I mean, he handwaves away the statistic that suggests the mean US citizen's calorie intake increased by nearly a quarter over the period that obesity rose simply by saying "that's not a jaw dropping increase". He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity! I'm actually less suspicious that calorie counts are an oversimplification after reading what he citates as evidence against them; you could make a pretty good case for diet being the sole cause of increased obesity in the US from the references he makes to argue it's unrelated!
(Nothing wrong with the "lipostat" hypothesis he proposes as the alternative per se, but moving the cause of obesity onto "changes in how many individuals' bodies identify satiation points and metabolise food intake" doesn't result in a hypothesis which is independent from how diet has changed, it just complicates the causation a bit)
I think the context here is that while 400 extra calories a day might seem like a lot, it's within the observed variability going back as far as we have measurements. Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960, and were no more obese then.
> He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity
Hmm, I think the point here is that there is more complexity than the "eat more, gain weight" hypothesis: there was wide variability in how much weight people gained when being overfed, and all of these people, when they stopped being overfed, lost the weight they'd gained effortlessly -- which is emphatically not the case for most obese folks today.
This implies something is different about being temporarily overfed (which makes weight loss trivial) and what's causing the obesity epidemic (which makes weight loss very challenging).
Also worth noting that the increased caloric intake also doesn't answer the question of what's causing people to eat more than they burn. (And again, there's not really any question that obese folks are eating more than they burn -- it's the only way to actually gain weight, after all -- the whole point of this line of inquiry is to figure out why.)
I'll cite what they say about this:
> From this study [0], for example, consider this sentence: "TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily. Obese individuals generally burn 3000+ kcal/day, and while not every modern person is obese, it does make the increase from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010 look relatively small.
That's his assertion, but all we've got is a link to a complex dataset on "food availability" and his word for it (and some probably-unjustified ancillary assumptions about calorie burning between the two eras being similar, of course). Extraordinary claims, I think, demand a higher standard of evidence.
> Hmm, I think the point here is that there is more complexity than the "eat more, gain weight" hypothesis: there was wide variability in how much weight people gained when being overfed, and all of these people, when they stopped being overfed, lost the weight they'd gained effortlessly -- which is emphatically not the case for most obese folks today.
Sure. But that's furiously demolishing a straw man that there's no variability in weight gain between individuals whilst dismissing the actual finding that it takes as little as 3 weeks to show a clear increase in weight from eating 1000 extra calories as incidental. And he's trying to use it to argue against the notion that average calorie intake data consistent with the obese ~40% of the US population eating ~1000 extra calories on a permanent basis could have caused the latter group to have gained weight!
> This implies something is different about being temporarily overfed (which makes weight loss trivial) and what's causing the obesity epidemic (which makes weight loss very challenging).
One obvious difference is that people overfeed for longer. This doesn't seem to be a gotcha for the basic assumption "people eat too much" and nor does the fact that eating "too much" is obviously likely to be caused by different factors in different people. But whilst "people eat too much" might have little explanatory power, its not nearly as dubious as the blog's assertion that "diet and exercise are out as explanations for the epidemic" despite them being both consistent with macro trends and a change in one undoubtedly entirely to blame for some individuals' weight changes
The confusing question is: why is everyone suddenly eating “too much” and seemingly unable to control it? Why does it now require willpower and dieting to not become obese? People in the 1960s had plenty of food access, plenty of cars, etc. etc., and did not have obesity rates in the 40%+ range. Their diets were not so different from today’s diets in terms of macronutrient composition, in fact they were probably worse: plenty of sugar, fat, etc., components that have since been demonized.
Why are so many people eating “too much” now?
> People in the 1960s had plenty of food access, plenty of cars, etc. etc., and did not have obesity rates in the 40%+ range.
I don't think they had comparable level of physical movement. They had more of it just by existing. Take office worker - today I come to work and sit on chair until I go to toilet or home. Communication is done via keyboard, documents are in computer. Compared to my parents in 80-90ties - when they wanted to talk to people, they would stand up and go physically to another office. If they wanted documents, they would stand up and search for it. People did used walking to stores and public transport more too. In 1960, 1980 kids walked to school and that includes 6 years old. They played unsupervised outside for hours. Again, expectation today is that they are driven. The 6 years old playing outside is outrage, so they dont do it (plus indoor tablet is more fun to them subjectively).
None of that is huge amount of movement. But I think these frequent low effort movements counts and adds up. And, just turning wheel on 1960 car requires more strength then on current one. A lot of housework (both the one done by women and men) requires less effort then people in 1960 needed - cleaning cooking too. Everything is physically easier.
I have car, but used public transport to get to work. I made around 8000 steps every day just by existing. When covid hit and I was at home, the amount of steps went down drastically - could be just few hundred.
TL;DR If adding a couple miles per day of walking would resolve the obesity epidemic, it'd already be resolved across a huge swath of the population. But all evidence is that the marginal weight-loss benefit of walking tails off rapidly, unless it's paired with a restricted-calorie diet (which is exactly the point: our 1960s parents/grandparents didn't need that.)
They also did A LOT more manual labor back then. Heavy construction projects (roads, dams etc.) were still performed by thousands of people literally swinging a pick-axe 10 hours a day, slowly chipping away at the hill that stood in the way. That must have required couple thousand of extra kcal per day. Meanwhile, in 1960, a lot of most energy-consuming work was already performed by machines.
> 2.1 Calories in calories out is a bad model
True. It's insufficient. But it's not nothing. The article later claims that calorie consumption has "only" risen by about 20%. I find this take to be ridiculous. 20% is a lot. If I eat 20% more, I'll put on weight.
Article also claims sugar consumption is down and carb consumption is down so therefore they can't be the cause. Yet in prior years we see an extremely strong correlation between carbs and sugar consumed per person and % obesity. Corn vs. actual sugar. Artificial zero calorie sweeteners. It all adds up.
