The full study is much more interesting:
"We devised a machine-learning algorithm
that integrates blood parameters, dietary habits, anthropometrics,
physical activity, and gut microbiota
measured in this cohort and showed that it accurately
predicts personalized postprandial glycemic
response to real-life meals."
Thank you for the link - the study is very interesting to read. I have been bumbling around for a while trying to see what fits for me and there have been counter-intuitive things that seem to work. This study makes me think of that. Part of diet is finding what works to keep things in balance, cravings and spikes might indicate the diet is not working.
As an example - initially starting dieting, I stayed away from fruit as a vehicle of carbs. Over the past two weeks I have allowed myself bananas, apples, melon and berries as breakfast and afternoon snack. This appears to not 'spike' me as I would have thought but gives me stability.
Night snacking is a killer for me and I have been able to get by with a cup of tea around 2200 with a single biscuit.
Its just been 2 weeks but these two little cheats actually seem to give the diet some stability - for now anyway.
This is a great study, for nutritional science I am very impressed with the methodology. It's very large and very thorough. It should be heavily noted that the goal of the study is not to create algorithms for healthy people, but for diabetic and pre-diabetic populations.
The only well supported long term consequences of post-prandial high glycemic response in otherwise healthy people is an increased psychological urge to eat. Outside of that, the importance of insulin levels in healthy people is extremely overhyped. These machine learning algorithms are cool, and may be useful for diabetic people, but for the general population monitoring your insulin levels is a waste of time.
> Outside of that, the importance of insulin levels in healthy people is extremely overhyped. These machine learning algorithms are cool, and may be useful for diabetic people, but for the general population monitoring your insulin levels is a waste of time.
a waste of time? really? what does that mean? does this mean the difference between 10-20 pounds over the course of 10 years? because that's the vast majority of 'weight' concerns - people who are overweight but not obese are 'otherwise healthy' but if we can put a finger on exactly what causes people to put on a few pounds it would be a significant advance in science that would affect billions of people.
like, how can you possibly say that investigating what causes a "increased psychological urge to eat" is some kind of trivial pursuit? that's the whole problem with "otherwise healthy" people.
Sorry I think we agree! My point is it is a psychological issue. All things being equal (calories, nutrients etc.) the speed/magnitude of the insulin response is not important for overall health (in the non-diabetic population). The study mentions things like:
> postmeal blood glucose and its long-term metabolic consequences.
and the point is there aren't long term metabolic consequences.
> but if we can put a finger on exactly what causes people to put on a few pounds it would be a significant advance in science that would affect billions of people
I totally agree! We know it's not the insulin response in and of itself that is causing weight gain, it's the subsequent increased caloric intake, so my point is by being deliberate about what we are studying we can get better results. I'm not saying we don't need to study the psychology of eating, definitely the opposite! That's really what we need to focus on, and stop worrying about the "metabolic consequences" of the insulin response.
how do you define 'metabolic consequences'? i would consider 'uncontrollaby wanting to eat more' a 'metabolic consequence'.
and how exactly do you know that the insulin response doesn't affect the psychology? that's begging the question, and that's exactly what i'm saying is erroneous about your mindset. the state of nutrition science is currently horseshit, any casual observer can see that - we need all the good science we can get.
I actually think the insulin response 100% affects psychology (which is why I think we are in agreement here, still). At this level it gets very tricky to differentiate between "just the psychology" and a physical reaction, though, and so my point is there is no evidence of any bad health effects caused directly by the insulin response. An insulin blood spike is not unhealthy for you in and of itself, but sometimes it will cause you to eat too much and that's not good for you. That gets into will power, which is the place where the mental and physical meet, and where both groups of models tend to not work particularly well. It's not well understood and it's Complicated.
I agree with you about the sorry state of nutritional science, and when it comes to diet I'd love to see a lot more resources put into the psychological (especially reward pathway/will power) aspects of it.
It is very interesting. I wonder, however, if it's enough to isolate all relevant variables (this is peanut gallery speculation, I am not a scientist of any stripe)? The narrator explains that she is "an accident & emergency doctor [...]. Rushing around on my feet all day with strange working patterns". Never mind that the stress and adrenaline of such work must affect her body in some ways, she probably also moves quite a bit more than the average person. We're not told anything about her counterpart than her name, and that she's the same age and gender.
I've commented a bunch of time on gut microbiome before and I'll say it again here who may have not caught it. If this article is interesting check out "The Good Gut" by Justin and Erica Sonnenburg, PhD. I've been experimenting with an ad hoc restorative process through ideas in the book and reading/research around a myriad of pro/prebiotics + diet change.
For me the whole subject adds a lot of weight to the idea of "skinny fat" vs "fat". I'm glad we're in an age of companies like WellnessFX where I can objectively see the positive changes made by changes to a lifestyle... But, again, I can't stress enough how much great information and studies that have been broken down is in the book. No affiliation, but it's very powerful knowledge.
I am in agreement about the microbiome and it's importance but I found the good gut to be a terrible book full of wild speculation and little facts to back them up. Many sections started with a few thin facts then the authors made jumps that didn't exactly connect to those facts in order to speculate as if that was a fact. I hope there is a better book out there on this topic or one coming soon.
Interesting. Do you have any specific examples you can remember? I read the book from the perspective that it wasn't verbatim research results, but example based results from their research. I found the connections between the test and result generally existed, although I would say the book got a bit muddy on reuse of a few key topic areas. It's definitely a dry book - it took me a while to get through as it didn't always hold my interest.
That being said I agree that I hope there's more to come.
Except it doesn't in the realm of weight gain/loss. People's metabolisms vary by a wide margin, we could both eat exactly the same and I could lose weight, while you gain.
Of course no two persons are exactly the same, so your statement about gain/loss is true no matter what. However, I just want to say that a wide margin is only about ~10%, or two tablespoons of peanut butter for a typical "doing nothing" metabolism. This is assuming roughly the same physique and exercise pattern [1]. People differ, but in my experience the influence of genes is overestimated quite often.
