[TomGullen]

> According to you I'd be overwheight and dying of diabetes, cancer, metabolic syndrome and whatnot.

Nope, not sure where you get that idea from.

> Exercise daily, provide adequate protein intake and watch out the calories. That's it.

So I can eat a few chicken breasts a day, and then 1,500 kcal of mars bars? Sounds great!

Alternatively if you're trying to lose weight, you can simply cut out the sugar. Exercise is of course important for a host of reasons, but for weight loss it's probably just about the hardest way to do it. I'm in despair when my severely overweight friend relays the advice from her doctor and nutritionist:

"Eat less calories, and get on the treadmill".

Doesn't sound fun, or easy at all. There are other ways.

[elrzn]

> So I can eat a few chicken breasts a day, and then 1,500 kcal of mars bars? Sounds great!

Doesn't it?

The only issue with sugars are the null effect on satiety and promotion of binge eating. The reason some folks work so well on lowcarb diets is because sugars make it easy to overeat, but that's just a way to create a caloric deficit for them.

Now, I bet most folks here on HN are much more quantitative oriented than the average person, so why limiting yourself to a small set of foods (paleo, keto), when you can free yourself and get away eating pretty much whatever you want, as long as you track the calorie intake?

[TomGullen]

> The only issue with sugars are the null effect on satiety and promotion of binge eating.

> sugars make it easy to overeat

Those are issues, for sure! And great reasons why when dieting, a good foundation is exclusion of carbs.

But that's only scratching the surface. Let me give you another downside. Eating sugar causes arterial inflammation. When your arteries inflame, your body packs it with oxidized LDL which can lead to heart problems and strokes due to constriction in your arteries. Guess what causes arterial inflammation?

There's more as well. We need to brush our teeth because of our high carb diets. It causes tooth decay and gum disease. Before high carb diets, our ancestors had healthier mouths than we do today. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/02/24/172688806/ancient...

> "You're walking around with a permanent immune response, which is not a good thing," says Cooper. "It causes problems all over the place."

More as well! It turns out that calories is an oversimplified model of dieting. Here's a recent interesting study that paints it clearly: http://www.dietdoctor.com/overeating-carbs-worse-overeating-...

But there's more! Garry Taubes explains a lot of reasons very well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vpFV6Wkl4

There are so many reasons carbs are bad for you, not just from a satiation point of view but also from long term health points of view.

I'm confident this post has actually done a disservice to the question why should we eat less carbs, but hopefully it's something you might find interesting and read more about and maybe change your opinion on. All the information, studies and evidence is out there.

[elrzn]

Assuming LDL is a bad thing, low carb diets (which are usually high fat diets) tend to spike it up as well, and at a greater rate.

People on ketogenic diets and below maintenance calorie intakes end up reporting high levels of LDL, with high levels of HDL to balance it out. Now, give them a hundred more calories above maintenance and things start to get funny.

Calories in vs calories out might be an oversimplified model, but so is blaming everything on insulin as Taubes does, as he still believes it's the only factor promoting fat storage.

> I'm confident this post has actually done a disservice to the question why should we eat less carbs, but hopefully it's something you might find interesting and read more about and maybe change your opinion on.

Been there, done that. I've been in keto for years until I crashed. Not anymore.

[TomGullen]

But the problem is with arterial inflammation. That's what people need to work towards reducing. My understanding is that the inflammation is the root cause of all the problems.

Perhaps Taubes is over simplifying it, but you have to admit that there are far more problems and negative health consequences with eating sugar than simply satiation which you originally asserted.

[elrzn]

Well I'd say inflammation is rather a symptom of problems, but yeah, it sucks and should be avoided.

But can't blame all on sugar, since some processed foods and lean meats (!) promote that cycle as well. So the best way to avoid it is by not overeating.

I agree with you though, that since it's difficult not to overeat when abusing simple sugars, most folks will do better without them.

[Dewie]

> Doesn't sound fun, or easy at all. There are other ways.

You'd think, with the title of this webpage, that most would be interested in ways of elegantly and easily solving problems that are important to themselves. But it seems that the constant chanting of no pain no gain has left a lot of people with the conviction that, when it comes to health, things should not be easy nor simple.

