Hedonic Hyperphagia: salsa, salad, chilies, oh my!

Ultra-processed, hyper-palatable... salsa?!

If you remember, a few months ago I reported some bizarre experiences involving salsa, salad, and sour cream.

Death by Salad

In short, after a fat fast, I ate several pounds of pretty much non-caloric salad consisting mostly of carrots, cucumbers, pickles, pickled onions, raw onions, and similar vegetables. Lots of them pickled. The only thing in there with any cAlOriEs to speak of were olives.

As a sauce, I used salsa - somebody on Twitter had recommended a certain fancy brand, and the ingredients looked great: just like the tomato pasta sauce I was using, sans even the olive oil. Plus, it was spicy.

So, all good, right?

I found myself insatiable. It probably didn’t help that there was actually near-zero nutrition

Eating 3 giant bowls of this useless pseudo-food salad, I gained 15lbs in 15 hours.

That’s right, I gained a pound per hour. Of course it was pretty much entirely fiber and water weight, but still. It was very painful, I was bloated for days, and it took me nearly a week to lose all of it again.

Ok, I thought, after a 14 day fat fast (with cAlOriE restriction to 2,000kcal/day!) I was hungry, and I ate non-food with no nutrition in it, so I massively overate. Makes sense.

So of course I learned my lesson, right?

Death by Sour Cream

Up next, because my friend John from The Heart Attack Diet had reported that he’d lost weight eating sour cream, I experimented with that instead of heavy cream.

I bought 3 giant tubs of sour cream, a pound each. In the evening, when I’d normally eat my whipped cream dessert, I ate sour cream instead.

Since I still had some fancy salsa left over from the salad experiment, I poured that on the sour cream.

I finished the whole pound in one sitting. 45 minutes later, I was RAVENOUS. “No satiety” doesn’t begin to describe it; I was near-starving despite just having eaten a pound of sour cream.

So I ate the second tub of sour cream. And then the third. At this point I was out of sour cream, and my stomach was painfully full, the sour cream sitting in it like a ton of bricks.

That’s pretty much the reason I didn’t continue eating sour cream. Still ravenous.

I abandoned the sour cream idea quickly.

Maybe it’s because sour cream is higher in carbs than heavy cream? And higher in protein? And lower in fat?

So of course I learned my lesson, right?

Say Salsa One More Time

I’d kind of had it with the salsa, to be honest, and I didn’t buy any more after finishing the leftovers from the salad experiment.

A few weeks later I switched from using Rao’s tomato pasta sauce to just using canned, diced tomatoes, and crushed tomatoes for my daily lunch. It was fine, tasted exactly the same. With the strong beef flavor and the butter I add, it tasted just as good.

But one day, just to try it, I bought diced tomatoes with green chilies. Some lemon juice, and salt. No olive oil, nothing else.

And I ate the whole can of diced tomatoes (!) with a spoon before I ever got to cook with it.

My alarm bells went off. I hadn’t been calorie restricting, I hadn’t done a fat fast directly before this. There was no sour cream. The macros in my diet were entirely unchanged for weeks.

What in the world could induce this incredible level of hyperphagia? Surely not just the green chilies, right?

Recreating Shitty Salsa

Luckily this is a very easy experiment to do, and it takes very little time commitment. My normal experiments often take 30 days to show a success/failure, so I was glad to be finally doing something that could be over in a single meal.

I bought:

• Diced tomatoes (w/o salt or anything else added)

• A fresh lemon

• Canned, chopped green chilies

I already had some salt left over. Although I don’t use salt for cooking, it is helpful when rendering your own beef tallow, as it absorbs sediments/odor if you want the tallow to be white & clear.

And so I tested the following:

1. Diced tomatoes w/o anything

2. Diced tomatoes w/ lemon juice

3. Diced tomatoes w/ green chilies

4. Diced tomatoes w/ lemon juice + green chilies

5. Diced tomatoes w/ lemon juice + green chilies + salt

And, sure enough, each additional ingredient made the diced tomatoes more delicious. I got a big psychological “hit” with every spoon, which I don’t get from just normal diced tomatoes, or even nearly as much from Rao’s tomato sauce.

The spicy part was the worst. Some salt wasn’t too bad, and I needed a lot of lemon juice for it to make a difference. But spicy vs. non-spicy tomatoes made a huge difference. I’d say just the green chilies were 80% of the effect, and the salt + lemon juice added up to the remaining 20%.