Of course, top athletes can burn through 2-3 times what a desk-worker might burn through. And I think the small number I mentioned above also tells that you can slowly but steadily put on quite some weight, by eating every day just one slice of bread more than you need.
I coach myself and other bodybuilders/figure athletes on the side, consider this anecdotal. Working with the extremes of muscle mass I've found that it can affect metabolism a great deal. Simply by the fact that you have so much more weight to carry around/maintain. For example, I maintain weight at 205lb @ 5'7" (relatively) lean at 3500 kcal, for a competition I have to be ~170lb, my maintenance intake at that weight is closer to 2000kcal. Note that exercise also increases closer to a competition, so that 2000kcal maintenance is with higher activity levels than offseason.
No one wants to admit it's their fault they got fat, but it always is.
If that were the case then studies to find out why two people can eat the same thing and do the same amount of exercise yet one of them can end up fatter than the other wouldn't be necessary. It seems to be the case that, all external factors being equal, how fat you are can be determined by something outside of your control (genetics, gut microbes, etc). To that end, someone could be fat without it being their fault.
Every single time someone says "I eat the same as them" it's been shown to be self-reported, and therefore not verifiable in the least, including this current study. There's a show called "Secret Eaters", you should really check it out. People lie, to themselves included, about how much they eat and how much they exercise. Add to this a 4ft woman will not have the same BMR as a 6ft man, and there's no reason to go searching for some external influence.
There are psychological issues, to be sure, but except for rare exceptions (like Crohn's and extreme outliers, ie, not common) people of the same height and weight are within 200-300Kcal of each other BMR wise (source: http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...)
I know I am at least partially at fault for being fat. I sit on ass all day and rarely exercise. That certainly doesn't help.
But I also know that several of the reasons for obesity do not originate in the frontal lobe of the brain, and are therefore not the result of conscious decision-making. And that absolves me from some fraction of the burden of culpability.
But not the whole thing. I could make conscious choices to make my body healthier. But I don't, and therefore I can accept at least a little bit of the blame.
It's more important to me that I don't care one little bit about how strangers feel about my obesity. The only one I am answerable to for the condition of my body is myself. So if you choose to view me as a slothful glutton, you may. If you choose to view me as the unlucky product of genes, microbiome, and advertising, you may. I only care to the extent that you can help me achieve my own health goals.
Continually reiterating the thermodynamic dietary hypothesis to me (energy eaten minus energy expended) does not help. I doubt it helps anyone except possibly those who do not already know what a kilocalorie is.
That's why I like that research in this vein is being pursued. Even if no one loses even a single gram of white adipose tissue as a result, it could at least help kill off the multitude of fad diets that do not work for anyone, regardless of their individual physiology. And it might instill a bit of humility and understanding in those who never quite grasped that their fit bodies are the result of hard work and good fortune, not just the former.
"But not the whole thing. I could make conscious choices to make my body healthier. But I don't, and therefore I can accept at least a little bit of the blame."
I think this is the sad truth of the matter (at least for now). People tend to fall into one of two camps: 1) Those who believe that obesity is largely (if not entirely) the obese person's fault; 2) Those who believe that obesity is heavily influenced by factors outside of conscious control, and therefore, there's nothing to be done about it.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Some people are luckier than others, genetically or epigenetically. The unlucky ones will put on fat more easily, and they will have a much harder time losing it. So that means they need to work twice as hard (if not 100x as hard) to keep it off. It's a shitty break, but it's the truth.
I grew up fat. Losing that fat took nothing short of a Herculean (and borderline unsustainable) dietary effort. I mean, I lived like an ascetic monk, depriving myself of any and all pleasurable food, for the better part of a decade. I worked out like a crazy person. And even today, keeping off the fat requires a constant vigil over everything I eat, and the amount of exercise I do. I wasn't responsible for getting fat in the first place -- I lost a prenatal dice roll -- but I did take responsibility for battling the bulge.
"Continually reiterating the thermodynamic dietary hypothesis to me (energy eaten minus energy expended) does not help. I doubt it helps anyone except possibly those who do not already know what a kilocalorie is."
Agreed. It's also willfully reductionist, and it smacks of passive-aggressive moralizing. To me, rattling off the calories-in-calories-out line is no more helpful than calling obese people lazy, stupid, irresponsible, or sinful. (And in basically 90% of the contexts in which someone says it, that's the subtextual insinuation.) It's unproductive. It's an attempt to close the case summarily, and this case needs to stay open.
> Continually reiterating the thermodynamic dietary hypothesis to me (energy eaten minus energy expended) does not help.
There are those who would deny it, unto their dying breath. You do not appear to be one of them, and that's the first step. The saying I like is that weight loss is simple (subtext: simple to understand), but not easy (subtext: not easy to execute). Sure, there are tonnes of factors that go into what causes someone to overeat. And fad diets, or even the whole concept of "dieting" need to DIAF (it's lifestyle changes or nothing). And shaming people for being fat might actually be counterproductive. But being at a healthy weight is there for the taking, if you want it. If you choose not to be a healthy weight, fair enough. Just don't complain when you have to (rightfully) pay for two airplane tickets because you take up that much space.
And just for the record, there are many of us for whom weight loss had nothing to do with good fortune. We were fat, we had bad eating habits (snacking unconsciously, bingeing on soda, etc, etc). We've been there, we recognized what caused us to be fat, and we turned it around through hard work and perseverence. Didn't even have to get a gut biome implant or exercise like a fiend, just simple reduction of intake.
While it's true that people's metabolisms vary widely, and the amount of calories for one individual to maintain weight might make another gain, it's not true that the weight gain is outside of their control. They have control over how much food they eat.
If you're gaining weight, it means you're eating more than your body can burn, so you need to eat less.
This is not as attractive an answer as "i just have the wrong gut microbiota" but it's far more accurate.
If you're gaining weight, it means you're eating more than your body can burn, so you need to eat less.
Or your body is skipping the usable energy stage completely for some foods and storing them as fat directly without it ever having the chance to be used. Then some of the food you eat makes you gain weight regardless of the amount of activity you do - you just run out of energy and get fat.
