Why the Calorie Is Broken (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Nutrition is a subject for which everybody should understand the basics. Unfortunately, this is hard. Not only is there a ton of conflicting research about how to properly fuel your body, there's a multi-billion-dollar industry with financial incentive to muddy the waters. Further, one of the most basic concepts for how we evaluate food — the calorie — is incredibly imprecise. "Wilbur Atwater, a Department of Agriculture scientist, began by measuring the calories contained in more than 4,000 foods. Then he fed those foods to volunteers and collected their faeces, which he incinerated in a bomb calorimeter. After subtracting the energy measured in the faeces from that in the food, he arrived at the Atwater values, numbers that represent the available energy in each gram of protein, carbohydrate and fat. These century-old figures remain the basis for today's standards."

In addition to the measuring system being outdated, the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person. Differences in metabolism and digestive efficiency add sizable error bars. Then there are issues with serving sizes and preparation methods. Research is now underway to find a better measure of food intake than the calorie. One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods.

Comments

Not the Calories fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA "Nash uses an app to record the calories he consumes and a Fitbit band to track the energy he expends."

Is it possible that the Calorie is just fine and maybe using some cheap piece of electronics strapped to your wrist is just a really piss poor way to track the energy expended?

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[Drethon]

That or the calorie count on the food he consumes is not as accurate to each person as it should be?

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[bickerdyke]

But this leaves us still with the other piss poor (or - learning about its history - rather literally shitty) method used on the other end of the equation: we can't say how much of the available energy (and here the calories are indeed fine) are actually processed and absorbed by the human body as this varies. (Hint: it's not 100% as there is still energy left in the digestive waste products)

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the Calorie is pretty well defined. 1 Calorie = 1kcal = 1000 calories, with 1 calorie defined as the amount of energy it takes to heat up 1 ml of water 1 degree C. If that's broken, then so is the joule. Now if the number on the side of the box is wrong, that's believable. If they're consuming more then the serving size without realizing it, that's believable (seriously, this small package contains 2.5 servings?). Different peoples digestive systems operate at different efficiencies, thus different people get a different amount of energy out of the food, that's believable. And it's well known the amount of energy you burn depends on your amount of activity and the amount of muscle you have which means that wearing a fitbit to track your energy expenditure is almost certainly worthless. Considering all those things on why losing weight isn't so easy to put into a simple mathematical formula still doesn't imply that the calorie is broken. It does it's job of measuring energy just fine.

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[sFurbo]

we can't say how much of the available energy (and here the calories are indeed fine) are actually processed and absorbed by the human body as this varies. (Hint: it's not 100% as there is still energy left in the digestive waste products)

The fact that it is not 100% is well known. The method you decry as "piss poor" explicitly takes this into account by measuring the energy content of the faeces. It might still be a piss poor method due to inter-personal variation, or even variation over time in the same person.

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article; they explain really well why it is broken. A synopsis:

1) We don't actually get the same amount of energy from food as burning that food does. (burning in a calorimeter is how they determine calorie count).
2) You can take the same food - say a steak - and serve it different ways (for example rare versus well done) and have it provide a totally different number of calories like 300 for rare and 600 for well done because of how more heating breaks the cell walls and makes more energy available to your body.
3) Some people's intestinal flora extract extra energy for them from the undigested food and other people's does not.

It makes for a very inexact measure when applied to people.

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[Deadstick]

Two units, one 1000x the other, distinguished only by capitalization...WTF does it take to call something broken?

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's the calories fault how? No, the calorie is an excellent starting point. It by itself is not sufficient, I agree, as my post clearly states, or at least I feel it clearly states. But knowing what the potential intake is must be the starting point. You can then apply all the inefficiencies from that point. But the starting point MUST be what the maximum potential energy in the food is. Trying to claim that portion is broken is just....I don't know what. And the calorie works fine for that. If you prefer the joule, then fine, but it has all the same problems as the calorie. Now, if you're a fool and don't realize that things like your own metabolism don't play a factor, well, that's a different argument, and again is in no way the fault of the calorie.

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only done that way in the US. This is a great example of a situation where Europe's adoption of SI prefixes on everything has helped with readability. The capital-C-Calorie is the same as the kilocalorie, or kcal.

If you want to point fingers at broken stuff, point at the US government agencies responsible for this: FDA (regulating food) and the FTC (regulating packaging). They've been broken for decades, especially the FDA. They most likely prevent food products from being labeled in "kcal" and insist on it being labeled in "Calories".

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[parkinglot777]

And if you really think of what TFA is saying, you would see that TFA is missing the point completely.

The TFA actually explained itself as misinterpreting. The first 2 examples from 2 people (Nash & Tara) in TFA already demonstrate the misunderstanding/mistake. Nash is using "Fitbit", which is NOT an accurate device or software, to determine intake and outtake of calories, and he assumes that the device/software is correct. Tara, has the right idea that intake and outtake could be used to determine the gain or loss, but she over simplifies the situation. The intake should be from eating subtract waste. Outtake could be varied from one to others. She has no way to accurately measure intake/outtake calories. I bet she use intake calories by a standard table or on product labels, and outtake from another standard exercise/activity table. Standard tables are correct in their own way, but not a one-side-fit-all solution. Product labels are questionable accurate. Therefore, both of them are misinterpreting how to control calories.

Think of calorie system as a tool. It is for you to apply how you use it. There is no FIXed way of application for everybody. TFA, however, takes unqualified examples (misuse of the tool) and uses them to support its hypothesis that calorie system is broken. Actually, the intention of what TFA said has nothing to do with those unqualified examples. This is misleading and an attempt to make news in public. People should move on...

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[angel'o'sphere]

Considering that all your definitions are wrong, obviously the "Calorie" is broken.

First of all the "Calorie" in any scientific way of measurement: does not exist

Now back to the "definition": 1000 _kalories_ is what is needed to heat one kg (1l ^= 1000ml) of water from 14.5 degree celsius to 15.5 (which is quite different than the amount for e.g. from 1 degree celsius to 2 degrees)

Yes I'm nitpicking, but it is important that the base is 1 LITER (^= 1000 liter) not 1 ml. More important is the temperature range (which often was changed in history).

Back to the "Calorie", that is basically a mistake of layman magazines mixing up "kalories" with "kilo kalories", which would later be internationally named "kilo calories". So now we have "Calories" and "calories" which makes reading an english text about "C/calories" unreadable as you need quite a lot of basic knowledge to grasp when there is a typo, or a generic misunderstanding about which of which is which.

However if we talk about nutrition we can safely assume if numbers are in the "thousands" range (1000 ... 8000) we are talking about "kilo calories", which is a bit strange, isn't it? As "kilo" means thousand. So we us a "measure" that is already "scaled by a kilo" to measure stuff that is still "in the thousands".

In other words, an average human burns about 2 Giga calories which is 2 kilo Calories which is equivalent to 2000 Calories ... did you notice the slight change in spelling from c to C?

Of course your comments about "feeding value" are right.

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[Obfuscant]

They've been broken for decades, especially the FDA. They most likely prevent food products from being labeled in "kcal" and insist on it being labeled in "Calories".

It really doesn't matter if you call it a Calorie or a Floogle or a Blortch. It's a reference value. It's an invented unit. There is nothing physically magic about raising the temperature of one cc of water one degree C. Had the circumference of the earth been larger or smaller, the calorie (and Calorie) would have been larger or smaller, too. Had the creator of the centigrade scale not tied 0 and 100 to freezing/boiling, the calorie would be different.

What's important is using it as a reference value. If you eat a 2000 Calorie diet and can't lose weight, cut back to 1500. It doesn't matter how big a calorie is. You know that 1500 is 3/4 of 2000. It doesn't matter what the efficiency of your digestive system is, cutting intake by 25% is still cutting intake by 25%.

Anyone who sees the proclamation that a normal adult male requires a 2000 Calorie diet, and then thinks "well, my digestive system is 50% efficient, and my intestinal flora help add back 10%, and I always eat my steak well done so that doubles things", and then goes through the twisty little maze of passages, all alike, to determine "I must eat 3284 Calories per day" is a moron.

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[Obfuscant]

In other words, an average human burns about 2 Giga calories which is 2 kilo Calories which is equivalent to 2000 Calories ...

Hmmm. 2000 Calories is 2000 * 1000 calories, which would be 2 megacalories.

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[niftymitch]

Read the article; they explain really well why it is broken. A synopsis:

1) We don't actually get the same amount of energy from food as burning that food does. ....
It makes for a very inexact measure when applied to people.

I just did some math.
I could get fat as heck by eating raw (paleo) unpolished
diamonds over and over and over.

Dr. Google tells me:
for the combustion of 12 grams of carbon to 44 grams of carbon dioxide:
Diamond (1). - 93,240 calories; Diamond (2). - 94.650 calories; Natural graphite - 93,560 calories;

Clearly I do not need to eat that much diamond... about 5 ct per gram, 5ct at the large meal
of the day for +7000 calories.

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[AK Marc]

What's important is using it as a reference value. If you eat a 2000 Calorie diet and can't lose weight, cut back to 1500. It doesn't matter how big a calorie is. You know that 1500 is 3/4 of 2000. It doesn't matter what the efficiency of your digestive system is, cutting intake by 25% is still cutting intake by 25%.

But that's not how it works. I may digest that 1500 Calories at 100% efficiency, but the 2000 Calories are digested at 50% efficiency, so cutting calories may increase weight gain. The body can go into "starvation" mode and slows down the metabolism and increases efficiency as calories drop. And the "Calorie" is about the energy content of the food, and isn't strictly nutritional energy, though some use that, especially diet foods designed to mimic tastes while being undigestible.

There are many reasons why a person could cut caloric intake, and still end up gaining weight.

Re:Not the Calories fault?

[AK Marc]

And Giga should not be capitalized, "G" as the prefix should be capitalized, but when spelling it all out, it should be used in lower case. For someone who was complaining about the capitalization of Calories, one would expect him to be paying attention to capitalization.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[stealth_finger]

Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet and getting exercise?

What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the point being made in the article is questioning what is a balanced diet. You make it sound like some scenario out of The Sims games. It's much more complex than that. Whatever happened to people on Slashdot actually taking a more scientific look at things instead of flippant remarks that sound like a Facebook meme?

Stupid headline

[Tx]

I don't see how any of that stuff makes the calorie "broken". Sure, "Differences in metabolism and digestive efficiency add sizable error bars." etc etc. Gasoline has 30MJ/L of energy, and the fact that cars have different fuel efficiencies doesn't mean that isn't useful data, or that the joule is "broken" either.

Is it really news to anybody that you need to take account of more than just pure calorie intake when monitoring your diet?

Re:Stupid headline

[gstoddart]

No, it's saying that the measure of how much calories is in a given serving of food isn't really a good measure of anything.

And all of those things which say how much calories is in a portion are such bad estimates as to be fairly unreliable, because the methods of measuring it are pretty incomplete and sketchy.

The scientific calorie and the nutritional calorie are different things .. the nutritional calorie is, at best, a wild ass guesstimate.

Re:Stupid headline

[jbmartin6]

The summary is off base also, for the same reason. The calorie isn't any more outdated than the joule. The article does a much better job, talking about exclusively focusing on calories in and out doesn't necessarily work.

Re:Stupid headline

[CastrTroy]

I agree. The Calorie is a useful measurement. If you monitor your health by tracking Calories eaten, weight, and Calories expended then you should be able to control your weight. If your weight is going up, you have few options, reduce your Calorie intake, or increase your calorie expenditure, or some combination of the two. Maybe the numbers on the packaging don't work for you, and you actually get more energy out of the foods you are are eating than what's reported on the label. The fact still holds that if you eat less of the foods then you will be getting fewer calories, and you will be able to lose weight. If you are somehow overestimating how many Calories you are using with exercise and other baseline activities, then you simply need to increase the amount of exercise, and you will burn more calories. The important thing here is to monitor what you are eating, and how much exercise you are doing, and adjust the inputs until you get the desired output. If you aren't monitoring anything then there's no way to tell if you are headed in the right direction

Re:Stupid headline

[rmdingler]

A rough guideline. General nutritional guidelines are like most things, your mileage may vary. It is well established that a fat calorie and a carb calorie behave differently in the body. Hell, glucose and HCFC are treated differently.

Right at the top, it seems likely the nutritional content label would be something of an average or mean over many ears of corn or servings of potatoes.

And every one of us is a little the same and a little different, so there's no universal tenet that works for everyone.

Re:Stupid headline

[omnichad]

If the weight goes up, I eat less. If the weight goes down, I eat more. For all the complexities of it, it really is simple to track.

That only applies if you eat the same thing every day. The quantities you should/can eat for each form of protein, fat, or carbohydrate vary wildly. So eating a little less refined sugar might make a bigger difference than eating a lot less olive oil.

Re:Stupid headline

[aaarrrgggh]

That approach generally works, but it can be hard to maintain a healthy balance if you treat 100 Calories of Coke the same as 100 Calories of steak.

Re:Stupid headline

[gstoddart]

If it were saying those things it might be an interesting article.

Well except that it is saying those things, because calories is highly dependent on how or if you cook something:

Wrangham found that mice fed raw peanuts, for instance, lost significantly more weight than mice fed the equivalent amount of roasted peanut butter. The same effect holds true for meat: there are many more usable calories in a burger than in steak tartare. Different cooking methods matter too. In 2015, Sri Lankan scientists discovered that they could more than halve the available calories in rice by adding coconut oil during cooking and then cooling the rice in the refrigerator.

Wrangham's findings have significant consequences for dieters. If Nash likes his porterhouse steak bloody, for example, he will likely be consuming several hundred calories less than if he has it well-done. Yet the FDA's methods for creating a nutrition label do not for the most part account for the differences between raw and cooked food, or pureed versus whole, let alone the structure of plant versus animal cells. A steak is a steak, as far as the FDA is concerned.

If you can halve the amount of calories in rice, or shave a few hundred calories off steak by how you cook it ... and the FDA only allows one way of listing it, then the way of listing it is fundamentally broken.

It really is a guess, with such a huge margin of error as to be useless.

Re:Stupid headline

[loonycyborg]

Actually calorie IS outdated. Scientific community moved to SI units like joule. The fact that calories instead of joules are used to measure energy stored in food shows that no genuinely new research was done in that area since nineteenth century.

Re:Stupid headline

[pla]

The fact that calories instead of joules are used to measure energy stored in food shows that no genuinely new research was done in that area since nineteenth century.

I know, right? Much like all those silly 19th-century-throwback MPG ratings on cars - Those crazy ol' Hollow-Earthers at Tesla and Toyota might as well measure it in furlongs per hogshead of whale-oil!

/ Okay, MPG actually does suffer from many of the same problems as food calories, but KMPL suffers from exactly the same problems despite using nice modern SI units.

Re:Stupid headline

[omnichad]

my experience is that foods fall into groups - sugars, meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, and so forth - and within a group one food is much the same as another in terms of its Calorie value

From the article:

Wrangham’s findings have significant consequences for dieters. If Nash likes his porterhouse steak bloody, for example, he will likely be consuming several hundred calories less than if he has it well-done.

Re:Stupid headline

[angel'o'sphere]

For 90% of all living beings there is only one easy option: reduce your Calorie intake.
An ordinary human being is not able to increase its Calories spent in any significant way. Or do you want to give up your office job to become an athlete, spending years in training to get down to normal weight and then years in training to become competitive and then years in training to "earn money"?

The amount of energy you can "eat" is easily 10 times you ever can spent with "sports".

Hint: hard working people need 3000 Calories (3000kcal), athletes like cyclists use abut 10000 if they are under "full load". That is roughly a factor of three. Ever looked at a Sumo Tori? They spent as much energy as a cyclist. A cyclist is slim, eating only what he needs to run his bike, less weight is good. Sumo Tori even eat more, they want to gain weight on top of what they spent.

There is no way that an "office worker" or a house wife is increasing his/her energy spent by a factor of 1.5, 2, or even 3.

The next option is to figure if you suffer from bad gut bacteria, actually they are not bad but could help fixing starvation problems. Those bacteria are right now living in cows, but plenty of people are "infected" by them. Hence they digest stuff ordinary people don't digest. So even on a diet of 500 Cal, they actually get 2500 Cal. They digest "fibers". Considered "indigestible" by humans.

Re:Stupid headline

[havana9]

That approach generally works, but it can be hard to maintain a healthy balance if you treat 100 Calories of Coke the same as 100 Calories of steak.

Exactly, this is because in my experience asking and advice to an expert is useful.
A dietician will make a customized diet to mantain an healthy balance, and give you advices.
If someone likes say pizza or risotto, hone has to know that are high calories food and mustn't eaten everyday. If someone likes grilled fennel, way to go, but be aware of dressings, because are low calories food and so on.

Even wine and beer could be a part of an healty diet...

The other important thin is that the bare calories counting isn't useful due the variance on food composition. The calorie consumption is also a very rough estimate and depends on the daily chores. Add to this that the human body react differently on changes of calories intake, so a feedback loop is mandatory. If someone sees the weight going up, one should limit the food intake, otherwise one should increase. Unfortunately the daily body weight has a lot of noise, so one has to mahe at least a weekly mobile mean to extract the trend

Re:Stupid headline

[CastrTroy]

You can definitely make a big dent in your net calories by using exercise, and you don't have to be a professional athlete to do it. Assuming a 2000 calorie diet, that's 14,000 calories a week. I've been working out on a stationary bike this winter, and the training tools say that I burn about 600 calories an hour. Let's assume that estimate is a bit high, and I actually only burn 500 calories per hour. If I do 2, 1 hour sessions per week, I burn an extra 1000 calories. That's 7.4% of my non-workout calorie expenditure.

Sure, you'll have a hard time getting to 2 times the regular energy expenditure with exercise, but eating 2 times your baseline energy requirements is a terrible diet anyway. Exercising can provide you with a little wiggle room for when you want to eat a few extra calories as a treat. Eating only the bare number of calories makes for some pretty uninteresting eating habits. Also, cardiovascular exercise is important for other health reasons. If you just eat the right number of calories and never exercise, you will still be in bad cardiovascular health, and will still suffer health problems because of it.

Re:Stupid headline

[angel'o'sphere]

Many people it significantly more than two times the base line calories.

Burning 500 - 600 Calories per cycling session is pointless if you want to _lose weight_

It might be ok if you already have a diet 'that works' and you only want to 'stay in shape'.

Simply consider: a typical lunch you eat in 30 mins already has two to three times the amount of calories we are talking about.

How many Calories you burn depends on "speed" and "terrain", 600Cal is not unreasonable.

popular simplfying of complex systems fatal

[sittingnut]

"Nutrition is a subject for which everybody should understand the basics. Unfortunately, this is hard. Not only is there a ton of conflicting research about how to properly fuel your body, there's a multi-billion-dollar industry with financial incentive to muddy the waters."

assumptions underlying above statements are flawed.
each body is a highly complex system and varies from one to another. food usually consist in highly complex molecules. to simplify all that to give simple numbers that " everybody should understand" is bound to fail. and research into such complex systems are bound bound to be "conflicting".

path of simplification here is wrong.

