Mega-fail: Calories-in, calories-out hypothesis.
“It’s hard to reconcile what these data show, and what is happening with the prevalence of obesity,” co-author Dr. William Dietz, former CDC director of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, told Reuters Health.
What controls/corrections were done for guestimating the amount of food people ate? I don’t believe most people can accurately eyeball the amount of food they ate.
The laws of conservation of energy and mass have never said calories in/ calories out. The laws have always said
Input = Output + Accumulation.
I think that the problems here are multiple. A calorimeter probably does not tell us much about the calories that our bodies extract from foods, the results probably vary from person to person depending on their own digestive efficiency.
Calories out is only an estimate based on carbon dioxide excretion and estimates of the energy contents of other excretions. All of these probably vary among individuals.
Accumulation, weight gain or loss, can be measured directly, but depends on the status of hydration at the time of weighing, which also is highly variable among persons and within a single person.
There probably is a set of parameters that will work for each individual at each time of his life, that will provide an estimate of the expectation of weight loss vs weight gain at differing calorie intakes and exercise levels. And it probably is mostly true that reduced calorie intake and increased calorie use by exercise will result in some amount of weight loss. It is probably not true that one can expect one pound of weight loss per 3,500, or any other constant value of calorie deficit.
Dietz can’t understand it because he’s staked his career on the myths of obesity and its profitable politics and refuses to acknowledge the body of medical evidence.
Man’s greatest accomplishment is rationalizations of personal weight.
Believe what you wish. In the end, we are all responsible for our own salvation.
Obesity is caused by others eating in proximity of the afflicted.
I use irrefutable logic to show how the obesity epidemic has been caused by passive eating. (Satire warning!)
Realize that I am no dietican. However, there is more to it than just calories-in-calories-out. What you take in, such as starches or vegetables, has as much to do with it as anything else. I consider myself average, but I have gone from 30 waist to 38 back to 34 and on to 36. All by control, or lack thereof, of my diet, and age. I am certain that genetics also plays a part, but what we can control is what we eat, and how much. I have found poor results with diet rich in starches like corn and potatoes. I have found good results with vegetables, fruit, and lean meat. I have seen poor results with sugary soft drinks, cookies, icecream and other snacks. Again, what, and how much of what we eat plays the lion’s share of obesity. Angus deluxe burger with a diet Coke buys us no real effort at weight loss. And we MUST match intake with output, or our bodies will just store it up. Eating many smaller meals helps fool the body into not storing energy for later. it’s the fasting that defeats the dieter.
I am a mature-body-size female (don’t make fun of me lest I sit on you). I have calculated my caloric intake, which is easy since I eat pretty much exactly the same things in the same amounts each day (very definite food sensitivities, so nothing with grains, no fruits, dairy, egg, or sucrose). According to the charts I have consulted, and pretending that I never move off of my couch, I should actually be losing about five pounds per month. This is even with the fact that I do move around, climb stairs, go to work every day, shop on the weekend, etc. However, my weight has remained constant for the last five years. Even though we can count the calories from foods and exercise, it is much harder to measure what our metabolism actually is doing, or what our genetics has decided to do with whatever we eat. In addition, I have tried cutting back on the little I do eat, and my body goes into hypoglycemic shock and I try to die. My husband told me that he would rather have me around (even with me being quite a-round), than take a chance on me not coming out of the hypoglycemic coma. So, for those of you who actually can balance out food, exercise, and weight, you should count your blessings. Some of us quite literally have no choice in the matter.
Europeans who visit the U.S. are stunned to see that we are just normal sized people.
Have you ever wondered why obesity statistics are typically post 1999? In 1999 they changed thestandard of measurement of obesity and overweight and instantly doubled the number of Amercans that were obese (and overweight). So prior to this change the number of women in America that were obese was 17% the next day it was 35% without any change in weight. Certainly everyone who knows enough about obesity to write an article on it knows this simple fact but choose to ignore it. In fact some take advantage of it to distort their article and will say things like “in 1998 only 17% of Americans were obese and in 2013 35% are obese”. They use this anomoly to prove their case even though it only proves them to be dishonest. I assume that if the standard for obesity were to change tomorrow and suddenly 50% of Americans were considered to be obese that would be a headline and all the low information people would believe it.
“Nevertheless, about 35 percent of U.S. adult women are obese, and that percentage has held steady since 1999, according to the CDC. For men, obesity has risen from 27 percent to 35 percent over the same time period.”
How stupid do you have to be to believe that a third of American adults are obese?
BMI also does not properly account for height (it discounts it too much), so it classifies tall people as obese. Everybody in the NBA gets the double whammy!
Body Mass Index (BMI) is also very flawed as well muscled athletes are commonly shown as being overweight or even obese due to the high weight density of their muscle causing their BMI to be high. Common complaint among body builders and weight lifters.
Well, one big reason for the rise in obesity is the change in the definition of obesity. At once point, there was a height vs weight chart (which changed several times, reducing the ideal weight vs height), now they use a proportion of the size of the neck to the size of the waist. The current method is really only valid for certain builds, and most athletes show up as obese using that method. So I cant help but wonder if the rise in obesity is as much due to a change in the definition as any other factors.
I think the thrust is not about how the calories treat the body, but how the body reacts to the body.
No, genetics controls your metabolism which heavily regulates your weight.
This is good reading on the subject.
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-law-of-thermodynamics-in-real.html
There probably is a genetic component to weight. Several studies on the Pima indians showed that they would gain weight even on starvation (800-1000) calorie diets. This was attributed to a “thrifty gene” that was upregulated over the generations as a consequence of the conditions they lived in. However, if you know any second generation Vietnamese, they are usually much larger than their parents, both height and weight. So there is also a component of environment involved. For me personally, physical activity is the most likely factor that correlates with gain or loss. Not proof, I know, but an indicator.
So you believe calories discriminate, based on genetics?
obesity, true obesity is genetic. Your body craves calories and it stores calories. Most people will over time gain weight and some of us will indeed gain a lot of weight. That to is genetic. The skinny man or woman is genetically skinny and the potbellied man or woman is genetically pot bellied. If you are average weight you couldn’t become obese if you tried to. On the other hand if you are obese they only way you can reach average weight is a starvation diet and even if you could reach an average weight it would require a lifetime of dieting to maintain it. How can anyone not understand this is genetic?