The mistake you're making is assuming that humans are perfect machines for turning food in to energy, and simple mechanics means extra energy is stored as fat. It's far more complex than that.
If fat were deposited and not burnt under starvation, body would be unable to perform work (law of energy conservation), and organs would fail. Ultimately, starving people would be dying fat.
But we know this is not the case. Starving populations are very skinny.
This is not to say that starvation is healthy, only that starvation is a reliable, affordable, and obvious way to lose weight.
> If you're gaining weight, it means you're eating more than your body can burn, so you need to eat less.
This is spot on. So you have a slow metabolism/bad genetics/conditions/etc? Sucks to be you. Sorry. It's like that saying by Schneier about copy protection and the speed of light. If you want to lose weight, adjust your intake downwards. That's all it takes. Hungry/craving something? Try substituting something more filling (less calorie dense), or eating a little bit to see if that makes the craving go away.
It's tough to hear but no matter what your genetics or internal flora are, being overweight is still your fault. It may not be "fair" that someone puts on less weight than someone else eating the same diet, but ultimately you're the one responsible for maintaining your own weight (by controlling what you put in your mouth) no matter what the state of your gut microbes.
edit: not picking on you Onion2k...I end up commenting a lot on these stories because it really irks me when so many articles and people are looking for something external to blame for their weight problem. You may or may not be able to change your metabolism but you absolutely can change the number of calories you're consuming.
The ability of human beings to control their biology through willpower is limited (if you don't believe me, try holding your breath for 30 minutes, or not drinking anything for a few days). Willpower itself is limited, and motivation is itself influenced by mental health. And diseases like Prader-Willi and Emery-Dreifuss demonstrate situations in which motivation and willpower are irrelevant.
And that's only what we know.
Sometimes when I have dinner with friends, I'll observe a situation where two of them will order the same thing, the bigger one will wolf down the dinner and the thinner one will pick at it and eat maybe half. I don't see two people equally tempted, where one gives it to his cravings and other is morally strong. I see two people with two different drives.
Why do different people respond so differently the same meal? What is it our society that leads so many people to consume a calorie surplus? It's disappointing the number of people that don't even want to investigate the biological and psychological origins of such phenomenon, instead claiming (without evidence) that it's all about moral failure.
In the 19th century, when painkillers first started becoming available, physicians would refuse to give them to woman in childbirth, because the Bible says childbirth is supposed to be painful. Women had sinned, therefore they must suffer. That's nonsense, of course, but people really wanted to hold onto their moral judgements, even at the expense of biology, good medicine, and relief of suffering. I think we should be suspicious of any impulse to use moral judgement to avoid investigation into the causes of medical conditions. Like obesity.
> In the 19th century, when painkillers first started becoming available, physicians would refuse to give them to woman in childbirth, because the Bible says childbirth is supposed to be painful. Women had sinned, therefore they must suffer.
This is a great analogy. "It's your fault" is not a public health policy, it's a cop-out. And it doesn't even make sense. Obesity is rising dramatically in developed countries. Is the current generation just morally inferior to the ones that came before?
Obesity is peoples' fault in the same way car accidents are. That doesn't mean the proper response is to simply blame people, instead of using science to devise solutions.
> This is a great analogy. "It's your fault" is not a public health policy, it's a cop-out.
A cop-out from what, exactly? Does society have a responsibility to make everyone thin?
Even if you say it does, how would you propose it goes about doing that? There's no scalable, organizable effort you can take that will make fat people thin.
If you say we have to throw more money at research, I say, sure, we should! Along with every other worthy cause. Where we're going to get the money, I've no idea. If you do, that's a completely different kind of argument.
Society does have a reponsibility to not provide those substances that cause serious physical harm to many people more readily and cheaply than those more suited to good life.
Yet we don't tax sugar, processed food is the cheapest and non-processed are the most expensive.
The entire food industry is designed to sell more of 'their' product, and the addictiveness is developed more than the health value. Lobbyists ensure the governments keep the status quo.
You can surely make people fat, or lead-poisoned, or stuffed full of sugar and diabetic, or more full of meat, etc. through government decisions.
While the libertarians might have a point that most such decisions turn out to be deleterious, it's certainly not the case that policy can't make you fat, and so can presumably avoid making you fatter.
How does research pay for itself? Naturally the results of the research could well be worth the time and money invested, even many times over if you're lucky, but that doesn't mean that it paid for itself. Somebody still has to pony up the dough to pay the scientists, lab assistants, equipment, time for them to figure out what they're doing, etc. None of it is free.
>Obesity is peoples' fault in the same way car accidents are. That doesn't mean the proper response is to simply blame people, instead of using science to devise solutions. //
But if obesity is primarily the fault of the person who is obese lacking will power then shouldn't we start by doing things directly addressing this.
For example, I snack late at night - except when there are no snacks in the house. Sometimes I'll still make food, but mainly I'll just wander around feeling tetchy and eventually get distracted enough to not think about it. For me it absolutely is lack of willpower (which is much better recently probably due to antidepressant meds) to avoid eating things I know aren't healthy for me; or indeed just to eat less in general.
If we're looking to prime cause then for me willpower seemingly fits the bill, as you say that revelation may not help to fix things for me - if I can do outdoor pursuits for a week then I can lose weight no problems! - but healthcare workers looking to help me should perhaps seek ways to enforce diet that don't rely on my willpower so much rather than just ignore willpower deficiency altogether?
> But if obesity is primarily the fault of the person who is obese lacking will power then shouldn't we start by doing things directly addressing this.
Yes, we should. The average weight has gone up far faster than humans can change genetically, so people start looking for things like gut flora or epigenetics. Occam's razor would point to the average supermarket and restaurant selection of today versus a few generations ago to explain the obesity epidemic. Cheaper, faster, tastier food (capitalism optimizes for these three qualities in food), and more riveting, less active indoor pursuits can easily explain it. That's not to say the research is worthless, but gut biome most likely influences subconscious cravings, not BMR, and epigenetics is still young enough that many biologists think that pulling conclusions from research into it is premature at best.
