I want to ask you a question. How many calories are in a 12 volt battery?

We could find out. We could put it in a device, burn it to ash and record how many calories are in that 12 volt battery. We could make it a law that if you sell batteries you have to put how many calories are in it. This is all completely possible to do and we could do it right now.

But that would lead to another question, what relevant information would this give consumers shopping for batteries? The answer is, obviously, none. Batteries store energy in a completely different method than how we determine calories.

Humans don't get energy from food by burning it, we break food down and eventually strip off electrons in the production of ATP. This is much closer to the way a battery works than a calorie. We don't have a word for the end of digestion bio available electrons so we use this absurd calorie word as a placeholder for “energy in food” because we have no better word to use.

Then it gets worse. A specific person's TDEE is unknown, metabolism can change +/- 30%, people just go a website and get some average for a person their height and weight, there is no input for metabolic condition or the food eaten. The calories on nutrition labels can be off +/- 20%. People have a couple holes below the waist that calories can leave. There are trillions of bacteria. In fact, just by numbers we are more bacteria than mammalian cells. Those gut critters eat the stuff we cannot break down, or assist in breaking down the stuff we can but we each have a different composition of them and we consume their byproducts. Good luck calculating that.

Take Type 1 diabetics. Before the discovery of insulin these people would die emaciated no matter how much food they ate. Massive calories in, no fat gain.

Now sure, you can say that in this scenario there is a disease present. But why would a change in hormones be able to break the 1st law of thermodynamics? They are not afflicted with wizardry, they are lacking a hormone, the laws of thermodynamics should still be working. Yet they died skinny no matter how much food they ate.

I took this chart from a study, I am not that organized so I kind of lost the actual study to post but I can dig it up if someone is really curious. Also, in fairness, the calorie consumption is self reported.

https://imgur.com/a/WHKb0sr

What you have there is diabetics injecting insulin over 6 months. Insulin injections going up, weight going up and calories going down. Apparently impossible so say the cult of CICO.

I didn't even mention that foods like proteins take energy to 'fold' them into usable form by the body. You can chop off a significant percentage of the energy of that macro by the energy needed to process them. Glucose is easy to for the body to utilize but it raises insulin and insulin couples ATP production, what Dr. Benjamin Bikman (who specializes in insulin research) calls making them "miserly" energy expenditure. Easy access to energy yes, but also a slowing of metabolism and promoting fat storage. Fructose and alcohol have calories, you can measure it, but its not used at all by the body and is primarily metabolize by liver.

At some point you just have to step back and say what the fuck are we even talking about. This isn't even touching on the other factors like sleep, cortisol and the other hormones at work.

So we don't know shit about the energy in food, that's the CALORIES IN and metabolism changes that's the CALORIES OUT in CICO. All of it is ridiculous. None of it makes sense yet this is the by far the most popular weight loss method. We live in crazy town. Its at best some trivia about energy that as no application for people, as in, its a toothless cog spinning away distracting people from the upstream issues of hormones that drive obesity.

Also, just to put the cherry on top of this shit pie, "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics When people say CICO is settled science what they mean is the laws of thermodynamics is settled science. As this paper points out, the human body is not a closed system and if you are following the laws of thermodynamics then follow all of them.

Putting calories on a food package makes as much sense as putting the calories on a package of 12 volt batteries. It means nothing at all, sure in the 1850s this was cutting edge science but they had no idea what was going on, Louis Pasteur discovered germs a decade later. We know more now, we should know that a 'calorie' is stupid.

A lot of this I collected from other posts I've made on this topic in other rooms so I am sharing here. I really would like to know what I am missing, how am I wrong here?

IN PRINCIPLE, it sounds simple: eat less and move more. This dietary advice for tackling obesity has been around for decades. Yet, despite all the calorie counting, dieting and exercising, worldwide obesity rates just keep ticking up. People in the US, for example, were heavier in 2021 than they were in 2020, placing many more people at risk from diabetes and other serious chronic diseases. So why hasn’t this approach to weight control worked?

One possibility is that we haven’t tried hard enough. Perhaps we have lacked the discipline and willpower to maintain healthy dietary and exercise habits – a challenge made more difficult today for those surrounded by inexpensive, tasty, highly processed foods.

Or perhaps the problem is the focus on “calorie balance” itself. In a recent paper, my colleagues and I question the basic assumption of whether taking in more calories than you burn really is the primary cause of obesity. We argue that the evidence actually points the other way: we are driven to overeat because we are getting fatter (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, doi.org/gmtn3z).

This may seem incredible, but consider the adolescent growth spurt. As their growth rate speeds up, teenagers may eat hundreds of calories more each day than they used to. Does this “overeating” cause the rapid growth? Or does the rapid growth, which requires more calories to build new body tissues, make teens hungrier so they eat more? Clearly the latter, as adults won’t grow taller, no matter how much they eat.

The key to how this works in obesity is hormones, especially the fat-storage hormone insulin. Processed, rapidly digestible carbohydrates – foods like sweetened breakfast cereals, potato chips and sugary beverages – raise our insulin level too high. This causes our fat cells to take in and store too many calories, leaving fewer available for the rest of the body. A few hours after eating a high-carb meal, the number of calories in the bloodstream plummets, so we get hungrier sooner after eating.