Hedonic Hyperphagia

There’s a concept in nutrition science called Hedonic Hunger:

Hedonic hunger or hedonic hyperphagia is the "drive to eat to obtain pleasure in the absence of an energy deficit". Particular foods may have a high "hedonic rating" or individuals may have increased susceptibility to environmental food cues. Weight loss programs may aim to control or to compensate for hedonic hunger.

I don’t love the term “hunger” here, hunger seem to imply some actual nutritional requirement. Hedonic appetite would be better, but hedonic hyperphagia is actually great.

Hyperphagia doesn’t imply some “desire” or “want” like hunger or appetite do. It just implies that the thing made you eat more. A lot more.

I also don’t like the definition: eating in “absence of an energy deficit” would mean all eating that led to fat gain (= a positive energy balance) was hedonic, which misses a vast majority of reasons people eat and gain fat, e.g. metabolic factors like fuel partitioning.

By this definition, even overeating due to lack of protein according to the Protein Leverage Hypothesis, would be hedonic.

I’ll therefore slightly modify the definition:

… in the absence of a nutritional deficit.

Did Hedonic Hyperphagia do diabesityheimer?

No, I don’t think so. In a sense, this is the core of the “ultra-processed, hyper-palatable food” hypothesis, which I think is total bunk.

Even if hedonic factors in a meal might make you overeat, a healthy metabolism would simply increase metabolic output. Even if some of the extra got stored as body fat, this should simply lead to longer satiety, leaving the person with a longer time until hungry again, and therefore balance out.

This is what happened for thousands of years. People might’ve eaten a huge feast, including e.g. pounds of honey or as much delicious meat as they could fit into their bodies, and then they were just satiated for long enough not to worry about food again.

I don’t buy the argument that we are now constantly swimming in much more hyper-palatable food. This might be true compared to some bronze age hunter & gatherers, but even then: if you put down a mammoth, your entire tribe could probably feast for months until the meat & fat was all gone. And since you didn’t have any refrigeration, you were actually incentivized to eat as much as possible and store it as body fat where possible.

Yet, somehow, this didn’t cause diabesityheimer.

And our even closer relatives, aka grandparents, were pounding (literally) butter, refined flour, refined sugar by eating pound cake and super rich desserts with nearly every meal. You can say a lot about the American diet of the early 1900s, but not that it wasn’t refined, that it wasn’t energy-dense, or that it wasn’t hyper-palatable.

How much of the sugar & butter in pound cake is “added” sugar and fat? All of it. There’s no such thing as natural pound cake from a tree.

Hedonism in a Broken Metabolic World

But what happens when we introduce a metabolic problem into the situation?

What if nearly everybody in this world is slowly metabolic broken, until, eventually, 43% of the country are obese and 72% are overweight, with 12% having been diagnosed with diabetes and probably 30-40% qualifying as pre-diabetic?

In this world, where satiety on a mitochondrial level is totally unknown, hedonically pleasant foods would be hugely problematic.

The people in this world could only ever not “overeat” in the caloric/fat gain sense by using willpower to restrict their overall food intake. Anything that tasted good would therefore be enemy #1 - it would erode your willpower, or require more of it, and it would make you eat those darned caRoliEs. Screw you, tasty food!

You might imagine the people in such a world clinging to such desperate tactics as only eating boring, plain, bland foods that didn’t taste good, such as dry chicken breast & broccoli or *shudder* the atrocity known as “skim milk.”

A crazy, dystopian nightmare, I know.

The point of Troll/Meme Diets

This actually brings up a good point I’ve been thinking about: what is it about “unreasonable” and “stupid” troll/meme diets?

• My heavy cream diet

• Carnivore

• Brad’s The Croissant Diet

• Anabology’s Honey Diet

• The Potato riff trials (incl. potato + skittles lol)

• The Ice Cream diet

I think the unreasonable, silly nature of these diets actually serves an important point.

Say, hypothetically, that the key to reversing obesity is as follows:

1. Avoid linoleic acid forever

2. Reduce protein intake to adequate/sub-adequate levels in the short term

3. Possibly don’t “swamp” (=mix carbs/fats in your diet)

You could of course implement this by eating a Whole Foods, Plant Based diet of potatoes, squash, vegetables, and so on.