A study showed that transplanting gut bacteria from obese people into mice led to the animals gaining weight, while bacteria from lean people kept them slim.
The findings were published in Science.
Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, took gut bacteria from pairs of twins - one obese, one thin.
The bacteria were then put into mice which had grown up in completely sterile environments and had no gut bacteria of their own.
Mice with the obese twin's bacteria became heavier and put on more fat than mice given bacteria from a lean twin - and it was not down to the amount of food being eaten.
---
Ok, so you may need 1300 calories a day to maintain an "ideal" bodyweight but The Minnesota Starvation Experiment shows that amount of food intake causes severe emotional stress and depression. So yeah
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment was such a poorly designed diet that it's not really relevant to the modern discussion of prevent obesity among a relatively prosperous population. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experimen...), the diet was based on "foods that were expected to typify the diets of people in Europe during the latter stages of the war: potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni." In other words, almost entirely carbs, with practically no fat or protein. Almost every reasonable diet I know of (coming from the modern fitness community at least) focuses first on maintaining adequate protein intake as the top priority, usually followed by at least a reasonable amount of fat. While it may have been useful to understanding starvation in a population with food scarcity, it just doesn't apply when looking at obesity in modern America.
I used to exercise 3-4 days a week. Lifting weights, cardio, and yoga. I wasn't losing weight. I started gradually counting and cutting calories and when it didn't help I cut more. The only way I was at a good weight was on 1400 calories/day. This made me completely miserable and anti social (I wouldn't eat outside my house). This may be sustainable for some, but it wasn't for me, eventually I just had to eat more. I kept it up for a couple years though. I didn't have a body image problem either, my weight was a couple pounds below "overweight" BMI.
On the other hand a decade before that I ate junk food every single day and was very thin. Something seems to have changed in my body, but I don't know what. When I was thin my diet was truly horrible!
Even when I was a kid - Every single Halloween I would eat an entire pillow case worth of candy over the course of around 3 weeks, but I never gained a pound.
There is SO MUCH we don't know on this topic!
Yes, one can cut back on food, but willpower and the ability to control are limited to some degree.
Very similar experience here! 4K+ calorie daily average mostly of junk food from ages ~15-21, maybe 30 minutes/day average of weightlifting, rarely some cardio, visible upper ab muscles, call it a "4 pack", full on six-pack abs if I happened to be slightly more active in a week (a few hours of casual swimming, for instance).
Then I decided I wanted to cut down to the six-pack bodyfat level and stay there, so for the initial "cut" phase of that plan I dieted at ~1400 calories a day, every single day (no cheating) for ~2-3 months, and started doing way more cardio. Only lost a couple pounds, little or no visible difference, so, confused and frustrated, I gave up. Makes no damn sense according to any "weight loss calculator" I've ever seen (which all claim that my BMR should sit in the low 2000s), but that's what happened.
Packed on fat immediately when I went back to my usual eating patterns, took me years to get that under control. To this day I seem to easily hit a plateau a bit over what I'd call my healthy range when dieting at any reasonable (not near or under starvation level) caloric intake.
OTOH I've found that strength training's more effective for me than it "ought" to be but requires time, which sucks. I'd love to be able to diet my way to a trim waist, since maintaining an intake under what weight loss tables/calculators say should work for me is something I find easy to do. Too bad it doesn't.
Don't know what the explanation is, but something weirder than the "calories in/calories out, and calories out is fairly easy to guesstimate with useful accurately" orthodoxy is going on.
The laws of thermodynamics still apply. If someone does not lose weight on 1300 calories a day then either their body is a marvel of science and should be studied for its amazing efficiency... or they are completely sedentary.
"Thermodynamics"? There are 120 calories in a tablespoon of olive oil. If I pay you $50 to drink a whole bottle of olive oil, do you think you'll gain several pounds of fat?
To elaborate upon this point, let's say I gave you 10,000 calories of sawdust to eat every day for a week. Would you gain weight or lose weight, ignoring the other health consequences?
Similar - I saw an episode of Superfat vs Superskinny where the superskinny guy ate almost nothing but chocolate. His calorie intake was probably 4000 calories a day or more yet he was unhealthy skinny. Do you think he was lying?
Yes. If there's anything reading diet studies has taught me, it's that people lie, to themselves even, and people are very bad at estimating calories. Things like MyFitnessPal have been a boon to countless people trying to lose weight because they can actually get a handle on what their intake really is. Bonus, they can compare across food choices to see what will fit in their caloric budget but still be filling or satisfying.
I'll issue you a counter-challenge: watch "Secret Eaters".
Yes, they typically under report their calorie intake, not over report it. Its not really socially acceptable to eat like 10 chocolate bars a day and hardly anything else so why say you do when you really don't?
I did not watch this show so I have are some questions.
1. Was the skinny individual monitored the entire time? He could have regurgitated his food.
2. Was the skinny person's poop analyzed for complete digestion of the 4000 calories?
No, its not some sort of science experiment, its mindless entertainment. 4000 calories was a wild gestimation of something I saw probably 5 years ago.
The premise of the show is they bring in two people - one superfat and one superskinny. They weight them and each person tells what a typical day's food intake is for them. Then they switch diets for a couple weeks and are weighed again at the end.
Yes, its possible he lied about eating all that chocolate. Yes, he could be throwing up every day. This isn't a controlled experiment, its a TV show. It seems odd someone would do that though.
The question is moot; sawdust is basically pure undigestible fiber (poor mans Metamucil), so since the caloric content of it is virtually nil, it would be impossible to consume 10,000 calories of it.
The caloric content of olive oil is not virtually nil, and you can in fact consume a whole bottle of olive oil. Does "thermodynamics" dictate that you'll gain several pounds of fat after you do that?
Your answer, of course, is "no". So just to move the conversation forwards: do you think if 3 random people consumed a bottle of olive oil, they would necessarily gain an equivalent amount of weight? Why or why not?
