I would argue that they have not. They've just not learned how to use their past "failures" to their benefit. There is an article on my webiste at that talks about how you can take past "failures" and turn them into current and future successes. Well worth the read (but I'm biased). Enjoy! Mohamed "I lost 100lbs without drugs, surgery and fad diets -- I can teach you!"

Hey Mohamed; I lost 70 lbs without drugs, surgery, or fad diets; you can't teach me a thing, but I can teach you not to spam the Wikipedia. I'm not biased, though. Put together a link to a truly free and non-circus-sideshow portion of your website that has good, unique, public-domain, non-woo-woo info on it, and maybe it'll stay in the list. Blair P. Houghton 20:39, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Motivation

I think there should be something about the mental factors at work here. People often overeat because of low self-esteem for example. Dieting therefore has to look at how you tackle that. Andrew

Maybe a new section on Motivation? Could get kind of out of hand, though. Might do better as a subsection in the psychology portions of the obesity page. Could also be added piecemeal to those techniques subsections here that have motivational components, because many of the diets leave motivational tools (beyond buying into the premise of the snake oil) out. --Blair P. Houghton 21:03, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)