Every time there is some discussion about weight here, somebody will come with the whole "there is no good or bad food, calories in/out is the only thing that matters" argument. And while technically correct it's also overly symplistic. The whole point about "bad" (processed) foods is that they make it very easy to take in a lot of calories without feeling sated.
Take an apple or orange juice for example. To eat the equivalent amount of fructose (or calories) that is contained in an orange juice, you will need to eat a lot of fruit, and like feel full before finishing, while the equivalent juice doesn't even register.
Anyone who says only calories matter should try tracking their calories, then eating processed food one day, unprocessed the next. If you stick to the same total calories, you’ll be very hungry the first day.
Obvious answer to this is that if you create overly simple model of human body so that you can apply the easiest law available without thinking, then you are not trying to deduce off laws of physics.
Some people are hungry all the time regardless, so it doesn’t matter that much whether you’re hungry after you ate healthy unprocessed foods, or hungry after you ate sugary junk food.
I do think there’s a difference, though, between processed and unprocessed foods. My guess is that your body can extract more of the calories from highly processed foods than it can from unprocessed foods, or that extracting the calories from unprocessed foods takes more work, burning calories in itself.
I'd rather say that the cause of weight gain is excess calories, the cause of weight loss is a calorie deficit. To achieve a change in weight requires a change in calorie intake. How one can achieve that calorie intake is obviously more complicated than just changing calorie intake, because hunger is extremely difficult to ignore.
The goal is changing weight. The immediate means is to change calorie intake. The hard problem is that doing so requires changing hunger, and we don't have a good (safe, cheap, widely available) way to do so.
CICO is necessary to understanding, but is not sufficient. Any proposed solution that doesn't address hunger is bound to fail.
It's more like cars. Different engines have different efficiencies. So filling up a few gallons at the pump will get you less pollution per mile on car A than in car B.
But regardless of the efficiency, if you overfill the tank and the fuel starts to spill on the pavement, that is not going into the milage but straight into the pollution bracket.
The idea that intake is irrelevant is just as ridiculous as the idea that everyone's metabolism is an exact clone.
I stopped drinking fruit juice when, randomly, one day I stopped and thought about how many oranges it takes to make an 8oz. glass of orange juice (and no one drinks 8oz. at a time, it's usually more like 12 or more). And though, "There's no WAY I would ever eat that many oranges in one sitting."
It's not how many calories you put in your mouth and swallow though. It's how many calories get taken in through your digestion system. Gut microbiome likely has an effect on that as well as a few other things.
If I overeat for one meal, then I won't have much appetite for the next. How satiated I feel immediately after eating doesn't matter much, it averages out over time.
One thing that distinguishes me from my obese family is a lifetime of for the most part getting the doctor recommended amount of exercise.
Regardless of how many calories I burn with exercise, I am also training my metabolism.
My metabolism includes feelings of hunger and satiation, as well as cravings for particular foods. It is plenty capable of going out of whack for all kinds of reasons, but my best tool for bringing my metabolism back to a healthy place is a spate of vigorous exercise, and I've relied on that.
If my metabolism were conditioned to be in an unhealthy place over a long period of time then I would have an uphill battle ahead of me to correct it, and I believe many people are stuck in such a situation.
One observation is a growing class divide between the fat and the fit that saw a sharp uptick over the pandemic. Our culture unfortunately is very poor at accommodating healthy activity and getting poorer. Conversely, the national parks the last 2 years summers were mobbed with people who found healthier lifestyle practices during their downtime and were out to challenge themselves.
Fascinating. Japan's caloric intake per capita has declined since the peak in the early 90s. No wonder everybody here is so lean. I'm always shocked when I step off the plane in Germany or the US at how fat everybody is.
Fat taxes. [1] The Western world is/was adopting a fat acceptance mindset, at the same time Japan decided to start fining businesses and governmental regions for having overweight workers/residents.
Fat acceptance? Turn on any form of broadcast media and you are going to be inundated with products/lifestyles/coaching on how you can lose weight to get the body you want.
Random web hit claims 89% of American women are unhappy with their weight[0]
I think capitialism/consumerism have a "double speaking" nature. They want you to believe it's okay to be fat so you buy more food than you need, then they want you to believe it's not okay so they can sell you weight-loss products.
The amazing part is that it works: humans are capable to believe two contradicting things at the same time.
That data is calorie supply, not consumption. It could be true that Japanese consume just as much as ever, but waste slightly less food than they used to.
Fair - and accurate anecdotally. Food waste is something that is way more avoided. Also, portions in restaurants are about 30% the size compared to the US, so a lot of food waste is avoided.
The point is the added calories aren't coming from sugar, contrary to what everyone here thinks. And even if sugar did somehow magically make you fat regardless of calories, sugar consumption has actually gone down, yet the obesity and diabetes epidemics have only gotten worse.
But, body weight increase is going to correspond to the "area under the graph" (the integral) and NOT the current level (the instantaneous value).
Yes, it's nice that we're getting sugar consumption back down to 1970 levels so we don't keep adding more obese people to the cohort, but that doesn't help everybody who gained weight prior to 2020.