This question is facetious, almost as facetious as the "10,000 calories of sawdust". Almost. The human body can only process so much fat at once based on bile production. On top of all that, I would say no, I wouldn't gain several pounds of fat after consuming a whole bottle of olive oil because it wouldn't be 3500 calories (12floz = 24 tablespoons * 119 calories = 2856 calories), even assuming I don't poop most of it out (as can be seen on Youtube videos). That doesn't change the fact that a tablespoon of olive oil contains 119 calories and up to a certain volume the human digestive tract will extract energy from it.
Second, I don't think three random people would gain the equivalent amount of weight; that's one of my points I've made elsewhere. TDEE for different people is different, based on height, weight (heavier people have higher TDEEs, which is ironic because it makes it easier for them to lose weight), and activity level. If you're talking three people of the same height, weight, strictly controlled activity level and strictly controlled intake, then I would expect their weight gain to be as close to identical as to make no difference. There's always some variance (within 200-300 Kcal: http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...)
Since we're cherry picking completely unrealistic intakes, I'll pose back to you: if three random people consumed 3500 calories worth of refined sugar, and that exceeded their TDEE by 3500 calories, then yes, each and every one of them would gain 1lb of adipose tissue. Seeing that many in the US easily approach an intake of this much refined sugar in the form of soda, the results (of the population, 2/3 is overweight, and 1/3 is obese) should not be surprising.
It's not my argument that the environment plays no role in obesity. It clearly does. I too think liquid calories are a major culprit.
I just think the "thermodynamics" argument oversimplifies immensely. Even the variance in resting metabolic rate is unlikely to capture the whole difference between multiple subjects consuming 3500 calories of oil (or, for that matter, bacon or butter), because resting metabolic rate captures the variance you'd see between people consuming refined sugar, and there are more variables involved in metabolizing fat.
Later, because this is bugging me a bit
And that's all before we get into satiety, which is a hormonal response. I had some cheese and rillettes for lunch. I'm not going to be hungry for the rest of the day. If I'd had the equivalent calories in carbohydrates, I'd be hungry in an hour. Upthread, the term "willpower" is being bandied about as if people can simply will themselves to eat a fixed number of calories. That's true only if you eat carefully, and if you don't have any hormonal dysfunction; it's as true as saying I could will myself into coding for 48 hours straight, if I just focussed my "will" on it.
> ...no matter what the state of your gut microbes.
Or your mental state. Or working hours. Or illness and injury. Or depression. Or lifetime habits, possibly due to choices your parents made.
Yes, it is all our own faults. That doesn't mean it is easy to change. Nor does it make somebody a lesser person for having made poor choices.
BTW, It is also your own fault for everything else that is wrong in your life. Ever answered a question wrong, made a mistake, messed up a project, gotten a speeding ticket, injured yourself, or hurt anybody in any way? All your fault.
Perhaps throwing blame at problems just isn't a good approach to making things better?
I certainly did not mean to imply that it was easy. Simple yes, easy? Hell no. (I lost 45lbs last year, not fun). Nor did I imply that someone was a lesser person for being overweight. However, I do believe if you want to change your weight you need to take responsibility for the things you can control.
Having been 330 lbs at one point and now being less than 220 you're both right and wrong at the same time.
Your statement is the equivalent of saying its a heroin junkies own fault: Technically true but useless. It also has many parallels in the way you grew up, differing genetics, etc.
If it were just a matter of willpower or simply eating less then I would already be my ideal weight. It isn't that simple. You can't detox off food and quit eating. At least a drug addict doesn't have to take just the /right/ amount of the drug every day to stay healthy!
The drive to eat is one of the most basic instincts. Evolution has created signals and feedback mechanisms far more powerful than our puny frontal lobes. The problem of too much food has simply never existed before. Fruit eventually falls to the ground and rots. During winter food becomes scarce. Excess food is consumed by other animals. For our entire evolutionary history the correct long-term survival move was to eat while the eatin' was good because there was definitely going to be some kind of lean time ahead.
The only simple or easy part of losing weight was cutting out sugared soda. That dropped 30 lbs. The rest was a slog and using various techniques to trick my body (like eating a large meal before going to the grocery store so I wouldn't buy anything outside my meal plan). It also involved lots of extremely strong urges to eat more and hunger pains. I have to think about what I eat every day and no matter what I do I will never be my ideal weight. Internal or external, this is a battle a lot of people just never face. They just eat when they are hungry and stop when they feel full. Of course their myopic view says it's just "calories in, calories out" (which the research has already proven is false... Some people gain more weight on the same calories).
Methadone is the most popular maintenance drug for opiate abuse and the relapse rate is around 90%. Many people on methadone/buprenorphine maintenance prefer to just stay on the program rather than come off.
Based on all this discussion I regret using the phrase "it's your fault" which sounds too aggressive. Instead I wish I just emphasized that regardless of biological and societal pressures everyone of us does possess the ability to control your weight. Specifically by accurately counting calories (with a food scale) and tracking your weight you can adjust your caloric intake to lose, gain or maintain weight.
It's just not the simple. The body fights back with a caloric reduction either through drowsiness, reduced thyroid, and hunger pains. The body wants to maintain.
It's easy to posit so that some people's responses may be more intense than others.
It is that simple; it's just not easy. Having been there, yes, it was hard. But it was also worth it, and I didn't have to change my gut biome or epigenetics to do it.
Again, that was you. And your level of difficulty may not be equivalent to someone else's. Our responses can be different, some more intense than others.
It's not really worth it, though. If I eat much less than I do now I just suffer, and the weight loss quickly plateaus at a point that doesn't have any aesthetic value and isn't likely to improve my health.
So I can weigh a little less by becoming obsessed with what I eat and always being in a bad mood. And I get no credit from the smug thin people who still see me as a lazy obese person.
And to add to your point, you also can absolutely change the number of calories you're burning. Exercise (especially at high intensity) can make a huge difference.
