does food realy make you fat

If you continually eat more than you need then yes it will make you fat.

Ignoring the studies doesn't make that statement true. Although, the study was not able to look long term. But, short term, it wasn't true hat eating in excess made thin people fat.

What makes the statement true is that it's true.

Energy intake effects energy output and some people will burn more when they eat more, but if you continually eat more than you burn you will get fat.

You should also not conclude that I am ignoring research just because I don't look at one study and decide to disregard thermodynamics entirely.

I understand the science.

But, everything we know today will be wrong tomorrow. I'm keeping an open mind. The study was interesting regarding BMR and the bodies reaction to maintain regardless of calories consumed. Yes, there are many studies out there. I wish there were more that would continue along these lines.

Everybody's different. Some people just have a faster metabolism. My brother and his girlfriend eat whatever they want and never gain an ounce. He's 5'9", 120 lbs, and his girlfriend is 5'3" and 94 lbs.

I absolutely guarantee you beyond any doubt whatsoever that your brother and his girlfriend either eat far fewer calories than you think, or burn far more than you think. Possibly both.

The amount that people eat when just left to themselves without thinking about calories varies enormously. Left to myself, I'd easy eat 3000-5000 calories a day. One of my friends who "eats whatever he wants and doesn't gain weight" consumes more like 1900-2200. I've actually observed and calculated this for several people. He eats almost nothing but junk food and fast food. He just doesn't eat nearly as much of it as I tend to.

Quantity matters. It matters a LOT. At a party with a bunch of snacks out, I'll eat Doritos and he will eat Doritos. But he'll just eat a few chips and be done with it. I'll eat half the bowl.

The bottom line is that "metabolism" just doesn't vary that much from person to person. What really DOES vary a great deal is energy expenditure, in the form of movement, and calorie intake.

Nope. I've live with both of them. They live off fast food, lasagne, chicken nuggets, pizza, frappuccinos, and soda. And they put ranch on pretty much everything. If I started eating all my meals with them, I would absolutely gain weight. I can't think of a time I ever saw them eat anything healthy. His girlfriend won't even have vegetables on her hamburgers. She orders it plain, just meat and cheese. My brother works out every once in a while, but it's usually because he's recently watched a kung fu movie like Ip Man or something. His girlfriend never exercises. She says there's no point in working out since she's already skinny.

"I absolutely guarantee you beyond any doubt whatsoever" that you know the person I've known all my life better than I do, even though you've never met? That's a pretty foolish thing to say. I, however, can absolutely guarantee you beyond any doubt whatsoever that you don't know what you're talking about.

The fact that you keep talking about the types of food they eat, rather than the quantity or caloric content, tells me without any doubt whatsoever that you have not done a rigorous analysis of the food they consume. You don't lose weight by eating healthy foods, you lose weight by eating fewer calories than you burn.

May 8, 2007
Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside
By GINA KOLATA

It was 1959. Jules Hirsch, a research physician at Rockefeller University, had gotten curious about weight loss in the obese. He was about to start a simple experiment that would change forever the way scientists think about fat.

Obese people, he knew, had huge fat cells, stuffed with glistening yellow fat. What happened to those cells when people lost weight, he wondered. Did they shrink or did they go away? He decided to find out.

It seemed straightforward. Dr. Hirsch found eight people who had been fat since childhood or adolescence and who agreed to live at the Rockefeller University Hospital for eight months while scientists would control their diets, make them lose weight and then examine their fat cells.

The study was rigorous and demanding. It began with an agonizing four weeks of a maintenance diet that assessed the subjects’ metabolism and caloric needs. Then the diet began. The only food permitted was a liquid formula providing 600 calories a day, a regimen that guaranteed they would lose weight. Finally, the subjects spent another four weeks on a diet that maintained them at their new weights, 100 pounds lower than their initial weights, on average.

Dr. Hirsch answered his original question — the subjects’ fat cells had shrunk and were now normal in size. And everyone, including Dr. Hirsch, assumed that the subjects would leave the hospital permanently thinner.

That did not happen. Instead, Dr. Hirsch says, “they all regained.” He was horrified. The study subjects certainly wanted to be thin, so what went wrong? Maybe, he thought, they had some deep-seated psychological need to be fat.

So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.

The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.

The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: “It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals.”

Eventually, more than 50 people lived at the hospital and lost weight, and every one had physical and psychological signs of starvation. There were a very few who did not get fat again, but they made staying thin their life’s work, becoming Weight Watchers lecturers, for example, and, always, counting calories and maintaining themselves in a permanent state of starvation.