Basic science, broken.

[rickb928]

"Then there are issues with serving sizes"

Someone doesn't understand calories.

Re:Basic science, broken.

[CastrTroy]

I think the issue is with how calories are reported on labels and how much people typically eat in a serving. There was a case a while back where certain cola producers were reporting the calories on the label based on a serving size of 100 mL, even though they knew that nobody only drinks part of the can when consuming it. The serving sizes reported on product labels are usually much lower than a person would typically eat, which makes the calorie count of products appear lower. Sure people should just be smart enough to do the math, but is it really too much to ask that food producers use realistic serving sizes?

Re:Basic science, broken.

[flopsquad]

Yeah. As long as we're using modern methods to determine the calorie (energy) content of food now (and not tables of burning poop data from the turn of last century), I see no issue with the calorie itself. Although the "raising the temperature of water" bit is kinda contrived, torching a cheeseburger is going to release energy measurable in 4.2 kilojoule increments. Complaining that bigger portion size messes with the amount of available energy is... not the calorie's fault?

Though I agree with the author that the most reasonable replacement for the calorie as a nutritional tool will be detailed, ongoing chemical analysis of each person's internal chemistry, customizable gut bacteria, and nanobots that zap fatty molecules with tiny pew pew lasers.

Re:Basic science, broken.

[angel'o'sphere]

Someone does not understand service sizes?

In Europe it is required to write the "Calories" per 100gram.

I see plenty of American products with "this contains X Calories" in total, or as ... "this contains Y Calories per potion" if serviced as 4 potions on the label.

That is misleading labeling and has nothing to do with understanding [c|C]alories.

Re:Basic science, broken.

[angel'o'sphere]

Yeah. As long as we're using modern methods to determine the calorie (energy) content of food now (and not tables of burning poop data from the turn of last century), I see no issue with the calorie itself. Although the "raising the temperature of water"
Actually the data from a century ago is exactly the same as today, why should it be otherwise?

Re:Basic science, broken.

[Obfuscant]

Sure people should just be smart enough to do the math, but is it really too much to ask that food producers use realistic serving sizes?

What's a "realistic serving size"? What's realistic for you might be terribly small for me, and vice versa.

Yes, you could demand "per container" numbers, but then most people would still have to divide to get the "real" number.

What should be fixed is the odd situation where one container of a product can say "zero calories" and another, different sized one will say "5 calories".

Re:Basic science, broken.

[Obfuscant]

or as ... "this contains Y Calories per potion" if serviced as 4 potions on the label. That is misleading labeling and has nothing to do with understanding [c|C]alories.

"Calories per serving: 200. Servings per container: 3." How is this misleading? Eat the whole package and you have, umm, log 200 plus log 3, ten to that number ... 603.93521 Calories. Easy peazy.

It's not meant to be incredibly precise or accurate. It's like the ballpark "pi equals 22/7". Good enough for lots of uses, ans especially good enough when you consider all the other factors that modify nutrition and diet.

Re:Basic science, broken.

[flopsquad]

So I was talking about measuring today's foods today (which they of course do).

As for the "poop tables", even the Atwater stuff still in use today is not without controversy. There are a bunch of assumptions, generalizations, weightings, empirically derived coefficients, etc. that are subject to debate and may not reflect current dietary realities.

No knock to a pioneering food scientist. Just that the data, subjects, and methodology are probably not exactly the same as today.

Re:Basic science, broken.

[russotto]

Eat the whole package and you have, umm, log 200 plus log 3, ten to that number ... 603.93521

Nice try, robot, but humans do not multiply that way.

Re:Basic science, broken.

[Obfuscant]

Whoosh. Humans do make jokes, though. Like pretending that multiplying 200 by 3 is a really complicated task that takes logarithms and stuff. It must be, if labeling a package with such trivially easy numbers to multiply is "misleading".

Re:Basic science, broken.

[angel'o'sphere]

It is missleading as every single seller of any product can simply shift the numbers as he wants.

In Europe every package is required to have the Calories mentioned by 100g or 1kg.

So two packages of cheese look completely comparable, not one with 4 service potions of 80g with 300 Calories each and the other one with 5 service potions of 60g each with 250 Calories.

Sorry, if you can not grasp that for a mere housewife it makes no sense that she has to calculate this back and forth in her mind just to judge what to buy (and probably the price per kg for each of the packages ...) ...

There is a reason that all vendors mention for cars miles/gallon or l/100km and don't use arbitrary distances and speeds.

Re:Terrible article

[bickerdyke]

They apply more than you understood:

We can't use 100% of the chemical energy available in food. So it has to be a lower number. And there is no indication why that efficiency should NOT be individual.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[serviscope_minor]

What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.

They then also claim BMI is innacurate because "it doesn't take into account muscle mass". Yeah, you might have some obscure medical thing that makes your body inexplicably pile on muscle as you scoff biscuits from your office chair, just like 99% of the rest of the overweight population, really.

The basics haven't changed

[petes_PoV]

If we're talking about obesity, then it's still a case of you only get fat if you eat too much. And here (for those who haven't already clicked Reply and are starting an argument) "too much" means more than your body needs to function, for however much or little exercise you take.

If your weight is increasing and you don't want it to: either exercise more to burn off the excess, or eat less. That is independent of whatever unit of energy you use - or the accuracy of the food labeling.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[omnichad]

Eat "less" is the part that's in question. how much less to eat depends entirely on what type of calorie you are eating (specific types of fat, protein, or carbohydrate). Cutting out the soda but not cutting out the ribeye steak might make a lot bigger difference than the converse, even if they are the same decrease in overall calories. And there are some arguments that decreasing carbohydrates and increasing fat intake and overall consuming more calories can still result in weight loss (or at least no additional gain), depending on individual biology.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[epine]

Yes, but nobody who studies nutrition in the 21st century gives a flying fuck about the back of a torn business card energy-balance calculation, because food consumption patterns are tied to human behaviour and performance in a hundred other ways and most people wish to lose weight more for vanity than actual health reasons, while also continuing to cope with life stress—does anyone even take a shit any more without consulting their iDevice?—and maybe even dream a little in their spare moments.

Oh, look, scope creep! People wish to lose weight without becoming lethargic, depressed, and antisocial.

I think it's time for you to pony up, buddy, and replace that 19th century torn business card with a proper recycled-fibre-only cafeteria napkin. Step by step, century by century, deep down in my innermost heart of hearts I'm sure you can someday join the now-happening conversation.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[bobbied]

Still, using calories to measure and "eat less" works as well as anything else out there. Assuming you don't change your diet content or buy different foods, eating less calories will lower the available energy going into your body and lower your weight gain. Further, if you do change the mix of your diet, using the calorie to evaluate what it might do to your weight is a good place to start (Atkins followers aside) in that it generally captures the most important metric about food's energy content available to your body and is thus useful as a tool...

The humble calorie has the advantage of being simple and generally effective as a measuring tool in every day life. Now if you want to start into a thermodynamic analysis of an operating human to 3 decimal places or make radical changes to your diet like the Adkins folks do, yea it's got issues. But we have known that for a long time..

Re:The basics haven't changed

[omnichad]

The study indicates that something as simple as cooking a steak to well done instead of eating it medium rare can result in a difference in a hundred or more bioavailable calories. We're not talking about 3 decimal places here.

Eating less is a useless metric alone. Because without satiety you are going to have far less success. Consuming more calories, but fewer that your body will actually use will mean that you won't be hungry and you still lose weight. And some of the foods you're eating don't necessarily need to be cut - maybe they need to make up a bigger portion of your diet. And not everyone eats a only small variety of food, so that complicates things even more.

I think you need to actually read the article before you speak about something you know nothing about.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[bobbied]

Still, the fact is the Calorie with it's inherent limitations and provisos is simple and easy for the consumer to understand and it works well enough. There isn't going to be any system that really captures the individual diversity between humans anyway, so saying "eat less Calories and loose weight" is usually good enough.

Any system that goes into enough detail to distinguish between a rare and well done slice of meat is likely to be too complicated for everyday consumer use. The Calorie is hard enough for many..

Re:The basics haven't changed

[omnichad]

The fact that the calorie is "easy" is meaningless if it doesn't actually provide any information you need to know. You don't just go from eating a 300g portion of chicken and a 60g portion of broccoli to eating a 200g portion of chicken and a 40g serving of broccoli. For one, you'll just end up hungry and more likely to fail. And if you decide to eat different foods to get the most satiety out of your more limited calorie budget, you're going to be comparing apple calories to orange calories. For another, the human diet is a lot more diverse than the same entree and vegetable for every meal.

I'm not suggesting an alternative, as that's a much harder job, but knowing how many degrees you can warm up water by incinerating the food is not that useful either.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[AmiMoJo]

While everything you say is technically correct, it ignores an important reality. People's bodies burn calories at different rates, and their bodies generate powerful feelings of hunger at different rates, and their bodies are more or less capable of exercising than the average. Food manufacturers are also really good at making food that encourages you to over-eat, and not everyone has the time to prepare their own meals.

Obesity is more than just a failure to do basic arithmetic or a lack of willpower. The only way we are going to fix it is to recognize that. We tried just telling people to eat less and exercise more for decades, and it didn't work. On the other hand medical procedures like faecal transplants do seem to work, as well as forcing food manufacturers to change their products.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[bobbied]

The Calorie may not tell you DIRECTLY what you need to know, but neither does your gas gauge in your car. The Calorie just gives you a basic idea of the relative energy in something you eat compared to something else you may choose to consume. Much like the gas gauge just tells you it's not time to worry (when it's showing near full) or it IS time to worry about finding a gas station (when it's approaching empty). What you REALLY want to know is how much gas is in the tank and more importantly, how far can you get down the road before the car stops running.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[omnichad]

The Calorie just gives you a basic idea of the relative energy in something you eat compared to something else you may choose to consume

Except it doesn't. It doesn't even give you relative energy between more and less cooked versions of the same food in the same portions.

From the article:

Wrangham’s findings have significant consequences for dieters. If Nash likes his porterhouse steak bloody, for example, he will likely be consuming several hundred calories less than if he has it well-done.

The calorie is fundamentally broken as a dietary tool. Relative energy is only useful on the large scale at best. Like steak vs. broccoli.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[bobbied]

If you try to introduce a system that varies the net affect of the same portion of the same food that was cooked longer/shorter, few people will be able to actually make use of it or keep track of all the detailed variances. The Calorie may be imperfect as a measuring tool, but it's effective in conveying information about what might be a bad food choice for somebody concerned about their weight. Which is the point here isn't it? If you propose a system where 8 oz of Prime Rib has X energy when rare and Y energy when well done, most won't bother with the detail, average the two numbers and use that anyway.

Re: The basics haven't changed

[omnichad]

You're missing the point. This isn't just about using out as an effective weight loss tool.

When steak is arguably better for weight loss than chicken, but only when cooked a certain way, you're only getting a false sense of security by generalizing or averaging. The difference between 400 calories and 700 calories (e.g.) is huge and not something you can just average away. We're going to need to rewrite the whole concept of eating less and hope we find a good way of doing it.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[angel'o'sphere]

Wranghamâ(TM)s findings have significant consequences for dieters. If Nash likes his porterhouse steak bloody, for example, he will likely be consuming several hundred calories less than if he has it well-done.
Yeah, and this is wrong on two accords:
a) he will "consume" the same amount of energy, the only question is: how much "more?/less?" energy does the body need to "digest" this exact same amount of energy
b) I really doubt that the difference in energy _consumable_ between "rare meat" and "well cooked meat" is that big

Even if I'm wrong with b, the wording of the citation is simply wrong.

Re: The basics haven't changed

[angel'o'sphere]

When steak is arguably better for weight loss than chicken,
It most certainly is not.
Why should it? Both is meat. The Calories in meat does not vary between specimen enough to warrant any significant difference in diet.
Perhaps you want to say a steak usually is kinda fat free and if you eat half a chicken you also eat lots of fat? But then we are away from what "steak and chicken" implies: meat. We are on a topic of X%proteins plus Y%fat versus x%proteins + y%fat. Now we could get nitpicking and consider if certain types of meat have sugar stored in them, like liver ...

Re:The basics haven't changed

[angel'o'sphere]

People's bodies burn calories at different rates,, No it does not. Except you mean the difference between sprinting or sleeping or the difference in base consumtion (which is not tied to _weight_ but muscle mass)
and their bodies generate powerful feelings of hunger at different rates Only if they have a mis trained body. E.g. having an insulin resistance (which comes from training your body badly) ,and their bodies are more or less capable of exercising than the average. everyone is the same capable of this, or do you mean people chained to a wheel chair.

Obesity is more than just a failure to do basic arithmetic or a lack of willpower or "knowledge" than arithmetic.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[omnichad]

Even if I'm wrong with b, the wording of the citation is simply wrong.

You did not read the article. I copied and pasted the quote from the article directly. It's not about how much energy you use in digesting it. It's in how much energy is left behind after digesting and passes right through without being absorbed into the bloodstream at all. And this means that 100 grams peanuts have fewer bioavailable calories than 100 grams of those same peanuts ground directly into peanut butter.

Part of the equation is that we've been underestimating the role of "pre-digesting" food by cooking and/or processing in the amount of energy that the human body receives. The other part is the variation from person to person in the intestinal microbiome's consumption of material in the digestive tract. For some, the bacteria may agressively consume calories and their waste products are not usable by the human body. Other bacteria break down food into an easier to absorb form of energy. So even that peanut butter may have more or less bioavailable calories from person to person.

Re:Terrible article

[monkeyhybrid]

Sorry to be presumptuous, but that can not be right. Assuming by exercise you mean something at least as vigorous as walking, two hours of that will burn ~500 calories alone. That leaves you with around 500 calories of energy to keep your body alive. Your body would not be able to cope with that for extended periods of time, and there's no chance it would reserve those precious calories as body fat.

Re:Terrible article

[serviscope_minor]

Of course it's individual.

However the gutbuster 3.2387490e+47 calorie lasagne and chips caff special (which is sodding awesome by the way) is going to give you more energy than that little salad from Pret.

So yes, if you're measuring your energy expenditure very accurately (you're not) then the precise calories matter (so they don't).

However they give approximate answers. Count up calories. If you're fat, try reducing the numbers while eating the same sort of stuff. The thing is the absolute numbers aren't important. However, the relative numbers are more useful.

You can also help by changing the type of food too. But if you don't, the relative counts are good enough for may purposes.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet and getting exercise?

What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.

Well that is one question that the conventional research does not adequately address.

If someone is a diabetic, all of the numbers are skewed towards fat storage being a priority in general. If this were not the case, and you could validly shift all the blame onto the "people are overeaters and lazy " as a 100% valid and testable explanation of the problem, then you have been hiding under a rock in the US for about 40 years now and are not paying attention to any evidence.

Here are some things we know now that are not being acknowledged that is along this line of questioning and you can see results with today (and the calorie as a concept is only partly to blame, the proper question being "What sorts of calories are needed and what sorts of calories cause a problem?")

1- Since the 1950s, the poor conclusions of research by Ancel Keys was treated as gospel, and yet he cherry picked his evidence, that the best diet to prevent heart disease was a high carb , low fat diet. This failed to explain the Innuit people, the French and the Japanese, who eat high fat moderate protein diets and had anomalously low rates of heart disease and obesity despite eating high fat diets.

2- It is nearly impossible in the US to find foods that do not have carbohydrates added to them.

3- Mountains of research have shown that high carbohydrate diets lock down your stored fat such that you cannot access it even if you do enough exercise in a day that would kill an olympic athlete, it is not laziness that is the problem because if you run the numbers on how many calories you eat and how many you expend, on the normal american diet, you would have to kill yourself to lose the average of a fraction of a pound a day. Exercise, in general is not an effective method of weight loss, and your body will actively fight you on it if your macronutrients (how much fat, carbohydrate and protein) are skewed toward energy being derived from carbohydrates.

4- despite all the claptrap, there is no such thing as an "Essential Carbohydrate". This has been shown over and over..

So if you want to lose weight and you are the supposedly lazy office worker you talk of, perhaps you could:

1- limit carbohydrate intake to as low as possible.
2- get adequate protein in your diet (20% of daily calories or enough that you have .6 to 1 gram of protein for every pound of lean body weight, which every is closer for your activity level)
3- Consume saturated fat for energy and put this up to somewhere around 75% of daily caloric intake.. and of these fats have 1/2 of your fat intake from short chain fatty acids and about 46% from mono-unsaturated fatty acids which would be your olive oils etc and limit your poly-unsaturated fatty acids in a 50/50 mixture of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids totaling your intake of poly-unsaturated fats to no more than 4% of total caloric intake per day.)

if you can do those 3 things correctly every day, you will lose body fat, even if you are eating over your magic number of essential calories. I have done it and I am a diabetic who many doctors just throw their hands up and say that this is a chronic problem I will never be able to fix (they being fat themselves) and then when I come back and give blood they have no idea how I am able to control my blood sugar so tightly , keep my cholesterol numbers so fantastic and lose fat without losing lean body mass and then their explanation turns to some vague mention of being "Genetically lucky". All the while all I am doing is Ignoring the bullshit bad science being pushed on us by Ancel Keys.

Oh and by the way, in summary the concept of a "Balanced Diet" is a snow leopard, there is 0 consensus on what a "balanced diet" is. Never has been, yet you hear

Re:I guess it's easier...

[kaputtfurleben]

You're making several errors, the first of which is that it's overweight people whining about BMI. It is not, from what I've seen. Fit people talk about BMI. I was one of them, and I was borderline overweight despite being a very thin person.

The second is that one's daily schedule is irrelevant if they are careful about what they eat. A full meal can be very low in calories, and a lack of exercise does not necessarily lead to obesity. There are many, many more factors at work here.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[pr0t0]

Most people claim that BMI is inaccurate because...it's inaccurate. Professional athletes whose bodies are the epitome of fitness perfection are rated obese by BMI. The BMI was designed to determine the overall fitness level of a large group of people, like a nation. It was never meant to be used as an index for an individual level of fitness. It's used because it's a simple number that most people can understand, but human physiology is complicated. Most people are not smart enough to deal with the level of complexity, all the variables, to make intelligent decisions.

Re:Terrible article

[sFurbo]

And there is no indication why that efficiency should NOT be individual.

Given that we are all the same species, it is not a bad assumption that we process food in roughly the same way. It might be wrong, it should be tested, but to say that there is no indication why it should not be individual is misleading.

Sounds like they're trying to make eating costlier

[QuietLagoon]

The calorie works well, the problem is people who are trying to use it for reasons other than what it was intended.

.
Regardless of metabolism, exercise, how well you digest food, etc, the following always holds true (maybe not precisely true to minute decimal places, but true)

Take all the calories you eat, subtract out the calories you lose, exude, emit, excrete or otherwise eliminate.

If the result is more than the number of calories your body needs to run, you'll gain weight.

For me, I know the magic number is around 2400 calories per day. I don't stress that it may be 2350 or 2450, the round number works well.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[serviscope_minor]

You're making several errors, the first of which is that it's overweight people whining about BMI. It is not, from what I've seen.