Oh please. Energy from food gets stored in fat molecules, that's true, but it's not like physics decrees exact equality in people's outcomes. Someone who digests less efficiently will receive less nutrition from the food they eat. People with tapeworms manage to put on less weight than you'd expect from their diet, for example, and it doesn't seem to be worrying any physicists I've met.
The report makes no mention of any inclusion of genetics or epigenetics (environmentally-influenced gene expression) in this study.
It would be a shame if that were excluded as a factor worth investigating, as research I've seen elsewhere indicates that it is [1].
The notion that the gut microbiome is a major factor in metabolism and health is now widely known and accepted, but it just raises the next question: what is the cause of variance in the health of the microbiome?
A good diet and supplementation with good microbes (probiotics, ferments, etc) is part of it, but the body itself also needs to do its part to create an environment that is fertile and hospitable for beneficial microbes, and inhospitable for harmful ones.
This requires a well-functioning immune system, correct enzyme activity, oxygenation, pH, optimal function of all the organs, to name just some of the factors in the vastly complex system that is the mammalian body.
Genetics and epigenetics play a key role in this system, and you'd hope to see this being included as a part of a study like this.
This happens in pigs and other livestock. Animals are specifically bred for their Feed Conversion Efficiency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio). I don't see why something similar couldn't happen in people as well.
Peasants have been bred by the nobility for thousands of years for improved feed efficiency. Modern humans have become much better at turning the terrible diet the average peasant had into human labor.
Well chubby people are certainly the descendants of peasants :)
Thankfully the nobility never became a genetic isolated population - they are all just jumped-up peasants who think they are better than everyone else.
I'm not saying that people are being bred for a similar result, but that a variation in feed efficiency in people doesn't surprise me as a similar effect has been found in livestock.
However, I could imagine in the past feed efficiency was an evolutionary advantage.
You need the ugly to actually realize beauty. If everyone is beautiful, the word "beautiful" wouldn't make any sense.
You could argue that this would be a solution to many discrimination issues today if everyone is beautiful, strong, tall, ... . Mhh. Interesting thought.
As you realized, beauty is relative (to ugliness). I can't quite grasp how you missed this relative aspect by going further with your assumption of "everyone is beautiful". People will always find distinctions and there always will be a scale of beauty (or whatever else).
HN is mostly young people who only associate with young people; if you can get past whatever vestigial respect for elders remains as a cultural value, most people will agree that old people are a pretty good source of ugly. Especially pre-modern medicine, ravages of outdoor labor and warfare... We arguably do live in a world where all 20 year old women are beautiful, and the 90 year old women are somewhat less so.
> For Leila, the results were very different. Whereas pasta was "bad" for me, it was fine for her. Yoghurt was good for me, but bad for her, and our responses to bread and butter were also complete opposites.
(Note: "bad" and "good" above refers to "high-GI" and "low-GI", respectively.)
Another interesting anecdotal observation from my acquaintances: our relationships with food differ significantly. While some people simply like to eat (like myself - I find great pleasure in food and seemingly can't ever get enough), others simply don't find such enjoyment in eating - food tastes good for them, but not particularly amazing, and they don't seem to perceive the same amount of Freudian pleasure from the feeling of fullness. Interestingly, this seems to correlate highly (and again, anecdotally) with our life-long struggles with weight - the first group has to be conscious not to eat too much (and put on too much weight), while the second group consists of mainly skinny individuals, some of whom struggle putting on weight.
So the "goodness" and "badness" of food might have completely different base levels across population!
I guess the saying, everybody is different applies here.
I still remember the days when I could eat 3 - 4 pound of beef, along side with mesh potato, or 12 inch Pizza, or whole bucket ( 10pcs ) KFC, per meal! And these meals would come with Coke as well. in Tea time i will eat Ice Cream, eat lots of yogurt etc.
I dont do lots of sports, may be once a week maximum. Otherwise I just sit down playing World of Warcraft or watching TV.
All while I don't gain 1 pound of weight! I had a VERY hard time gaining weight when I was in the age of 16 - 22. I even tried those weight gainer and protein. And does't work
Now that i am a lot older, trying to lose some weight, I find out a lot of these theories simply don't make sense when i was younger. If you are what you eat, then I was definitely eating 4000+ calories per day and not getting Fat.
I think, everybody has a different body type that reacts differently.
> then I was definitely eating 4000+ calories per day and not getting Fat.
Not true at all, you weren't even counting your calories you're just throwing out a number. And if you were counting you were counting wrong. That's a huge part of people who say they can't gain or lose weight. They claim to eat these vast amount (or extremely low amount) of calories when they really have no idea. People trying to lose weight will look at a burger and say "that's about 400 calories" and someone trying to gain weight will look at the same burger and say "that's about 1500 calories", when in reality its somewhere around 900. Do that for 3-4 meals a day and boom, you've got your "I eat 4000+ calories and can't gain weight".
It definitely can be the case. Absorption of calories depends on the person so the same people who eat 2k calories could get roughly 2k calories OR LESS depending on the gut bacteria and other variables.
I do agree with you on people's reported caloric intake. Most people inaccurately record their eating habits. I use an app to get an idea of what my day was like.
Nutritional panel information is not an in vivo measurement.
If you put 100g of broccoli in a bomb calorimeter and burn it in pure oxygen, you heat it up by 34 kilocalories.
If you put it in a human digestive tract instead , the human can absorb anywhere from 0 to 34 kilocalories of food energy from it. We already have ample evidence that the food energy absorbed may be affected by the microbiome in the intestines, the preparation method used, the time of day, the time of year, and other foods that may have been eaten at around the same time.
But the calorimetry does establish a hard upper limit on absorbable food energy.
This is why non-ruminant herbivores with shorter digestive tracts--like the arctic hare--will engage in coprophagy. They will eat their "first-through" turds, because there is still some food energy in them. Ruminants do essentially the same thing with multiple stomachs and regurgitation.
If you aren't weighing your food and burning your poop in a calorimeter, you are inaccurately reporting your caloric intake. Even then, you can't really know for sure how much of that energy was absorbed for use by human cells, and how much was used to sustain your microbiome.
