Someone asked me to help them with finding a monodiet that would work for them, and of course I thought of potatoes for all the obvious reasons. They tried that, and quickly decided to try a duodiet instead: potatoes and butter. This is all well and good, and they were able to stick to it for six weeks. Trivial weight loss, no weight gain, no fatigue, regular satiety, and undying love of potatoes, as expected. You know the drill.
I talked their head off about my work on developing n-diet food pools. Figure out some core items you're willing to eat and use nutrition data in large quantities to try to develop a pool of foods you're willing to eat from on an ongoing basis that will more or less hit all of the nutritional points you care about. I stick to ketogenic diets, so mine end up being more-or-less unsurprising. I should eat a pound and a half of meat and a kilogram of greens, and top it all off with a spoonful of cod liver oil or caviar. Nothing shocking.
I can do a meat monodiet, but I tend to fuck it up eventually, and I have this nagging sense that it's because there's some other knob I'm neglecting, and finding the signal and the noise of that is kind of brutal. You can tweak electrolytes and easily end up puking and hiding from the world for an afternoon if you guess wrong about what to tweak. So I'm grinding away at piles and piles of code to go with lots and lots of notes to try to at least not make the same mistakes over and over again.
When you develop a pool of foods you want to eat as diet staples, you're basically doing the work of inventing a food culture, and hoping it lands you in some worthy island of stability. There are no doubt a huge number of dietary islands of stability represented by all of the cultures of the world, but they don't suit all of us equally, either because of our microbiome, our genetics, our palates, or how we want or need to feel and function. It's good when you can do this in a way that lets you tell when you've fucked up.
I haven't tried potatoes, myself, but I have tried rice a few times, as well as some other simple carbohydrate mixes, and I always just end up with a headache, a mood crash, and a loss of 300 points of Elo in bullet chess on my phone. I don't care for that.
So someone wants to explore the diet space a bit more, having found potatoes enjoyable but having some niggling cravings around the edges. They ask about peas, and, yeah, that makes sense to me. Cheap, quick, fairly nutritionally complete, neither terribly boring nor terribly unenjoyable. Peas.
They made it about a week of constant complaining and regular cheating, and are finding peas just don't work. Even moving to peas-and-butter, to match the delight of potatoes-and-butter, was an immediate and clear failure. This is very exciting for me.
You see, by mass, peas and potatoes are about the same in terms of the amount of total energy, so this is an opportunity to try to amplify the signal and drown out some of the noise.
Now, how do you evaluate a monodiet or a duodiet? Rather, how do you compare two of them? Ideally, I suppose you'd eat both to satiety, and compare the sating amounts, but if satiety is elusive, then you've got to either compare them by straight mass, or matched by some nutrient or by total energy.
In the case of potatoes and peas, they're luckily pretty close in energy density overall, so maybe you don't have to think about it too hard. Er, except that they look close at 100g of mass, but eating more like 2.5kg, those differences start to add up.
At 2.5kg, potatoes will give you around 1900kcal, while peas are closer to 1500kcal. That's a pretty nontrivial difference, but again, it should be possible to eat to satiety, right? But peas don't give satiety, nor satisfaction, and along the way they produce something that feels like total energy shortage. Now, someone is probably generally pretty keto-adapted, so we could wonder about carbohydrate tolerance, but we already know potato was effective, and they've been adding butter to both, anyway. There should be plenty of energy available.
Well, let's calorie match them, then. Potatoes and peas, both to around 1900kcal. You start by looking at the biggest differences, and so I look at them in terms of order of magnitude. Energy-matched, peas have a log10 difference of 0.75, which is pretty substantial, nearly an order of magnitude more fat. It's still not very much fat, though. It's around 11g, which is nothing compared to the fat from butter, and while a fair bit of it is PUFA, it's a pretty modest bolus, especially since someone finds it impossible to eat peas in this quantity, feeling fatigued and sick of them well beforehand.
