A Calorie REALLY ISN'T a Calorie

Acg67

To whomever stated that CICO is a biochemical fact.............................that is laughable.

Trying to use the “Laws of Thermodynamics” to explain human biological functions is pure folly. Scientific laws only apply to laboratory situations where variables are controlled and systems are closed off from all other systems.
The human body is NOT a closed system and our lives DO NOT take place in laboratories. To put it simply, calories are units of heat, not measures of potency.
ALSO…
When it comes to attaining optimal health and weight loss, there are a number of variables that are just NOT the same from person to person.
Remember, we are not inanimate objects and we are not living in a closed system.
Here is a short list of examples of the variables that create challenges for the “calorie in/calorie out” myth:
First, we are each unique. You may have heard this called; biochemical individuality.
NATURE
Genetics
What is your ancestry? Are you from a cold climate or warm climate? How does your body handle starchy carbohydrates? How does your body handle fatty proteins? How do you do with the sun? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Secondly, physiologically, how have we handled our environment and time.
NURTURE
Sleep (Are you allowing your body to recover?)
Toxins (Tobacco, Alcohol, Sugar, Artificial Sweeteners)
Food Sensitivities (Gluten, Soy, Dairy, etc.)
Medications (Over The Counter, Prescription)
Stress (Chronic and Acute)
Quality of Health (Recent Illnesses, Immune System Health, Degenerative Disease, etc.)
Hormonal Health (Insulin, Cortisol, Glucagon, Leptin, etc.)
Age (Menopause, Andropause, Accelerated Aging)
Past Caloric Restriction History (Dieting, Bulimia, Anorexia, etc.)

Strong copy pasta, perhaps some of the things listed as "biochemical individuality" actually do affect one side of the energy balance equation but does not invalidate it?

jonnythan

Scientific laws only apply to laboratory situations where variables are controlled and systems are closed off from all other systems.

Toxins (Tobacco, Alcohol, Sugar, Artificial Sweeteners)

These two are just...LOLWUT?!

Don't be too harsh. She copied it from a blog that says calorie deficit is a myth:
http://the-healthy-omnivore.com/calorie-in-calorie-out-myth/

Isn't it funny that pretty much everyone in fantastic shape with good body composition believes calorie in vs calorie out, but the people who don't are generally obese?

Anything to shift the blame off yourself.

Sarauk2sf

Mental health is also important.

BeachIron

Some people fail even high school level chemistry.

Or fail to take the analogy to the most basic level. Take your pick.

Pointing out that water is technically chemical and that milk and cream are suspensions of chemicals =/= stating that water and plutonium are the same. Seriously, this is actually junior high level science.

jwdieter

Some people fail even high school level chemistry.

Or fail to take the analogy to the most basic level. Take your pick.

Pointing out that water is technically chemical and that milk and cream are suspensions of chemicals =/= stating that water and plutonium are the same. Seriously, this is actually junior high level science.

Water and plutonium are both made of atoms. It's not terribly complex as a concept. Claiming water is a chemical is technically true, but irrelevant. Claiming water and plutonium are both made of atoms is also technically true, but irrelevant.

BeachIron

Some people fail even high school level chemistry.

Or fail to take the analogy to the most basic level. Take your pick.

Pointing out that water is technically chemical and that milk and cream are suspensions of chemicals =/= stating that water and plutonium are the same. Seriously, this is actually junior high level science.

Water and plutonium are both made of atoms. It's not terribly complex as a concept. Claiming water is a chemical is technically true, but irrelevant. Claiming water and plutonium are both made of atoms is also technically true, but irrelevant.

You stated that they are the same, which is false. Nice attempt at a save though.

jonnythan

Some people fail even high school level chemistry.

Or fail to take the analogy to the most basic level. Take your pick.

Pointing out that water is technically chemical and that milk and cream are suspensions of chemicals =/= stating that water and plutonium are the same. Seriously, this is actually junior high level science.