No matter what conditions you may have (or think you have) the above method will tell you exactly how much your total daily energy expenditure is, including what passes through you that you don't absorb, so you can know how much you need to eat to lose, maintain or gain.
The insane amount of food i used to eat. Yes i was just throwing in numbers. The numbers i got wasn't measured then, because i didn't count at all and don't really know how much calorie was. The number i throw here is how i remember what i eat, and given the information i know now, it must be over 4000+.
I did say all the thing i posted there was for one meal. 10 Pcs of KFC Chicken, may be you should look it up? I bet it is over 3000 calories. And this was for JUST one meal! Likely Dinner, because lunch I would have rice, or Kebab with Chips.
The Coke i drink. Which was 4L / Week. And Ice Cream.
Why did i remember all these so well? You may ask. Because at one point in life I was counting every penny because i spend too much on food. I was running out of money and I was desperate. I can't eat enough. I was constantly hungry. And Starving make me depress. I used to joke about How i eat all these and walked back to College in the cold weather i would burn off 1000 calories instantly.
Like some have suggested below, I guess it has to do with A) BMR, I think living in Cold weather make things a little different, and B) Not everyone absorb every Calorie they take! And that was my point. Some people simply don't absorb very well at all.
Sometime after the age of 24, something changed, I started absorbing, Within 2 years my weight went from barely 150Lb to 200Lb. It took me 2 years to slowly adjust my appetite. To eat less, and now days i am counting every calories I can to slowly shake off the weight. It is very hard, just as hard as I was trying to gain some weight many years ago.
Edit: And the 3 - 4 Pound Beef, Now i am older I know a single pieces of US prime Stripling is around 15Lb. My mum bought me over to my aunt's house and have dinner, They have half pieces of Prime Striplion left, that is about 7Lb. It was my first time ever to have US Prime beef and it taste unbelievably great! The dinner was self served and I was eating like there is no tomorrow. I had half of that pieces and was continually eating, my aunt found out and had to pull that striplion away from me to leave some for others. My mum then stare at me saying how i embarrassed her. At the time i thought I was hungry, why can't i eat more.......
My mum later had to buy back a present to my Aunt as good gesture.
As someone who cooks for a 17 year old who trains for and plays rugby quite seriously the sheer amount of food an active teenager can consume is quite staggering.
It's pretty nuts. I used to eat the same kinds of things I eat now, except I would eat three plates of it, instead of one. Along with around a gallon of whole milk a day...
I was just playing soccer and basketball, not trying extra hard to bulk up for football or anything.
> then I was definitely eating 4000+ calories per day and not getting Fat
I'm not sure about that... allegedly, research suggests that most people have the same BMR (basal metabollic rate), and that there is nothing like "fast metabolism" (i.e. people get rougly equal amounts of energy from food).
What I was referring to above, and what the article referrs to (with Glicemic Index) is purely psychological - how much food you want to eat, and how hungry/satiated you feel. I'm still pretty sure that calories-in/calories-out theory is more-or-less correct.
Research has demonstrated that there is about about a 15% base difference between people with "slow" metabolisms and "fast" metabolisms. In addition, the composition of your gut microbiota significantly impact how efficient you are at extracting energy from the food you eat. To top it all off, some people notice a larger/more immediate reduction in BMR when they reduce calories than others.
At the end of the day calories in/out is still correct. It is just more complicated than how much food you eat and how much activity you engage in.
> I'm still pretty sure that calories-in/calories-out theory is more-or-less correct.
From where do you derive this certainty? There's plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating significant variance among individuals. Simply less efficient absorption of ingested calories would obviously make a huge difference, and I don't think there's any reason to think everyone absorbs calories with identical efficiency is there?
That issue does not affect the correctness of CICO, which is more or less thermodynamics. This issue just means that the CI for two people given the exact same portion of food is not necessarily the same.
If one is discussing effectiveness of different weight loss approaches, ignoring CI variance based on the exact input foods, and the underlying reasons for that, seems.....unwise.
It's tangential because, despite being at best an approximation, calories in is still a measure that can be used to reduce intake. It might take experimentation to find the limits for you.
It's quite simple: if you are gaining weight, eat less. The variation between calories marked and calories absorbed is not great enough to fundamentally matter.
> There's plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating significant variance among individuals.
However, research evidence disagrees. So, the most likely culprit in the variance reported anecdotally isn't different BMR or efficiency of digestion, but different (even delusional) calorie-counting approximations.
> I'm still pretty sure that calories-in/calories-out theory is more-or-less correct.
Unless someone has overturned the laws of thermodynamics, it is correct. CICO rules over all, and it's simple but not easy to lose weight, due as you put it to psychological factors.
TL;DR - almost all people of the same height and weight will be within 200-300Kcal of each other BMR wise. There are some outliers, but not enough to cover all the people claiming to be special snowflakes. And even if someone does have a "slow metabolism", that changes nothing: they still had to overeat to get fat. Mass doesn't come from nowhere.
Could a similar approach work to find the impact of foods on other health factors (sleep quality, digestion, ...) in a personal experiment?
I picture logging my coffee consumption (or even all foods + sports etc) and sleep over a few weeks, then using machine learning to find a possible relationship.
I'd appreciate any links to OSS projects/commercial apps that work on this.
I have a lot of time for Michael Moseley, but recently his "Trust me, I'm a Doctor" TV show has been falling into the same traps as the medical establishment, making concrete claims based on the flimsiest of evidence.
In a recent show one of the presenters (admittedly not Moseley) claims "The good news is that we have shown that Olive oil really is good for us", which was a ridiculous claim based on the evidence presented.
Do you mean "Eat, Fast and Live Longer"(https://vimeo.com/103656060)? If so, it was great. Totally changed my view on fasting (I now-a-days do 16h fast/day).
On an individual level the study shows why some people are more prone to weight gain than others. But there's been an epidemic of obesity over the past few decades, and there's no reason to believe people's gut flora changed over that period. Even if it did, there must have been an underlying cause.