Or you could do a version of the Mediterranean Diet where you didn’t use any seed oils, you avoided high-linoleic acid meats like fatty chicken & pork, and so on.

But in both cases, you wouldn’t be proving a new point. People could say “Well you just ate a plain, boring, non-Western diet with no ultra-processed & hyper-palatable foods! Duh! Of course you reversed your diabesityheimer!”

If, on the other hand, you lost 75lbs (hypothetically) by eating a diet mostly of heavy cream, or butter croissants, or dates & orange juice, or ice cream, all of those factors are nullified.

For the record, I believe most of these “common sense” dietary heuristics to be totally useless, for example:

• Clean eating (so.. bleach then cook?)

• Whole foods (no cutting? Can I chew the food or does it have to go down whole?)

• Natural (cyanide is natural)

• Non-processed (define processing, and no NOVA isn’t a good framework)

• Healthy foods (oh, I should eat HEALTHY foods… jeez why didn’t I think of it)

These are all magic words. None of them explain why certain foods are obesogenic and others are not, or why some help reverse obesity.

As heuristics, they’re largely garbage: they throw out way too much food that’s inert/harmless/positive, and they miss large categories of foods that you should cut out even though they’re “whole” and “natural” by some common-sense definition.

In a crazy food environment, common-sense is probably wrong. If you follow common sense, you’re going to get common results: 43% obesity, 72% overweight, 12% diabetes.

But troll/meme diets come to the rescue: if you can achieve positive health outcomes, especially drastic ones (like, say losing 75lbs, TOTALLY HYPOTHETICALLY) while eating a diet that would give any registered dietitian or doctor a heart attack, you’re proving a point: there’s a specific mechanism you found, a switch you hit, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the silly magic words & incantations that the dietary mainstream likes to tout.

Don’t mix hyperphagia with ad-lib food if metabolically broken

What does this mean for us, specifically maybe for me & salsa?

Eating a jar of salsa seems harmless enough. Eating 3lbs of sour cream w/ salsa does not. If I did that every day, I’d be back at 300lbs in a heartbeat. Well, let’s say 6 months, probably.

So I’m not going to do it.

Interestingly, this shines a light on another confusing phenomenon I’ve experienced: non-caloric sweeteners.

During the first months of ex150 I would regularly buy an energy drink when going for a walk, and sip it. The drink was sweetened with monk fruit, a “natural” (if that’s the sort of thing you’re into) non-caloric sweetener. It was extremely sweet.

Yet I lost a bunch of weight, and the energy drink didn’t seem to prove problematic at all.

But, of course, I wasn’t drinking this energy drink with an ad-lib meal. There’s only 1 ad-lib meal on ex150, the dinner dessert of whipped cream. Even if I put salsa on my 150g beef lunch, it probably wouldn’t make a huge difference: there’s only so much of that meal, and I’d eat it anyway. Maybe I’d eat it slightly faster.

Later I tried mixing magnesium powder sweetened with monk fruit into my whipped cream dessert.

This totally destroyed it. I lost any sense of satiety, where previously I’d gotten severe cement-truck satiety from the whipped cream. At the same time, the cream became disgusting!

It was so sweet I would literally grimace with every bite. Yet I wouldn’t get satiated at all, and had I not stopped myself at a bowl, I would’ve probably eaten five.

The extreme sweetness from the monk fruit had made the cream way, way less palatable in the colloquial sense, yet at the same time caused hyperphagia.

In conclusion, I think it’s probably fine to consume known hyperphagic agents like spicy salsa or sweet monk fruit, given that it won’t make you overeat some other ad-lib food.

Maybe it’s a bit like fire: fire’s great, and it’s fine to light one in your fireplace or your backyard grill.

But don’t light a fire with a bunch of combustible material around, e.g. in your bed or a barn full of dry hay.

Will hyperphagia go away with a fixed metabolism?

That would certainly be my hope. I presume that, in a few years, when I’m totally linoleic acid-depleted and everything is super sweet and cool, I’ll be able to make a giant pot of chili with salsa, eat it ad-lib, and just reach satiety from that. Or maybe I’ll overeat a bit, and then not be hungry for a day.

But I’m currently not there yet, and so I’ll separate my known hyperphagic agents from real food.

And maybe, I’ll never be able to do that. It would suck, but oh well. Being 300lbs also sucked. I’d rather avoid salsa & monk fruit than regain the weight.