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Matching DNA To a Diet Doesn't Work (statnews.com)
DNA testing won't guide dieters to the weight-loss regimen most likely to work for them, scientists reported on Tuesday. From a report: Despite some earlier studies claiming that genetic variants predict whether someone has a better chance of shedding pounds on a low-carbohydrate or a low-fat diet, and despite a growing industry premised on that notion, the most rigorous study so far found no difference in weight loss between overweight people on diets that "matched" their genotype and those on diets that didn't. The findings make it less likely that genetics might explain why only some people manage to lose weight on a low-carb diet like Atkins and why others succeed with a low-fat one (even though the vast majority of dieters don't keep off whatever pounds they lose). Unlike cancer treatments, diets can't be matched to genotype, the new study shows. The results underline "how, for most people, knowing genetic risk information doesn't have a big impact," said Timothy Caulfield, of the University of Alberta, a critic of quackery.
Why would anyone read that article?
I wonder whether it can be explained by the gut biome taking a large role in the actual metabolism of food consumed? There's all the stories lately about how the composition and behavior of the gut bacteria actually favor/prevent people's efforts to change their diet and effects on weight. Would make sense then that one's own DNA has less to do with it.
In the spirit of fairness, I believe we ought to also hear from at least one advocate for quackery. Gilbert Gottfried?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Diets won't help you lose weight, only continuous bowel cleaning will do the trick. Go buy some now.
1) forget the whole calorie schmalorie pseudo bullshit 2) reduce the carb intake 3) eat more fat, fiber and protein
There's no magic. Calories in = calories out = equilibrium. Upset the equilibrium for change.
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
The only diet that works is one that you are happy sticking with. Sure, it's easy to lose a bunch of weight. I've lost 30lbs+ three times. That weight comes back if it's "a diet." The only diet that works though is the one that ceases to be a diet and becomes the lifestyle.
If you hate your diet- you're never going to stick on it. If you're happier leaving out carbs- leave out carbs. If you're happier counting calories- count calories. If you want to cut fat, cut fat.
Overall though, if this isn't something you can do for the rest of your life, the weight will come back. Everyone needs to find the diet that they are happy with. That's the only way they can reach their ideal weight. You can never stop being on "a diet" so it has to be something you love.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
That could be a component. It would make sense given that your gut biome is influenced by your geographic location, and that certain regional-based diets, like the "Mediterranean" diet, don't tend to work so well outside of the Mediterranean.
In any case, I've given up on all forms of structured dieting and started doing this:
1. Eat less
2. Eat more vegetables
3. Excercise regularly
Lo and behold I'm losing weight at a pretty decent clip.
There's only two numbers that matter, calories in vs calories burned. Everything else is bullshit.
Check out the company Viome. They do exactly that. Matching biome to diet
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Diet and nutrition appear to be incredibly complex. For very good evolutionary reasons, it seems to be a flexible, creative system, with a lot of redundancies, failovers, and alternatives. The more I learn, the more I realize just how laughably little we know. It doesn't help that the field is filled with quackery, moralizing, conspiracy theories, and so, so many people determined to shore up a presupposed agenda, as opposed to searching for the truth. Also, the amount of money on the table just encourages the craziness.
I think eventually we will find things that are DNA-dependent, but many of those will be niche. A heart medicine comes to mind, which in trials did almost nothing for the general populace, but was found to work wonders for men of African descent. There are also a lot of other known issues dealing with medical effectiveness and dosing based on people's biological ability to use or remove the drug from their systems.
But I suspect for a lot of issues, most of the time results will be pretty general. Bodies that can burn both fat and sugar for energy might not have a reason to lose weight if the calorie intake is the same, but the scales are tipped in favor of either fat or sugar. Or we may find that certain genetic types respond well to a particular diet, but only if two or three other related factors are also strictly controlled for.
It sure as hell isn't going to hinge on something as simple as your blood type; that I know for sure.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Duh... you should match the diet to the DNA... not the other way around.
Seems the rise in weight and diseases really kicked off with the Fat Free fad.
The fat was replaced with carbohydrates.
And it has just been going up ever since.
Read what is in your food and you will notice the western diet consumes massive amounts of carbohydrates.
I hate to break it to people, but DNA doesn't show anything but tendencies. The responsibility falls on us to shape ourselves both figuratively and literally, and there is no such thing as a magic formula that absolves us of effort. You are just going to have get off of your asses, stop theorizing, and actually *try* some different things. It will take time, living a life is not hailing an Uber.
