This is very interesting. "Calories in, calories out" has long been an established principle and topic of debate & discussion among those who follow nutrition, and while it largely still applies, this article points out the factors that bend it somewhat. I wonder about the compositional effects of diet on the way ingested calories are used, too: studies have shown that isocaloric high-protein diets result in increased lean/muscle mass and lower fat mass, compared to high-carb ones. It would be nice to have a survey article to read on recent studies in this area, if anyone would be so kind.
I liked this factoid in the article: "Back when it was the craze to measure such variety European scientists discovered that Russian intestines are about five feet longer than those of, say, Italians." Useful adaptation there (I wonder if it tends to make Russian guts any bigger?)
Here's the core problem. At a fundamental level the thermodynamic argument with regard to body weight has to work, of course it does, there's no way to slip past the laws of physics. If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop.
But by the same token, it's a useless fact, utterly.
Look at the same argument as applied to finances. If you make more money than you spend you will build up savings until eventually you are rich.
The issue is that these are trivial facts. They don't tackle the core difficulties of the problem they are just bland tautologies. Ultimately long-term weight loss is a complex matter of psychology, motivation, habits, and indeed personal temperament and genetic baggage. For some folks it will come naturally and easily, for others it will always be an uphill climb, and for others it will be almost impossible. And the same thing is true with regards to being wealthy. Some folks quickly and intuitively acquire the skills to step into a business, tweak the knobs until its profitable and then start building up their personal finances from those profits until they have a desire to move on to something else where they do the same thing, continuing to get richer and richer over time. Whereas for others it can be much more of a struggle, or maybe even effectively impossible because they don't have the same opportunities.
> Here's the core problem. At a fundamental level the thermodynamic argument with regard to body weight has to work, of course it does, there's no way to slip past the laws of physics. If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop.
This is just not true. Our bodies follow the laws of thermodynamics, but the laws of thermodynamics do not dictate how or whether we process calories. We can poop out fat. If you drink a bottle of olive oil, you will probably not digest it all. If you eat fiber, you won't process those calories. Our bodies are not bunsen burners.
He does end this section with "period, full stop".
However the rest of the comment is tangental does nothing to mitigate my response. Weight maintencance is not about calorie count, it's about understanding how our body processes food.
Yes, precisely. But I'm talking about the limits. If you ingest fewer calories than you burn you will lose weight, period. That's the argument that people have been making about weight loss for ages. But the difficulty there is that in reality the range of "thermodynamic calories" that a person can ingest relative to the exercise they do while maintaining a healthy weight can vary across a huge margin.
I recall reading about an experiment where obese mice were injected with insulin regularly after being denied food. The mice starved to death despite still having fat stores.
Of course, mice are not humans, but this implies that diets that stimulate a lot of insulin production (or normal amounts in insulin-resistant populations) would cause a person to not lose fat.
I'm not sure how you looked at the sentence "if you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight" and managed to read "if you eat enough and exercise little enough you will gain weight".
We're not talking about helping sick people gain weight by shoving food down their throats, we're talking about losing weight.
p.s. Pooping out fat is 'calories out'. Several weight loss products even make use of this.
> p.s. Pooping out fat is 'calories out'. Several weight loss products even make use of this.
Not in the sense of what people mean when they say 'calories in equals calories out'. Usually they mean that most calories that are consumed are utilized, and hence anything not burned gets added to your weight. This is of course an incorrect assumption based on both laws of thermodynamics, and also, as you point out above, ignoring the calories that aren't absorbed during digestion.
> "Ultimately long-term weight loss is a complex matter of psychology, motivation, habits, and indeed personal temperament and genetic baggage."
As someone who has suffered and struggled with obesity in the past, I hear ya loud and clear, but IMO the notion that "calories in < calories out -> weight gain" is still very valuable.
One of the fundamental problems that lies between our society and healthy weight is that we continue to believe in miracle diets, or that somehow we can cheat the rule. We talk about being carb-free, being fat-free, rarely acknowledging that maybe we should just stop eating so damned much.
When I was in high school I was quite obese, and the (Canadian) government paid to send me to a dietician in a group program. Let me tell ya, the notion that "calories in must be less than calories out" was news to a lot of people there.
You're right of course - this knowledge, in an of itself, is insufficient force to turn a fat man into a thin man, but in the current state of our society, simply acknowledging and owning up to this fact is pretty tremendous.
Why do you say that? Is the knowledge that heroin is bad for an addict any motivation for them to quit? I hardly think so.
Considering that you can eliminate heroin from a person's usage and that you can't eliminate food it seems that the relapse rate for both is reasonably close.
Until obesity and eating psychology gets more study in this area, I don't think anything's going to happen to improve the health of the typical US citizen (or Canadian, eh?).
I liked this factoid in the article: "Back when it was the craze to measure such variety European scientists discovered that Russian intestines are about five feet longer than those of, say, Italians." Useful adaptation there (I wonder if it tends to make Russian guts any bigger?)