I've seen it plenty. Especially overweight people actively deluding themsleves by claiming that BMI doesn't apply.

Fit people talk about BMI. I was one of them, and I was borderline overweight despite being a very thin person.

I'm a fairly average build (currenty just overweight according to BMI and undeniably I have a few lb to spare). If you're anything approaching a normal build and your BMI is too high then you have excess day.

That's another thing: fitness has little to do with weight. Well, once you get morbidly obese, the massive excess weight makes keeping fit hard. However, you can easily keep fit in terms of cardiovascular health and still have excess fat.

My experience in the other direction is when I went a bit fitness mad for a bit. I managed to get my resting heart rate down into the 40s, could do the splits, put on a lot of muscle and it was the only time in my life I had anything approaching a washboard stomach. I was smack bang in the middle of the OK range for BMI and that's the most muscular I've been ever. I also ate the most immense amount and was happy but too zoned out to work all that much.

I wasn't concentrating on bulking though. If I did, I probably could have pushed my weight into the "overweight category", but I think I now have a fairly good idea as to how much muscle would be required on my frame to make me appear overweight without having excess fat. The answer is: a hell of a lot. If you're bulking that much you're going to be concerned with protein shakes so on, not a general purpose but fairly blunt tool like BMI.

The second is that one's daily schedule is irrelevant if they are careful about what they eat.

No, not irrelevant. Yeah sure with any schedule you can starve yourself into thinness, but moving around helps.

There are many, many more factors at work here.

And yet 99% of people with a high BMI could easily afford to lose some fat. Very few people are the special snowflakes to which BMI does not apply.

I've actually known a few. Bulging muscles hardly describes their appearance adequately.

Re: I guess it's easier...

[jofas]

Bmi is a gross descriptor and is NOT meant to be a physical assessment target. It is based on statistical analysis of data, not on prolonged research of how to live right. One must take it as part of a bigger picture.

Re:Terrible article

[Nidi62]

If you're fat, try reducing the numbers while eating the same sort of stuff.

That's what I did. Cut back on how much I ate, added a little bit more exercise than I was already doing (changed the type of workout too though, went from working out for football to working out to lose weight) and lost about 30lbs over 3 months. Of course, spending a semester with my school's rugby club probably didn't hurt either. Sadly, I then went to grad school and managed to gain it all back and then some over the next few years.

Re: I guess it's easier...

[jofas]

You are closer to the truth than anyone here. Our modern lifestyle is the most important factor in our health.

Re:Terrible article

[bickerdyke]

Because lots of our body attributes are individual, height, weight (even with similar diets and workloads).

Ok, not individual as in completly random, but spread out probably in the good old bell curve way.

Re:The only weight loss plan that works

[omnichad]

counting calories from feces is horribly inaccurate

Well sure - it's exactly the opposite of the energy your body actually took in. I can't see how it makes any sense at all to assume it's proportional.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exercise, a balanced diet, and a healthy lifestyle are dangerous thoughts. That suggests it might be your own fault you're fat, and we can't have dangerous thoughts like this. It's most certainly society and their improperly quantified calorie making me fat, not my sedentary lifestyle full of fast-food.

BMI is a poor tool

[sjbe]

Especially overweight people actively deluding themsleves by claiming that BMI doesn't apply.

BMI is pretty useless for many people. Taking myself for example. I'm about 5'10 and weigh around 175-180lbs with body fat % somewhere in the low teens. I coach a wrestling team and I'm in reasonably good shape and stronger than average for my weight. If I were to cut to competition weight I would be 150-160 and I competed in college at 150 many years ago. Anything lower than that and I'd be well into unhealthy - certainly nothing sustainable. But according to BMI calculators I would have to get down to around 130lbs to be considered underweight. Last time I weighed that much I was cutting weight as a junior in high school and was under 6% body fat. You'd have to put me in a concentration camp or give me cancer to get me that low again. BMI calculators put me now at borderline overweight at my current weight and that description doesn't make sense. My waist size is the same as it has been since college and while I could shed about 5-10% of my body mass without ill effect that's hardly overweight. I'm not delusional about my weight - I actually have a better idea of my body composition than most people do. Basically BMI is too crude a measure to be much use for a large swath of the population. It does have some utility but it can be pretty misleading too.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[Alioth]

Well, a small swath of the population. People with lots of muscle and little body fat are a very small minority of the population. For nearly everyone else, BMI is a perfectly good rule of thumb. For instance, looking around the room now I can see about 20 people, all of which if you calculated their BMI would give a perfectly good rough idea of where they fit.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[serviscope_minor]

BMI is pretty useless for many people.

Not as a fraction of the population.

I'm about 5'10 and weigh around 175-180lbs

That puts you into the "OK" category. High end, but OK nonetheless.

I coach a wrestling team and I'm in reasonably good shape and stronger than average for my weight.

And you have a wrestlers physique!

I actually have a better idea of my body composition than most people do

Great, so the BMI isn't for you. You have something better.

Basically BMI is too crude a measure to be much use for a large swath of the population

No I disagree. You're a fairly extreme case. You're a wrestler and clearly do a lot of excersise etc. And you come out mostly OK. The majority of the population is sedentary. And the majority certainly don't care enough about such things to measure body fat percentage.

So congratulations, you are in fact one of the special snowflakes, but 99% of the population ain't.

Seriously, you coach a wrestling team. Now look at the people round you next time you're in Walmart? Do they have wrestlers physique or are they simply fat?

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[serviscope_minor]

Gerat, at least one other person gets it here!

It's funny half of the threads people are complaining that everyone wants to be a special snowflake. Then BMI comes up and everyone claims to be a special snowflake.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[bondsbw]

Or, everyone is complaining that BMI is a bad metric for its intended purpose. Your "special snowflakes" are anecdotes, and once enough anecdotes exist (and it extends FAR beyond this small discussion thread) they are no longer exceptions, but tend to become a rule.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[bondsbw]

Actually, considering that YOU are pretty much the only loud voice backing BMI in this discussion, I'm giving YOU the title of "special snowflake".

Hope it doesn't get too warm for you, you might melt.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[serviscope_minor]

Or, everyone is complaining that BMI is a bad metric for its intended purpose.

Yeah and they're wrong. No, it doesn't apply well to people who hit the gym to bulk muscle, but that's a tiny fraction of the population. For the 99% who have a normal musculature, it applies pretty well.

Your "special snowflakes" are anecdotes

er huh?

and once enough anecdotes exist (and it extends FAR beyond this small discussion thread) they are no longer exceptions

There are 300 million people in the US. You can have 1 MILLION anecdotes of it being "wrong" and it will still apply well to 99.7% of the population. For it to have serious errors, let's say only working well for 90% of the population, you would need 30 million anecdotes.

5 or 6 anecdotes in a slashdot story hardly qualifies.

It it applies well to 99.7% of the population or even 95% it's still a really good measure.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[tempmpi]

It is a rule of thumb, but a very inaccurate one. If the BMI of someone is 30, it is extremely likely that he or she should lose weight. But if the BMI is 25-28, then it is very unclear. Depending on muscle mass, fat distribution, blood pressure, sugar levels, he or she might be perfectly fine and healthy or too fat. Some people with a BMI of 25 should lose weight, while others with a BMI of 27 are perfectly fine. So basically BMI does not tell you anything that most people would not know without the BMI. Someone with a BMI of 30 usually noticed that he or she should lose weight. BMI is helpful to people with body image disorders that think they are fat with a BMI of 18 or are healthy and just a little bit chubby with a BMI of 35. But normal people do not get much extra information from the BMI. Waist-to-Height Ratio is actually much more useful.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[bondsbw]

Your "special snowflakes" are anecdotes

er huh?

http://dictionary.reference.co...

5 or 6 anecdotes in a slashdot story hardly qualifies.

Did you even read what I wrote? The part about it NOT being limited to these few Slashdot comments? Go ahead, read it again, come back once you're done.

It it applies well to 99.7% of the population or even 95% it's still a really good measure.

[citation needed]

You claim that it is good for that portion of the population. Back it up with data.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[Trailer Trash]

Especially overweight people actively deluding themsleves by claiming that BMI doesn't apply.

BMI is pretty useless for many people.

I agree, but 99.99% of the people saying that are morbidly obese. You're the .01%.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[GLMDesigns]

Wrong.

BMI is terrible. I'm a desk jockey and am a regular gym goer. I'm 5'10 and 185 and while I don't have a six pack I can see my belt buckle. According to BMI calculations I am overweight. If I put on 20 pounds of fat and muscle I would be called obese.

BMI is foolishness and ought not be given the light of day. Google Mike Tyson. At his prime he was 5'10 and 215. OBESE (and yet had a six-pack).

A better generic measurement would be a ratio of waist and chest. Picture two males at 5'10 and 185. One with a chest of 44 with a 33" waist; and another with a 38" chest and 38" waist. One is in good shape. The other is in miserable shape and both have the same BMI.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[shaitand]

"For instance, looking around the room now I can see about 20 people"

You'd think but not necessarily. The guy above, coaching wrestling is probably a large obviously muscular guy but you don't have to look like that to have a lot of lean mass. If he put on 20lbs of fat, his BMI would still be just as inaccurate but he wouldn't look muscular, he'd look massively fat.

Additionally, many people are highly athletic, they not only pack on lots of muscle but highly distributed they also stretch properly so their muscles aren't compacted into large bumps that project three dimensionally. Look at the build on many pro basketball players for example. BMI is just as useless for them as it is for that hulking bulky wrestler. If you take someone like that, add a few percentage points of body fat (for example taking them up to healthy female BF levels) their muscles wouldn't be visible at all but their BMI would be ridiculous.

You can be muscular, heavy, and dense. You can even get that way without losing your BF. Another common example are tall, large framed men. A lot of these guys pack on a lot of BF and are definitely overweight but their BMI is completely inaccurate first because someone with those genetics is predisposed to build muscle and they are lifting a few hundred pounds with every movement every day. Having that giant gut and fat rolls doesn't change that underneath that fat they are likely packing as much if not more muscle than that wrestling coach above. I've watched someone with that build straighten the steel hook on a heavy bag when he learned how to punch correctly in a martial arts course. Does he have weight to lose? Absolutely, but that isn't the point. His BMI is a useless metric to lose it by.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[compro01]

Compared against body fat %, BMI incorrectly classifies people as over/underweight about 25% of the time.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[shaitand]

You can be both fat and muscular and many people are. BMI is useless for them as well. BMI is also useless if you have far less muscle mass than average. The problem is that BMI is a VERY rough ballpark estimator for people of average composition, the problem with average is that if you take a tall person and a short person and come up with an average based on them you get a person that is represented by nobody in your sample. I've seen BMI tell a woman she could lose weight eating 1600 calories a day with light exercise when the real answer was 1200 upon measuring her lean mass.

Using body fat and lean mass requires either $50 scale or a $10 scale combined with a $5 caliper. Either way you are much better off than using BMI. The best is an internet connected scale because weight fluctuates far more than measuring at the same time of day, especially for females with hormonal cycles that can cause their weight to drift up 10-15% in a day just from water retention and then drop the next week due to hormonal shifts. Tracking weight over the course of months and your average weigh in is far more useful for most people.

My issue with BMI is that it leads people toward calorie restriction and weight loss alone as an indicator. The reality is that every lb of muscle is sacred and while you may well want to lose weight you don't want to lose muscle. If you aren't training for any particular end you can do any exercise you can manage 1-5 of before you drop or a wall squat to fail to each day combined with a lean protein heavy calorie restrictive diet. That is enough to ensure that the weight you are losing will be more fat than muscle. If you don't track lean mass you can't even set a proper calorie restrictive diet because lean mass defines how many calories you must eat to maintain the weight you don't want to lose at rest. What you eat and how you use your body determines whether or not those calories actually get used for that purpose.

There is little point in dieting just to become skinny fat.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[serviscope_minor]

Did you even read what I wrote?

In order for your claimed anecdotes to be accurate you have to argue that people are not good at deluding themselves. This is demonstrably inaccurage.

You claim that it is good for that portion of the population. Back it up with data.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

Basically if you select a random person from the population and BMI says they're obese, then chances are they're oobese. And if it says they're not obese there's actually a decent chance they're obese anyway.

So it's way over one side on the ROC curve. It almost always diagnoses someone as obese when they are in fact obese, but it misses quite a lot of those.

If it says you're obese it has a 95% chance of being right for men and 99% for women.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[russotto]

Yep, BMI is crap. It's convenient to distill everything down to one number based on two measurements, but it doesn't get you anywhere near 99% of the population. If you're reasonably athletic, that bumps up your BMI into the overweight range pretty easily. If you're tall, that bumps up your BMI (because healthy humans do not scale the way BMI assumes), and if you're short it bumps it down. Body type matters; yeah, it's cliche for fat people to claim to be big boned, but the fact is that your bone structure does matter. For sedentary people with near-average height and near-average bone structure, BMI works pretty good. For the rest (which is far more than 1%), not so well.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[serviscope_minor]

BMI is terrible. I'm a desk jockey and am a regular gym goer. I'm 5'10 and 185 and while I don't have a six pack I can see my belt buckle.

I'm 5'11 and probably 190. I can see my belt buckle. I can run 7 miles comfortably. I'm also slightly overweight and can squidge plenty of fat in various places. You're confusing overweight with obese. I'm not obese and I'm not especially fat but I am overweight, in that I have squidgy bits of fat to spare.

Overweight is not having a great big bulging belly. That's obese. Overweight is, well, having a bit extra weight to spare.

At his prime he was 5'10 and 215.

Ah yes because Mike Tyson is so very very representative and has precisely the same physique as everyone with a BMI over "OK".

How are you incapable of understanding that a good rule of thumb that applies to 95% of the population is not "wrong" because some freak of nature doesn't fit the model.

A better generic measurement would be a ratio of waist and chest.

Just waist alone compared to height is fine, the latter being more or less unchanging. Waist is certainly a better measurement in that done properly it's more accurate.

But lots of people have scales and it's very easy to do waist measurements badly.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[wbtittle]

BMI is useful for people that are the proper height. As soon as you get out of the proper height range, BMI becomes pretty much useless.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[serviscope_minor]

You can be both fat and muscular and many people are. BMI is useless for them as well.

Why? Because it says they're fat? You just said they're fat!

I've seen BMI tell a woman she could lose weight eating 1600 calories

That's got nothing to do with BMI. BMI is a number dericed from height and weight plus some thresholds for underweight/OK/overweight/obese/morbidly obese that are derived from population averages.

Calories are not part of BMI.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[serviscope_minor]

Another common example are tall, large framed men. A lot of these guys pack on a lot of BF and are definitely overweight but their BMI is completely inaccurate first because someone with those genetics is predisposed to build muscle and they are lifting a few hundred pounds with every movement every day.

So a big guy with excess fat has excesss fat but his BMI which says he's overweight (i.e. has excess fat) is "completely inaccurate" because REASONS.

Did you even read your own post?

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[kheldan]

BMI tables make broad assumptions based on statistical averages which may or may not reflect your actual body composition. If you really want to know what your body composition is, find a doctors office that can do bone densitometry, and get a DXA scan. DXA is the Gold Standard for determining body composition, even over hydrostatic weighing, because it directly measures adipose tissue, lean tissue, and bone. If someone is really concerned with what their bodyfat percentage is and are actively trying to control their weight, then getting a DXA scan once a year will provide enough information for someone to determine how many calories per day they should be consuming in order to gradually lose excess weight, actually make what the scale is telling them meaningful, and give them definitive markers of progress (or lack thereof, as the case may be). For just body composition purposes should cost less than $100 per scan (I get them for $80).

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[GLMDesigns]

I understand that Mike Tyson is not the norm. Our primary point of contention is the phrase "95% of the population." Secondly I don't think that BMI is a good indicator of flabbiness. I have a friend who is taller 5'11 and lighter than me (mid 150s) and he is most definitely flabbier than I am, especially around the middle.

And yet his BMI is normal (21.6) and mine is overweight (26.5) -- Just used a BMI calculator - I pretend don't know this off hand. :-)

Third, BMI doesn't pass the sniff test. Take a guy 6'1" who is 230, goes to the gym all the time, pushes 315+ while benching and is solid but overweight (BMI of 31.7) . Tell him that he should get down to under 190 to be in "good" shape. That's a joke. At 190 he would probably be in the 5-8% body fat range. That's not overweight that is competitive athlete range.

These three things: that BMI is fairly accurate only with those people who are not regular gym goers (not talking about aerobics or pilates here); that the normal / overweight range does not give accurate "flabby" measures, and doesn't pass the sniff test with regular gym goes is the reason it's not respected - nor should it be.

Your waist is a good measure of your fatness. It would be great to have accurate ratios to go by (hip, waist, chest, height) because for those of us that go to the gym 5-6 times a week BMI is bullsh!t.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[shaitand]

BMI is a number, the overweight, obese, etc marks are just vague ranges. Indicating he is obese when he is actually overweight is inaccurate, indicating a 40 when he should be at a 38 is also inaccurate. BMI does not win the day simply by given any result that indicates you could stand to lose BF when you do in fact need to lose some.

Hell, I could make a magic 8 ball that says "you need to lose weight" as the only possible answer and have everyone in the US check it and be right most of the time. By your standard my 8 ball would be just as good as BMI!

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[serviscope_minor]

Right, so it gives the right answers that these people should lose weight but is wrong. Of course.

Anyway I posted a study of it elsewhere in the thread. When is says obese it's right 99% of the time for women and 95% of the time for men. When is says not, it's wrong 30% of the time. IOW it a rarely miss misclassifies people as obese when they're fine.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[shaitand]

Calculations for resting daily calorie burn at different activity levels utilize BMI.

"Why? Because it says they're fat? You just said they're fat!"

Because if they gain 2lbs overall and the gain is 2lbs of lean mass because they performed strength training their BMI score moves in the wrong direction. For that matter it will do the same if you improve bone density, are pregnant, while saying you are more healthy if you are dehydrated. End of story. That change in score can mean the difference between being marked morbidly obese vs obese or OK vs overweight, etc. A guy who is 6'4 and has 1% BF would likely be obese or morbidly obese on the BMI scale while actually being severely and dangerously underweight and unhealthy.

You can't accurately assess if someone is healthy using BMI, therefore it is useless at the doctors office. You can't accurately use it to calculate calorie burn for the purposes of dieting, therefore it is useless there. You can't use changes in BMI to accurately indicate changes in fitness and diet because BMI moves in the wrong direction when you gain muscle mass, which is the most effective long term strategy for losing BF. It is a useless and wildly inaccurate attempt to take a complex thing and turn it into a single number. About the only thing it is good for taking people who already know they are dangerously overweight and you already know are dangerously overweight and categorizing them so you can scare them into changing their life. Sorry, you don't need BMI to know that someone who has to be moved with a fork lift is going to die if they don't change something.

The biggest danger of BMI is that it tells people who are skinny fat, meaning they are skinny but have a high BF vs lean mass ratio they are healthy when they are most definitely weak, frail, and likely malnourished.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[shaitand]

You do realize that not being obese does not mean you are fine?

