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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Insatiable: A life without eating
davidkuennen wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
I'm amazed Stanley Dudrick didn't win the Nobel Prize for inventing
TPN.
RCitronsBroker wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
This is what pulled me out of an eating disorder as a teen. Got
diagnosed with Crohnâs, also was put onto a mush-diet for almost half
a year, and got so pissed over that timespan, that the primal joy of
eating just straight up overpowered any sort of disordered
obsessiveness i was fighting with before. Life is so damn strange.
tonnydourado wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
Well, that was some nightmare fuel early in the morning. I've been
diagnosed with Crohn's almost 20 years ago, had two surgeries, and am
currently on meds. No fistulas, thankfully, but the whole thing is a
Damocles sword, nevertheless. Reading this made it a little extra
sharp.
bruce343434 wrote 8 hours 59 min ago:
I wonder if a hunger inhibitor like ozempic would help
mise_en_place wrote 9 hours 12 min ago:
> As the experiment progressed, Ancel Keys, the nutritionist running
the study, noticed odd psychological effects.
As we know now, Keys was a truly unscrupulous fellow. He took bribes
from the AHA to lie about the effects of saturated fats and animal fats
on heart disease.
Varriount wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
Can you provide a source for this assertion?
omoikane wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
The idea that taking away food also takes away what's human reminds me
of Dazai Osamu's "Ningen Shikkaku"[1], where the narrator wrote in the
first chapter that he had no idea what being hungry means, that he
never understood what it means to feel hungry. People must eat to
survive and thus must work in order to eat, but because the narrator
never felt hungry, he does not understand how humans operated at all.
[1]
"No Longer Human" seem to be the official English title, although a
more literal translation would be "disqualified as human".
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Longer_Human
gcanyon wrote 12 hours 13 min ago:
The best meal I've ever had was clear chicken broth and it's not even
close. Let me explain: in my 20s I was in a motorcycle accident. I was
in a forced coma for over a week, and in the ICU for four weeks. No
food, only an NG (nasogastric) tube. When they took the tube out, the
first thing they gave me was a toothbrush. I brushed for something like
five minutes, it was indescribably pleasant. Then they gave me a cup of
clear chicken broth: basically salty water with something to color it
yellow.
It. Was. Heavenly. I have literally never in my life enjoyed eating
anything as much as I enjoyed sipping that broth.
DoreenMichele wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
That falls under the saying "No spice like hunger." It's just kind of
an extreme situation for it.
I can relate, actually.
I had a terrible first pregnancy and threw up constantly for most of
it. Once the baby was born, my husband rushed off to Burger King to
get me a burger and fries and I wolfed it down. It was half gone
before I realized what was "weird": I had been picking at my food for
months.
I don't even usually eat burgers, but was also all "Wow, soooo good!"
gcanyon wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
What I always say: "When you're really hungry -- I mean really
hungry -- nothing satisfies like food."
Ductapemaster wrote 13 hours 22 min ago:
Thereâs an excellent Radiolab episode that ends with a similar story
of someone on TPN. If you found this interesting, itâs worth a
listen.
URI [1]: https://radiolab.org/podcast/197112-guts
TheCapeGreek wrote 19 hours 23 min ago:
The bit about the 1944 study and how they rebounded eating way more
food after their starvation really struck an emotional chord with me.
I had a few years of financial struggle as a high schooler and student,
to the point where I was constantly hungry and very skinny. It was a
bit of a traumatic time for me for other reasons, and this article gave
me more insight into another dimension of it.
Since I hit a career stride and haven't been walking nearly as much,
I've been at my largest ever. A kind of eternal overcompensation. My
father also sometimes excused wasteful grocery expenditure saying "I've
gone without before; I refuse to do it again".
rufus_foreman wrote 15 hours 29 min ago:
>> I had a few years of financial struggle as a high schooler and
student, to the point where I was constantly hungry and very skinny
Why didn't you just steal food?