Compare muscle mass, not total body weight. The calories you burn for a given amount of exercise is primarily how much muscle you have. If you're a 5'2" woman with 35% body fat, you're going to have to do a lot more and eat a lot less than a 6'2" man with 5% body fat.
Sorry, but if you're a small woman, you have to eat less than a man, a lot less.
I raise pigs.
I raise a lot of pigs.
I raise thousands of pigs out on pasture.
I am deep into the genetics of my pigs, that is to say I do very hard selective breeding between my nine lines of genetics in order to produce the best pigs for our market niche that will thrive in the outdoors (we pasture pigs) in our climate (USDA Zone 3 northern Vermont mountains) on our pig diet (80%DMI pasture, 7%DMI dairy (primarily whey), 2%DMI spent barley from a local brew pub, 1%DMI eggs from our pastured hens, 1% dated bread (great treat for pigs) plus apples, pears, sunflowers and other things we grow.)
Genetics make a HUGE difference in the pigs. Pigs with poor genetics do not perform as well - all on the same diet. I have selectively bred for pigs that thrive on our climate, diet and management. Looking over my decades of selective breeding of our herds I can clearly see the improvement in the animals and it is genetic, not environment.
Gut biome also makes a difference - yogurt helps, piglets eating their mother's manure helps to inoculate their guts with the right bacteria.
What I've done in pigs I suspect also applies very strongly to humans. Of course, with the pigs I'm aiming to put on weight while with humans we're looking to not put on (too much) weight. But actually you see it is closer than you might think because I do not want fat pigs. I want good muscling with marbling and about 2 cm to 3 cm of fat cap on the back.
So for a human lets use me as an example. I eat a high meat, high cholesterol and high fat diet. I eat a lot more than the daily recommended calories - but then I'm not an office worker sitting on my butt. But here's the interesting part, I have excellent blood chemistry even with that diet. Today I happen to be at the doctor's office for my annual physical today and got my blood labs done. The doctor was very pleased. He said keep doing what ever it is I do because it works.
What do I do, besides eating meat for two to three meals a day, seven days a week? Well, I get a lot of varied exercise every day. I farm. I do construction. I live on the side of a mountain. I built and operate my own on-farm USDA/State inspectable butcher shop. That means most days are moderate exercise for me - what most people would consider pretty heavy exercise for six to ten hours a day. Two to three days a week we do nine to ten hours a day of very heavy exercise - marathon butchery sessions. I figure I lift about 16,000 to 35,000 lbs in reps of 1 to 200 lbs each those days.
My sons and daughter are like me and so is their mother although she carries a little bit of extra weight - probably it is from not getting as much exercise.
We eat carbohydrates and sugars in moderation. A little ice cream or cake once in a while. A little bread once in a while. But neither is a big part of our diet.
Mostly we drink mint tea, hot chocolate and milk. Not much in the way of sodas although occasional, maybe five or ten a year. Little to no alcohol other than in cooking. (Alcohol gives a lot of calories which is why I mention it here.)
Genetics may be a partial factor: my father and one of my brothers, who looks like my father, have high cholesterol but are trim. My other siblings, my mother and I all have low cholesterol. My mother is over weight, the rest of us are not. I'm the most physically active of all of us and I'm the heaviest - high muscle and bone density, trim with narrow waist, no inch to pinch.
This is a very small data set but it does suggest a genetic component.
I suspect that the exercise is the key component - we burn a lot of calories - but my siblings are all trim and they don't get nearly as much exercise. My guess is that the other big issue is genetics, contrary to the headline on this article.
So back to the original research, my guess is they just don't understand the genetic well enough yet to apply them to dietary recommendations. With more research and time that will come. After all, look at how well we understand animal diets and genetics.
This is an absurd level of certainty given how little we understand what wide swaths of our genetic code even mean. If they are right about what their stuff shows, that just means that we don't currently know how to decide a diet to use based on genetics, not that there isn't a good way to do so.
Wtf is that and as a scientist how do I enlist to become one?
We like to think nutrition is wildly more complex than it really is these days. You have so many food options and recipies, its hard not to think in simpler terms. But all food, in terms of weight loss efforts, can be categorized by 4 groups.
Carbohydrates, 4 kcal/gram
Fat 9 kcal/gram
Protein 5 kcal/gram
Alcohol 7 kcal/gram
That is all food. Every recipe you will see, anything from a vending machine to to highest michelin star restaurant. Of course, this ignores micronutrient content but the good thing about humans is we get sick of eating the exact same thing, so deficiencies in those are hard to come by.
