Potato diet

Trial Updates: Novavax Approved, Potatoes Work

James Bailey1 Comment

I’m usually the one writing the papers, but I recently did two studies as a participant / guinea pig. Both just released major positive updates.

I joined the Novavax trial in late 2020 to have the chance to get a Covid vaccine sooner; at the time Pfizer had just got emergency approval but wasn’t available to the general public. The smart bio people on Twitter also seemed to think it was likely to be safer, and perhaps more effective, than other Covid vaccines (it delivers relevant proteins directly, rather than using mRNA or a viral vector). The trial results were published over a year ago now, and were in fact excellent:

Results from a Phase 3 clinical trial enrolling 29,960 adult volunteers in the United States and Mexico show that the investigational vaccine known as NVX-CoV2373 demonstrated 90.4% efficacy in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 disease. The candidate showed 100% protection against moderate and severe disease

As usual the FDA dragged its feet, even as other agencies around the world like the European Medical Agency and the World Health Organization approved the US-made Novavax. But last week it finally gave emergency authorization, and yesterday the CDC recommended Novavax. Of course, by now almost everyone who wants a Covid vaccine has one, and this approval is only for adults. But this will be a great option for boosters, as well as for anyone who was genuinely just concerned with the new technologies in the other vaccines (rather than just afraid of needles, or preferring to cut off their nose to spite authority’s face). As the CDC put it:

Protein subunit vaccines package harmless proteins of the COVID-19 virus alongside another ingredient called an adjuvant that helps the immune system respond to the virus in the future. Vaccines using protein subunits have been used for more than 30 years in the United States, beginning with the first licensed hepatitis B vaccine. Other protein subunit vaccines used in the United States today include those to protect against influenza and whooping cough….

Today, we have expanded the options available to adults in the U.S. by recommending another safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine. If you have been waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine built on a different technology than those previously available, now is the time to join the millions of Americans who have been vaccinated

I’m glad I was in this trial- I got a Covid vaccine several months before I otherwise could have, I made a few hundred dollars, and I learned a lot. But it would have been much better if they found a way to do fewer blood draws, and if FDA approval had come quicker. I’ve been in a weird gray area with respect to vaccine mandates for the last year; almost everyone ended up accepting my vaccine card, but I never knew if they were going to say “no, you need an FDA approved one”. I ended up getting Pfizer for a booster even though I think it’s a worse vaccine, partly for this reason, and partly because Novavax said they’d only give me the booster if I did another blood draw and I was tired of that.

The all-potato diet trial I wrote about here also released its results this week. This trial was much less formal, much smaller, and had no control group, so the results aren’t a slam-dunk the way Novavax is. But I think they’re still impressive. I lost 8 pounds in the 4-week trial, but it turns out the average participant who did all 4 weeks did even better:

Of the participants who made it four weeks, one lost 0 lbs…. Everyone else lost more than that. The mean amount lost was 10.6 lbs, and the median was 10.0 lbs.

Their summary also explains other costs and benefits of the diet, showing lots of data as well as many quotes from participants, including two from me. They conclude with some fascinating speculation about potential mechanisms from the boring (literally, lower variety makes eating boring so you eat less) to the speculative (low lithium? high potassium? weird lithium-potassium interactions), check it out if you’re interested in why obesity rates keep rising or if you’re considering doing the potato diet.

I’m glad I was in these two trials- what to try next?

Irish Superman: 4 Weeks of Potatoes

James Bailey1 Comment

Back in May I mentioned that a study was recruiting participants to try a 4-week all-potato diet. What I didn’t say was that I was joining the study, and I finished this week.

I’m glad I did it; I lost 8 pounds and 2 inches of waistline, going from slightly overweight (BMI 26) to just barely not-overweight (BMI 24.9). Here are some of my notes:

Day 5: Energy boost kicked in today. Feel half my age

Day 6: Potato energy going strong. Feel like Irish Superman

Day 15: Almost too much energy, hard to sit down at a computer and work, took a break to play basketball

So like many people who previously tried this, I can add more anecdotal evidence of weight loss (despite eating all the potatoes you want) and energy. I’ll also echo people who said that “hunger feels different” and not as demanding, and that it “resets your tastebuds” so that previously bland foods taste good (I just had a turnip with zero seasoning and it was almost too intense). Now to answer your likely questions:

Q: Did you actually eat nothing but potatoes for 4 weeks?

A: No, but I got reasonably close. I cooked potatoes in avocado oil and added seasonings, I drank coffee and beer, I ate other vegetables, I had some snacks. Overall I estimate I got 75-80% of my calories from potatoes.

Q: Was it hard to stick to? didn’t you get bored?