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[Himmy32]

From your linked article:

The results of our study, involving a large sample from the US population, demonstrates that BMI has a limited diagnostic performance to correctly identify individuals with excess in body fatness, particularly for those with BMI between 25 to 30 kg/m2, for men and for the elderly.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[Gr8Apes]

BMI is about as useful as a medium shirt is to determining someone's weight. If they fit in the shirt, they'll probably weigh in around 150 or so. BMI uses the same concept as using your shirt size, except has additional fudge factors of height and gender. Those fudge factors make it fit the distribution of "medium" people a bit better, but that doesn't make it any more accurate than using dress shirt sizes (with arm length, chest and neck measurements).

I guess BMI proponents are as lazy as anyone else, they want a simple easy calculation to determine whether you're overweight or underweight. As soon as you're not in the couch potato class however, BMI is useless.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[Gr8Apes]

It's not a good measure, never has been and never will be. You can have a "perfect" BMI and be as healthy as a goose right before making foie gras. BMI means nothing. The sooner people like you realize that, the sooner we can move on to an actual health measurement, like body fat percentages and other meaningful measures.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[Livius]

BMI is pretty useless for many people.

BMI is very limited in its applicability, and most people over-estimate its usefulness.

But it is better than nothing.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[AthanasiusKircher]

Do some research before disagreeing in ignorance. Read some actual studies, which there are many of on the inaccuracies of BMI. Basically, BMI misclassifies at least 25% of the population -- tall people are disproportionately flagged as obese (particularly women), while short people (particularly men) are incorrectly viewed as healthy. If you try to move the thresholds around, it doesn't ever really get better. And there are loads of simple measures that are superior to BMI -- for example, men's waist measurement (regardless of height) has a MUCH higher correlation with obesity-related illness than BMI.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[Jack Griffin]

For nearly everyone else, BMI is a perfectly good rule of thumb. For instance, looking around the room now I can see about 20 people, all of which if you calculated their BMI would give a perfectly good rough idea of where they fit.

I assume none of them are Asian or Polynesian...

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[goose-incarnated]

You keep using the outliers as representative of the population. They're not.

If we were to grab a random sample of people with BMI indicating obesity we'd get far far more obese people than muscular people. If you and I were to bet money on whether the BMI for each person in the sample is accurate or not, you'd lose a great deal of money betting that the BMI is inaccurate.

BMI is a useful average indicator. If you're muscular and/or tall you already know it's inaccurate - the majority of fatties have a fairly accurate BMI indicator.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[GLMDesigns]

Thank you.

Very nice post.

OK. Point made.

I would lose money on that bet. I still don't like it as a generic test to see if a population is overweight.

Population A and Population B both have 30% regular gym goers.
Population A spends it's time lifting weights.
Population B spends its time on cardio.

Population A will be obese in comparison with Population B - but more muscular.

Then we hear A is fat and B is better when in reality it isn't.

yes I'm leaving a lot out - but ... such is the nature of quick posts on line.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[utahjazz]

Balancing caloric input with exercise is missing the point. We're all going to live a life of some enjoyment, and then die a death of some misery. What should maximized is enjoyment over misery. For example, This woman is my hero.

Re:Terrible article

[Deadstick]

somehow, the laws of thermodynamics don't apply just to them.

They might be the same people who think the 2nd Law of Thermo disproves evolution...

Simple Solution

[BoRegardless]

Dump the crap food, eat good stuff with enough "fiber" and eat less overall w/more fiber to lose weight.

Re:Calories do not exist

[Deadstick]

A "calorie" is a depreciated unit of measurement

You mean it used to be worth more money? The word is "deprecated".

Re:I guess it's easier...

[aaarrrgggh]

"Shit foods" aren't always clear to the consumer. To some degree, they vary between people as well.

All told though, it isn't rocket science: reduce carbs, eliminate refined sugars, and get exercise. Avoid comfort food habits.

Good thing it was then.

[TheCarp]

If he had done that research today he would have died in the swat raid looking for his bomb.

But its ok, it would be his own fault for making them suspicious enough to put him on the no fly list for his seditious publication about bombs.

Familiar ground

[Archtech]

All this should be very familiar by now to anyone who is interested in nutrition. Gary Taubes, in particular, has explained the facts fully and clearly in his books, starting with "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (published, for some strange reason, under the title "The Diet Delusion" in the UK).

It should be obvious that the total chemical energy in a substance is by no means the same as the energy that the human digestive system extracts from it. Otherwise we could consume, and thrive on, hydrocarbons such as coal and oil. Incidentally, there is strong evidence that the potential calories in alcohol are not used by the normal human body for energy. (See Tony Edwards' book "The Good News About Booze" for many convincing citations). The confusing exceptions are beer and sweetened drinks, in which the energy is provided by carbohydrates not alcohol. If we did use alcohol for energy, I would certainly not have lost weight in the past year while eating a good balanced diet and drinking several bottles of wine a week. (Dry wine, of course).

Another ancient metric that is completely discredited is the Body Mass Index (BMI). Adolphe Quetelet proposed the standard formula "weight(kg)/height(m)^2" as a stopgap approximation in 1830! It is a marvellous example of how people will accept a standard, once it is exists, without ever asking how valid or accurate it is. A single glance should be enough to recognize that, as human beings are three-dimensional and not two-dimensional, there is something seriously wrong with Quetelet's BMI. He himself seems to have understood that an exponent of more like 2.5 would be more appropriate. Yet everyone, from doctors to actuaries, has simply gone on using it ever since. See https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/... for a better approximation, with a brief explanation and an "improved BMI calculator".

Re:Familiar ground

[angel'o'sphere]

If we did use alcohol for energy, I would certainly not have lost weight in the past year while eating a good balanced diet and drinking several bottles of wine a week. (Dry wine, of course).
Shows how idiotic your "knowledge" how the body works, is.
Ofc we use alcohol and burn it in our bodies. But 10g alcohol give bottom line less energy than 10g sugar as the digesting process costs energy, too.
Als, what is a couple of bottles of wine/week meant to mean? That is _nothing_ most french e.g. drink one bottle per day or more. 1/4 or 1/2 at lunch more than that for dinner and likely get out for a drink in the evening. I crtainly drink more than a bottle per day.

Re: I guess it's easier...

[serviscope_minor]

Good rule of thumb: if your BMI says you're overweight and you don't have a 6 pack, then I'll bet you've got plenty of squidgyness where that 6 pack ought to be.

Go to the dietician and ask him.

[havana9]

I was 85 kg in June, now I'm 69 kg. How I've lost weight? Fiers of all i've gone to my general practitioner and him made a me a request for a visit to a dietician at the hospital. I paid a ticket €40 fort the visit, the doctor visited me, printed a personalized diet after having asked me my food preferences, advise me to make some exercise everyday. I started to walk at work instead of using the car, making 4 km every day. I followed the diet at the letter (except xmas, of course).

Following the diet at the letter was meaning weigh as much I could all the food I was eating and estimate when I couldn't, say wen I was eating outside, and having one and only one meal per week where I eated a bit more, like pizza or sushi, but without overeating.

Of course some foods were banned, like carbonated dink with sugar or industrial snacks. The doctor said to me that if I wanted to eat say some chocolate, having to eat less was way better to eat the high quality one.

When last week I meet him for the control visit, he complimented me with the result and gave me the maintenance diet, that was similar to the one I was following for loss weight but with some more daily food to eat.

I think that self made diets or read on newspapers aren't going to work. Ask an expert..

Re:I guess it's easier...

[oh_my_080980980]

Yeah that explains all the coffee drinking...

US Gov Advice USED to be OK for the masses

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Remember the government's "four food groups" with X servings of 4 groups (meats, dairy, bread, fruits and vegetables)? (http://www.rootedcook.com/visuals/foodguides/ - 1956-1992) It worked (it was even used on game shows) because people could understand and remember four things and whole numbers without units.

Today's government food pyramid? It's 6 different items measured in a mix of "cups" and "ounces" (http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/05/82105-004-3C485EB5.jpg) - not exactly how food is packaged and remembering 6 different figures with units is beyond what people can easily recollect.

If you want the masses to "get" any nutritional advise, I can't see how blowing up a common denominator like the calorie would help.

Re:US Gov Advice USED to be OK for the masses

[moeinvt]

The USA government's "advice" was probably some of the worst advice imaginable! It was never "OK".
As you might recall, they were advising people to eat a whole bunch of breads and cereals to get their daily calories and to consume very little meat. That "advice" has contributed heavily to the obesity problem and general poor health of the people in this country. I think the government employees knew that their advice was going to make people fat and sick and it worked exactly as they intended.

"My first rule: I don't believe anything the government tells me" -George Carlin

Now THAT is good advice.

Re:US Gov Advice USED to be OK for the masses

[angel'o'sphere]

As you might recall, they were advising people to eat a whole bunch of breads and cereals to get their daily calories and to consume very little meat. That "advice" has contributed heavily to the obesity problem and general poor health of the people in this country.
Actually it did not. It was a very good and very healthy advice. At that time!

The problem is: the bread changed! Or do you consider the mainstream blown up "things" made from "flour" and "dough" e.g. the uneatable garbage that is used to serve a burger inside indeed as "bread".

And on top of that: you drink now a Mega-Sized Coke with it. And you have a fatty burger with the "bread" and you put a lot of super sweet ketchup on top of it. And the salads you get are not healthy at all as the stupid "american dressing" (that is how it is called in Europe) consisting of Ketchup and Mayonnaise and extra sugar: who is so idiotic and makes a a salad where the dressing has 3 to 4 times the Calories the salad has?

The main problem with diet hints is: you always want to reduce any problem to one single cause. This means: you are 99% of the times wrong with the diagnostics and hence with the solution/therapy.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[codeButcher]

... Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods. ...

Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet...?

My guess is that if you eat fresh/raw foods (i.e. not processed junk), or foods that have been "processed" via age-old traditional methods like Lactobacillus fermentation preservation as well as sprouting, you may be getting a whole lot closer to both goals.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Anonymous Coward]

Through researching my own diet (dropped 60 lbs over the course of a year), I've learned that exercise and diet do not contribute to the same things. In short, exercise deals with fitness, and diet deals with fatness.

It takes a looooot of exercise to equal the weight loss effects of simply eating less, or at least eating less high-fat and high-carb foods. But eating healthy, while still very good for your overall health, doesn't contribute much to your cardiovascular system or musculature.

Re:Calm down and think

[oh_my_080980980]

We all have the same digestive system moron. What differs between people is their MBR and fat set point. Some people burn energy like a humming bird others not. Some people are satiated very quickly - others not. Again, balanced diet, proper portions, and exercise.

Yeah, I wonder...

[SharpFang]

With the way calories are counted... what's the official calorie value of a box of tissues?
'cause cellulose burns pretty well, but contributes a flat 0 to human nutrition.

Nutritionism

[CPIMatt]

This sort of story smacks of "Nutritionism" as explained in Michael Pollan's book 'In Defense Of Food'. Generally people do not need to know how many calories, carbs, nutrients, vitamins, etc. are in a piece of food unless you are a nutritionist, and most people aren't. How to eat healthy comes down to one simple rule:

Eat food(1) mostly plants(2) not too much(3).

(1) Food defined by things your great-grandmother would recognize as being food. Nothing overly processed. Food should spoil. If what you eat will not spoil you should not eat it. Things that are not food, but edible food-type substances: refined sugar (includes soda, twinkies, etc), refined flour (white bread, etc), refined oils of all kinds (peanut oil, sunflower oil, and *gasp* olive oil).

(2) Plants, meaning whole fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. And a variety. Different shapes, textures, colors, whole and fresh if you can get it. This should make up 90% of your diet. Less than 10% of your diet should come from animal products. This includes dairy and meat.

(3) Don't eat too much of one thing. Don't overeat.

If you do this, you don't need to count calories or take vitamins or worry about your riboflavin intake. Just eat and be healthy.

-Matt

Re:Nutritionism

[AmiMoJo]

Food defined by things your great-grandmother would recognize as being food.

Problem is my great-grandmother was a stay-at-home mother and had plenty of time to prepare meals. It was one of her primary responsibilities. I, on the other hand, have little time to find recipes, shop for ingredients, manage my stock and cook food from scratch.

Plants, meaning whole fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. And a variety. Different shapes, textures, colors, whole and fresh if you can get it. This should make up 90% of your diet. Less than 10% of your diet should come from animal products. This includes dairy and meat.

In Japan fruit is quite expensive, for various reasons. They eat a lot of rice, a hell of a lot of meat, fish, seafood and seaweed. They also have very long life expectancy and are generally pretty healthy if they don't destroy themselves with alcohol or smoking. Obesity is only really much of an issue with the younger generation that has a slightly more western diet.

I find I can't finish most Japanese meals, the portions are too large. Japanese people do okay. I think it's because they are used to the amount of protean. Protean makes you feel full, and meat has plenty of it.

Re:Nutritionism

[kheldan]

See, that doesn't work, for a simple reason: The food industry (at least here in the U.S.) goes out of their way to make sure you're as addicted to their products as possible, and they make it cheap and easy to get/consume. 'Moderation' is not good for profits.

Re:Nutritionism

[JMZero]

I prefer eating fruit and vegetables (and I love grains and nuts of all kinds) but to manage my weight I find I have to eat a bunch of meat (more meat than I want). My brothers have found the same thing - as we've all got into our late 30s, we've had to switch to eating more meat (I eat mostly slow-cooker chicken) to keep from ballooning up in weight. But I also have to have carbs in the morning or else I under-perform at work. Anywho, your vague "natural"/"grandma-recognizable" stuff is completely useless for me: as a younger man I had no problem gaining weight on whole wheat bread (my mom ground the flour herself!) and home-grown potatos.

So what is it then? Maybe I ate too much? Well, you could say that for anything. Later in life, my mom lost a bunch of weight on some quack "HCG" diet (which is obvious nonsense, and yet it worked because it restricted calories). If you only ate things that being with the letter P on Mondays, you'd probably lose weight, at least for a while.. but it's hard to think of that as an effective meal-plan; it's effectively just "eat less".

"Don't eat too much" is an easy catchall, but is often completely unhelpful in terms of helping people make decisions that will make healthy living easier. And, for me, avoiding meats is advice that would make healthy living much harder. I've found a balance of stuff that's working for me (when other stuff didn't), and I'm mostly happy with my health/diet situation, but I've never seen some overarching theory that really fits my experience of health and nutrition. I imagine what you've presented is working for you, but it's not some universal home run - and I think a good chunk of it is baseless bollocks (or is correct by coincidence).

The very idea that there's a simple formula for how to do this is a big part of what's screwing people over; people glom onto some theory, and when they find it isn't working they blame themselves or give up. In the 80s, it was super simple: just eat less fat and you'll be less fat. That kind of sounds intuitive (man, people are eating a lot of fat these days, and fat is so calorie-dense!), and cutting fat worked for some people. Yet for many people, trying to cut fat was just going to make their life harder.

My sister-in-law is overweight and eats a bunch of nuts because it fits some Venn diagram of the 3 kinds of BS she's swallowed (and it would fit your plan too). But she's not losing weight. I think the nuts are making it harder. None of the people telling her things (and that's everyone; everyone is telling you something when you're an overweight female) are making things easier for her, and most of the sources she hears from in society pretty much actively shame her; they're saying "it's your fault for not eating more natural, for eating too much meat or gluten or dairy or whatever". Everyone has an idea, most of them backstopped by "well, if you're doing that stuff and still not losing weight, then you must be eating too much" and, again, the general notion "your lack of willpower is the core problem".

I don't think the answer IS simple. I think to help her, you'd need to sit down and look at all the things she eats and how much. You'd need to look at what she's doing, how she feels during the day, and what are the situations where she ends up really going off the rails and overeating. You'd need to try a few things, experiment through a few failures, and approach the problem from a few angles. "Her": the specifics of her body, her mind, and her life, would need to be part of the plan - such that if the plan fails, we don't say this external thing like "your willpower" failed, we say "we need a better plan".

Some people may just need a simple answer. For other people, I think "seeking the simple answer" is preventing them from building out the more complex answer they need.

Re:Nutritionism

[Faust6]

There's no shortage of quick and easy ways to prepare healthy food. E.g. baked salmon (12 min in the oven) with basmati rice (5-6 min) and broccoli florets (1.5 min blanched, or microwave from frozen) works and would yield leftovers for the week. Stop making excuses.

The Japanese eat more vegetables, especially in areas renowned for life expectancy (Okinawa). City-goers, like those in China, are increasingly experiencing health issues due to westernization of their diets (i.e. refined food).

Re:Nutritionism

[Faust6]

If you were ballooning then I imagine grains, legumes and starches were overrepresented on your plate. You can scale up vegetables as well as the meat, most people don't have enough anyway.

Re:Nutritionism

[JMZero]

Ballooning might have been too strong of a word. I wasn't getting huge, but I was slowly, consistently gaining weight over the years.

For a while I was having success with more vegetables and less meat than I'm doing now; specifically, I was eating a lot more East Indian style stuff with vegetables as well as tofu and cheese (lots of protein at night seems quite important for me to have success over time). But it was a lot of work to make it all balance out (and to prepare), and lots of it is stuff that doesn't fit well now because my kids won't eat it. The chicken works because I can double up on chicken, while they eat chicken plus rice/pasta (which I skip). (That's not to say we have chicken every night, but we eat lots of it).

Anyway, my point wasn't so much about what's working for me being the right answer, or that I couldn't ever find something that would work better for me. My point was more that a focus on simple answers will often preclude the solutions that work best for different people, solutions which might be much more complex. And, more specifically, I think simple plans focused on "healthy" (especially when defining healthy as "natural", "not processed", or traditional) and "not healthy" (especially when excluding things: no dairy, no meat, no gluten, whatever) buckets is often going to push people into dietary patterns that won't work for them, or that they won't be able to sustain at a healthy level when considering their lives as a whole.

Re:Nutritionism

[Faust6]

I agree, only you know your own body, and what's prescribed as ultra-simplified plans often overlooks important details and can be flat out wrong, espoused by charlatans. So it's best to remain skeptical, I wouldn't argue against that, but would suggest that once you've found your rhythm and accumulated the relevant knowledge in confidence, then the actual execution of a healthy diet is exceedingly simple. It took me years to arrive at combinations that work for me, not merely to remain slim but to have vigor, energy. Mind you it takes extra work if you like novelty and delicious diverse food on a regular basis, to be sure.

Re:Nutritionism

[dyslexicbunny]

I, on the other hand, have little time to find recipes, shop for ingredients, manage my stock and cook food from scratch.

While there is a bit of prep time involved, crock pot cooking is pretty much my go to approach for food. I also find myself cooking enough servings for an entire week so I don't have to cook most days (except breakfast as I can't cook eggs in advance).

A coworker was telling me he and his wife found some mom blog with a whole month's worth of food you can get at Costco for like $150 and you just cook it all in one day then freeze stuff and eat it over time.