That's what I did when I was poor. There's a store the size of a city
block a 5 minute walk away from me, there are tons and tons of food
stacked up in that store, any type of food you could want, and I'm
going to go bed hungry? That didn't really make sense to me. I never
went to bed hungry.
I respect property rights now, of course, because my belly is full.
sethammons wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
When I was poor and in high school, I lived alone for a very long
while in a house that my dad had started to remodel but then he got
distracted by a woman and moved to her place. This meant winter in
a house in the mountains literally missing a whole wall.
We lived in the middle of nowhere. I hitched rides to school from
friends, neighbors, and rarely family. There was no store to steal
from, so I stole food from the school.
I was on free lunch, so I'd steal an extra hamburger, sell it for
half price to a kid for 50 cents, and I would use that to buy a can
of soup when I could get someone to stop by the store. That would
be my dinner that I cooked over a wood burning stove since I could
warm up that bedroom but the kitchen was missing a wall and was
_cold_ (between 20-40 Fahrenheit, but, again, poor, so no good warm
clothes). My dad would give $20 every now and then, and I'd use
that to buy potatoes that I'd heat in a toaster oven.
A plain potato, a school lunch hamburger, and usually a 50ish
percent chance for can of soup was what I ate. I was skinny and
hungry. A few years later, I would be able to eat regularly (and
now I am doing more than ok), but it took nearly two decades to be
comfortable throwing out a plate of food; the poor, hungry kid in
me wasn't sure when the next food would come even though I now had
food aplenty.
heavensent wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
If there was ever a line between sarcasm and questionable advice,
this comment does a good job of walking on it.
>I respect property rights now, of course, because my belly is
full.
the_real_cher wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
It's a really strong truism though.
riku_iki wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
In rich country, one likely can apply for some food stamps if can't
afford food.
In poor country, store owners are likely not that rich too, and
will fight hard those who steal.
nasmorn wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
In a rich country a few percent of the population can easily live
just on the food thrown away at supermarkets.
3abiton wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
I think the literature is clear enough on the difference between
calory restrictions and intermittent fasting. The latter being much
effective because it also reduces the production of hunger hormone,
not the case with the former approach.
mlinhares wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
Been there as well. Took me a while to recognize I did not have to
finish every plate of food, that i could either save it for later
when i was hungry again or just throw it away.
koolba wrote 17 hours 20 min ago:
I always felt the real lesson to be learned from finishing your
plate was to not overfill it in the first place.
madacol wrote 18 hours 23 min ago:
As a descendant of italian immigrants, I am still struggling with
that
rikthevik wrote 18 hours 26 min ago:
I don't want to waste food, but I need to regularly remind myself
that overeating is also wasting food.
appplication wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
Wow thatâs incredible, this just blew my mind. Thank you.
najra wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
That's a great way of looking at it, thanks, I'm stealing it :D
sourcecodeplz wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
I try to waste as little as possible. Would have been nice to
live in a house with a yard and some chickens. Would give them
leftovers. Otherwise just turn it into compost.
LorenDB wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
If it's not going to waste, it's going to waist.
mikestew wrote 16 hours 31 min ago:
Itâs just as wasteful to put the food on my ass as it is to put
it in the trash, as I tell my spouse on occasion.
gwern wrote 19 hours 32 min ago:
I wonder how much appetite suppressants like GLP-1s could help here?
They seem to hit appetite at a high level and curiously reduce other
cravings or addictions, so they might be able to deal with the hunger
here.
DoreenMichele wrote 19 hours 35 min ago:
Everything was vigorously wiped with alcohol because any bacteria would
be injected straight into my heart.
Anyone with a serious medical condition that requires home care on par
with hospital care deals with this -- often, while at their very worst.
It's probably one of the scarier aspects of living with a serious
chronic condition.
smeej wrote 19 hours 39 min ago:
This really puts the two years my UC and I could only eat one meal for
every meal in perspective. I eventually got used to being the weirdo
who brought my own food, or just declined everything if we made
spontaneous plans while we were already out.