The problem is over consumption of those 4 things. If you consume more kcal per day than you need, you will store the excess as fat. There is no other reason. What caused this over consumption is heavily debated, but the more something is argued the less it really matters, because food is not capable of mind control.
What I guess as to the original control of kcal consumption, pre-obesisty epidemic, was even simpler: money. Food budgets were strict, they had to account for what you needed, not what you wanted. Food became insanely cheaper with refrigeration and other preservatives, meaning even if the food budget remained exactly the same, or even lowered, the new kcal values able to be bought were orders of magnitude higher than necessary.
Nobody ever had to know what kcal or their TDEE even was when food budgets were tighter.
Now that we do, we see all around us the people that attach mass to themselves haven't realized that yet. Buy a food scale, look up your TDEE online, and do some basic math or continue your gluttony.
Some people eat a meal and they're full for a few hours (normal)
Others eat and they're hungry 10 minutes later. Not just a little peckish. HUNGRY.
Until you work on the mechanism to fix that, sticking to a diet and keeping weight off is going to be exceedingly difficult.
And of course people who've never known such hunger will continue to blame and bully fat people on the assumption that they are lazy gluttons. Much easier than dealing with the truth.
Meanwhile whatever the problem is there is a genetic component - not in terms of diet, but in terms of appetite and metabolism. Eugenics is not a workable solution for ethical reasons, but any time you breed animals for a trait, that trait becomes stronger in that population. Meanwhile we've got modern medicine extending the life of the overweight and obese. They live longer, so not only do they breed, but they support their offspring for longer.
This I know, because (((they))) tell me so
Perhaps we would find a better match with intestinal microbiom 's DNA. There have been numerous studies about how microbes in our gut affect weight.
Breaking addictive habits is difficult and requires a lot of strong motivation that needs to be maintained over a long time. And with food it's not as if you can go cold turkey, you always have to eat something. A successful diet requires changing a lifetime of habits and maintaining the change over a number of years. It's just a really hard thing for most people to do, regardless of what style of diet they actually choose. So I would guess that the mental and behavioral aspect of dieting would have a far greater influence on success than genetics. The smaller the effect compared to other more prevalent effects then the harder it's going to be to statistically prove anything. Plus the science on all of this stuff is still pretty immature, we've got a ton to learn about how our bodies process food, how the gut biome can influence it, how even different forms of the same kinds of food are processed differently. Seems obvious enough that trying to find a clear and notable effect for "genetics" in this mess of factors is doomed to fail in the short term.
Get some self control and use more energy than you take in. It has been proven that anything other than this violates the laws of physics. People who can't lose weight are utterly pathetic and lacking in any basic self control.
I weighed about 375lbs for years, then I just started essentially doing Atkins (a loose version of the plan, I didn't buy any of the expensive food, books, or anything), I stuck to <= 50 carbs a day and I've been roughly 190lbs (6ft tall, large frame) for nearly 10 years. My blood pressure, cholesterol, etc are all under control and have been. I briskly walk a few times a week with my wife but I essentially never exercise which is something I do need to change. I haven't put any weight back on, I don't count calories because I am not a rocket engine.
I basically just copied a friend of mine's father who did the same, he pointed out that people lose the weight then just go back to how they used to eat, gain it right back, and then bitch and moan the diet didn't work. This isn't just a comment mindlessly promoting low carb, I can imagine other diets may work in the same way if you are just consistent, but this keeps me much more full for longer.
Overall, the biggest things I think were simply bread and soda.
There, that's your diet. Don't over complicate it.
Reduction of calorie intake is the key to weight loss. But it's complicated and annoying to count calories, weigh everything, know the calories in a given food and so on. So forget the counting, switch to a quality diet that reduces your calorie intake, without leaving you hungry and annoyed at calorie-counting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...
Eat the rich.
"Diet is for Health
Exercise is for Weight Loss"
Until you get that through your skull you will never lose the weight you want or need to lose. The only time people lose weight through dieting is when they starve themselves. That is unhealthy and only works due to reducing your calorie intake far below the amount of calories you burn through your daily routine. You can continue eating what you currently enjoy eating, you just need to increase your exercise to burn off the calories. You won't improve your health drastically, outside of the positive effects of weight loss, but you will LOSE WEIGHT. Weight and health are separate with only some overlap.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!