Comment by nradov 12 hours ago
What's the hypothesis there? Were they just shitting out the extra starch without digesting it? Due to conservation of energy the calories can't just vanish.
It doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much, regardless of how hard I'd been working. Most likely that number is just wrong.
If your diet is 90% potatoes and you do hard manual labor all day, you would absolutely need about 7 pounds of potatoes (2500 calories). I don’t think 13 pounds seems that crazy. I have sat down at a meal and eaten 3 pounds of potatoes before.
A little off topic, but there is this joke:
A Russian and American soldier meet during some peacekeeping mission/veteran fair and discuss which army is better.
They go through weapons, the American really likes AK-47. They talk about training. They discuss the distributed vs centralized command.
Finally the American says that they eat 5k calories per day. The Russian suddenly jumps up, points his finger at the American and starts yelling: "Liar! Nobody can eat that much potatoes!"
13 pounds of potatoes is about 4600 kcals. That's in the range of what an NFL athlete consumes in a day.
The problem is digesting that quantity of food, not the energy content. Elite athletes typically eat some potatoes but most of what they eat is more nutrient dense.
Seriously guys, get out your scale and weigh 13 pounds of potatoes. Could you really consume that much volume in a day without feeling sick? Let's do a reality check here.
I had a HS friend who was a serious swimmer (not quite Olympic level but he won state championships) and watching him eat was insane. He would eat about 3x of what we all ate. Like literally down 3 sandwiches while we had one. I think he was on a 6000 calorie a day diet. I believe the potato thing. It sure sits outside what I think I could eat, but having seen others do similar, it seems realistic.
Hypothesis is that the irishmen were doing hard physical labor that required a high caloric intake. PCT thru-hikers consume 4,000-4,500 calories per day (at least I did) while staying thin. According to inter-net, 13 lb of potatoes has about 4,500 calories. Apparently US civil war soldiers expended 3-4k per day.
I was responding to the claim by @codeableconcept that the absence of significant dietary fat somehow prevents obesity, independent of energy balance. That seems unlikely.
Obviously it's possible for an active man to expend ~4500 kcal/day. I've done it myself many times. Even back during the Civil War, US soldiers typically consumed more energy dense food and only got a fraction of their calories from potatoes.
>it doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much,
Presumably you aren't doing hard manual labor every day.