Hi, Steven,

It's awesome to hear that you've lost 175 pounds eating a low-carb diet. Congratulations!

I think I respectfully disagree with a lot of your claims. A few thoughts:

-This study investigated the impacts of starvation in the context of post-war Europe. I.e., we wanted the info so we could help starving Europeans. In that context, low-carb is somewhat irrelevant. It would have been unfeasible to suggest a bunch of starving people in a worn torn country just go keto. I think this idea still applies to many populations today—the diet you are suggesting can be culturally and financially inappropriate for many populations.

-When you lock people in a lab and feed them calorie-equated diets of either low-carb or low-fat, they lose the same amount of weight (Christopher Gardner at Stanford has done great work here). This is why many (not all) scientists today think energy balance is the primary driver of weight loss. I.e. The carbohydrate insulin model of obesity doesn't seem to hold up in a controlled setting.

-Lots of people do indeed reporting not feeling as hungry when losing weight on low carb. And that's great! But some data also shows that people report feeling fuller on carbs in a weight-loss context. Which is also great! So that feels like a wash.

-The anthropological data, based on studies of hunter gatherers and small-scale farming/hunting/gathering societies suggests that those people ARE hungry and eat when they can. E.g., the Hadza hunter gatherers are constantly complaining of being hungry. They're one of the closer models we have to early humans. So the claim that early humans just didn't eat for days at a time feels off to me.

My two cents :). Congrats again on your weight loss. I'm surely not saying there aren't individual benefits to low-carb, but I am saying that this is what happens for most weight loss most of the time. If we didn't have these mechanisms, we would have died off.