What has undoubtedly changed are people's lifestyles:
(1) Less smoking. (This is a good thing, but it has resulted in weight gain.)
(2) More driving and less walking/bicycling.
(3) Children playing games on computers instead of outside.
(4) More sitting at desks, and less moving about, at work.
I have a very high metabolism. Some envy me, others find me too skinny. What troubles me though, is that I don't have weight as a heuristic in regards to my health. I sometimes worry, as everything else is quite ambiguous. Energy levels depend on sunlight, sleep and so on. How often I fall sick is equally dependant too many variables for it to be a reliable indicator.
I would love for something like this to be reliable/easy/cheap so I have something I can turn to when I feel uneasy about my health.
Interesting results. While I understand the microbes do affect how we process foods does our diet affect how they work? As in, if long term she eats grapes then perhaps either the microbes in her changed or the microbes themselves adopted a new behavior.
So the idea is, put a group of people on a strict diet long enough to affect which microbes they have and the exposure of the microbes to the diet. Then take three different directions from there and monitor how it all works out.
I'm not that versed in the subject, but my (dilettante) guess is that our own behavior may affect the fauna of our digestive microbes by consuming spicy food, alcohol, having nicotine in blood, or through other unhealthy habits.
There is a lot to be said about spicy. In a few words, "spicy" is not really a taste like sweat, bitter, salty, and acid are. Spicy is actually the sensation of the inflamed taste buds. (But there are condiments that are inducing only this inflamed sensation without actually causing it.) This chemically-induced inflammatory effect is deadly for many bacteria. This sanitizing effect was one of the main reasons why the hot and wet south Asia developed so many spiced dishes in their traditional cuisine. (In Europe they used alcohol for the same effect.) So although spicy will not harm you (directly, in the long term), it will kill some of your symbiotic pals!
- Dietary affects on metabolic rate/'calories out'
- Digestion differences on calories in
- Food/portion affects on satiety
- Food addiction
- Long term diet maintainability
We've known about calories in vs. out for years, yet our society is not seeing the results we want. The important question is: How do we control that equation?
Your conclusion is as helpful and callous as abstinence-only sex education.
If I read that article correctly it seemed to be pointing out that sometimes calories are literally mislabeled. That is - a sandwich from a vendor may be labeled as 400 kcal but actually it turns out it was closer to 500 kcal. Casey Neistat did a special for the NYT a couple of years ago about this very problem [1]. The ArsTechnica article you linked did go into other things - but there's definitely a difficulty in dealing with things where labels say one thing and can be 10-15% wrong pretty easily.
Funny because eating 2000 calories of a carb rich diet maintains my weight, but eating 3000 calories of a carb poor diet and I lose weight. All calories aren't the same, and your body doesn't use them the same. Why is this still controversial?
Because the much more parsimonious explanation is that you're counting calories incorrectly, instead of a wide body of literature being completely false. Put simply, without very careful weighing of everything you eat and extensive tracking, it's impossible to get an accurate assessment of calories consumed.
Eating a caloric deficit will predictably result in weight loss, but there is some feedback between diet and resting energy expenditure (REE). The macronutrient balance you eat can affect REE.
> Among overweight and obese young adults compared with pre–weight-loss energy expenditure, isocaloric feeding following 10% to 15% weight loss resulted in decreases in REE and TEE that were greatest with the low-fat diet, intermediate with the low–glycemic index diet, and least with the very low-carbohydrate diet.
Because diet can affect REE, you can change your diet isocalorically yet still gain or lose weight. Your particular example seems to be an example of this, but the effect is likely very exaggerated. Differences are on the order of 10%, not 30%.
TL;DR: eating less carbs makes you burn more energy.
Because people won't let go of their heuristics, and also the shame and judgement they put on people for being overweight (most of the time, originating in how people treat themselves when overweight).
> Conclusion: Among overweight and obese young adults compared with pre–weight-loss energy expenditure, isocaloric feeding following 10% to 15% weight loss resulted in decreases in REE and TEE that were greatest with the low-fat diet, intermediate with the low–glycemic index diet, and least with the very low-carbohydrate diet.
This is a change of REE on the order of ~10%, so not huge, but definitely significant.
When eating a similar diet, eating less certainly works. However, affecting TDEE through diet and exercise is an important consideration as well, and may be easier and more maintainable than caloric restriction. There are also issues with satiety and diet that are important for weight loss.
Calories In -> Calories Out should only be a response to people who claim to be unable to control their weight. If they control how much they eat, they can control their weight. It does not make it helpful weight loss advice, though.
Agreed. But obese people need to understand the basics first (EAT LESS!) and then they can tweak their diets to make them more comfortable with fewer calories.
I find the exact opposite to be most effective with myself and the others I have seen in groups around me. Eat food that is nutrient dense and filling and take out empty carbs and you can succeed at eating less a whole lot easier. And that is when people who have been overweight for a long time succeed in the long term.
If it was really that simple, don't you think people would already do it? Your advice comes across as pretty sanctimonious. It's the equivalent of shouting at heroin addicts "STOP TAKING HEROIN!"
Heroin addicts don't usually go around saying that they're just as healthy and beautiful as non-addicts. And they don't promote Heroin Addiction in schools.
I think keto diets have been in most cases successful precisely because they not rely on understanding and self control, the body simply adjusts and starts feeling full faster.
Well the biggest reason people put on weight is because they don't understand how calories work from a lack of education, which is why poor people and immigrants generally become the most overweight. People who don't speak English well won't run into scientific articles that talk about calories, so they aren't even thinking about the subject.
Most people don't understand calories as it relates to their food intake. However lack of education has very little to do with it. Just look at all the comments in this thread. The things that can be said to be true are:
Thermodynamics is correct..
People consuming same amount of food may end up absorbing different calories from it.
They also may burn calories at slightly different rates.
This is all very helpful but not a plan to control weight.
Poor people (anecdotal) have less time to cook healthy meals and hence end up eating calorie dense fast food.
PS: edit . typo. Grammer. Phone..
http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(15)01481-6.pdf