We can even work it out: 1lb of human fat has ~4000 calories in it. If we assume that only 10% of those excess calories actually end up as fat thats still 70lbs of additional weight by the time you’re in your mid 20s.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+bitter+trut...
1. Bulk food manufacturers can have a decent variance in the actual calories compared to the anticipated calories. Nutrition labels can be inaccurate by up to 20% when it comes to listing calories, according to the FDA, so that 400 calorie meal could be 320 or 480. If you're eating for 1600 calories a day and relying on pre-made foods, then you could be eating 1920 calories a day unintentionally.
2. Not every body processes every calorie consumed. A simple example of this is the weight loss medicine Alli, which can prevent your body from absorbing fats. So even if you ate a 400 calorie cup of olive oil you may only absorb 360 calories of it.
3. Metabolism itself isn't a set standard. Unless you have had your metabolism tested to ensure that it is operating at the standard level, you may be naturally burning fewer calories than your height, weight, body fat, muscular density, and age would otherwise indicate.
A simple test for the last one is to take your temperature in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Standard is 98.6, but in metabolically impaired people, it can decrease by a few degrees. Colder body means fewer calories being burned. This happened to me, where at ready my body was burning 300 calories a day under my expected TDEE and to reverse it I had to eat more, put on weight, and exercise heavily with weight lifting heavy weights to build muscle to reverse it. My standard body temperature had dropped to 97.3 or less, and it's been months of undoing the weight loss that I had achieved to get it back to normal.
4. We are still learning about the various effects of microplastics and other man-made forever chemicals on the human body, but many of them are known endocrine and hormone disruptors so it is likely that future science will discover that these unavoidable chemicals may increase the likelihood of obesity by either interrupting the satiation mechanism or decreasing the body's ability to respond to insulin.
5. Once you become obese in the modern sense, you are now the proud owner of an oversized organ of fat cells that do not simply die when you lose weight. They will release their lipid stores, but the cells themselves remain, sometimes for life. When your normal organs are not signalling that they need nutrition immediately, these fat cells will preemptively consume any excess sugars and fats in your body to refill themselves. Being previously overweight dramatically increases the likelihood that you will become overweight again because of this, and the only potential solution is either having liposuction or using some other non-invasive technology that can literally directly destroy the fat cells, and either option is going to be expensive, time-consuming, and risky to some degree.
If environmental factors cause you to overeat, due to stress, maladaption, or due to exogenous chemical exposure and you become overweight because of it, there can be many, many reasons why you would then become more and more overweight afterwards.
Yes, at its basic level, it is calories in > calories out, but that overlooks external factors that can make consistently eating fewer calories than you burn a herculean effort that can very well never ever end.
The variation lies in different utilization rate, the burn rate, and all other variables, but within the limit of PHYSICS.
If people, try to eat less their body gets unhappy -- it starts to burn less calories. Furthermore, it starts ramping up your hunger trying to convince you that you are starving. Over a year it typically wins.
CICO is useful as an upper bound on calorie utilization, but unfortunately not relevant to the problem of obesity, which deals with the exact opposite end of the problem space.
CICO might be important if the problem was that people in first world nations were starving due to an insufficient supply of calories. But the obesity epidemic indicates that this is not the case. So CICO is relevant to the problem in the same way that a theoretical understanding of the gasoline-air reaction is relevant to understanding why my car's gas mileage has dropped recently.
Personally, when I reduce CI, my body responds by decreasing CO: I don't think as clearly (problematic for being a functional adult), and I'm even colder than normal. With no reasonable way to accurately measure the change in CO, it's difficult to balance the equation.
tldr: what's simple and obvious with spherical cows in a vacuum is not so simple in the real world
Similarly, CICO is just an simple scientific fact to give you the idea what's happening physical world. Did anyone say CI and CO calculation is simple? Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air?
Tell me just one dieting method is simple, effective, helps everyone 100% to achieve the target weight again? As I mentioned in the above post, a good recipe doesn't make you a successful cook. You are not going to become Gordon Ramsay by watching his video alone
Yes, I have seen and heard plenty of people say CICO is simple and "all there is to it", often along with some "laws of physics" snip, as included in your previous comment.
> Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air?
That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.
Your problem is with the people who say it, not CICO itself. Once again, if you can't cook with a recipe from Gordon Ramsay, are you saying the recipe is bad? Btw I replied to above post when he said CICO is nonsense. Do you have a problem with his claim?
> That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.
Because I am countering his arguments? All am I saying CICO is simple physics, I am NOT saying CICO is simple weight reduction method. Can you tell the difference? If someone are saying the CICO nonsense, then isn't the logical conclusion is that you can defy physics and gain calorie from the thin air?
100%
Not all calories are equal.
Watch Robert Lustig's presentations on Sugar: the bitter truth. I think he explains what's happening quite well. Unfortunately it seems to "sciency" and most people aren't disciplined enough to stay with it and hear him out because they don't understand chemistry and physiology. :( https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+bitter+trut...
Not a scientist, nor a nutrition expert, so I'm not going to pretend to try and convince anyone.
If a person is eating 1000 calories per day regardless what what food, and is burning 2000 calories per day (CO), how is anyone going to gain weight this way?
Please, as I mentioned above, there are many variables, but not the core principle of CICO which is basic math. You cannot create calories out of thin air! It doesn't mean anyone can stick to strict diet with CICO calculation. It doesn't mean they always measure accurately. Don't mix up the failure in application with the principle. I watched many cooking videos in youtube. It doesn't mean that im gonna cook well; It doesn't mean that the recipe is bad
It turns out, the simple explanations (people eat more & move less! too much sugar! etc.) are in fact insufficient.
[0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p...