But at least I could eat.
PunchTornado wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
One of those reads that changes your perspective on life in a way.
Night_Thastus wrote 19 hours 45 min ago:
Very dark, but also very insightful.
We take a lot of simple pleasures in our lives for granted. The feeling
of stretching, scratching an itch, relaxing our muscles, sleep, the
taste of food, the smells around us, feeling warmth or cold on our
skin, etc.
I've wondered a lot about what a life would be like without these
things - even if you were otherwise completely healthy.
rincebrain wrote 19 hours 29 min ago:
It can be a strange experience, to try and describe to people,
something missing from your shared vocabulary.
I had a number of rounds of an IV drug treatment 4 or 5 years ago,
and on one and only one of them, shortly after being treated, I found
myself feeling a strange sensation, one that I couldn't place, but
that I definitely remembered having experienced before.
After 5 minutes or so of wondering and racking my brain, I placed it.
It was hunger.
At some point in my early teenage years, that particular piece of
wiring stopped working, and I didn't really pay much attention at the
time, so I can't place precisely when, but I had no severe injuries
or medical maladies crop up. The two likely causes of that are
apparently a brain tumor or hormone problems, but my bloodwork and
brain scans turned up nothing exciting then or since, so ...who
knows. (I did, many years after this started, start drinking caffeine
sometimes, but it doesn't stop happening if I stop drinking caffeine
for months, so I don't think it's related. I'm not on anything
stimulant-like or adjacent either.)
But it's a difficult thing to explain, the absence of that - and the
knock-on effects, the absence of motivation to avoid it that results,
the absence of satisfaction from eating causing it to vanish.
How you can sincerely ask "why am I having a pounding headache - oh I
forgot to eat for 2 days", and not have had any sign unless you set
deliberate calendar events and phone alarms to serve as a reminder
that this basic feedback system is broken. (I usually don't need
them, these days, because habit is a powerful thing, but I keep them
around so that I don't become sufficiently sick or taxed by life that
something breaks down and I forget...again.)
I can't exactly offer an A-B comparison of the difference, my
memories of my childhood are not clear enough for that at this point,
but while I will be sad if I end up not eating something especially
tasty or unusual, there's not a visceral absence of satiation in it,
it's an intellectual lament.
jamiek88 wrote 18 hours 25 min ago:
Hey this happened to me too.
I never feel hunger just the effects of not eating.
My thirst mechanism is messed up too.
If it wasnât for my wife Iâd be a real mess.
I at least eat one good meal a day because she does!
If I get really, really stoned Iâm talking 500 mg of thc level
stoned, I can feel hunger.
But that isnât conducive to a good routine!
arghwhat wrote 19 hours 53 min ago:
The post says that the TPN solution is fed slowly and that the body
barely reacts.
What if it was intentionally fed with periodic bursts, simulating
strong blood sugar, fat and protein spikes from eating and triggering
stronger insulin responses with resulting lows? I wonder if that would
substantially change the experience.
Maybe tuning the nutrition mixture. I vaguely remember the journey of
the Soylent guy experimenting with the composition and hitting various
snags along the way before he finally got to a point where it made him
feel satisfied and not crave any other foods. Soylent still has the
mechanical feeding sensation though...
Sometimes medical developments plateau when it reaches a point of
working, before it reaches the point of being good.
rincebrain wrote 19 hours 47 min ago:
I think the whole framing was that the reason the problem space is
hard, is that if you deliver too much at once, your body notices and
treats it much like if it found splinters stuck in you - invasion of
foreign mass to trigger inflammatory response.
arghwhat wrote 19 hours 35 min ago:
I am not sure if the burning was related to inflammation. I recall
the sensation of marker fluid aburning as it moves towards the
heart, but it might just be a sensation rather than a reaction.
Wasn't clear from the post at least.
Maybe one could burst only some convenient nutrition that is easier
to deliver in higher doses like glucose, while still drip-feeding
the bulkier macronutrients.