If you have kids, you could get them to help in some of the easier prep as well. I know it's not 100% easy but it is a start.

Re:Nutritionism

[mike4ty4]

Yep -- they've made it so that the "healthy" "real food" stuff is pricier and more expensive so those of us from the lower socioeconomic strata cannot get them so easily. And that's also where the greatest levels of chronic disease are found -- not surprisingly.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Crowd Computing]

Exercises is fun and pleasant, but when it comes at the cost of not seeing kids at all that day which is reality of many crunch or full-time+ working guys, I guess they favor being present fathers over having fun with friends.

So why can't you exercise with your kids? There are different kinds of exercise. You only need the extreme variety if you're training for the Olympics or are a professional athlete. If playing with the kids is not your bottle of beer, you can do simple light calisthenics before and even after every meal. Just don't eat a horse or you might throw up. You can also try old-fashioned walking. If you work in a high-rise, use the fire exit for part of your journey to your office. If all else fails, do what bonobos love to do when they're not eating bananas.

Re:The only weight loss plan that works

[SharpFang]

Wait, is there any nutritional content that gets lost through sweat?

I mean, I ate 3000kcal worth of food, shat out 1000kcal worth of shit, that would mean I acquired 2000kcal of energy which I either burned through activity or accumulated in fat or blood sugar.

Or do you imply, if I in the meantime, sweated out 500ml of sweat, if we dehydrate that sweat, what is left can be burned for any reasonable amount of calories?

50 extra calories day are >5 lbs gain per year

[tempmpi]

Everyone can figure out why someone who is overeating more than 500 calories a day gets fat. But even if someone consumes just 50 calories (a small apple) each day too much, he or she gains 5 lbs each year, in ten years he or she can easily go from normal weight to obese. It is almost impossible to estimate both calorie intake and use to such a high accuracy.

Calorie counting only works because people will also constantly monitor their weight and adjust calorie intake accordingly. People can usually not get a stable weight by calorie counting. They will do classical bang-bang (on/off) control and constantly switch between eating a few hundred calories less than needed and eating a few hundred calories more than needed. That way calorie counting does not have to be very exact and still works but also causes stress. If calorie intake and use could be monitored more precisely people would not need to switch between two different states, but instead tiny adjustments of meal size would also work.

Re:Terrible article

[serviscope_minor]

Sadly, I then went to grad school and managed to gain it all back and then some over the next few years.

Aah you got a thesis gut. Yep, I got one of 'em too.

The Hacker Diet

[dentar]

Google "The Hacker's Diet." In it, John Walker explains the basics of how it's all about just doing the math every day. I lost 33 lbs last year with a slightly modified version of this method. When I tell people I lost weight, the first words, almost invariably, are, "What's your secret?"

When I say "I counted calories every day" they are underwhelmed. The only other "secret" is that you have to be willing to be -a little- hungry, but not starving.

Web edition: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackd...

Re:The Hacker Diet

[Nidi62]

Google "The Hacker's Diet." In it, John Walker explains the basics of how it's all about just doing the math every day. I lost 33 lbs last year with a slightly modified version of this method. When I tell people I lost weight, the first words, almost invariably, are, "What's your secret?"

When I say "I counted calories every day" they are underwhelmed. The only other "secret" is that you have to be willing to be -a little- hungry, but not starving.

Web edition: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackd...

I lost 30lbs in 3 months. Never felt hungry, didn't count calories, didn't even change what I ate. I simply ate less. My dinner meals were basically either beef or chicken with rice almost every day of the week. While I did cut out snack foods (in fact I made sure to keep no snack food in the kitchen), I didn't stop drinking soda or sports drinks. Never starved myself, never went hungry; I ate until I didn't feel hungry then stopped. I also went from doing a workout designed to maintain conditioning and improve strength (I had just finished up my final season of college football) to a workout designed to improve cardiovascular activity and maintain muscle mass/strength. I weighed a little more than the lightest I had been in the last 10 years (which was my freshman year of high school) but was still skinnier than I had ever been.

The secret to weight loss is there is no secret. There's no magic formula, or algorithm you can plug numbers into, or a fad diet that will make the weight melt away. You simply have to decide on what your goal is: 1lb a week, 10lbs a month, 30lbs by the end of the year, whatever. Then you have to make the changes(severity of the changes depends on your goal): eat a little less, exercise a little more. Don't cut out foods you love, it will only make you want them more and eventually you will cheat; just have less of them. And lastly, you need to actually have the will and motivation to do it and stick with it. And I say this as someone who both got down to their ideal weight in only 3 months, but 7 years later is about 100lbs heavier than that ideal weight. I got down there, but didn't stick with it and eventually it slowly came back on. I am starting to slowly get the motivation to get back onto it though.

Of course, what worked for me may not work for people diagnosed with conditions that affect weight such as PCOS or thyroid issues.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[ComputerGeek01]

How much exercise? What is the correct balance of food? What is the baseline and how do we adjust for age, height, climate, altitude and yes even ethnicity? These are the questions that should be addressed. One hugely effective thing that seems to be proven over and over again only to be immediately forgotten a month latter is that you need to time your meals with your circadian rhythm i.e. only eat at certain times of the day based op when you wake up and when you go to bed. These are the kinds of improvements on efficiency that the rest of us are looking for.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[knightghost]

The calorie works great. Weight is calories in vs calories out. It's simple, effective, and efficient.

Health, otoh, is complicated. Eating balanced meals, exercise, etc. People keep confusing the two.

Re:Calories do not exist

[bigdavex]

A "calorie" is a depreciated unit of measurement for energy. You don't eat calories, you eat food, and this food is digested and burned (producing CO2) which releases energy. When the amount of food you eat surpasses your need it is "stored" in the form of fat inducing your overweight. The reasoning of measuring energy is that an excess of food with high energy (sugars, fats) release will induce overweight because the way the body accumulates its carbohydrates in the form of fat, but it is a very complex process. Anyway energy is not a thing and does not have mass, therefore there is no sense in thinking that "x calories equals y grams of mass", at least not directly. In fact physicists, not physicians, and engineers measure energy in Joule units, which should be used for anything energy related, and some countries -New Zealand, I guess- post the nutrition facts in J/g as it should be.

A calorie is 4.2 joules. Multiplying by a constant isn't something to get bent about. -Eating food not calories- is some sort of bizarre, vacuous straw man. This is obvious and useless. Food *has* an energy content. Not is. Has. Who is confused about this?

J/g is a perfectly fine way to measure energy density for a person who knows what a Joule and a gram are. But it's not more proper or righteous than other ways to measure it.

Statistical significance

[sjbe]

Not as a fraction of the population.

Yes even as a fraction of the population. I'm not saying BMI is without utility or that it doesn't apply to many people but it's misleading for probably somewhere north of 10% of the population. That's a significant amount for such a widely used tool.

You're a fairly extreme case. You're a wrestler and clearly do a lot of excersise etc. And you come out mostly OK.

I'm really not a particularly extreme case and there is plenty of data to support that. I'm probably more active than average but I assure you I don't work out enough to be considered an extreme case physically. I'm probably something like 70-90ith percentile. Somewhere between 1 and 2 standard deviations on the good side if you presume a bell curve. My point is that there are a non-trivial number of people like me - enough that BMI by itself is frequently misleading if you don't understand what it measures and where it isn't useful.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Rei]

The article is a confused mishmash of different topics.

1. They present nothing wrong with the basic method used by Atwater, despite calling it "outdated". Discrepancies like the issue with nuts having 20-30% fewer calories than thought isn't due to a flaw in the Atwater method, it's due to them not actually being tested - they were simply grouped together with legumes and the calories just estimated based on fat, carbohydrate and protein present in them. The solution has nothing to do with there being "something wrong with the calorie" - the solution is that they need to test better and get better data.

2. Individual differences are generally small, and the only potential for significant deviation from the norm is towards those who get unusually few calories, not unusually many. I don't have time to dig up the numbers yet again right now, but they're in the ballpark of the average person's digestive system consuming ~94% of the protein that they eat, 97% of the fats that they eat and 99% of the carbohydrates that they eat. So a person's digestive system could potentially be much less efficient than average in some regard - although that's not normal - but it can't be much more efficient than average. You can have some more relevant variation on the breakdown of fiber to SCFAs but that's only a very small portion of daily calories. This excuse that the article is pushing people towards of "my body is just a much more efficient digester than the average person, that's why I'm fat" is simply not realistic.

3. Like in #1, there can be a difference between cooked and uncooked food in terms of availability of various nutrients - but again, this is not a problem with the concept of calories, it means that labels need to be accurate in regards to the preparation method. And it has very little impact on meat, contrary to the article's emphasis; it's mainly a plant thing (see the example of the nuts above). The human body is exceedingly good at breaking down cell membranes (animal cells), but not so great at getting through cell walls (plant cells), and it has more effect on non-caloric nutrients (many types of vitamins and minerals) than caloric ones. A lot of the energy loss in cooked meat is simply a fraction of the meat destroyed or otherwise lost (such as grease) in the cooking process. A steak shrinks dramatically when you cook it because it's losing ~45% of its water and a ~30% of its fat in the cooking process. The same steak has fewer total calories cooked, but more calories per gram.

4. Of course how you prepare food has an effect on what sort of nutrients it has, but since when is this news? Broiled, fried, steamed, etc - your mind is immediately jumping to pictures of how healthy that preparation method is when you see those words, isn't it? When you eat meat do you leave the skin on or take it off? Do you cut off gristle? Do you not expect these things to change the ratio of fats and proteins in the meat? We all know that how you fix a meal is going to influence the final picture. You don't calorie count a prepared meal by looking up the raw ingredients, you look up the prepared meal as a whole.

5. Their conflating the issue of cooked rice with the above about "cooking freeing up calories" is totally off mark, and actually backwards. Many types of starches (not just rice - potatoes, for example) partially convert from digestible starch to indigestible starch after cooling for several hours after cooking. There could be a general point to be made about how people should be better informed about the many ways in which preparation can alter the number of calories (though we already are generally rather aware of this), but it's not that the concept of the "calorie" is broken.

6. Metabolic consumption has nothing to do with the calories present in food. And yes, there are variations in basal metabolic rate. But the standard deviation is only 5-8%. Variations in metabolism from exercise betwe

Much simpler approach

[Dcnjoe60]

Instead of

One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods.

1) Eat food - food does not list ingredients, but often is listed as an ingredient. A potato is food, A box of scallop potatoes is not. If what you are eating is required to have labels to inform you of what is really in it, then it isn't food. (Note: this applies mainly to packaged food products. Obviously, there are foods that have labels, because they may be packed in water, etc.)

2) Don't change calories - Calories simply measure the maximum amount of energy that may be utilized. People have different metabolisms so that one person may be more efficient at utilizing those calories than somebody else, but that doesn't mean we should change the measure. Different automobiles are more or less efficient at utilizing gasoline, but that doesn't mean we should change how gasoline is labeled.

3) Calories aren't nutrition - Calories are about energy, not nutrition. 100 calorie apple and a 100 calories of sugar both provide the same amount of available energy, but the sugar has zero nutritional value. However, since calories do impact weight as in calories consumed less calories burned will either add to or subtract from one's weight, they can't be ignored. On the otherhand, they shouldn't be obsessed over, particularly since metabolism has a major impact on weight.

4) CICO - Calories In, Calories Out - assuming one is getting adequate nutrition, if the concern is weight, then regardless of ones metabolism, if you are gaining weight more weight than you want, you either a) need to reduce calories or b) burn more calories. Likewise, if you are losing more weight than desired, you need to a) increase calories or b) burn less of them. It doesn't take some database tailored to your specific body or specific flora in your gut. Those may explain why one person loses or gains more than another, but it doesn't alter CICO.

TL;DR - We don't need a national database of each person's metabolic profile or gut flora. We simply need to eat nutritious food and have more active lifestyles.

Re:Much simpler approach

[lcall]

I basically agree. I simply 1) try to eat regular, balanced meals with nutritious foods that are healthy, avoiding overdoing it, and 2) weigh myself before supper on most days to see how much to eat, and stop if I'm already beyond my target for the day, and 3) don't try to lose or gain weight too fast. If one has habits or emotions about food that prevent the above, maybe that is the problem.

Re:Much simpler approach

[iMadeGhostzilla]

The condensed advice I heard was: 1) Eat food. 2) Not too much of it. 3) Mostly vegetables.

A bag of chips or ice cream isn't really food, it's entertainment for the taste buds. Not saying we should never eat it, but if see it as entertainment -- and there are benefits from being entertained and a price to pay for it -- we are less at risk of being harmed by it.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bobbied]

Aw come on... This is not hard...Exercise a couple of times a week and try to eat a variety of things in your diet.

If you are gaining weight, exercise more and/or eat less calories.

Have any questions, hit up the "food pyramid" on Google and/or ask your doctor for information. After they drop dead from shock, I'm sure they will happily load you down with materials on nutrition and exercise.

Measuring healthy body composition

[sjbe]

People with lots of muscle and little body fat are a very small minority of the population.

Not to the point of statistical insignificance. Furthermore a tool that purports to measure what constitutes healthy body composition should at a minimum be able to work for people who actually DO have a healthy body composition. Telling someone they are "overweight" when actually what happened is they found the squat rack means that it isn't a very good tool. It can't tell the difference between healthy amounts of muscle and unhealthy amounts of fat. You don't even have to go to extremes (I'm certainly not one) to find cases where BMI falls apart as a useful measure.

BMI has some utility but it's over used and misapplied quite a lot.

Re:Measuring healthy body composition

[serviscope_minor]

Not to the point of statistical insignificance.

Never claimed that. BMI applies to most of the population. And if you have little body fat and enough muscle to put you into a high BMI then you're almost certainly heavily into exercise and have better methods at your disposal.

If you're not seriously into your lifting then BMI almost certainly applies to you.

BMI has some utility but it's over used and misapplied quite a lot.

I'd say it's underused rather than over used.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Rhacman]

People *want* it to be more complex than that. People don't like the guidance they are given to be active, eat more vegetables and less simple sugars. Every time a study like this comes out they quiver in their seats at the thought that they've been absolved of personal responsibility for their health because the metric was wrong all along.

After all, if the medical community is so confused who can say if it is or isn't a good idea to tuck into another sleeve of Oreos? The definition of a calorie isn't perfect, so maybe drinking beer and watching TV actually counts as exercise?

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Ol Olsoc]

Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet and getting exercise?

Define balanced diet precisely and universally, Einstein.

You aren't a very good source of wisdom if you don't read anything but the headline.

What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.

What I don't get is strawman arguments. As a person who has struggled with keeping my weight in line most of my life, what I don't get is people like yourself thinking it's oh so simple. My metabolism doesn't handle carbs well, my lowest adult weight was achieved by running several miles a day, bicycling 25 miles a day, another half hour of weights, and a half hour of other exercises. And around 800 calories a day. That's a guess, because I only ate one meal a day. That got me down to 185, which was considered borderline obese for my height. Incorrect of course, because I had almost no body fat.

So here ya go Einstein - Where was I going to remove more food and get more exercise? I was basically working, or exercising. TV consisted of watching the evening news before bed. Awaiting your calculations.

Couple that with say, my wife who is model thin. She ate roughly what I ate, is about 3 inches taller, her exercise was horseback riding, but she weighs about half what I weighed.

There is all manner of parameters that go into a person's weight. Body structure, metabolism, and the gut bacteria thing is very interesting. Moderate food consumption and sufficient exercise is always indicated, but if there is one thing in likfe I've found about weight it is that most people who think it's really simple are those who don't have much trouble keeping a good weight.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apply your rubber stamp logic to someone with type 1 diabetes vs someone who does 45 minutes of cardio a day vs someone who does nothing but resistance exercise vs someone who lives in a high temperature climate vs a cold climate vs someone with a genetic predisposition of a low triglyceride level...

You really don't know what you're talking about. Too bad you wasted your time in that biology course.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Anonymous Coward]

One hugely effective thing that seems to be proven over and over again only to be immediately forgotten a month latter is that you need to time your meals with your circadian rhythm i.e. only eat at certain times of the day based op when you wake up and when you go to bed.

Um, whut? No. That's some astrology level of bullshit there.

Try this ratio:
2 meals per day (drop breakfast)
150-200g (5-7 oz) meat per meal, preferably high-protein, low fat is not required but helpful, can substitute cheese for some of it
Under 200g (7 oz) carbohydrates per DAY (ie: no sweets, easy on the sauces, no bread/pasta/rice/nuts/soup/etc., easy on the fruit)
500g vegetables per meal (17-18 oz)

I lost a lot of weight on that diet, and I was able to stick with it for a full year. If your own diet only lasts a month, you'll never keep the weight off. Even this diet won't do me any good if I go back to eating like a porker just because I hit my ideal weight. A diet only lasts forever or never.

Re:Terrible article

[fropenn]

How many overweight people were there in the concentration camps? On a starvation diet, everyone becomes thin. Not that I'm suggesting a starvation diet is healthy or realistic, of course, but calories in obviously does matter.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[TheRaven64]

You might want to take a university-level biology course. Hint: science taught at school contains simplifications. Variations in intestinal flora, for example, has a big impact on the effect of various foodstuffs on different populations.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Sique]

And here lies the problem with your simple solution: "proper portions". What is a proper portion seems to vary from person to person, even if they have the same exercise regime. And there are many factors involved in determining what the the proper portions are, from your gut bacteria to the expression of several genes.

As the experiment of Mark Haub has shown (the famous Twinkie diet), even a very loop sided diet taken for several months can be ok and actually improve your health if you take care of what "proper portions" are.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bazorg]

The lack of empathy is quite remarkable, but I'll give that a miss and just suggest that the size of servings is influenced by bad habits and by expectations from food sellers. In the same way that toothpaste manufacturers hoped to increase sales by increasing the size of the toothpaste lid opening, food suppliers are can adjust the size of servings to promote sales growth.

Have a look at the sizes of servings in restaurants in different countries and you might see correlation with obesity in the population. I'm not having a go at Americans, but *everyone* I know who visits the USA notices that all restaurant servings are huge. Imagine if those sizes are seen as normal from an early age, how can people not adjust their expectations (and feelings of satiety) to regularly eating enough food to obtain 3000 or 4000kcals per day?

Add to that the composition of foods offered and the logistics of food, and you'll see that it's easier to get people to eat larger pizzas than it is to overeat fish with salad. In the UK, for example, I see any shop front offering Coca Cola and many types of chocolate bars as snacks (400kcals+ per unit). The retailer can stock up on those products and not worry about wastage for several years. However, if they wanted to have less kcal-dense food on offer, their margin would be lower due to logistics and waste even if the chocolates were significantly more expensive and offered slower or less intense brain rewards than the "healthy snack" alternatives.

Re: I guess it's easier...

[shaitand]

If you have a healthy bodyfat percentage you won't have a six pack at all. It is only by cutting your BF down to unhealthy levels that you get a six pack. Cut your BF down that low and you will look muscular and have a six pack without even really being all that strong.

