Re:Caffeine attenuates high-fat-high-sucrose lipogenesis and...
by AnimalMuppet on Friday January 03, 2020 @07:03PM
(#21951683)
I'm mostly agreeing with you, but I think you may be going slightly too far.
If you absorb more calories than your metabolism burns, then you gain weight. Variables are:
- Calorie content of food.
- Ability of your body to absorb those calories. This includes what form the calories are in (petrol, obviously, doesn't work), but also may include your gut biome, and perhaps other person-specific issues.
- Your activity level (not just exercise, but non-exercise physical movement as well).
- What your food does to your metabolism.
Sure, if you eat too much of the wrong things, it hurts. If you exercise, it helps. But it's much more complicated than that.
People throw around this idea as if it was simple.
Just the concept of calorie, which is bound to water temperature changes, is at most a vague second or third order approximation of a body’s energy intake. Petrol would be of super high calorie for instance, but it makes no sense for the body.
We have no clear idea of what any food gives as energy to a body, nor how each body reacts differently to any food, nor how much of that goes out, when that potentially stored energy is used in what amount (would CO2 production measurement help in this regard ? even if so but then it might be get rid of in unexpected ways)
So while the in/out idea may not be completely wrong, it’s effectively useless to anyone seriously thinking about diets.