Another crazy idea could be to intentionally introduce glucagon and
insulin to artificially induce highs and lows.
I'm sure it's a very hard problem space, but it might be one
looking for a creative patient willing to put effort into further
research...
rincebrain wrote 19 hours 20 min ago:
The explicit quote from the article was "believing it required so
much liquid, and such a high concentration of chemical nutrients,
that it would cause inflammation and burning when administered.",
and I am assuming that the former was not just redundant with the
latter.
Directly mucking with glucagon and insulin for anything short of
directly demonstrable life and death is going to be a fraught
proposal in almost any circumstance, I would speculate, given
that the risk is not just wasting away from malnutrition but much
more direct tissue damage and death. (Much like I suspect
something with a risk profile like Accutane's would not get
approved again _now_ with the body of evidence we have for what
happens if you introduce something that's "almost, but not quite,
vitamin A" into rapidly growing bodies...)
arghwhat wrote 16 hours 57 min ago:
That was the quote describing why they originally thought that
intravenous feeding was entirely impossible, which proved
false, so I didn't take it as an observation regarding solution
as it was later invented.
It was how the original solution was invented and tested, with
resistance to mucking about likely limiting it's development
significantly.
It is certainly not a game to entertain without understanding
the signficant risks, but healthy people can intentionally take
on extreme risks, so I see no reason to stop a patient with a
coordinated plan for research into bettering theirs and others
situation.
IncreasePosts wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
I've always thought we should have a digestive system bypass in the
esophagus. Give us the joy of tasting, chewing, and swallowing food,
but then have it go into an external bag before it hits the stomach.
sandspar wrote 15 hours 18 min ago:
Aristotle talks about gluttony in his book about ethics. He mentions
a Greek gourmand who fervently wished to have the neck of a crane,
since he felt that swallowing is the most pleasurable part of eating.
knodi123 wrote 20 hours 2 min ago:
Know what's weird to me? I don't get any pleasure out of swallowing
food. Tasting, sure. Chewing, sometimes. But swallowing? Just a
necessary mechanical coda, as emotionally laden as the period at the
end of a sentence
But if someone suggests that we enjoy an ice cream sundae, but spit
each bite into a bucket? Suddenly they're a reviled heretic!
mixmastamyk wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
Not the swallowing exactly, but the result of filling a previously
empty stomach. Thatâs where the satisfaction comes from,
depending on how hungry you were.
lkuty wrote 7 hours 53 min ago:
Reminds me that typically I prefer smelling wine that tasting it
and of course than swallowing it. I often find a wine very good by
smelling it and am disappointed when I taste it. Of course it also
depends on the wine. I mean on average.
sethammons wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
That's me and coffee. Smells great, tastes like literal ash (no,
not from over-cooked beans; coffee fanatics have offered me their
best and it all tastes like someone filtered it through an
ashtray).
arghwhat wrote 19 hours 45 min ago:
I think the exact positive sensation differs between people. I
certainly find joy in swallowing the food - which makes sense as
it's a pretty important step. Tasting and chewing feels like only
the precursor to eating, and taking only those steps reduce the
sensation to that of chewing a bubblegum.
... But if someone has a non-bulemic reason to simulate eating, by
all means go ahead. Just don't make it a big trend as we waste
enough food as is.
knodi123 wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
I was partly tongue in cheek. I certainly don't spit my meals
into a bucket, despite being a little overweight. But I stand by
what I said about not enjoying the act of swallowing. The
closest I can get is the joy of not feeling hunger anymore- but
that's just the absence of discomfort.
I don't understand it, but I can't dispute it.
coldtea wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
>I was partly tongue in cheek. I certainly don't spit my meals
into a bucket, despite being a little overweight. But I stand
by what I said about not enjoying the act of swallowing. The
closest I can get is the joy of not feeling hunger anymore- but
that's just the absence of discomfort.
You're conflating the joy of food with its mere taste.