That said I've known plenty of athletic people, especially females, who BMI does not give an accurate indicator for. For instance I know quite a few girls in roller derby. If you looked at BMI or pure body weight they are grossly overweight but in reality they are simply a more voluptuous build, not ultra low BF but the body isn't actually meant to be ultra low BF. Many of these girls are eating reasonable portions and dieting (usually 1200-1500 cal targets for 5'9 170lb girls) and doing 3 intense multi-hour workouts a week in addition to bouts which amount to a couple hours of HIIT each.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Forgefather]

I would recommend reading the article. For once they actually linked to an in depth discussion of the topic and the author cites a lot of useful information. For inctance, there is wild variance in calories based on whether or not the food you eat is completely cooked. Large pieces of meat can be potentially hundreds of less usable calories if prepared rare instead of well done.

It is this evidence that the article uses to criticize the calorie because a calorie is a measure of the absolute value of energy in the food you eat not the measurement of what the usable amount of energy is. Furthermore the article delves into how those calorie measurements are taken, and cites several pieces of evidence that those calorie amounts are highly inaccurate.

The article also disuses the role that gut bacteria play in our digestion, citing an example where a mother had gut bacteria transplanted from here obese daughter and gained 40 lbs without any change to diet an exercise. Thus diet and exercise are not the only influences of what we gain and how much. The article is littered with such evidence.

It is not just as simple as the food pyramid which, btw has been a broken model since its inception. Protein is supposed to occupy the lowest rung not carbohydrates and this has been well understood for years. Any doctor should be able to tell you that.

In the end I do understand where you are coming from. After all I am someone that lost 60+ lbs just by counting calories, but there are a lot of things that I could verify within the article based on my experiences. Such as continued unexplained weight loss even when I seemingly exceeded the maximum calories per day that I should have been eating. The article is definitely worth your time to read and even if you disagree with the assertion that the calorie is a broken method of measurement there is still a lot of useful information present.

Re:The only weight loss plan that works

[NormalVisual]

that's why calories are properly determined with burning of the food in a controlled laboratory, not the human body.

Except, as was noted in the article, people don't work like bomb calorimeters and don't extract all of the available energy out of food.

Why did he collected their faces

[Cowclops]

He's collecting people's FACES? What a monster! Oh, theres just a superflous A in feces. How do you pronounce faeces, is it like fah-eh-ceez?

Re:I guess it's easier...

[pr0fessor]

as the token skinny guy that sits in the office and only does fifteen minutes of low impact exercise intended to keep my back in good shape.

Here are the rules I follow... Drink water, stay away from soda or any other drink that has corn syrup it really hard to tell how much of this you are taking in so limit it. Stay away from artificial sweeteners and diet soda like they are the plague. take a slightly larger portion of meat at meal time, eat the higher protein foods first that way if you are full and leave anything on the plate you will not have filled up on carbs,

Re:The calorie is not broken, conclusions are

[bobbied]

Wait a min, the Calorie is NOT useless here, in fact it's served its purpose for decades.

What has really changed (and it didn't really change, everybody should have known it was an estimate to start with) is how our culture defines nutrition, how we generally diet and why we think we gain or loose weight.

Where your 1200 calorie diet and mine may have totally different results based on how well we can digest what goes into our mouths, the FACT remains that if I'm gaining weight at 1200 calories and I drop to 1000 calories a day, chances are I will gain less weight and maybe even loose some. Calories are a comparative measure, not an absolute measure. So doubling the calories means you are getting more energy in comparison than you did before. Or if you eat half the calories you are getting less. It's sort of like measuring long distances with a yard stick and a protractor...

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Blaskowicz]

Interesting bit about circadian rythms but I believe (or was indoctrinated) that social eating during the course of a long meal is very important. You have to start at the same time but you have plenty leniency and time regarding the speed at which you eat (and the quantity). You also derive much more pleasure and eating pleasure likely correlates well with eating well.
Maybe a one-hour lunch is useful even so that you can tie to your circadian rhyme (if you've begun eating your salad too early it's no big deal, but you can time your heavy mashed potatoes or fried chicken action the way you like)

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Jason Levine]

in proper portions

This is the key stumbling block for many. They might think they're being healthy by having whole wheat pasta with veggies, but they pile so much pasta on their plate that they wind up eating five servings instead of one. Then, they wonder why they aren't losing weight. Combine this with mindless eating (open bag of chips and "I'll just eat one... and another... and another... how did this bag get empty so quickly?") and people's best intentions can be thwarted.

This is why I recommend that people:

A) Pay close attention to food labels. That "one serving" bag of chips that you think is only 80 calories might actually have 2.5 servings in the bag. So you're actually eating 200 calories. (Yes, I realize the article was all about calories being a bad measurement, but the point remains valid. You think you're eating X but you're really eating 2.5*X.)

B) Get a food scale and weight their food. Yes, it can be annoying, but it helps you keep track of just how much you're eating. Going "by eye" is a good way to overeat.

C) Write down what you eat. It could be a notebook or an app. (I prefer the MyFitnessPal app.) This helps cut down on mindless eating. And yes, write down EVERYTHING. You ate a few M&M's? Write it down. Cheating here or there (especially when you're just beginning) will lead to you overeating while your recorded food intake seems minimal.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Aaden42]

People on diet have lower performance because their brains are lacking fuel on diet.

Absolutely false. When I'm not "on diet" IE eating three square meals full of traditional American junk, I feel like garbage, my brain is fuzzy, and I'm generally rubbish at my job. Cut out the sugar & starch, eat enough protein, and I can easily eat only one or two meals a day (approx 1200Kcal), and work several times better. My brain has plenty of fuel between those limited calories and the lard on my ass that's getting burned off in the process. There's an acclimation period of about a week that's no fun at all, but once over the hump, I'm a much, much, much better code monkey when I lay off the bananas and stick to protein.

As far as being fat/not fat, exercise doesn't make much difference. You can't burn enough calories working out to make up for over eating. Can't out run the fork as they say... Exercise makes me feel better. I'm an endorphin junkie, no question. When I feel good, I stress/depressed eat much less, so that helps in weight management.

"Enough" exercise to get that effect in no way requires me to never see my family. I run three times a week. I do it at lunch time (those would be the one meal days usually), and I'm not actually away from my family any longer than if I'd spent lunch going to Mc HogBurger for a triple artery blocker... Or here's another idea... Want to be a present father? Exercise with your kids, and maybe even their mother too. Turn it into a family affair, teach your kids to enjoy something that's good for them, and be a far better parent than most.

If you want to exercise, you can absolutely find the time. If you don't, you'll spend the time finding excuses instead.

Source: Dropped about 180 lbs over 18 months by eating less and exercising more, all while working full time (plus standard tech career unpaid overtime) as a coder.

Wilbur Atwater

[ganv]

Can someone explain why the article cites Wilbur Atwater as a Department of Agriculture scientist? I think he did his research as a faculty member at Wesleyan University. http://www.britannica.com/biog... Maybe he had funding from the Department of Agriculture? Maybe the author is trying to be dismissive of the scientific results by implying that it was serving an agenda? It was primitive work in the late 1800s, but it did set the foundation for a lot of more precise work on human metabolism. No one is questioning the main conclusions of Atwater that human metabolism obeys the law of conservation of energy, and that it is important (and difficult) to quantify energy intake.

Re:Wilbur Atwater

[cashman73]

Funded by the USDA.

Re:Bacon diet

[bobbied]

My doctor said I needed to add more plants to my diet, but I cannot find any bacon seeds...

Gut flora transplants

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I can see becoming very popular in the next couple decades is Gut Flora Transplantation.

The flora of your gut are heavily responsible for a lot of what goes on in your body.
To put it in to perspective, they should be considered a 3rd facet of human biology, 1 being the mitochondria, 2 being our human genome, and 3 being the gut flora we inherit from parents.
Kids that don't inherit those bacteria tend to have all kinds of horrible illness around the puberty ages onwards. C-sections have been a large one to blame for that, with a large correlation and very good evidence linking it as a causation.

Equally, they have also found out a massive link to how "fast" your metabolism works, and how fat you are likely to get.
They define how gassy you get, how much wind you get. They can even influence acidity if some acid-loving ones get a foothold, which can lead to autoimmune down the line. (don't drink carbonated drinks kids! They are awful for you!)
There are even links to mood and depression especially.

The fact that there has been a bunch of people that have had gut flora transplants and suddenly either became much thinner that they usually were, or fatter, was pretty out of the blue. They never thought things like that would have happened.
The people that gave said transplants were thin and fat, respectively.

It needs a lot more research. Finally it is being taken seriously after years of pushing it under pseudoscience nonsense by the larger scientific community.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[ComputerGeek01]

At the most basic level you're right of course, but are you honestly saying that you don't see any point in "fine tuning" this stuff? For instance, for most people exercising twice a week is fine. But Jim-Bob is a 6'0" predominantly white male, over the age of 35, working 50 hours a week and living in a subarctic climate. Jim-Bob should be going to the gym more often than you and he should be taking more vitamins to not only make up for the lack of sunlight due to his latitude but also his above average amount of time spent in the office under fluorescent lights. He should focus on cardio more than strength building or speed training meaning swimming would be his best option. Whether it is more beneficial to go before work or after is dependent on the level of stress he experiences at his job since it will directly impact his motivation to stick to the program. This list goes on for quite a while, ask a personal trainer not your PCP since the former actually make a career out of putting into practice exactly what I'm talking about. It's the kind of stuff we didn't realise 20 years ago and I promise you that there are more "hidden factors" just like these that are yet to be discovered. Evolution hasn't caught up with urbanization and we can't afford to wait for it or half ass it with general statements like "Exercise a couple times a week". We need to be taking more efficient measures to survive as individuals.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[laie_techie]

Have a look at the sizes of servings in restaurants in different countries and you might see correlation with obesity in the population. I'm not having a go at Americans, but *everyone* I know who visits the USA notices that all restaurant servings are huge. Imagine if those sizes are seen as normal from an early age, how can people not adjust their expectations (and feelings of satiety) to regularly eating enough food to obtain 3000 or 4000kcals per day?

I don't eat out often, but when I do I take home roughly half my meal in a doggy bag for the next day. I know my body type and where my ancestors came from, so I eat accordingly. I am engineered to crave sweets to keep me alive during those dark, harsh winters. To undo thousands of years of evolution, I don't keep sugary snacks at home or near my desk. Every time I get a craving, I have to decide if it's worth running to the store.

Re:Terrible article

[monkeyhybrid]

Can you be more specific as to what you're calling bullshit to? I didn't make any bold claims as far as I can tell.

Burning 500 calories for a 2 hour walk is a reasonably conservative figure for an adult human. For most humans it will be more, for some it will be a little less. The greatest influence on that figure is body mass. And with each step requiring energy to lift your body mass (that is not recovered on the down step), to a certain height (dictated by leg length and stride), a minimum amount of energy required can be calculated. That's just physics, no way around that. Any in-efficiencies will only increase that number. If you can find an adult who can walk for 2 hours and burn substantially less than several hundred calories.... well, you won't.

So going back to my original reply, a human that takes in 1000 calories a day and burns ~500 calories a day through exercise, has only ~500 calories of energy intake left to power their body's everyday activities. Considering that an adult's basal metabolic rate is typically in the 1,500 to 2000 range, you'll need to be burning your body fat, and eventually muscle, to stay alive. If for some unlikely reason your body was in fact storing fat under those conditions, you're going to be very ill, very soon.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[laie_techie]

The calorie works great. Weight is calories in vs calories out. It's simple, effective, and efficient.

Weight is calories absorbed vs calories spent. It is deceptively simple if worded like this, but in practice it's anything but simple. Based on genetics and gut fauna (and other factors), you may absorb a different number of calories than someone else despite eating an identical diet. WOW chips and the like can claim to be zero calorie because 99% of the population isn't able to absorb their calories. Likewise, your metabolism, weight, body composition, etc, affect how many calories you use to do different activities.

Health, otoh, is complicated. Eating balanced meals, exercise, etc. People keep confusing the two.

Re:Terrible article

[monkeyhybrid]

Exactly.

if (energy_in < energy_out) {
        energy_stored--; // Lose weight
} else {
        energy_stored++; // Gain weight
}

Real Science

[jellomizer]

The laws of thermodynamics still do apply. Person a average body temperature is 97.6F vs a person whose average body temperature is 99F There body is converting the energy of food to body heat, and people have different averages.
Also if you eat 2,000 calories a day. and due to your body you poop out 300 calories while someone else will poop out 400 calories.

The problem with most diets today it isn't based on good science, where there is a full study, but take a small sample of people and just use what seemed to work.

Re:Calories do not exist

[Forgefather]

I think the thrust of the article was that the calories in food are not all usable so in terms of controlling a diet a calorie is not always a useful metric. In the case of that sentence -Eating food not calories- could be very true if we are considering eating 400 calories of a small sandwich and salad vs. 400 calories of pure sugar. In the case of the sugar you can be pretty sure to get very close to 100% efficiency in absorbing that energy as apposed to the general meal which is high in fiber and other non-digestible cell walls.

The thing is that this imprecise system of measurement should be helping people lose weight assuming they are accurately counting calories as it would mean they are absorbing less energy than what they think they are, not hurting people in their weight loss endeavors as the article implies.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet and getting exercise?

It is a completely disastrous, full of fail theory for long-term weight loss, like all other fad diets. It doesn't work.

People cannot adhere to it. They operate on eating what their body tells them to, which is everything they can, which evolved in an animal world of hunter-gathering and want, and where there was lots of physical activity.

We need calorie-low (very very low) we can add salt and spices and Doritos spray to and guzzle hand over fist and lose weight

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bobbied]

Well, the problem is we are all unique and we are constantly changing. I used to eat like a horse and never gain weight, even when I tried. However, after middle age set in, I find that keeping the weight off takes a bit more thought. My body is changing.

So, science isn't going to easily come up with a solution that is unique to me and if they did it would be different next month as I age more. Why bother with the scientific rigor? All I need to do is learn what I can eat while staying a healthy weight and adjust (less food, more exercise) if I gain too much.

Now if you want to perform a thermodynamic analysis on my body's processing of various foods to three decimal places, the Calorie isn't likely to be your measuring stick of choice. However, if you want to loose 5 lbs., it will serve it's purpose in giving you a relative measure of what you might choose to eat.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[shaitand]

"Basically if you don't have a ripped 6 pack"

Stop spreading this nonsense. A ripped 6 pack means you have ridiculously low BF, having one does not require being strong or having much muscle but it IS almost a sure indicator you do not have enough fat to be healthy.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[ZorroXXX]

... suggest that the size of servings is influenced by bad habits and by expectations from food sellers.

The human mind is actually quite deceptive, and exactly when you feel full when eating is in no way an objective, fixed norm. Search for bottomless soup bowl for an intresting experiment that shows how people are fooled to eat much more than they expect without notecing.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[stealth_finger]

Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet and getting exercise?

Define balanced diet precisely and universally, Einstein.

You aren't a very good source of wisdom if you don't read anything but the headline.

What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.

What I don't get is strawman arguments. As a person who has struggled with keeping my weight in line most of my life, what I don't get is people like yourself thinking it's oh so simple. My metabolism doesn't handle carbs well, my lowest adult weight was achieved by running several miles a day, bicycling 25 miles a day, another half hour of weights, and a half hour of other exercises. And around 800 calories a day. That's a guess, because I only ate one meal a day. That got me down to 185, which was considered borderline obese for my height. Incorrect of course, because I had almost no body fat.

So here ya go Einstein - Where was I going to remove more food and get more exercise? I was basically working, or exercising. TV consisted of watching the evening news before bed. Awaiting your calculations.

Couple that with say, my wife who is model thin. She ate roughly what I ate, is about 3 inches taller, her exercise was horseback riding, but she weighs about half what I weighed.

There is all manner of parameters that go into a person's weight. Body structure, metabolism, and the gut bacteria thing is very interesting. Moderate food consumption and sufficient exercise is always indicated, but if there is one thing in likfe I've found about weight it is that most people who think it's really simple are those who don't have much trouble keeping a good weight.

Balanced diet = A good mixture of foods. Meat and 2 veg so to speak. What it isn't is pre-processed crap for every meal. Rule of thumb, if it's cooked in the microwave, it's crap. If it's 20 minutes in the oven to heat, it's crap. It's not hard or expensive to eat reasonably well, it's the people who's fridges are full of ready meals who have the biggest problem.

You may have had issues with weight and sucks to be you, for some people it's more complex. Note I said 'the people who...' implying the ones who do that, not all of them. Can't speak for eveyone but if someone thinks they're too fat, eat less and exercise more. Most people can't be bothered with that though. If that doesn't work look at what you're eating. Some people are just genetically fat and there's really not much they can do about it, most aren't though. Most people don't naturally gain weight, they do it because they take no notice of what or how much they put in their bodies and then they sit around doing fuck all. So there you go Einstein. Doing as much exercise as you said and eating as little as you said you're obviously not one of the eat loads and do nothing types but one of the ones with a genuine issue somewhere. So, what do you want? A sympathetic pat on the belly? There there fatty, it's not your fault it's your genes. Might be true for you but for most it's not.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bobbied]

Yea the humble Calorie is obviously not a totally accurate measuring stick, but it is a useful tool to gauge the energy content of similar foods that is simple and fast. Are their times when the vagaries of digestion and preparation techniques might cloud the accuracy of what it measures? Yep. However I think anybody who understood what it was actually measuring would quickly understand it's limitations and why they exist.

So, for the person watching their weight, it's a good tool to start on, but you are going to have to fine tune the solution based on *your* situation anyway. So long as you understand this, I don't see much of a need to ditch the Calorie, Especially if the tool proposed to replace it is more complex to use for the average consumer.

Re:Terrible article

[SuiteSisterMary]

By that logic, a hummer, a smart car, a Toyota camery and a kia Sedona all should have almost equal mpg ratings. After all, they're all the same species (four wheeled internal combustion engine vehicles.)

Re:I guess it's easier...

[shaitand]

Being a body builder or not only impacts how much energy you need. You need more protein than carbs. The difference should come from dietary fat not carbs. Complex carbohydrates still burn faster than fats and lead to a body chemistry that prefers body fat retention while burning lean mass for energy. You want your body in lean muscular hunter mode, not lazy gatherer mode.

Exercise as way to burn calories is actually a fairly poor way to go about it unless you are planning to go insane with cardio/HIIT. All you really need to do is whatever fatigues to failure or near failure within 1-5 reps a couple times a day. Don't count it for burning calories, the point is to trigger the hormonal response that will cause your body to build muscles. At all times your body is in part burning muscles for fuel no matter what diet you are on, you simply need to trigger enough building hormones to offset that. Lean mass is important and if you are losing weight you want to retain it because even at rest it is burning calories.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[shaitand]

Eating healthy in the right ways is very important to being able to maintain and grow musculature and musculature is very important to building up your baseline calorie burn every day.

Lifting heavy is also important, not only does it lead to more dense bones but it is also the only thing shown to trigger the body to regenerate joint cartilage. But no, it is not in any direct way a means to burn calories. Exercise aimed at burning calories a lot of work for very little payoff.

