Site is a link aggregation of a series of blog posts that cite various studies about the mystery of why the obesity rate is increasing, and why the rate of increase is itself accelerating. Authors make a compelling argument that normal homeostatic processes (the theorized lipostat specifically) tend to keep people within a certain BMI range. Authors argue that environmental contamination is breaking the lipostat, driving obesity rates upwards, and faster where there's more contamination.
Interesting read and a great reason to switch to :vegan-v: with a focus on not buying anything wrapped in plastic.
then how do people get fat
According to this study, one major cause is signaling getting fucked up by environmental contaminants.
Alternatively, some people's bodies naturally tend a bit heavier (an advantage in times of famine). For them, calorie counting can work fine. And everyone's body is likely to take on some amount of reserves when it's easily possible to do so, but this tendency varies quite a bit.
But the obesity epidemic goes against all of that. It used to be rare to be obese, and extremely rare to be extremely obese, the latter usually caused by some signaling issue (thyroid, I think). Now it's extremely common. HFCS is 55% fructose vs the 50% in table sugar; it's not helping but it's not so different it could cause the epidemic we're seeing.
unless you're talking about differences in people's skeletal structures or something, no. there's no such thing as "naturally heavier." your body creates and burns fat the same way mine does. if you have a greater proportion of fat stored on your body than i do it is because the ratio of calories you eat vs calories you burn is higher than mine.
there are a wide variety of reasons it might be difficult for a person to eat fewer calories than they burn but none of those are that the gods just decided to bless them with excess fat from thin air
The same way, sure. But that doesn't mean there's no variation in people's metabolic signaling systems, which are astonishingly complicated. Every node in all of those signaling pathways is a protein encoded by a gene, which means every one is a source of potential variability between different people.
Edit: here's a poster showing just a part of a teeny-tiny fraction of the metabolic signaling system, namely the insulin receptor system.
Of course, there's plenty of variations. But that doesn't make the actual process each individual needs to do any more complicated. Let me put it this way: If you don't eat, you will lose weight. Right? We can of course agree on that. On a similar note, if you simply do nothing but eat cookies all day, you will gain weight. Now, in between those two extremes, there will be a certain amount of food you can eat which will cause you neither to lose nor gain weight. Eat 10% less than that, and you will ... lose weight.
That's why it's simple. It doesn't matter how complicated all the systems of your body are because you don't need to know all that. What you actually need to know is very simple.
See the way you say simple makes it feel like you're saying "easy," like, here's a pat answer so stop complaining about it. You know full well, though, that a starvation diet, leaving aside the awful health implications, is simply impossible to actually do for enough time to achieve useful results. So I argue that the answer you're pushing, then, is largely worthless.
I'll note that my problem is that I can't seem to gain and keep weight, quite the opposite of most people's, and I find it roughly as impossible as the obese people do to work against that. (Oh but all I have to do is eat more, right? Except that the body regulates food intake via appetite, doesn't it? And if you ignore that and overstuff yourself, your body will be quite willing to just forcibly eject the excess food by vomiting--I have personal experience on this point.)
But those are two different things and I don't know how to stress that any more than outright saying it 2 hours ago in my first actual comment on this topic
I never recommended a "starvation diet" I was trying to establish a baseline on which we can both agree so that I could construct the actual, practical argument I was making. And yet, no matter how clearly I lay this out, you still try to argue with it because you're not actually conversing in good faith. You're not paying attention to what I'm actually saying, you're just looking for anything at all that I say that you feel like you can interpret in the least charitable possible way so that you can write out a hostile argumentative reddit-tier debatebro comment that "scores points"
No, not exactly. What you have to do is eat more calories. Not just more volume. If you try to gain weight on a watermelon only diet yeah of course you're going to throw up because that's impossible. Your appetite is largely based on the volume of the food you're eating (because of course that's what literally fills up your stomach) and your weight is determined by the caloric content of the food you're eating. That's why relying entirely on your appetite is insufficient, because it doesn't measure the part of the food that actually determines whether you gain or lose weight.
Except the phrase "it's simple" can be interpreted as being applied to the CICO logic, or to the process of trying to apply that logic. It fits for the former, but does not for the latter. My entire point is about the complicating factors that make the application of your simple logic into a near-impossibility. Your entire point feels semantic, honestly.
And look, everything I eat is incredibly calorie-dense; I eat a typical shitty American diet. I studied biochemistry in college; I know all of this. And yet I still can't maintain a weight of over 130 fucking pounds, and people who sound an awful lot like you do right now like to tell me how it's all my fault and I fucking hate them for it.
Under the CICO model, does every calorie eaten count as a calorie "in"?
I guess not necessarily. If you eat something you can't digest that's of course not going to get stored as fat on your body or used to keep your heart beating. Typically though, this conversation happens on the topic of weight loss, where over-counting the calories you eat is not really a problem. I've personally never had an issue gaining weight so it's not something I've got that much knowledge of theoretically :shrug-outta-hecks:
Makes sense, and that's where I think the model falls apart a little bit. We need to know way more about absorption rates and digestion to properly measure how many calories are going in, and that's what OP's post is about (been a little while since I've read through it).
I think one thing that you are getting pushback on here about is that you are kind of conflating strict bodyweight with body composition; and you're not really acknowledging the entire point of this thread.
Which is that people's metabolisms could be completely fucked up due to environmental factors, to where they're artificially burning less calories than they otherwise should be just to get the basic level of non-caloric nutrients (think vitamins/minerals) necessary for their bodies to actually function properly.
You're assuming a problem of strict over-eating, and not under-activity, or even just the wrong kind of activities or foods. A body will metabolize a calorie from an apple the same way it will metabolize a calorie from a twinky. It will not metabolize an actual apple the same way it metabolizes an actual twinkie though, because they are not just numerical abstractions the way a calorie is. You get the point right?
the only thing I'm trying to counter is the weird anti-science mockery of the CICO system, which, I will stress again, is simply objectively correct and not up for debate. you can talk about metabolism and society and mental challenges and all that other stuff in the context of weight loss and gain without going after simple scientific fact and making us all look like dumbasses
Okay, but remember the original comment that started this entire chain. You responded to a guy saying that "If the stated caloric content of the food was the only thing that mattered with regards to weight gain, then you could drink a cup of gasoline & you would gain weight", by saying "Yeah no, that's tru tho."
That's the part that people are pushing back on you against, because it's obvious bullshit. If you drink a cup of gasoline you will die, or at the very least get seriously ill because it is physically poisonous to the human body.
A calorie is a generalized unit of heat-energy that exists in just about any object you can name. That doesn't say anything about it's nutritional content to the human body. A body that stores more energy than it expends will accumulate more mass than one that doesn't; I don't think anyone is actually arguing against that proposition.
That does not at all give you a full picture of what effects different articles of food will have on the human body.
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Wow, that's really interesting! This is exactly what I meant about the body not being just a dumb machine--it adjusts to its environment and situation in ways that we're only beginning to discover.
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that sounds awesome, i wish metabolism actually worked like that in the real world
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lmao :jesse-wtf:
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That's a self-reported number from literally one guy lol
I'm fairly certain that the average person's body will burn more than 800 calories per day in a comatose state, there's no way in hell that number is accurate. This is a common broscience talking point and nothing in the paper cited in that article suggests that your metabolism can be permanently altered by weight loss.
Edit: a bedridden, 120lb, 80-year old man needs >1000 calories per day just for normal body functions
https://www.omnicalculator.com/health/bee#:~:text=Basal%20energy%20expenditure%20(BEE)%20is,%2Fday%20or%20kJ%2Fday.
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this is an extreme example