Can 1lbs of food make you gain more than 1lbs?

rybo

There are biology, physiology, and probably even physics professors rolling over in their graves from some of the "information" & ideas in this thread.

AmyOutOfControl

Hypsibius wrote: »

TR0berts wrote: »

Oh. Pro-tip: ignore everything you saw/heard/read in Fed Up. It's complete nonsense.

Gah, really? Anything better out there for a layman on how the body processes and metabolizes food? Very much want to better understand this and macros/nutrition, how different foods affect the body, the difference between "bad" and "good" foods and the correct balance -- but it seems like there's a lot of contradiction and articles that argue the exact opposite of something I just read.

@Hypsibius Here is scientifically based nutrition information you can trust: https://www.nutrition.gov & https://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic

ninerbuff

There's a difference between the weight of something and how long it takes to burn it off. You could eat a pound of spinach and go on with your regular day eating the rest of your meals and not gain a pound because spinach isn't that calorie dense.
You could eat 3500 calories from 9 packets of pop tarts and if you don't burn off that energy and still eat the rest of your meal, gain weight because the energy is in surplus.

Fat is a storage of unused energy.

That's how it works.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
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Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

Hypsibius

JacobNicolaus wrote: »

Let's be clear, we are talking about the possibility of the upper limit, i.e.:

Is it possible, even with perfect conversion of food energy into mass to achieve more weight gain than the weight of the food?

Short answer: NO.

Long version:
1. Conservation of mass/energy in physics - no possible event will result in more mass or energy out of nowhere. So, no matter what you eat, you cannot gain more mass than what you've eaten by any means whatsoever, using any food whatsoever.

2. Napkin calculations:
1 kg of olive oil = 8840 ccal
8840 ccal = 982.22g of fat
982.22g < 1kg.

So, even with the perfect conversion of calories into fat mass, you can't get more than you've eaten. Add to that all the imperfect conversions of food into carbs, protein, waste, heat, &c. - and you'll end up with even less mass adding to your weight as time goes by.

To answer those who'd say:

But if you convert those calories into carbs/protein, they'll end up weighing more than 1 kg.

- you won't be able to convert those calories into carbs/protein. Olive oil is 100% fat. Other foods will have different densities, so they won't make up the same weight with the same amount of calories.

Let me demonstrate:
1 kg of sugar = 3870 ccal
3870 ccal = 967.5g of carbohydrates
967.5g < 1kg.

Again, we know carbohydrates pack fewer calories per gram than fat. At the same time, 1 kg of sugar packs fewer calories than 1 kg of olive oil. Sugar is 99.98% carbs.

Finally, an example with proteins (and mixed in fat).
1 kg of Salmon = 1460 ccal of which there are 38% fat and 62% protein. That is, you have 554.8 calories locked in fat, and 905.2 calories locked in protein.
1460 ccal = 61.64g of fat + 226.3g of protein = 287.94g.
287.94g << 1kg.

So, between fat, protein and the rest of it, salmon is a very poor candidate if you want to gain weight which would be nearly equal to the mass of food you've eaten.


These rough calculations suggest, that sticking to pure-fat and pure-carbs options will yield the closest weight gain to the food mass, should you wish to achieve it.

Thanks -- this is actually the answer I was looking for. Very helpful!

RedSquadronLeader

rybo wrote: »

There are biology, physiology, and probably even physics professors rolling over in their graves from some of the "information" & ideas in this thread.

Hahahaha I am a physicist. This is all hilarious. Anyway weight and energy are not the same thing. Energy can be measured in calories (defined as the energy it takes to raise a gram of water by a degree celsius, 4.186 Joules) and then food calories are kilocalories. But food calories are essentially determined by burning food in a calorimeter - a simple experiment that most people have done if they've taken intro physics/chemistry. People don't burn their food. Digestion has efficiency factors associated with it. The thermal calorie estimates are more like upper limits for the amount of energy you can extract from your food.

Not that this makes any practical difference for anyone trying to figure out their energy intake vs expenditure -- if you figure you maintain at 2000 calories by logging food, but you really only get 1700 through digestion, whatever. It's just a rescaling.

You can gain more weight than what the food weighs, particularly for salty/carby things, because water retention. But it's not going to be fat as pointed out by the poster with the detailed calculations above.