[seanwilson]

For people saying any diet works, I think the interest here is the rules of "eat as many potatoes as you want" are very easy to follow, it's unambiguous if you followed it properly, simple to buy the ingredients anywhere and when eating out, it's cheap, is meant to work fast, and you aren't going to feel hungry which helps a lot. Most fad diets don't tick as many boxes.

Feels obvious to me that it works via “calories in, calories out” though. 2kg of potatoes a day is about 1500kcal so it's hard to overeat.

For the participants it didn't work on, surely the most likely cause that should be controlled for is how many potatoes they ate or how much oil/butter (some of the most calorific ingredients we use) they had on top?

And not if participants avoided tomatoes ("Tomatoes are our top bet, but other possible blockers might be: wheat, bread, grains more generally, maybe meat.")?

[matthewdgreen]

What’s interesting about the diet isn’t the mechanism for weight loss (you’re right, you don’t eat enough calories, that part is simple enough.) The interesting part is the intense appetite suppression that the diet produces. From my brief experience, it’s like after a couple of days you lose interest in eating - even when your body is sending you signals that indicate you’re likely starving. It’d be really interesting to figure out what causes this and then (preferably) reproduce it in a form that doesn’t require potatoes or injections.

[seanwilson]

Is this not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value which has already been studied?

"Satiety value is the degree at which food gives a human the sense of food gratification, the exact contrast feeling of hunger ... Foods with the most satiation per calorie are often:high in certain proteinase inhibitors that suppress appetite - eg potatoes"

Potatoes are well known to be the most satiating food by a wide margin.

> you don’t eat enough calories, that part is simple enough.

The articles doesn't seem to agree though? They seem focused on things like how tomatoes might significantly block the weight loss of potatoes.

[matthewdgreen]

The only way to explain the effect of the diet to someone is for them to try it. The effect is not like “I just ate potatoes and they quickly made me feel full.” It’s more like “I am taking a drug that disrupts the GLP-1 cycle in my body and makes me lose interest in eating food at all, even when I haven’t recently eaten many potatoes.” Obviously N=1 and no, I don’t think it’s very healthy to do this for long.

[seanwilson]

> It’s more like “I am taking a drug that disrupts the GLP-1 cycle in my body and makes me lose interest in eating food at all, even when I haven’t recently eaten many potatoes."

Are there any results that say most participants experienced that and to what degree? I spoke to a few people that followed similar diets and they didn't report (obviously anecdotal too) anything about really strange levels of appetite suppression, just that they were happy they could eat as much as they wanted when they felt like it. It likely depends a lot on what you're used to eating as well.

[matthewdgreen]

I think many people report things like “I get bored with eating potatoes and thus don’t eat enough calories,” even though in principle they could eat as many potatoes as they want, spread over as many small meals as possible, and they’re clearly in a huge calorie deficit. I’m not sure how you would use these anecdotal reports to scientifically distinguish appetite suppression from “satiety” from psychological effects here. All I can tell you is that it was an unusual feeling for my appetite to go away while I was very clearly starving.

PS I’m not sure if we’re even disagreeing here. People who take GLP-1 agonists report that they’re less interested in snacks and get “full” much more quickly when they do eat, which tracks my experience on this diet. The difference is that we have a slightly better understanding of what’s happening chemically there, whereas the potato diet we’re like “maybe potatoes just make you feel really full for some unknown reason, could be placebo, shrug emoji.”

[nightski]

Isn't that basically the premise behind Ozempic?