I've watched Dr. Lustig's video previously, and in general its the same principles touted by Gary Taubes, but I still find it dubious.
You can look at your patient population and come up with a hypothesis that would make sense from a pure biochemistry perspective, but that's really no different than what the proponents of dietary fat as a cause of heart disease did.
And since when is monitoring people in a controlled lab for a few weeks at a time (likely limiting their physical activity and who knows what kind of stress to the system having your blood drawn every 30 minutes induces) considered valid scientific research when it in no way exemplifies real world situations that people are exposed to.
And sugar is apparently carcinogenic because it can cause an increase in baseline insulin levels as a response, which can drive glucose into potential tumor cells allowing them to grow. That's purely speculative, and very difficult to substantiate when there are so many other reasons for people to develop cancer: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/health/research/red-meat-l...
Personally, I'm still convinced that a calorie is a calorie. And the reason we've been gaining weight, with greater incidence of heart disease, diabetes, etc. is that we simply consume too much food, perhaps too much processed food, but in general we just eat too much.
So eat less, and the best way is to consume small portions of food multiple times a day instead of large meals with large gaps in between. Trust me, it works.
It's true that you don't lose weight without caloric deficit. But while a calorie equals a calorie, the body reacts differently to fast calories and slow calories: a steady supply of blood sugar, vs. spikes and troughs. This affects feedback loops of insulin, satiety, etc., prompting people to overeat.
Side note: I'm really looking forward to future biofeedback tech. It'd be interesting to know my blood sugar level and heart rate at all times.
> Side note: I'm really looking forward to future biofeedback tech. It'd be interesting to know my blood sugar level and heart rate at all times.
It's a neat idea, and I'd enjoy collecting all that data too.
Would this data be useful for researchers? Or is it just too much information?
And there are risks of knowing too much about your body. People can develop anxiety illnesses (such as hypochondria, which has unfortunate popular connotations but in severe forms can be distressing and expensive) when they become too aware of their heartbeat, for example. See also full body MRI scans which are pointless unless you have an idea of what you're looking for.
Preaching to the choir, I've been paleo for three months and lost almost 40 lbs. I'm just talking about the physics involved: caloric energy used vs. caloric energy consumed. If you could measure them perfectly, there would be a loss.
> If you could measure them perfectly, there would be a loss
Again, how do you know?
Below someone says diet follows the laws of thermodynamics. That's hogwash. While our bodies certainly follow all laws of physics, that has nothing to do with diet.
We are perfectly capable of expelling unconsumed dietary energy.
Thermodynamics doesn't govern diet so much as it does everything in the known universe. ;) But I'll admit that my statement is merely a highly probable assumption. If fat doesn't leave based on burning it for energy, where does it go?
This is widely believed but not true or supported by scientific evidence. Have a look at Gary Taubes "Good Calories, Bad Calories" for a rundown on much of the relevant research.
It's thermodynamics. Living takes energy, and that energy needs to come from somewhere. We can't photosynthesize energy, and we can't get it from air or water. So if there's not enough energy in food to sustain our body's processes, then it must come from stores in the body (fat).
Weight loss only reduces to simple thermodynamics if the body is functionally equivalent to a coal furnace. It turns out metabolism is more subtle than that.
There are subtleties to nutrition and weight loss, of course. But let's say you stopped eating, and you didn't just die: do you think it's somehow possible to NOT lose body mass?
I didn't read the book but I wonder if what the scientific evidence concludes isn't necessarily the refutation of that equation, but rather that it's more complicated than x-y=z. For example, foods that require a bit more energy to consume such as foods high in fiber.
I mean, calories are just a unit of measure for energy, so if you consume energy, it must go somewhere, either expended or stored in the body. What happens if the body lacks the energy for its processes...doesn't it then burn fat? If you turn fat into energy, that means less mass in the form of fat, with the excess energy dissipating into heat. Isn't this just physics?