Water and plutonium are both made of atoms. It's not terribly complex as a concept. Claiming water is a chemical is technically true, but irrelevant. Claiming water and plutonium are both made of atoms is also technically true, but irrelevant.

She said there is no such thing as a chemical-free ice cream.

That is technically true. But it is a silly and meaningless thing to say. It is technically true, as there is no such thing as a chemical-free anything. Literally everything is made of chemicals.

If she meant artificial chemicals, it makes no sense at all, because there is plenty of ice cream - both commercial and homemade - that uses only natural ingredients.

Your post was equally meaningless and silly. Bringing plutonium into the discussion served no purpose.

UsedToBeHusky

300+ posts of nonsense

Oh please let them have 200 more so this will fall off my topics.

magerum

Scientific laws only apply to laboratory situations where variables are controlled and systems are closed off from all other systems.

Toxins (Tobacco, Alcohol, Sugar, Artificial Sweeteners)

These two are just...LOLWUT?!

Don't be too harsh. She copied it from a blog that says calorie deficit is a myth:
http://the-healthy-omnivore.com/calorie-in-calorie-out-myth/

Isn't it funny that pretty much everyone in fantastic shape with good body composition believes calorie in vs calorie out, but the people who don't are generally obese?

Anything to shift the blame off yourself.

HA...

jwdieter

She said there is no such thing as a chemical-free ice cream.

That is technically true. But it is a silly and meaningless thing to say. It is technically true, as there is no such thing as a chemical-free anything. Literally everything is made of chemicals.

If she meant artificial chemicals, it makes no sense at all, because there is plenty of ice cream - both commercial and homemade - that uses only natural ingredients.

Your post was equally meaningless and silly. Bringing plutonium into the discussion served no purpose.

Well, it did spark some disagreement somehow.

If you had noted how silly reduction of the argument to "everything is chemicals" was, we could have avoided 4 posts on this monstrosity of a thread!

girlnherdog

For non-sciency peeps like myself, I found the book "Eating Clean for Dummies" to be very helpful. I just thought I'd throw that out there. Thanks for all the great information!

CorvusCorax77

In more recent news,

haahahaha....

CorvusCorax77

Mental health is also important.

again!!! hahahahahahhaha!!!!!

SanteMulberry

It must be nice to be in a position to only eat completely 'healthy' foods while the rest of the peons eat a terrible diet that apparently will be causing all sorts of health problems.

ETA: I wonder what health markers would be like if you compared a significantly overweight person that only ate totally 'healthy' according to some extreme definition v a healthy weight person who ate a balanced diet with a variety of foods but ate some mass produced foods or non-organic produce.

When I was a kid we lived on a farm and grew our own vegetables (even made our own cleaning products, lotions, ect). We lived out in the country where there was no fast food, my brother and I only had McDonalds on special occasions (maybe twice a year). Despite growing and preparing our own food I was still obese and sick. By high school I was almost 300 pounds and on several meds including high bp medicine, depression medicine, pain medicine, and I was bordering on high cholesterol. So my markers were horrible. I was going through health issues of a middle aged women. Now I eat IIFYM. I have lost weight, lowered my body fat %, I no longer take any daily medications ( my bp actually tends to run low now), and my cholesterol levels are back to healthy levels.

I ate to many calories, plain and simple. It didn't matter that it was all unprocessed healthy meats and veggies. I ate too much, I got fat and I was still sick.

