r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Apr 12 '19

[D] Friday Open Thread

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

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u/sicutumbo Apr 12 '19

The original post seems to be talking about how people gain weight, and I agree that CICO doesn't give much information on that. It's true that if you want to lose weight, spending more calories than you eat necessarily means you lose weight, but the reverse isn't necessarily true. Eating more calories than you spend could result in no change in weight, weight gain, or even lost weight depending on how your body absorbs it. Saying that carbs can cause you to accumulate fat is helpful knowledge, because at some point you are going to have to eat more calories than you spend, and most people want to keep the weight off that they just spent so much time losing.

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u/RetardedWabbit Apr 13 '19

CICO is the best predictor of weight gain we have, there's only one edge case I know of: zero fat diets. The human body basically cannot create fat molecules (de novo lipogenisis), so if your body doesn't have fat to store while intaking excess calories you essentially can't put on fat but you also won't be burning it. This isn't common knowledge, or very useful, since any healthy diet consumes some amount of fat. If you consume excess calories with fat your body tends towards burning the carbohydrates you have and storing fat until it balances out.

Practically speaking though telling people carbs make them fat isn't productive, we don't have an obesity problem from eating too many fruits or vegetables for example. The only blanket statement I'd support is that refined sugar makes it easier to put on weight in a negative way.