Yeah, Taubes' main point (simplified) is that your muscle and organ cells are pretty good at burning fat, unless you eat lots of carbohydrates, which releases insulin, which will tell your body to stow away any fat that's in your bloodstream instead of burning it. So while consumed - burned = loss is still true, eating a diet that is high on carbs will reduce the amount of calories you burn from the same caloric intake.
Carbohydrates also have the added problem of making your blood sugar swing, which leads to hunger pangs and bigger appetites.
Paradoxically, it's not fat that makes you fat, it's hormones and pasta/rice/potatoes/bread/sugar because they mess with those hormones.
If your body wants more energy, it will find a way to get it, either by inducing you to overeat, or by making you less active. So fixing your hormone balance (specifically insulin levels) is more effective than trying to control your food intake.
Of course, the fact that many restaurants and diners in the US serve really big portions, that most of us don't do a lot of exercise, that we have very easy access to high-calorie foods, that the food industry precision-engineers foodstuffs to be addictive... all of that surely doesn't help, but if Taubes is correct those environmental factors are not the chief cause of obesity.
It's not that they're good at burning fat, it's that they require more energy to operate. They will get that energy from anywhere they can, be it from diet, stored energy in the form of fat cells, or protein in the form of muscles.
Don't anthropomorphize the constituant parts of the anthropos.
Also, if your body wants more energy, it's for a reason, and that reason is that the processes of maintaining life require it. And yes, it will get it, but not by making you less active - that's the tail wagging the dog. You're less active in that case because your body can't support the activity rate without burning more calories.
I think the best way I managed to wrap my head around the refutation of that is this: First off, some foods make you hungrier so you consume more calories. People have a very strong tendency to eat when they're hungry. The might be able to put that aside for a short while (dieting) but its' very hard to combat in the long run
Secondly, it has to do with how the body stores fat. Eating fast carbs produces insulin which signals the body to store fat in larger amounts than low/slow carb.
It's a pity that the caloric model is so entrenced when really it's the least useful one.
Really, it's not rocket science,stop eating white foods, don't drink calories, eat quality meat and veggies,and your set.
Me too. Just spent 8 weeks on a low carb diet and lost 17 pounds so far. Calories do not factor into it. Low carbs and low sugar intake lead to weight loss.
I don't think a skinny guy who eats junk food proves anything. I believe that ukdm's position is not that calories are entirely irrelevant, just that if you focus on low carbs and low sugar, then counting calories in practice doesn't matter.
> I have a reply to your McLuhan comment, but I've been too busy/lazy to have typed it out yet.
Haha, that's beautiful. Better get it out of your head before the idea half-life expires. ;)
Allow to me say pre-emptively that the Myers-Brigg abstraction is relevant to the medium/message issue. People inclined towards [P]erception can are more likely to suss out the author's intent regardless of how it is transmitted; people who lean [S]ensory are more likely to influenced by the subjective experience of the idea's packaging.
Personally, I'm still convinced that a calorie is a calorie.
According to this New York Times article[1], a calorie is not always a calorie:
A food isn’t a food — they’re all different — but since a calorie is just a measurement of energy, how can it vary? When I asked my question, Nestle’s answer was confounding: “Yes and no,” she said, adding, “It’s Talmudic.” Because calories change as they enter the body, the nine grams for fat and four for everything else turn out to be not very accurate measures at all; besides, foods are only rarely one thing or another.
Here’s what is true, she said: “The studies that have measured calorie intake, that have put people on calorie-reduced diets and measured what happened, show no difference in weight loss based on composition of the diet.” When people are essentially incarcerated, when all intake is weighed and measured, they will lose weight if the calories in their diets are reduced — regardless of the composition of the diet.
She spends a long time attacking the research. Really her problem is with how science is reported.
It's frustrating that she takes quotes from the BBC R4 Programme 'Today' out of context. John Humphries is an idiot and has no clue about interviewing technical people. The researchers were careful not to overplay the research.