A: Being hungry or even bored weren’t really issues, all 5 times I slipped up and ate a meal that wasn’t potatoes I’d say it was for social reasons (I was at a party with great food, at a restaurant with someone, et c)

Q: What kinds of meals did you cook?

A: Lots of home fries and roast potatoes using lots of varieties of potato (russet, gold, red, purple, sweet). Mashed potatoes a few times. McCain’s craft beer fries for my birthday.

Q: Aren’t potatoes bad for you? Why didn’t this make you fat?

A: Anything can be bad for you if you deep-fry it, or otherwise smother it with fats or process it to death. This is probably how most potatoes get consumed in America, but they start as nutritious root vegetables.

Q: What about protein? Doesn’t this kill your gains?

A: This was my biggest concern going into the study. Potatoes do have more protein than I thought, enough to live on but probably not enough to make you strong. My lifts did come down a bit, though it’s unclear if that was due to the lack of protein or just the lower calories and weight loss taking some muscle along with the fat. I was eating high-protein yogurt many days to try to mitigate this.

Q: If this is so great, are you going to keep doing it?

A: No, it was great for the first 14-16 days then just ok. Most of the weight loss and energy boost happened in the first half. If I ever do this again I’m going to plan on two weeks, which I think is also what Penn Jillette suggests. I do think I’ll do potatoes for lunch a lot more often than I used to, and pivot this to a “whole foods / not-ultra-processed” diet.

Q: Is there something special about potatoes? Would any single-food diet work as well?

I’m not sure. Some of the benefit likely comes from cutting out variety, so not eating a lot just because “I need to try everything”. Some likely comes from cutting out specific categories of food, like high fat / high sugar / hyper-palatable. I don’t think that just any food would work, probably most whole foods would, but potatoes are cheap and nutritious. The potato diet leading to weight loss is consistent with many, though not all theories of obesity.

Q: Can I still sign up for the study?

A: No:

Signups are now closed, but we plan to do more potato diet studies in the future. If you’re interested in participating in a future potato diet study, you can give us your email at this link and we’ll let you know when we run the next study.

But you can always just do it yourself.

Eat 20 Potatoes a Day…. For Science

James Bailey3 Comments

Several people have tried eating an all-potato diet for a few weeks and reported losing lots of weight with little hunger or effort. Could this be the best diet out there? Or are we only hearing from the rare success stories, while all the people who tried it and failed stay quiet?

Right now we don’t really know, but the people behind the Slime Mold Time Mold blog are trying to find out:

Tl;dr, we’re looking for people to volunteer to eat nothing but potatoes (and a small amount of oil & seasoning) for at least four weeks, and to share their data so we can do an analysis. You can sign up below.

I was surprised to see that they are the ones running this, since they are best known for the “Chemical Hunger” series arguing that the obesity epidemic is largely driven by environmental contaminants like Lithium. The conclusion of that series noted:

Bestselling nutrition books usually have this part where they tell you what you should do differently to lose weight and stay lean. Many of you are probably looking forward to us making a recommendation like this. We hate to buck the trend, but we don’t think there’s much you can do to keep from becoming obese, and not much you can do to drop pounds if you’re already overweight. 

We gotta emphasize just how pervasive the obesity epidemic really is. Some people do lose lots of weight on occasion, it’s true, but in pretty much every group of people everywhere in the world, obesity rates just go up, up, up. We’ll return to our favorite quote from The Lancet: 

“Unlike other major causes of preventable death and disability, such as tobacco use, injuries, and infectious diseases, there are no exemplar populations in which the obesity epidemic has been reversed by public health measures.”

That said, they did still offer some advice based on the contaminant theory that is consistent with the potato diet:

1. — The first thing you should consider is eating more whole foods and/or avoiding highly processed foods. This is pretty standard health advice — we think it’s relevant because it seems pretty clear that food products tend to pick up more contaminants with every step of transportation, packaging, and processing, so eating local, unpackaged, and unprocessed foods should reduce your exposure to most contaminants. 

2. — The second thing you can do is try to eat fewer animal products. Vegetarians and vegans do seem to be slightly leaner than average, but the real reason we recommend this is that we expect many contaminants will bioaccumulate, and so it’s likely that whatever the contaminant, animal products will generally contain more than plants will. So this may not help, but it’s a good bet. 

Overall though I think the idea here is to ignore grand theories and take an empirical approach. The potato diet works surprisingly well anecdotally, so lets just see if it can work on a larger scale. Seems worth a try; I’m sure plenty of my ancestors in Ireland and Northern Maine did 4-week mostly-potato diets and lived to tell about it. You can read more and/or sign up here. Let us know how it goes if you actually try it!