[socillion]

What if people took the same tack when it comes to mental processes? "Math is challenging, so I refuse to do any". "Reading books is too hard because I have to look up some of the words". Surely we can agree that challenging your mind is a good thing.

Is it impossible to find any enjoyment in challenging your body as well as mind?

[Dewie]

> What if people took the same tack when it comes to mental processes? "Math is challenging, so I refuse to do any". "Reading books is too hard because I have to look up some of the words". Surely we can agree that challenging your mind is a good thing.

Don't try to generalize my argument into absurdity. Simply not doing math because it is difficult doesn't solve the underlying problem, which is probably to become proficient at math. Now if there were easier ways to become proficient at math than what you were already doing, that would be more in line with my argument.

The key thing is solving problems. Simply giving up on learning math, or reading, solves no problem.

> Is it impossible to find any enjoyment in challenging your body as well as mind?

Challenging your body and maintaining good health are distinct goals, though they may be satisfied through the same processes. If you want good health, and a certain diet makes that easier, then I will say that it is no sense in maintaining whatever old diet you had simply because that would make it harder. If you want to challenge your body, and simply maintaining good health is not challenging enough, there are endless possibilities. Recreational sports, for example. Gymnastics. Parkour. But personally I would not choose to do things that were clearly suboptimal for my body solely because it would be more challenging. I might do it because I gain other things, such as eating tasty but unhealthy food, but I wouldn't choose to do it if the goal was only to make things harder for myself.

[socillion]

My argument is that challenging yourself is healthy, and that applies to both physical and mental activities. I suspect the difference may lie in what we consider "good health".

Being challenging also doesn't imply an activity is unenjoyable or unrewarding.

> But personally I would not choose to do things that were clearly suboptimal for my body solely because it would be more challenging.

What things?

[Dewie]

And where did I ever say that challenging yourself is not healthy? It seems that you went on a tangent from the start (the math and reading examples were clearly perversions of my original argument). Is your tactic now to gradually water down your argument until we arrive at something so non-disagreeable that I will just sheepishly agree, wondering what kind of misunderstanding lead us to this point? The original claim was that; assuming that a low-carb diet is superior to a more generic diet, it is better to use such a diet rather than simply doing something harder that yields the same end result, simply because of the attitude of "no pain no gain" (notice this last phrase. It describes a challenging activity that is also not enjoyable). So, no. I don't find value in challenging myself in masochistic ways. I might build character by hopping on one leg to work each day, but I'd rather spend my time in other ways, which may involve challenging myself in ways that also yields other rewards

[socillion]

> it is better to use such a diet rather than simply doing something harder that yields the same end result

You assert that exercising and changing your diet have the same end result when they clearly do not, unless you are using "healthy" as a euphemism for "lose weight" or something similar. Do you have a factual basis for asserting that changing your diet and exercising result in the same end results?

Thank you for clarifying that you do not find exercise enjoyable, I was curious if that was the case. I find exercise to be rewarding in it's own right - it's unfortunate that you don't experience it the same way.

"No pain, no gain" can be interpreted as saying that sometimes it is worth enduring discomfort or pain in the short term for a longer term reward. It's more a comment on dealing with delayed gratification than a description of whether an activity is enjoyable or worth doing.

[tensor]

> You'd think, with the title of this webpage, that most would be interested in ways of elegantly and easily solving problems that are important to themselves.

I sincerely hope not. This is the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be interested in working hard to solve difficult problems important to the world.

[Dewie]

Thankfully I am not so selfless that I will choose to try to save the world over maintaining my own body.

[tensor]

It's not an either or proposition.

[Dewie]

Pff, you are the one who implied that it was an either or proposition by saying that you hope that people here would not be concerned with problems that are important to themselves. My original statement certainly didn't imply that people here are likely to only be concerned with problems that only affect themselves. So, remind me, what is it that you find objectionable?

[tensor]

I assumed you meant that people here would be interested primarily in problems related to themselves. It would have sufficed to say "People here are interested in elegantly solving problems."