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Notes -
The Slime Mold guys are up to it again - this time asking people to drink large amounts of potassium chloride.. My OB thought it sounded harmless so I'm drinking about 1/8 tsp - 1/4 tsp of potassium chloride a day, though I'm not signing up for the trial as I'm pretty sure they don't want pregnant women in there. I do feel a little more energetic, we will see if that lasts or if it's just a placebo. The normal markers to assess health changes are lost to me, but I'm measuring my underbust to see if that changes over time. As a pregnant woman I am in a position where I am getting my blood pressure, heart rate, and blood samples taken regularly, so at least I'll know quickly if something isn't going well.
If potassium supplementation works, I don't know how they are going to work out their confirmation bias that it's obviously lithium causing obesity. My own assumptions regarding the obesity epidemic are that either 1) our soil is deficient in some nutrient and our body keeps telling us to eat food until we get enough or 2) it's seed oils. Potassium supplementation obviously addresses the first, for the second I wonder if potassium has an effect on ROS or oxidative stress.
On the potato diet - wouldn't that just work if there's 'something wrong with modern food that makes people want to eat more and be fat', independent of anything specific about potatoes? Or [not my guess but plausible] even if the issue is something else, maybe it's just that potatoes, when you're eating only them, are just less appealing and people eat less?
'feeling more energetic' is almost certainly just random fluctuations / placebo
Also, IIRC SMTM never replied to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium, pointing out many deep flaws in the lithium posts. (these aren't even the only flaws, it was an incredibly poor quality series of posts, and it was bizzare that e.g. it got a shoutout on dominic cummings' twitter)
Yes, the Potato diet thing was just to confirm that it even did anything. The Slime Mold guys seem pessimistic that anything has a long term effect on keeping weight off, so confirming that something does lose weight and keep it off would be one data point to them.
It absolutely doesn't tell them why the Potato Diet worked at all in the slightest. Hence this next step - is it a particular nutrient potatoes are high in? If this is a bust, they will undoubtedly turn to other possible causes.
It’s likely the blandness of potatoes that makes it work. It’s similar to the shangri la diet. Your effectively de coupling flavour from satiety, which means you can make better food choices far more easily with no negative cravings
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I don't have time to read through the whole thing but did they have any control group for the potato diet? Eating the same thing every day in general seems like it would have an effect on calorie consumption purely by virtue of not snacking or eating for entertainment for a month.
Unrelated, but the key to understanding the global obesity epidemic probably has something to do with infant and child obesity. Something has to have gone horribly wrong in our environment if infants fed on breastmilk or formula are following the same trend as humans with agency.
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Why did they stop looking at the potassium/BMI graphs after 2017? It seems like the data after that contradicts the claims presented. Such omission of data makes me more skeptical of everything else.
No control group for the potato diet, there isn't really any other food where it would be relatively safe to eat just it an nothing else for a month. They were just trying out a weird cool trick they saw online and wanted to put statistics behind it - did eating mostly potatoes for a month without restricting calories actually lose people weight? It did! They have no idea why though, the study has no way of telling why, so now they are trying other things.
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Novelty and variety increasing consumption is pretty well established.
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