>In that sense, a calorie is a calorie.

This has been thoroughly disproven for ages -- starting with the naive assumption that you can just eat X amounts of anything and it doesn't affect anything else in your health/apetite/metabolism.

I know we like to one up each other on HN, but you're just talking past the main point.

Calories matter. If you eat too many, you get fat. Some calories might be "better" than others, but they are a standard of unit of energy for a reason. A calorie is a calorie.

Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.

>Calories matter. If you eat too many, you get fat. Some calories might be "better" than others, but they are a standard of unit of energy for a reason. A calorie is a calorie.

That's quite irrelevant though (besides tautological), as we don't just eat calories, we eat food that has calories and tons of other stuff in different arrangements.

A calorie being a calorie doesn't cover whether the food you got the calorie from makes you satiated, or conversely makes you eat more, or makes you feel more energetic, or makes you store it as fat, or brings hormonal changes, etc.

A "milligram is a milligram" too, a standard unit of weight, but 1mg of cyanide can kill a person, and 1mg of water won't do anything to them.

>Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.

Again this presumes that people can just eat, regardless of what they eat -- and continue to eat it without that affecting anything else. I guarantee you if I ate just butter, I'd threw up after several hundred grams, and feel quite bad and stop the diet after some days.

We're not disagreeing, just talking about different things.

Surprisingly, you wouldn’t. I basically have been on your “butter diet” for over a year. I get about 80% of my calories from fat, much of it saturated. The rest is protein. I’ve lost about 50 pounds, normalized my blood pressure & cholesterol, and feel amazing.

How many calories were you eating pre and post diet?

2 sticks of butter is almost 1800 calories, that would be a weird diet with lots of hunger. There probably are a lot of sources of fat that work better than that.

To illustrate the point: dietary fiber, which contains a lot of calories, is not digestible. Eat as much as you can, but you will not get one calorie of energy from it. So just based on that, where calories come from matters.

There is a difference between fat metabolism and sugar metabolism. They use different metabolic pathways, in other words the process by which a fatty acid molecule becomes ATP (the ultimate source of cellular energy) is very different from how fructose (which has to first be converted to glucose in the liver) becomes ATP.

"a calorie is a calorie"

This is the exact point the article is... arguing against in a very convincing fashion

No, the article is saying that people are getting obese and diabetic because of sugar.

Its further pointing out that there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight. I didn't disagree there either.

The article never claims that you can eat any amount of calories as long as you leave carbs from the table. And thats the only thing i pointed out. Because thats just plain wrong. If you eat too many calories, you will gain weight. And if you're predisposed to obesity, you will eat more calories when you're flavouring stuff with sugar. This will, as the author pointed out, cause you to get even more obese and eventually get diabetes.

You are getting lost in semantics, because if you are saying:

there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight.

Then a calorie isn't a calorie.

Calories are calories (it's literally a measure of energy!) The packages they come in will effect hormonal and psychological responses differently which may affect the amount you would take in if intake is left unmonitored. To that extent, it's wise to take in foods which don't nudge you towards over consuming, but if you can be disciplined and take in a quantity of energy less than you expend on a consistent basis, eating that intake as sugar rather than other macros isn't going to magically make you gain weight.

You are making the same semantic argument I was criticizing. In the context of this discussion we aren't talking about the literal measure of energy, but the package. I.e., is a quantity of sugar that has a calorie of energy the same to the body as a quantity of fat or fiber that contains a calorie of energy. That's what someone is claiming when they say a calorie is a calorie. And to that question, the evidence bears out that it the effects are not just psychological, and don't just affect desire to eat. If you took two twins, and fed one 2000 calories of cane sugar a day, and fed the other 2000 calories of raw broccoli, after a month, they wouldn't have the same weight.

Sure, it is a measure of energy, but it is not a measure of of how much energy we as humans will utilize from the food. Some calories are much more efferent for us to extract than others. Some can't be extracted at all.

Are you aware of how calories are measured? They essentially set the food on fire and count how long it takes to go out.

Does our body digest things by acting like a furnace? No. There are different ways to extract energy from food and our body does things that aren't accounted for by the nutrtional facts blurb on the box. In some cases the food will just go straight through you, such as when you eat loads of fat. All those "calories" don't necessarily translate into x pounds on your body in new fat.