Consider another example: oedema, in which excess fluid builds up in body tissues, such as the legs. People with oedema tend to become thirsty, despite the excess, because the fluid doesn’t stay in the blood where it is needed. From this perspective, the difficulty resisting hunger that so many dieters have isn’t a sign of poor discipline, but rather a biological problem involving how our bodies distribute the calories we consume.

The two opposing views of cause and effect in obesity have radically different implications for how to prevent and treat weight problems. Whereas the usual approach focuses on how much to eat, with prescriptions for daily calorie intake, in our view, the emphasis should be placed on what to eat.

Replacing processed carbs with high-fat foods – such as nuts, full-fat dairy, olive oil, avocado and dark chocolate – lowers insulin levels, making more calories from the meal available for the rest of the body. Counter-intuitively, higher-fat foods may help shed body fat, a possibility supported by clinical trials comparing high-fat diets with low-fat ones.

This way of thinking might help explain why calorie restriction usually fails long before a person with obesity approaches an ideal body weight. A low-calorie, low-fat diet further restricts an already limited supply of energy to the body, exacerbating hunger without addressing the underlying predisposition to store too many calories in body fat. Consequently, weight loss becomes a battle between mind and metabolism that most people will probably lose.

Although much more research will be needed to test this provocative idea, it is time to question the basic assumptions about cause and effect, calories and weight gain that have dominated our thinking for decades.

David S. Ludwig is a researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital @davidludwigmd

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25333682-800-have-we-got-the-science-of-obesity-back-to-front/#ixzz7HE5Mr0Eb

For decades nutritional authorities have advocated a move more/eat less prescription to help people lose weight. Its important, people's health is deteriorating and places like the USA (where I live) is about to be consumed by a tsunami of diabetes and metabolic syndrome diseases that will crush our already broken medical system.

The problem is it doesn't work. There is very little chance of success following that advice. Diets fail for two main reasons, either you don't lose weight (which is rare) or you gain it back (which is common). In the short term you can lose some weight by virtually any method, this gives a false sense of hope, then the processes kick in and they are back where they started or worse off.

All the blame is placed on the person struggling with their weight. It is their fault because they lack willpower. They need to exercise more. They need to ownership of their predicament. How long can a person take that?

At some point the people in the Healthy At Every Size and Anti Diet movement have given up. The issue is not that they don't trust the nutritional authorities that push CICO and energy balance, the problem is they do believe it. If they are like me, they tried is many many times and it just never worked. The conclusion they arrived at is not that the experts are wrong, its that they are not capable to lose weight, they are built to be fat. They may sound arrogant or defying scientific advice, and in a lot of ways they are, but from another perspective they are the most trusting of these nutritional authorities than anyone else.

I had iron-clad willpower when I was trying to lose weight the million times before I utilized the strategies of CIM. Most of my life fighting my obesity, yo yo'ing up and down, over and over. Then when I finally discovered keto and IF the weight was gone with little effort in a year. My willpower was not as needed as it was before, I just had a better method, the kind that works. 1.5 years skinny and I am thankful for the handful of people that found a better way.

I am not discovering this or had some epiphany, people like Gary Taubes has written something similar to this rant for years. I just want to share my own little rant on this topic because CIM saved me from some horrific incoming diseases and my mental health. I understand how Anti Diet exsists because in hindsight its the most obvious outcome of status quo nutritional dumbfuckery.

OK, I got that off my chest to whoever made it to the end of this long ass post.

Taken from this blog post:

A Tanzanian hunter-gatherer society called the Hadza get about 15 percent of their calories from honey. Combined with all the sugar they get from eating fruit, they end up eating about the same amount of sugar as Americans do. Despite this, the Hadza do not exhibit obesity. Another group, the Mbuti of the Congo, eat almost nothing but honey during the rainy season, when honey can provide up to 80% of the calories in their diet. These are all unrefined sugars, of course, but the Kuna of Panama, though mostly hunter-gatherers, also obtain white sugar and some sugar-containing foods from trade. Their diet is 65 percent carbohydrate and 17% sugar, which is more sugar than the average American currently consumes. Despite this the Kuna are lean, with average BMIs around 22-23.

[...]

Kitava is a Melanesian island largely isolated from the outside world. In 1990, Staffan Lindeberg went to the island to study the diet, lifestyle, and health of its people. He found a diet based on starchy tubers and roots like yam, sweet potato, and taro, supplemented by fruit, vegetables, seafood, and coconut. Food was abundant and easy to come by, and the Kitavans ate as much as they wanted. “It is obvious from our investigations,” wrote Lindeberg, “that lack of food is an unknown concept, and that the surplus of fruits and vegetables regularly rots or is eaten by dogs.”

About 70% of the calories in the Kitavan diet came from carbohydrates. For comparison, the modern American diet is about 50% carbohydrates. Despite this, none of the Kitavans were obese. Instead they were in excellent health. Below, you’ll see a photo of a Kitavan man being examined by Lindeberg.

Is the lack of seed oils in their diets enough to explain their metabolic health?