A lot of the joy (which you might just attribute to the taste
part) comes as the food is digested. Not just the joy of not
feeling hunger anymore, but the various chemicals making their
way to the bloodstream and releasing endorphins and such.
Sugar, chocolate and co for example.
Even easier examples would be coffee and alcohol. Their taste
is hardly the major satisfaction factor.
arghwhat wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
Unfortunately, we also sense the mechanical filling of the stomach,
and the movement through the bowels.
Unless you stop the hunger altogether I don't think you'll feel
satisfied without the whole process.
bluefirebrand wrote 17 hours 51 min ago:
> Unless you stop the hunger altogether
My understanding is this is how drugs like Ozempic work. They make
you feel fuller quicker and prevent "food noise" where you think
about food and eating even when your stomach isn't empty
mateo1 wrote 19 hours 45 min ago:
It's not just that. I'm pretty sure your stomach and gut also
provide information regarding caloric intake, on top of other
sensors detecting the raise in blood sugars/lipids/aminoacids. And
even if it didn't, you'll get hungry when your body/brain detects
you've switched to using reserve power. If eating doesn't satiate
the hunger by providing energy, the response would likely be to
make you hungrier and hungrier.
sethammons wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
Your gut bacteria is amazing - it will signal even what kids of
food it wants. By passing those hungry bacteria will eventually
kill of those specific cravings I guess, but meanwhile, I'd wager
a lack of satiation if bypassing the gut.
mcmoor wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
Yeah I've heard that the reason artificial sweetener makes people
fatter instead is that the body feels robbed when they don't get
the supposed caloric intake they should get when eating something
sweet. So they crave more.
I actually do feel it, I still feel hungry if I eat lots of
something that has little caloric value. So eating lots of
vegetable and water doesn't fool my body into satisfaction.
arghwhat wrote 19 hours 20 min ago:
Well, "reserve power" is from starvation, intense exercise, or
weird diets, not hunger.
From brain perspective, "reserve power" would be when it ends up
relying on ketone bodies, which start to be produced in higher
numbers when you have been in high glucagon, low insulin
condition for a longer period of time. Long enough that the liver
burned through its glycogen stores and the liver cells redirect
oxaloacetate to gluconeogenesis (producing glucose from stuff in
the blood) to the point where the cells become unable to finish
its own metabolism of free fatty acids. It then turns the
intermediate products it can't use itself into ketone bodies.
That part can be regulated with nutrition, glucagon and insulin,
but having plenty of glucose won't replace sensations from the
digestive system itself.
theonlyjesus wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
I'm a fellow Crohnie.
Crohn's disease is a long, exhausting disease. I hope we see a cure in
our lifetime.
spondylosaurus wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
Same and same. It broke my heart a little to read that this essayist
got diagnosed at age 11... it's bad enough as an adult, but I can't
even imagine dealing with it as a little kid :(
marmaduke wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
Well, certainly puts things in perspective, doesn't it?
ericmcer wrote 19 hours 35 min ago:
If I had been born ~90 years earlier I would have died before I
formed my first memory. That thought comforts me when I feel like
life is unfair or difficult. The whole thing is a bonus for me⦠I
should be dead. Maybe similar feelings provide some comfort for
people who have to manage their lives with diseases like Crohns.
jessriedel wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
OK, but note that Crohn's (and ulcerative colitis) are nearly
unknown in the developing world. For reasons we don't understand,
they are caused by modernity. So 90 years ago having Crohn's would
be much less likely. (Symptoms from both Crohn's and ulcerative
colitis don't usually present until the teens or early twenties, so
this is not a case of infants with the disease simply dying early
in the developing world.)
Retric wrote 15 hours 42 min ago:
Mild cases of Crohnâs are less likely to be diagnosed in the
developing world and far more likely to be deadly when combined
with something else like Malaria or TB. So itâs almost
impossible to compare statistics between such wildly different
countries.
Essentially unless the healthcare system is good enough and
population healthy enough you only capture severe casss.
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