Could I ask you something? Don't mean to be nosy, but I was wondering if you ate much sugar growing up? One of my friends grew up Mennonite and could they ever eat! She still throws quite a spread because that is what she grew up doing. They ate very well--and they, of course, grew all their own food. They worked very hard--that goes without saying---but what particularly struck me was the number of fruit pies they ate at family gatherings (and always topped by homemade ice cream), in addition to breads, rolls, mounds and mounds of mashed potatoes with lots of butter and platter after platter of meat, etc. I think everyone here understands that this kind of high sugar/high starch/high fat eating will, even in the presence of heavy manual labor, pile on the pounds because it sends blood sugar levels skyrocketing. And high blood sugars inevitably lead to poor health outcomes (i.e. obesity, Type II diabetes, high blood pressure, renal disease, etc.). I grew up in a similar rural environment and we ate from our own garden and got meat, eggs, butter, etc. from local farmers. BUT I ate a LOT of sugar. And I also was hypertensive by the time I graduated from high school. I'm fortunate that I have not had a large capacity to eat (and have even less now--getting older is like getting a natural gastric bypass, lol) so I was only around 180 when I graduated from high school. I dropped the sweets when I got to university and gradually trimmed down to 140--I was pretty athletic in those days. Didn't start adding weight until arthritis set in and then I did a lot of crazy crash diets (boring story and somewhat, but not totally off the OP) which resulted in yo-yoing for years between bouts of illness.

jonnythan

Could I ask you something? Don't mean to be nosy, but I was wondering if you ate much sugar growing up?

Here we go again. Obesity is caused by SUGAR! Of course.

Mulberry you've solved it all. It's all just sugar. Calories are irrelevant, sugar is what matters.

You found your little pet scapegoat/demon and man you won't let go for anything. You've made up your mind! Everything is sugar.

Good god.

SanteMulberry

I might as well wade in on this, though I'm somewhat leery to do so based upon the vitriol that I've been reading. Whatever, I guess, take these as my opinions.

1. Calories In, Calories Out. I think it's obvious that you cannot make energy (stored as fat) where no energy previously existed (taken in). That's logical. However, I think it ignores several things that, for the purposes of diet/weight loss/health enhancement, should factor in. From the mental impact, such as satiety rate, that has an effect on one's ability to maintain one's diet, to the more physical/metabolic, with regard to how your body uses and partitions specific nutrients that are taken in. We like to consider the body a closed system when considering a CICO paradigm (in at the mouth, out as energy), which I think is useful but doesn't consider the fact that our body is a collection of many very complex systems which are affected by the nutrients we take in. The "out" is very difficult to measure in an exact way, because it's always changing.

2. Carbohydrates. As far as carbohydrates go, I think we generally have a range. As an example, take two people. Person A and Person B. Person A has normal fasting glucose levels, and fasting insulin levels around, oh, 10. Person B has normal fasting glucose levels, and fasting insulin levels around 40. Person A has a relatively healthy carboydrate processing system: normal blood glucose, normal insulin needed to keep that blood glucose, etc. Person B shows problems -- it takes four times as much insulin for Person B to maintain a normal blood glucose level as Person A. Person B is insulin resistant and probably likely to develop Type II diabetes at some point.

Now, we know that insulin is secreted in response to your body's attempts to normalize blood glucose after a meal. Now, it's a drastic simplification, but let's assume Person A eats 100g of carbs at a meal, and requires 1000 units of insulin to keep blood glucose normal. Person B eats 100g of carbs, and requires 4000 units of insulin to keep blood glucose normal. Given insulins role in adipose storage, it's going to be more difficult for Person B to achieve the same levels of fat regulation of Person A - specifically, they are going to be more inclined to store the excess glucose as fat. They're less tolerant of carbohydrates than Person A, and the specific dietary recommendations given to both of them should likely differ. Person B may benefit from more carbohydrate restriction, whereas Person A can get by without it.

3. Health versus Weight. I see these terms getting conflated quite a bit, and I think it makes sense to have some common ground on it. I believe most of us can agree that using weight as the determinant factor for health is likely myopic -- you can have very unhealthy slender people. That being said, however, obesity is a very strong correlator with all sorts of disease states: CVD, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's, etc., so being overweight is, generally speaking, "not healthy". So what else do we look at? Commonly, we use cholesterol levels, triglyceride levels, and other assay markers in the blood to determine whether or not our body is working at an optimal rate.

There is danger here, though, in that the science regarding all of these is always changing, and our adoption of a lot of these standards are strongly related to the amount of press each new study gets. For instance, it is the general belief that cholesterol is a strong indicator for CVD. However, studies from well before the current cholesterol recommendations through to today often show that it's actually a very poor indicator -- that many times, low blood serum cholesterol has shown higher correlation to heart disease and sudden cardiac death than high cholesterol. So what do we do?