From 1995 to 2005, people ate roughly an extra 10 pounds relative to 1970 of bodyweight in sugar every single year. That's an extra 100 pounds in bodyweight over 10 years if you don't adjust something else. That's huge. Literally.
Actually, there is significant research that shows that childhood obesity is an excellent predictor of adulthood obesity. Because sugar drinks made it so easy to take in way too many calories for children and hence became overweight, we now have a big cohort of adults with weight problems.
> Actually, there is significant research that shows that childhood obesity is an excellent predictor of adulthood obesity.
Fact.
> Because sugar drinks made it so easy to take in way too many calories for children and hence became overweight, we now have a big cohort of adults with weight problems.
Once you become a young adult, from that point on the total number of fat cells is conserved. Even liposuction will not change that.
This isn't completely hopeless, though. Fat cells "remember" the weight you are when they are created and fat cells turn over roughly 25% per year. However, it does mean that you need to hold your weight down for 3+ years for new fat cells to forget about the "fatter" you.
Per the data, caloric supply dropped after/during the great recession (2007-2008) to the levels of about 10-20 years prior. Did obesity drop during this period, too?
Edit: It doesn’t appear to have had much effect per the data on the same website [1]. I suppose there are a number of reasons why it might not have had an effect on the top level numbers, though.
1. It dropped to like ‘97 level which was already too high
2. Pretty sure calorie intake is not uniformly distributed so if avg dropped bc some folks went from 5000kcal to 4000kcal a day it’s not going to reduce overall obesity rate
Calories absorbed vs calories expended is physics, but it doesn't explain why people are storing more calories over time.
The idea that all calories are the same is not even held by people who say "everything is just about calories". Ask them what you need to build muscle and they will say protein. Suddenly not all calories are the same.
Fructose is does not stop hunger as much and is more easily stored as fat.
Dietary fat is even more easily stored as fat, since it doesn't require the added step of de novo lipogenesis (DNL) like carbohydrate does, or the added steps of gluconeogenesis + DNL as protein does. And go look up recent photos of Lustig: he's fat (bordering on obese) himself.
>Robert Lustig: I carry a few extra pounds and I’m not happy about it. I don’t eat sugar.
>Alec Baldwin: You don’t.
>Robert Lustig: No. I have dessert twice a year. When I’m in New York I have a piece of Junior’s cheesecake and when I’m in New Orleans I have bread pudding -
Notice his twice yearly dessert sugar indulgences are high in fat.
> If dietary fat is more easily stored as fat,
You seriously believe your body preferentially uses de novo lipogenesis to convert carbohydrate to fat (which entails some energy loss) rather than just storing fat as fat? DNL on a typical mixed macro diet is rare, to the point that something like 90% of your bodyfat came from fat you ate, and the fatty acid profile of your body mirrors that of your diet: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12324287/
Even in low-carb circles, this is tacitly acknowledged now by warning against eating meat from animals fed a high-PUFA diet, like poultry.
I'm not saying overeating carbs won't make you fat, but arguing that it somehow makes you fatter, calorie-for-calorie, than fat is ridiculous considering that eventually your body runs out of fat and has to use DNL (which is inefficient), and that fats require the least energy for your body to digest of any macro.
> why do keto diets work?
They don't, at least not any better than low-fat diets. They seem to work better initially because keto dieters lose a lot more weight early, but that weight is disproportionately fat-free mass, i.e., water, glycogen, and probably at least some lean body mass (muscle and bone density). See the graph on p. 4 of Kevin Hall's NIH study comparing the diets:
Notice his twice yearly dessert sugar indulgences are high in fat.
If it was only twice a year why would it matter at all? He also might drink alchohol, but the point he was making was not that you can't get fat unless you eat sugar, it was to explain the systemic rise of obesity.
These two things are completely different.
You seriously believe
I don't 'seriously believe' anything, I was just asking for evidence, which seems to make you upset. Your link also doesn't back up what you are saying, it is only says "Adipose tissue is a suitable biomarker of dietary fatty acid intake"
Even in low-carb circles, this is tacitly acknowledged now by warning against eating meat from animals fed a high-PUFA diet, like poultry.
Says who? This is another claim you aren't backing up.
They don't, at least not any better than low-fat diets.
You should tell that to thousands of people that post non stop about their 50-150 pound weight losses while exclusively doing keto diets.
Also you seem to be saying a high fat diet and low fat diet work the same, but then you're also trying to say that fat is treated differently by your body.
* They seem to work better initially because keto dieters lose a lot more weight early, but that weight is disproportionately fat-free mass,*
Anyone who looks at a keto forum like /r/keto can see that that isn't true. People slim down to half their weight, that isn't 'water and glycogen'.
Calories are equivalent to joules. Diesel fuel has lots of calories, but you probably won't get fat drinking it. (The human body can't process diesel fuel.)
Alcohol is also very caloric, and the human body can process small amounts of it. But replacing cola with alcohol won't have the expected effect either.
What is the expected effect here? Are you saying you can’t gain extra weight by consuming alcohol? Well that is simply not true - you just haven’t applied yourself enough