Re:50 extra calories day are 5 lbs gain per year

[bugs2squash]

Just exactly as you say, counting calories worked for me when I wanted to lose weight, I lost 35 pounds when I planned my intake and stuck to it. As you say, it's not like you have to hit the right numbers on day one, you can chart your weight and I could have adjusted my intake up and down through experimentation to manipulate my weight if I wanted to. My ultimate downfall is that I did not want to keep the diet up. The planning was a chore and quite frankly I enjoy eating the things that got me so overweight in the first place.

So in my case, the ability to measure my caloric intake with more precision would have made little difference I think

Maybe some kind of bio/blood monitor that could tell me that I had earned the right to eat something might help, but I'd probably switch it off if someone put a plate fo french fries in front of me

Re: I guess it's easier...

[jedidiah]

>If it was that simple, why are the researchers in this story, and others complaining it is not?

You are confusing "simple" with "difficult".

Knowing what to do is easy, being able to execute is what's hard. Weight loss requires deprivation. That's going to be impossible for some people right there. Some snowflakes can't handle any adversity what so ever. Dieting is self imposed starvation and that's acutely anti-instinctive.

Some people can't manage to stop indulging themselves. Never mind actual self deprivation.

There are plenty of medically engineered weight loss programs and plenty more "consumer grade" solutions. The problem isn't the lack of suitable solutions.

People just want excuses to not be responsible for their own actions. They want someone else to blame.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[ShanghaiBill]

It's incredible fucking simple.

No it isn't. My entire life, I have eaten whatever I want, whenever I want. I am skinny. Many others get fat while struggling to lose weight. Twin studies have shown that the genetic component of obesity is very high. Many ethnic groups (Polynesians, desert nomads, etc.) have a strong genetic propensity to store fat when sufficient food is available. Quit acting like you are morally superior just because you happen to have inherited the right genes.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[jedidiah]

Get over yourself snowflake. You are no diabetic. So the corner cases don't apply to your fat ass. You just have to face the fact that you're a failure with no will power.

Not that any of the actual diabetics 1 have ever known were actual lardasses. It's usually the Type 2 ones that are the lardbutts. Diet and exercise tends to do them a world of good. Some manage to even go into "remission".

If you fit into the "buff or fat" category then you stay buff. The fact that life's not fair doesn't get you a get out of jail free card. The pity party that some people are wiling to throw you won't help you. You take care of business or you suffer the consequences.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[mrhippo3]

I would add a few more caveats to the whole argument of "calories come from the food that you consume." Being lactose intolerant, ice cream and other "rich" aka calorie laden desserts may wipe out any other calories consumed. If I eat too much ice cream then whatever else I might have eaten just "goes away" (hard to describe rapid elimination while being SFW). Another issue for me is black or white pepper. As with lactose, the pepper can result in a rather quick stomach dump. Mood also affects how settled my digestive system is, which again affects how many of the calories consumed are calories digested.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[ShanghaiBill]

If you don't sit on your ass in work, your boss will eventually rightfully fire you cause most jobs today are about sitting behind computer.

Use a standing desk. I use mine for about four hours per day.

If you don't eat those 3 meals, your will be tired and your productivity (and logic and focus etc) will drop

You don't want to eat fewer meals. You want to eat more meals. Try eating six much smaller meals spread out through the day. Since you are not as hungry, you will not overeat, and will eat just enough to satisfy yourself.

Exercises is fun and pleasant, but when it comes at the cost of not seeing kids at all that day ...

Try exercising with your kids. Every weekday morning, my kids ride their bikes to school, and I ride with them.

Definition of Calorie ABSORBED FROM FOOD is Broken

[Irate Engineer]

The definition of a calorie as a unit of energy is fine.

The estimate of calories absorbed from different foods measured by Atwater is not fine. If a candy bar indicates 400 calories, you may actually get 700 calories or 200 calories or some other amount out of it depending on your particular ability to absorb nutrients. Different people, different absorption rates. Hell, people's absorption rates may change over the course of a day, week, month, year, lifetime.

Energy In - Energy Out = Energy Stored + Energy Expended

By burning all our foods in calorimeters we can measure Energy In. By burning all our poo in calorimeters we can get Energy Out. The problem is that the Atwater measurements are for a different person and it is assumed that the Energy In - Energy Out bit is the same for you as for them for a given food. Unless everyone wants to get in the habit of burning samples of their food and poo in calorimeters to calibrate their systems, getting accurate estimates of the Energy In - Energy Out bit will be very difficult.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[jedidiah]

Also, the food industry thrives on people that can't control themselves. They need people overeating. They need their unsustainable profit growth. So they need people drinking coke like water and snacking every minute of the day.

If you tell people they can take control of their lives then all of that collapses.

Once people know that they can control themselves when it comes to food then the entire basis of consumer culture falls apart. Once you can turn away from the snik-snaks, you can turn away from the rest of it and the whole house of cards collapses.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[kheldan]

The reasons are actually quite simple and easy to miss because they're right in front of your nose where you're least likely to look. :-)

1. Exercise is unpleasant (for the majority of people). Most people will use any excuse to avoid unpleasant things, even if the result of {unpleasant_thing} is to their benefit. "I don't have time" is probably the most common excuse; you don't have one hour, really?
2. The human body is evolved to be very efficient at storing calories and very efficient in it's use of them; read as: 'The human body will fight you to keep it's calories (i.e. body fat)'. One might even theorize that even on a mental/emotional level, it will throw roadblocks in the way of burning calories. After all the next famine might be right around the corner! How will we survive without lots of bodyfat? (i.e. human body still thinks we're hunter/gatherers)
3. Most people don't want to give anything up. Knowing what you're actualy eating (calorically, that is) is the first step to controlling your body composition, but most people flat-out won't do it, because then they have to be honest with themselves that the foods they enjoy the most, are the most fattening and worst for their overall health -- and if they don't know then they don't have to make a choice. Again, most people will use any excuse to avoid being honest about what and how much they're eating, and any excuse to give anything up, too.
4. The problem, at least here in the U.S., has got so bad that now obese people are spinning their obesity into some sort of twisted, messed-up virtue, with the 'healthy at every size' movement, etc. I've even seen some instances of women claiming that they're being discrimonated against by men, and that it should be some sort of (criminal or social) hate-crime to not be attracted to them; they actually want to force men to be attracted to them, date them, sleep with them, etc., I kid you not.
5. Every decade that passes, we're getting lazier and lazier overall, due to more and more modern conveniences. People don't have to do things for themselves as much anymore, so they don't. Before too long people won't even have to actively drive their cars, they'll sit there behind the wheel, barely even paying attention to the road, while a computer does most of the actual driving. We don't have to hunt or gather to survive; we don't all have to be subsistence farmers. Some don't even have to get off their butts to go to the grocery store, they can get it all delivered. Children are not encouraged to go outside and play, they're put in front of a screen to watch shows or play games. It's a bad trend overall for humanity, in my opinion.
6. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the trend towards rejecting science has something to do with this, too.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[russotto]

And around 800 calories a day. That's a guess, because I only ate one meal a day.

And there's the problem: you guessed wrong.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[ZorroXXX]

This is simple to show in a back of an envolope calculation: Around 3/4 of what you eat is used just to keep your body warm. So if you reduce your eating with 12-13% you have in effect halved your net food intake. Or if you increase your eating with 25% you have doubled your net food intake.

Of course it is not that simple, but it shows that variations in food intake have a significant impact.

Hm, reading the above I realize that it does not adress how this relate to the effect of excercising, but well. Maybe someone else could fill in.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[BronsCon]

No, it's calling out the importance of eating a *balanced* diet, balanced being the operative word and different for each person. I can get 2000 calories a day in a few spoonfuls of sugar, or I can get it in a few well-balanced meals. What you're implying is that those, because they potentially provide the same amount of energy, will have the same effect on my body. This has been proven, thoroughly and repeatedly, wrong.

Your body is going to process everything you put into it until it has everything it needs. If you eat 10,000cal worth of sugar, your body will process every calorie; if you eat the same number of well-balanced calories (nutritionally balanced, that is to say the food you eat contains all the nutrients your body needs, not just referencing the incorrectly-stacked food pyramid), you'll end up pooping out a lot of partially-digested food as your body got what it needed and stopped expending the energy to extract any more.

I'll admit that I started with a sample size of one and that has only grown slightly as I've convinced a few people close to me to try it, but I've tested this with a 100% success rate. And the participants have been healthier (both physically and mentally) to boot, because their bodies are getting all the nutrients they need to fuel their immune systems and balance out body and brain chemistries. Of course, there are still maladies that can befall a person that simple dietary changes won't do much for, but it's amazing the number of "ailments" for which the recommended course of treatment is to mask the symptoms with drugs, rather than face the root cause of the problem.

Don't take my word for it, though. Talk to a doctor and a dietitian; if they don't agree, ask the doctor which drug company is in his back pocket, then talk to a different doctor. Once you find a doctor that agrees with your dietitian on the importance of treating illness with a balanced died over masking the symptoms with drugs, keep seeing that doctor, and know that you can trust that any prescription (s)he writes serves a purpose other than earning them a kickback.

It may appear that I have veered slightly off-topic, but not really; diet and overall health are very closely related.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[JasterBobaMereel]

Most people do not eat carbohydrate, protein, or saturated fat, they eat foods most of which contain several of them, and they have meals which contain a variety of foods

Some carbohydrates give humans no energy, some lots, and restricting intake to extremes has been shown to be harmful (as is too much)

Your recommended diet is impossible for most people to understand or follow, and is by anyone's information unbalanced, it is likely (with some exercise) to allow you to lose weight, but is not a diet you should stick to indefinately, your wieght may be fine but your health may not be ...

Re:I guess it's easier...

[BronsCon]

Or, maybe the metric is wrong and actually getting some balance in your diet (not based on the Food Pyramid, e.g. a dietary schedule derived by an industry wanting to drive sales of cheap-to-manufacture high-margin goods over those which are expensive to produce but don't draw the same prices) is the solution. Did you ever think of that? I can tell you with certainty that my wife will eat over 6000cal/day if her diet isn't balanced but has no trouble keeping it in the 1200-1600 range when her body gets the nutrients it needs. Fix the model (and the marketing that drives it) and you fix the problem.

Re: I guess it's easier...

[jofas]

In no way does BMI include six pack as part of its definition.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[BronsCon]

Balance is more important than proper portions, though you could argue that a proper portion of one part of your diet will leave you hungry for proper portions of the rest until you get those; but once you've eaten that balanced diet, it doesn't much matter what you shove down your gullet after that; your body all bot stops processing food once it has everything it needs. You'll literally start pooping out partially-digested food if you overeat a balanced diet.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[blue9steel]

Your advice sucks and won't work for wide swaths of the population.

You MUST:

1) Control your calories
2) Eat sufficient protein and fats
3) Lift weights

Other things may help but are optional.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Alopex]

During my Ph.D. program we had a series of guest lecturers on special topics rotate through, and this venerable senior M.D. came in to lecture about relationships between obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

I felt compelled to ask: "Surely, out of the thousands+ of patients you've seen with type 2 diabetes, haven't some of them decided to become more athletic? The benefits on insulin sensitivity and blood sugar balance are well-established [as he had talked about during the lecture]."

The Dr. looked at me like I just asked him if he had ever treated a unicorn. "It's hard," he said, as if it were an impossibility.

Overall, I think the lardasses are that way not because of imprecision with the calorie, but a lack of willpower, or some other deeply-ingrained psychological problem.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Faust6]

That variance is interesting, but it's a small part of the reason people get fat. Refined grain, sugar, and isolated fats (such as hydrogenated oil), coupled with absence of insoluble fiber in the diet and overall malnutrition would all get you there, and the habits encourage more consumption compared to nutrient-dense food (for the same reason you can mow down a huge bag of chips but can't eat the equivalent in fruit).
The calorie still has some utility as a measure, but broadly it's the least important. Of course, obese people have to be more conscious about those numbers since they'll just keep piling it on, but they seem to have blinders on about other aspects of their diet. I've seen some refuse to eat fruit and yet grab a large plate full of empty carbs and red meat.

Re: I guess it's easier...

[BronsCon]

I phrased that poorly. What I should have said is "if your doctor argues with what your dietitian says" rather than simply if they disagree. That said, I agree with you that we likely haven't even scratched the surface with regard to nutrition. That, however, means that there is added value in testing what we think we know and being very open to admitting we were wrong.

To give you an example of what I'm talking about, my wife's psychiatrist kept her on the meds she was on when she started seeing him, only long enough to consult with her PCP and his on-staff nutritionist to evaluate her overall health and lifestyle habits. He's since taken her off her meds and put her on a dietary adjustment program. Yes, you read that correctly, a psychiatrist has a nutritionist on staff and prefers to treat with diet over medication; and everyone involved agrees that it's working, she's been off her meds for about 2 weeks now and is once again productive and happy. The original plan was to put her back on a low dose of something (to be determined) once her body and brain chemistries were as naturally balanced as they could get, but it appears, at least in her case, that diet did it all.

Kind of makes you wonder how much of a dent proper diet would put in the bottom lines of the drug companies, doesn't it?

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Faust6]

I'll add that calorie count is kind of redundant if you proportion the right foods correctly (giving representation to fat/protein, veggies, and some starch, grain or legume) and simply don't overstuff yourself, such that you reach a comfortable level of fullness (like 80-85%) and no more. I mean I could bother to count but it would still fall into the appropriate range for my age and height. If you aren't being gluttonous it's impossible to get obese with copious veggy intake and whole foods.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Khashishi]

You just have to figure it out yourself. You have years and years to do so. You have more opportunities to become an expert at being you than any doctor does.

Sounds like...

[tigersha]

...a truly shit job!

Because some fat bastard sat on it

[Hognoxious]

Because some fat bastard sat on it?

Of course it's not their fault. Metabolism or something.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Rhacman]

It was never my intention to suggest against a balanced diet, as that is the consistent guidance the medical community has always given: Eat reasonably portioned meals at consistent meal times. Reduce snacking. Reduce simple sugars. Be active.

Models are always approximations; they are never spot on but will get you in the ballpark. Even if calories isn't perfect it still reinforces the notion that reducing your intake will reduce your weight gain.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[thegarbz]

cost of not seeing kids at all that day

And here is why the kids are also fat. Ever considered exercising with your kids? Take them to the park, play sports, go for cycling rides, etc etc etc?

There's more to exercise than spending an hour at the gym.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[thoromyr]

A few months back I read what research I could find relating to digestion, in particular with a focus on vegetarian vs carnivore, but branching out as the results did. The first big takeaway is that we know almost nothing about digestion. It is quite complex and incredibly variable.

Although there are plenty of assertions about how long it takes to digest meat vs vegetables the truth is that it varies so much that any difference is *obviously* buried in noise. A person might completely digest (that is, shit out the remains) of a food in one day -- and then next week take an entire week before it passes. It is easy to think of the digestive system as being FIFO, but this is simply not the case. While your body is busily trying to digest food A, it may dispatch food's B, C, D, E and F in short order.

But digestion is not only complex and highly variable, it is also very challenging to measure. This appears to be the main explanation for the paucity of research. It just isn't that easy to check on the current status of any given portion of your digestive tract, much less complete monitoring of the entire system. When the summary said "...mapping your internal chemistry..." I laughed a bit. Of course, there isn't any reasonable proposal as to how this could be done on an individual basis because we can't even do it for a single research case.

Don't get me wrong: I think more research will happen and there will be advances, but I think it is a mistake to think we will gain much understanding in the near future. It is much more likely to be a little more understanding in the far future.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hylandr]

We are all learning the hard way that this formula that worked by chance for a large percentage of the population is no longer working.

Humans change and evolve over time and so has our 'food'. Most of what we put in our bodies today is not representative of the food we ate 100 or so years ago.

This study and challenging of the status quo of the calorie is a much needed improvement to better understand with all the new controls and variables we understand much more of today. No science is set in stone and I am very glad to see this conversation *finally* being addressed outside of the collegiate dogma: Eat less, exercise more.

It's NOT that simple.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[shess]

How much exercise? What is the correct balance of food? What is the baseline and how do we adjust for age, height, climate, altitude and yes even ethnicity? These are the questions that should be addressed. One hugely effective thing that seems to be proven over and over again only to be immediately forgotten a month latter is that you need to time your meals with your circadian rhythm i.e. only eat at certain times of the day based op when you wake up and when you go to bed. These are the kinds of improvements on efficiency that the rest of us are looking for.

The right amount for you, which involves tracking your exercise and eating habits and looking at the results. If you want to gain weight, eat less than you have been eating, or exercise more than you have been exercising.

The entire point is that you can't build a calculator that will take everything into account. You have to treat yourself as an experiment of one.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[drew_kime]

I guess you missed this

Re:I guess it's easier...

[pnutjam]

Aw come on... This is not hard for me...
FTFY
Glad to hear you have your own metabolism figured out.

Re: I guess it's easier...

[pnutjam]

Let's not pretend their aren't as many bad dietitians as bad doctors.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[kheldan]

2- It is nearly impossible in the US to find foods that do not have carbohydrates added to them.

With respect: I don't think you're looking very hard. Right at this moment I have food items in my refrigerator that don't have carbs added to them: boneless skinless chicken breast, sharp cheddar cheese, swiss cheese, 2% milk, half-and-half, and Fage fat-free plain Greek yogurt.

1- limit carbohydrate intake to as low as possible.

Sometimes part of the problem with people attempting to diet for weightloss purposes is they go to extremes because they want to lose as fast as possible, then they fail when it's too much. All you have to do is limit carb intake in a reasonable way and you'll lose weight. Trying to cut them out completely will just make most people very enervated and miserable, and they'll end up quitting and maybe even gaining more weight back than they started with.

Re: I guess it's easier...

[BronsCon]

Oh, I'm sure there are, but they don't go around prescribing potentially (and often) harmful drugs in lieu of treating the real problems.

Your intestinal flora make huge difference.

[Maxo-Texas]

Lacking certain probiotics will make some food indigestable to you.
Lacking a lot of probiotics will make a lot of food indigestible to you.
Lacking certain probiotics will lead to bad food reactions.
Having certain probiotics will lead to gaining weight as you will be more efficient at extracting calories from food.

While you usually lose a lot of your intestinal bacteria when you take antibiotics, you can also lose them from diseases which don't make you sick but which do kill off your intestinal bacteria.

While some people push taking pro-biotics every day (even selling them in bottles of 30 pills), in my life, I've found taking a single pill is enough to jumpstart my system when I lose it.

Whole foods used to sell 3 varieties of pills- each with a different selection of healthy gut bacteria. One was yellow and one was purple. I can't recall the color of the third type. My feeling was that a complex gut was better than a monoculture gut (no science to back that up tho).

Three times in my life- I've had my gut bacteria killed off by an illness. Two of those times, it only effected my intestinal flora. The other, I was also sick physically. In each case, taking a single pill of each type and some yogart fixed things up quickly.