We make compromises and sacrifices, and we eventually come upon something that we can live with. Then we implement it and see how it works. If it doesn't work, we likely make changes to it, and try again. If it does work, we've hit the jackpot -- clearly we've stumbled upon the ideal way that people should eat. And therein lies the problem.

We feel strongly about what has worked/is working for us, so it's natural to want to extrapolate that out to the scope of public health policy -- "It worked for me, ergo, it will work for everyone." While we are all human, and all process nutrients via the same mechanisms, the devil is in the details. Some people find a high fat diet more satiating, wherein if they went high carb, they'd be ravenously hungry. Other people can't imagine eating 70% fat, because they're concerned that their heart will explode immediately.

Who's right? The better question is, why does it matter? If you've found something that you're comfortable with, that you can live with, and has worked for you, congratulations. I, for one, had tried low fat, calorie restriction, and tons of exercise, and found that I had problems losing weight and felt miserable all the time. On my current diet, which is 70-80% fat, 20-25% protein, and minimal carbohydrate, I have lost weight easily, I eat a normal amount, and I get to exercise because I like it, not because of some compulsive need to do so. For what it's worth, I lose weight at 2000 kcal with this diet significantly more easily than I did with my previous attempts.

Does this mean that my diet is right for you? Not if you think it's unhealthy and will make your heart explode. I may think that your diet isn't ideal, either -- but if it works for you, why should my opinion count? We have a limited amount of time, no matter which way you cut it. Losing 50, 100, 150 pounds is almost guaranteed to make that time longer. So what we're really doing is arguing at the margins -- trying to find an "ideal" for everyone else. I think there is benefit to this, public policy wise (of which I think our current recommendations are probably poor), but not interpersonally. Just be happy for each other if they've found something that works for them.

Besides, I think the multiple camps could probably find some common ground, anyway:
1. Exercising is generally healthy.
2. Eating vegetables is not a bad thing.
3. Self-control is helpful when trying to lose weight.
4. Copious amounts of refined sugar are probably not good for you (I'll leave it to you to define "copious").

Stuff like that. We get too worked up over the minutiae - and trust me, I really like having discussions/debates regarding the science of it, too. When I do that, however, I like to make sure we discuss science, as opposed to "you". Discussing "you" always makes people upset, understandably.

Sorry for the wall of text.

EXCELLENT! Very well said. I thank you. :flowerforyou:

mommabenefield

Could I ask you something? Don't mean to be nosy, but I was wondering if you ate much sugar growing up?

Here we go again. Obesity is caused by SUGAR! Of course.

Mulberry you've solved it all. It's all just sugar. Calories are irrelevant, sugar is what matters.

You found your little pet scapegoat/demon and man you won't let go for anything. You've made up your mind! Everything is sugar.

Good god.

jonnythan

Could I ask you something? Don't mean to be nosy, but I was wondering if you ate much sugar growing up?

Here we go again. Obesity is caused by SUGAR! Of course.

Mulberry you've solved it all. It's all just sugar. Calories are irrelevant, sugar is what matters.

You found your little pet scapegoat/demon and man you won't let go for anything. You've made up your mind! Everything is sugar.

Good god.

Heh. The confirmation bias is astonishing. She's actually resorted to intentionally seeking out only information that will support her preconceived notions, rejecting any contrary information.

mommabenefield

300+ posts of nonsense

Oh please let them have 200 more so this will fall off my topics.

You could help by adding gifs that are equally as silly as the "current thought" cant do it all by myself you know :laugh:

fluffykitsune

Okay so I have no idea how this thread spun off to what it has become.

But regarding the original post.
Isn't the calories required to digest food pretty much calculated into our BMR ? I thought BMR was the calories we burned doing basic activities (breathing, eating, digesting, growing, repairing). So isn't it silly to try and recalculate those again, even if to save a few calories?