Even though this is epidemiology and not a double blind controlled study the results are pretty clear; the research was good quality.
Here's what the research said. (She quotes this.)
> “Unprocessed and processed red meat intakes were associated with an increased risk of total, CVD, and cancer mortality in men and women in the age-adjusted and fully adjusted models. When treating red meat intake as a continuous variable, the elevated risk of total mortality in the pooled analysis for a 1-serving-per-day increase was 12% for total red meat, 13% for unprocessed red meat, and 20% for processed red meat.”
This is a calm, cautious, undramatic statement.
The problem is that risk is presented as a percentage, and most people have no idea what that means to their life expectancy; or how to compare that risk to other things.
Check my math, but I think the above figures mean a decrease of one year in life expectancy over 80 years. Eg: compare Bob who doesn't eat too much red meat who lives to 80 with the same Bob who does eat too much red meat who lives to 79. (But risks unpleasant medical treatment that decreases quality of life.)
There's a lot more wrong with how the data was interpreted, not to mention the hyperbolic statements made by the researchers themselves.
"The statistics are staggering," study author Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public health, told us. "The increased risk is really substantial."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/03/12/148457233/death-...
That statement alone is absolutely contra-calm/cautious/undramatic.
The fact that this was an observational study based on a food frequency questionnaire is dubious as well. It's well established that participants underreport foods that are perceived as being "bad" for them and overreport things that society says are "good."
"Foods underestimated by the FFQs compared with the diet records (ie, the gold standard) included processed meats, eggs, butter, high-fat dairy products, mayonnaise and creamy salad dressings, refined grains, and sweets and desserts, whereas most of the vegetable and fruit groups, nuts, high-energy and low-energy drinks, and condiments were overestimated by the FFQs."
http://www.ajcn.org/content/69/2/243.full
Personally, I'm still convinced that a calorie is a calorie
Do you believe that a person can subsist only on mayonnaise?
According to this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+mayonnaise, it seems that 50 tablespoons of mayo will get you around 2500 calories, so that should be enough calories per day, right?
Your answer might be "no, you also need vitamins". So suppose I add to this hypothetical experiment the daily recommended intake of vitamins through pills (and similarly for other things, like fiber). Would the hypothetical subject live, according to your estimation?
What a curious reply. Obviously a person needs more than calories to live. Protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals, and water are all essential to life. Dietary fibre is pretty handy, but being indigestible is not counted as a nutrient.
I'm not sure I understand your reply:
Protein: OK, add to the hypothetical experiment enough protein shakes.
Carbohydrates: their inclusion in your list seems to suggest that a calorie is not a calorie, in the sense that one can't substitute all one's carbohydrates with fats, as long as the calories add up to the same amount. Right?
Fats: Mayonnaise has quite a lot of fat.
Vitamins, minerals: Take enough pills of those.
Water: OK, drink water as much as you want.
Would a person living on this diet be healthy? If not, and we controlled all the non-caloric variables, does that mean that the premise that "a calorie is a calorie" is false?
And since when is monitoring people in a controlled lab for a few weeks at a time (likely limiting their physical activity and who knows what kind of stress to the system having your blood drawn every 30 minutes induces) considered valid scientific research when it in no way exemplifies real world situations that people are exposed to. And sugar is apparently carcinogenic because it can cause an increase in baseline insulin levels as a response, which can drive glucose into potential tumor cells allowing them to grow. That's purely speculative, and very difficult to substantiate when there are so many other reasons for people to develop cancer: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/health/research/red-meat-l...
Personally, I'm still convinced that a calorie is a calorie. And the reason we've been gaining weight, with greater incidence of heart disease, diabetes, etc. is that we simply consume too much food, perhaps too much processed food, but in general we just eat too much. So eat less, and the best way is to consume small portions of food multiple times a day instead of large meals with large gaps in between. Trust me, it works.