Nearly an order of magnitude and a half more sodium in the peas, but I know someone is using salted butter, so I don't know that that's significant. If potassium is the key in potatoes, then the fact that peas have about half as much potassium might be significant, and it's hard not to wonder about the ratio of sodium to potassium as well as potassium overall. Does potassium fuel catabolism and sodium fuel anabolism? I swore by adding lots of salt to my ketogenic diet for many years, but now I find that adding none is more effective than adding lots, and adding a little salt is worse than either adding a lot or adding none. I don't know what's going on with sodium.
The carbohydrate-insulin model of metabolic dysregulation wants me to say that it's sugars. Peas are an order of magnitude more sugary when energy-matched to potatoes. The sugar could be stimulating insulin, while the fibre (more in peas than in potatoes!) is making everything else digest nice and slow. That's a great way to feel like shit, right? Tell your body to utilize glucose, to store it if necessary, and then don't provide it very much glucose to work with. I don't know, though.
The only other thing that stands out is protein: half an order of magnitude more in peas than in potatoes. Around 50g in the potatoes to 150g+ in energy-matched peas. You start thinking about food as part of a hormonal system, you start thinking about macronutrients and their metabolites as signalling molecules, you start coming up with little shorthands. Carbohydrate metabolism signals that energy is available to be used right now. Fat signals that energy is plentiful and costly metabolic processes can occur (either storage for later, or more complex adaptations.) Both of these can promote anabolic processes, but protein promotes anabolism above all else.
I used to get dreadfully tired from the crashes after a large carbohydrate meal, and it's still the case that I'm never as depressed as when I spike sequester energy with a large bolus of rapid-availability carbohydrates and then come down hard. Fatigue, though, is profoundly present for me with protein.
Bullshit little stories build up in my head about this, like that protein says: this is a time to build, and this energy cannot be stored in a way that we can build later, so now we should rest, and grow. This anabolic switch makes me want to sleep, and all my catabolic processes seem to stop. Ketosis certainly does, and total energy availability seems to go down. Fair enough, protein is kinda use it or lose it. The body takes its chances.
Do peas, then, promote anabolic processes at the cost of energy availability? Sugar, sodium, and protein seems like a pretty strong signal in the noise of what, superficially, seem like pretty simple and complete diets. If potatoes and butter is steady energy and good satiety and a feeling of satisfaction, then shouldn't peas and butter be, too? Peas are delicious and versatile and seem superficially desirable, and yet in this extremely small and ill-fated trial, they do not seem to cut it.
I am so terribly on the fence about protein restriction. I have been raised in the environment that has waffled a lot about fat and carbohydrates, but has been steadfast in viewing protein as always good, always desirable, and always the macronutrient to be most optimized for. From the far-right gym bros to the vegan cognoscenti, protein is always the most reasonable thing to focus on. Recovering from a restrictive eating disorder? Protein. Trying to lose weight? Protein. The UK are developing a simple little macronutrient and mineral formula to decide how to classify junk food, because ultra-processed food is too subjective, and they're focusing on eliminating fat, sugar, and sodium. Good bogeymen, but that's about it, I suppose. Protein shall be optimized. Well, we want everyone fit for fighting tomorrow, even if they feel like shit today, so protein it shall be.
I am not a growing child, and I do not need to be fit to fight tomorrow. I need to be able to think and move and act today. I am not trying to build mass, if anything my lean mass becomes something of a burden to be fed. It is a dangerous thing to start to wonder about how much protein one might really need, more forbidden even than admitting that carbohydrates are nonessential.
Maybe it is comparing peas and potatoes that will finally convince me to not eat macronutrients that bulk when what I really need is simply to thrive, to function here-and-now, not to prepare for hibernation, neither for unknown future physical demands. I am as tall as I am ever going to get, and as strong as I could ever hope to be. Potatoes or peas? I still mostly live on meat, but if I had to choose, I think I'd choose potatoes.
And I'll have to tune my diet parameters to be even more conservative in my imagined protein needs.
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