I have a friend who has celiac disease and her reaction was bad tho. She had strong distress after taking pro-biotics.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hognoxious]

It does, but the simple fact is if you're fat and trending towards obese you're eating too much for your particular configuration.

I think people latch on to "too much" and treat it as moralising and judgemental; it'd be better to think of it from a statistical process control POV.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bobbied]

Yea, and you know how I did it? By eating less and switching the mix of what I eat from foods with HIGH calories to foods with LOWER calories. It's a constant game of adjustments, but to be fair, I'm not obsessed with maintaining my weight. I'm really only interested in being healthy.

Re:Definition of Calorie ABSORBED FROM FOOD is Bro

[bhetrick]

Humans don't digest anything (except complex carbohydrates, via saliva in the mouth). Gut bacteria digest food. What is available for the host human to absorb after the bacteria are done changes significantly -- not by some little correction factor, by up to an order of magnitude -- depending on a number of factors such as food particle size, prevalence of cell walls and connective tissue, the exact ratio and distribution of gut bacteria species, and so forth, for a given "energy content" of food. (A human will typically absorb as much chemical energy from a 4-oz. medium-well hamburger patty as from a 16-oz. rare steak, and an much from a 2-oz. piece of cake as from a 6-oz hunk of black bread.)

What the human body then does with that chemical energy depends on a number of genetic, environmental, and experiential factors. Having lost a significant amount of weight lowers energy demand, permanently, by up to 30%. Food availability to the mother during gestation affects the metabolic efficiency of the offspring. Hormones and hormone analogs in _microgram_ quantities effect the efficiency and completeness of energy absorption by the gut and whether abdominal fat stores the glucose. (Subcutaneous fat responds to glucose levels, not hormone levels.) Oddly, there is a strong correlation between maternal soy consumption during pregnancy and non-obese offspring: but then soy is an estrogen mimic. Most plastics also shed endocrine mimics.

The "fuel" model of food is overly simplistic. The conflation of extreme overweight and obesity is overly simplistic (yes, obese people can diet and exercise to normal weight -- 5% of the time; the other 95%, other mechanisms keep the fat from turning into energy). The worldwide obesity crisis cannot be solved by diet, exercise, and willpower, because it is not caused by overeating, lack of exercise, and self-indulgence. _Overweight_ can be so addressed; obesity cannot.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[flargleblarg]

I can get 2000 calories a day in a few spoonfuls of sugar, or...

No, you cannot.

There are 16 calories in a tsp. of sugar; 48 in a tbsp. That's 125 tsp. or 42 tbsp.

Neither of those is "a few" spoonfuls.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[BoberFett]

None of that matters. It's still simple. If you can eat what you want and stay skinny, well bully for you. If you're fat, eat less and be more active. It's that simple.

Having a genetic predisposition to obesity is a reason, not an excuse.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[BronsCon]

I'd say 42 is quite a few, 125 quite a few more. I'd also say you're missing my point by about a mile or so.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[reboot246]

It really is not that hard. Do not count Calories!!! Don't even think about them. Eat what you like in small portions and then stop. Don't overeat. If you seem to be gaining weight, then shrink your portions or choose different foods. If you seem to be losing weight, then eat slightly larger portions or change the foods you eat. Reach the weight you're most comfortable with and stay with it. Don't bounce back and forth between extremes - it's not good for you.

It's better to eat several small meals each day than three big ones. Graze slowly and in small amounts. It doesn't take much to stop "hunger pains".

There's an old saying that really rings true if you think about it. Breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, dinner like a pauper. You'll be getting the right amount of energy you need when you need it, and then cutting back right before you watch tv and go to bed.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hylandr]

see a doctor and obtain their advice on how to proceed because you are weird and there likely is some medical issue you need to deal with

And that is where this research is a godsend. Because 'eating less and exercising more is *clearly* no longer working for a growing demographic of people that *have been* doing what you so flippantly declare as the ultimate solution. We aren't weird, our food has changed drastically from when the calorie was first identified.

The concept here is going to Healthy weight loss, not just starving yourself. This research needs to happen and those chanting 'eat less exercise more' seem poised to work to destroy anything that stands in the way of that mantra. That pisses me off.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Ol Olsoc]

Balanced diet = A good mixture of foods. Meat and 2 veg so to speak. What it isn't is pre-processed crap for every meal.

I'm what would be considered a foodie. Eat organic when at all possible. I even make a large amount of my own meatstuffs like sausage and bacon. I'm certain I eat probably a 10th of the so called chemicals most people do. Yeah I get my nitrates - mostly from veggies though.

You may have had issues with weight and sucks to be you, for some people it's more complex. Note I said 'the people who...' implying the ones who do that, not all of them.

You could run that by ten people and ten will come to th esame conclusion I would.

How about me calling you Einstein - think that I was calling some people who get smug about obesity and not you?Hell no, I was calling you that.

Because it walks and quacks like a generalization.

And no, my weight is not a matter of sucking to be me. I come from a long line of robust people with efficient metabolisms. Our family lives on average the same as everyone else. Even in the really old days, thos of us not killed by accident or war the men tended to live to 85 and the home to their mid-late 90's, who knows this generation? 150 years ago, no small feat.

So, what do you want? A sympathetic pat on the belly? There there fatty, it's not your fault it's your genes. Might be true for you but for most it's not.

I would like for you to stop being smug. Vwery few wear it well, and it is uglier and any adipose tissue I've ever seen. The shallowness of the fatshamers is pretty remarkable, and you exhibit all the symptoms. I need no pat on the belly. You, dear stealth_ finger, are in dire, desparate soul saving need of a teeny biy of humility, and possibly are hiding an esteem issue - many people who have a need to denigrate others do. Hope springs eternal

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bingoUV]

Actual absorption percentage of fats, proteins and carbohydrates in high 90s in unlikely. A typical person's faeces contains 30% microbes - the microbes eat human food, multiply, and come out.

So even if consumption in the gut is over 90%, it is not all consumption by the body but some of it is by the microbes which will not be in the body after defecation.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hylandr]

It's far more than 1% and your ignorance on the subject is staggering.

Why are there so many people that are completely unable to accept a changing world with a changing understanding of how it works?

If we lived in the time before someone suggested the world was not flat you would have been leading the lynch mob to destroy any such heresy before it caught on.

Thank you for telling the scientific community that their studies are a waste of time with no applicable benefits whatsoever. The real problem is *just* self control.

Go back to your cave.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Rei]

Looks like I got the fat and protein numbers backwards - fat is 95%, protein 95-98%.

Feces are 70% water. Of the remaining solid matter, 30% is bacteria, or 9% of the total mass. Furthermore, the mass of feces is generally significantly less than the mass of food ingested. Lastly, fecal bacteria consume many chemicals which are indigestible to humans.

Denial is not a river in Egypt

[diakka]

So the article does have some valid points that differences in digestion efficiency, individual calorie expenditure or inaccuracies in listed nutrients, etc. could be sources of inaccuracy when planning your diet. However, what the average overweight person will take away from this is: Counting calories is useless, I might as well just give up.

Having been raised by a very obese mother, I know this attitude all too well. I too, was overweight and desired to keep my weight down and also believed that calorie restriction would mess up your metabolism and eventually make you even fatter.

Eventually, I challenged myself to stop eating sugar since I have a family history of diabetes, and luckily found that I was able to break through my previous sticking point. This inspired me to try to add a little more rigor into my routine, which eventually paid off big time. Now I'm lean and muscular and go to the gym regularly. I find that calorie counting with a food scale is VERY effective.

So I tend to find the fatalistic attitude people have regarding weight loss to be very destructive, not only to themselves and others.

Re:Denial is not a river in Egypt

[ebvwfbw]

Do you know who the most gullible person in the world is? That's right, it's yourself. Everyone can convince themselves of just about anything. Especially if it's food it seems.

I have a friend that is way overweight and I couldn't believe her. Came over and she had this bit monstrosity caramel cake from Safeway. Man I was gaining weight just looking at it. She said - go ahead, have a slice. Nobody will know.

I was like REALLY!?!?!?!? WTF is that thing even doing here? You need it like a hole in the head.

That was years ago. Today she still a big old woman, taking a drug store worth of drugs to keep her alive.

I lost about 100 Lbs on the HCG diet. The diet drops. Just follow the protocol, you can do it to. I feel so much better. I wish I could lose about 75 more Lbs. That would take me where they say you should be, which most people think is way to small.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Jack Griffin]

The calorie works great. Weight is calories in vs calories out. It's simple, effective, and efficient.

Yet it fails even the simplest test. No matter how healthy your diet, you will still urinate and excrete faeces. So where does that come from?

Re:I guess it's easier...

[orasio]

The food pyramid recommends I eat most of my calories from cereals and other carbohydrates.
There is no scientific evidence that carbohydrates need to be most of your diet, calorie-wise.
You might need a very small amount of them, to jump start your day, maybe, but no reason to fill half your plate with them.

A diet of only protein and veggies is a lot better for me. I am overweight, but I do lose weight if I diet, I just cut as many carbs as possible, add as many veggies as possible, make sure all meal have enough protein, and not care about fats. If I add exercise, I can lose 2-4 pounds a week. I managed to lose over 40 pounds that way. Gained half that over several years of bad diet, no exercise.

Before that strategy, I tried several times low calorie, "balanced" diet, with exercise, I might lose 2 pounds in a month. My doctor says that carbs are bad specially when you are fat, and many fat people benefit from cutting carbs.

Also, most importantly, there's a psychological side to this. Eating is not something yo decide to do, it's more like an addiction. Some foods make you more likely to keep your diet. That's very important. Losing weight can be an test on discipline, but it's much better if some technique is found that helps you lose weight _without_ discipline. That would help more people.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bingoUV]

There are fat slobs, hard workers, smart workers, perfectionists, and professionals.

Fat slobs and hard workers don't need much information - the facts you mention are good enough for hard workers, and nothing can help fat slobs.

Smart workers, perfectionists and professionals can do with more information than what you mention.

Even people with a genuine genetic disadvantage can succeed by applying basic thermodynamics

No. Genuine genetic disadvantage can easily mean e.g. lower immunity when they eat less / exercise more / both. This results in a vicious cycle of illness preventing exercise causing further loss of immunity causing more illness - eventually this lack of exercise leads to "lifestyle" diseases.

Can they lose weight by eating less / exercising more? Sure. Can it be called "succeed" if it kills them / substantially lowers quality of life / causes genuine irritability even after prolonged practice? I am not sure.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[TheRaven64]

It does, but the simple fact is if you're fat and trending towards obese you're eating too much for your particular configuration.

Even that's not really true. You're eating too much of some things, but for some people it's very hard to find foods that contain enough of things that they are bad at metabolising (certain amino acids or vitamins, for example), without also including far too many of certain carbohydrates or fats that they do absorb. There are outliers who, eating what for most people would be a fairly balanced diet, are both putting on weight and exhibiting symptoms of starvation. There are a lot more people who tend in this direction, but to a lesser extreme.

Re: I guess it's easier...

[hackwrench]

Well, if you've taken one biology course, you've taken them all.
And have you taken them all?
I've taken one.

So tell me mister one class biology class expert, how can the people who grow the animals "fatten" meaning in this case producing meat instead of fat, do so while keeping them confined.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bobbied]

Oh boy... So now you resort to personal insults... OK (throwing up hands in the surrender pose), you win.

Look, resorting to personal insults is generally nonproductive and just shows that somebody isn't thinking rationally because they are angry. Calm down... It's not worth risking a stroke over.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bobbied]

It's *always* going to require some kind of change if someone wants to go from gaining weight to shedding weight. Eating too much or eating the wrong things for the wrong reasons is a bad habit.

I agree that what *really* needs to change is one's habits. Recognizing the phycology of over eating is great, but changing one's habits, one's lifestyle is the key to *any* effective change in one's weight gain or loss. Thus my suggestions that you alter your eating and exercise habits, and if you are addicted to food in some psychological way you take steps to counter it. (For instance, if you eat when you are stressed, or lonely, taking steps to reduce the triggers and instead of reaching for the chips, substitute them with carrot sticks or something.) In short, I am responsible for what I choose and even if I'm predisposed to choose badly or my habits of shoving chips in my mouth I am the one who must take steps to alter my habits.

Now, one must be very careful to make exceptions for medical reasons. I know a woman who lost a lot of her digestive tract to illness. She struggles to maintain her weight and obtain sufficient nutrients to stay healthy regardless of how much or what she eats. Such cases are extremely rare and generally obvious. Some may have autoimmune disorders that cause swelling and weight gain or are taking medications which make weight control difficult (such as steroids and diabetics), but these cases are generally medically obvious and require medical attention. However, just being fat and lazy out of habit is much more common and is about personal responsibility. You ultimately have control of your habits; if you want to change them, you can.

However... None of this is about the Calorie's use as a measuring tool but about personal responsibility. I still contend that using the Calorie as a measuring tool that gives you some idea about the relative affect of your eating choices is effective. It gives you valuable information and a way to compare two alternative choices in a form that is easy to measure and understand. But any attempt to adjust one's dietary habits, using any tools I can imagine, is going to require a change in one's habits and, for most of us, that means making some personal choices to change and this truth is not unique to the Calorie.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bingoUV]

Feces are 70% water.

Which being irrelevant I was talking about dry weight.

Of the remaining solid matter, 30% is bacteria, or 9% of the total mass

30% of dry weight, which is what I said. I didn't realize that body temperature water being zero-calorie has to be spelt out for you. In that case, I might also point out that by volume at STP, significant amount could be gaseous too though it varies hugely.

Furthermore, the mass of feces is generally significantly less than the mass of food ingested

Irrelevant, highly variable, and less less if the recommended amount of fibre is ingested.

Lastly, fecal bacteria consume many chemicals which are indigestible to humans.

Not a significant amount of which are chemically other than fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. Note that most fibre is chemically carbohydrate but nutritionally roughage - yet fibre processing gut flora is rare in humans.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hylandr]

Don't think of it as a personal attack, as much as my opinion of the authors attitude towards new information, and the negative impact it can have on the people outside himself that really need this information.

What ticks me off is people who refuse to take personal control for what they stuff in their mouths and try to blame *something* ANYTHING other than their choices of what they chew on, then complain bitterly about being overweight....

I wasn't the one that dived to a personal attack. This qualifies.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bobbied]

LOL, offended that I get ticked off at people who won't own up to their responsibilities? Sheshs, you must live a tormented life.

Ok Pot, meet kettle..

those chanting 'eat less exercise more' seem poised to work to destroy anything that stands in the way of that mantra. That pisses me off.

Which is what I say... "Want to loose weight? Eat less and exercise more, lather, rinse and repeat until effective."

So you are mad at me because I don't buy the "I cannot help myself" excuse? That I get ticked off at your self deception is some how a personal affront to you? Nobody is force feeding you, at least I hope not, and it seems you have control of your hands if you are typing stuff on Slashdot... You might have a "I'm mentally ill" argument in which case I pity you, but chances are pretty good you are in 100% control of what you eat and I'm right. Sorry if I don't suffer fools to continue in self destructive personal deceptions and tend to get ticked when the truth makes them mad, but it's called actually caring enough that I won't lie to you or let you continue to lie to yourself. IF that's not fair, best you get mental help... But we digress...

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hylandr]

My Anger comes from your inability to accept that nto every body is the same as yours. I am happy that worked for you, but not everyone is the same and this research is critical to that end.

WHY must everyone assume we all have the same effing *everything*.

I am done with this conversation, you are clearly not going to accept anything TFA has to offer.

Good day.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hylandr]

Here, Google this:

methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase

And that's just for starters.

Good luck on your journey.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hognoxious]

If people's nutritional requirements were as finicky as you make out, rationing would have killed more Brits in WW2 than Hermann Goering & Rommel put together.

If we hadn't actually become extinct long before that.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hylandr]

And this:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/28/...

Re:I guess it's easier...

[surd1618]

Ask someone sometime what a balanced diet is and if they say anything about carbohydrate intake being over 10% of daily caloric intake.. laugh at them and move on. They have been duped too.

Sincere question
But the brain uses ~20% of calories, and the body will throw all nearly all available glucose at it before shifting to ketones. Doesn't that imply that a 20% carb caloric intake can be healthy, so long as it's not a lot of sugar?

Re:I guess it's easier...

[bobbied]

We disagree on this I guess, no need to continue... We stopped with any constructive additions a few posts back anyway..

In true FIDONET (precursor to the internet) fashion: Flame ON! Cuz, we is well done...

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Hylandr]

Technically Fido Net came after the Internet. I think you mean precursor to the Word Wide Web.

I miss those old BBS days though.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Rei]

Cut it with the indignant act. You said " A typical person's faeces contains 30% microbes". No, it's not. It's 70% water. Just say "I made a mistake" or "I could have been clearer" and let it drop.

30% of dry weight, which is what I said.

No, it's not what you said. Perhaps it's what you were thinking of writing, but it's not what you wrote.

Irrelevant, highly variable, and less less if the recommended amount of fibre is ingested.

It's absolutely not irrelevant. If the human body would digest 99,9999% of a meal, leaving 0,0001% left over in the feces, then even if bacteria made up 100% of the mass of the remainder they'd still have only eaten the tiniest fraction of the meal.

Not a significant amount of which are chemically other than fats, carbohydrates, and proteins.

Really - you've never heard of, for example, cellulose? And the rest of the category "fiber" which, by definition, is indigestible to humans?

yet fibre processing gut flora is rare in humans.

Except, of course, that it's not. Most intestinal flora can digest fiber, at least soluble fiber.

And why are we even arguing about this? I gave you a link backing up the claim.

It is kilocalorie!

[MoarSauce123]

First of all, the unit referred to in regards to food is mislabeled. The amounts given are in kilocalorie...but since Americans are challenged by the metric system they do not notice that they constantly make an error by a factor of 1000. And kilocalorie is way more accurate than British Thermal Unit. I bet we can squeeze a footpound in there somehow to make it totally unusable. Energy content is measure in kilojoule these days anyway...and yes, units are never pluralized.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[TheRaven64]

Read the research. There was something published a few weeks ago that made it into the mainstream press on the effects of different sugars on different people, for example. The variation that they measured was huge.

glad people are questioning the calorie

[minyard]

the calorie is a gross rule of thumb at best. it doesn't account for any cycles in the body, insulin/leptin responses, digestion/processing time, how a person feels, or many other important factors. sure it's correct when you compare 300 vs 5000 calories in one day, but saying (almost) every adult should eat eg 2000 calories a day, every day, is a horrible disservice. our lifestyle (busyness, stress/anxiety, overscheduled eating, hurried/scant social connection) is more of a factor in obesity and disease than our number of calories.

Calibration matters?

[tjstork]

Well let's say there's some degree of error between the calorie in general and the calorie for you. I would think that, it's some multiplier, and that, you should be able to adjust it by monitoring your diet and the consistency with what you eat. Like, if you gain 1 lb a week, and eat 10000 calories during that time, then regardless of what the measure is, you need to either adjust your intake down, or increase your burn rate, or both. I hate to be barbaric about it, but you never see fat people in gulags and concentration camps. Sooner or later, calories DO matter.