“Did those who stayed thin simply have more willpower?” Dr. Hirsch asked. “In a funny way, they did.”

One way to interpret Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel’s studies would be to propose that once a person got fat, the body would adjust, making it hopeless to lose weight and keep it off. The issue was important, because if getting fat was the problem, there might be a solution to the obesity epidemic: convince people that any weight gain was a step toward an irreversible condition that they most definitely did not want to have.

But another group of studies showed that that hypothesis, too, was wrong.

It began with studies that were the inspiration of Dr. Ethan Sims at the University of Vermont, who asked what would happen if thin people who had never had a weight problem deliberately got fat.

His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.

That, of course, was contrary to what every scientist had thought, and Dr. Sims knew it, as did Dr. Hirsch.

The message never really got out to the nation’s dieters, but a few research scientists were intrigued and asked the next question about body weight: Is body weight inherited, or is obesity more of an inadvertent, almost unconscious response to a society where food is cheap, abundant and tempting? An extra 100 calories a day will pile on 10 pounds in a year, public health messages often say. In five years, that is 50 pounds.

The assumption was that environment determined weight, but Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania wondered if that was true and, if so, to what extent. It was the early 1980s, long before obesity became what one social scientist called a moral panic, but a time when those questions of nature versus nurture were very much on Dr. Stunkard’s mind.

He found the perfect tool for investigating the nature-nurture question — a Danish registry of adoptees developed to understand whether schizophrenia was inherited. It included meticulous medical records of every Danish adoption between 1927 and 1947, including the names of the adoptees’ biological parents, and the heights and weights of the adoptees, their biological parents and their adoptive parents.

Dr. Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had been adopted when they were very young — 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life. His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were as fat as their biological parents, and how fat they were had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were.

The scientists summarized it in their paper: “The two major findings of this study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that genetic influences are important determinants of body fatness; and that there was no relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that childhood family environment alone has little or no effect.”

In other words, being fat was an inherited condition.

Dr. Stunkard also pointed out the implications: “Current efforts to prevent obesity are directed toward all children (and their parents) almost indiscriminately. Yet if family environment alone has no role in obesity, efforts now directed toward persons with little genetic risk of the disorder could be refocused on the smaller number who are more vulnerable. Such persons can already be identified with some assurance: 80 percent of the offspring of two obese parents become obese, as compared with no more than 14 percent of the offspring of two parents of normal weight.”

A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.

The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

The results did not mean that people are completely helpless to control their weight, Dr. Stunkard said. But, he said, it did mean that those who tend to be fat will have to constantly battle their genetic inheritance if they want to reach and maintain a significantly lower weight.

The findings also provided evidence for a phenomenon that scientists like Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel were certain was true — each person has a comfortable weight range to which the body gravitates. The range might span 10 or 20 pounds: someone might be able to weigh 120 to 140 pounds without too much effort. Going much above or much below the natural weight range is difficult, however; the body resists by increasing or decreasing the appetite and changing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks.

The message is so at odds with the popular conception of weight loss — the mantra that all a person has to do is eat less and exercise more — that Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the Rockefeller University, tried to come up with an analogy that would convey what science has found about the powerful biological controls over body weight.

He published it in the journal Science in 2003 and still cites it:

“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe,” Dr. Friedman wrote. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.”

This is an excerpt from Gina Kolata’s new book, “Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss — and the Myths and Realities of Dieting” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Correction: May 12, 2007
An article in Science Times on Tuesday about the role of genes in weight gain misstated the publication date for an article in the journal Science describing the biological controls over body weight. The article was published in 2003, not 2000.


*Lots of comments after this article at the New York Times if you're interested - most not as depressing as this article and a few by readers that are maintaining a large loss of weight.

"Why are thin people not fat":
http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/why-are-thin-people-not-fat.html

I don't want to get too into studies and metabolic factors and suggest instead that you watch what your sister eats. My roommate in college was 5'10, 110 pounds on a heavy day, and the only one of the four girls who lived in our house to buy doritos, pizza rolls, and coke. She also drank a fair amount of beer. We used to shake our heads all the time and be like, must be nice to eat crap all day and be so skinny. Then I started to watch what she ate more closely. True, her diet was 90% crap, but I bet she was consuming less calories than me on a daily basis. She'd eat a double cheeseburger for lunch at McDonalds, and that would be all she'd eat until dinner time. That bag of Cool Ranch doritos would be bought in January, and the same bag would still be taunting me three months later. She never exercised, and if you saw her at the bar with a liter of beer and a huge plate of nachos, you might be like, well that's unfair. But that huge beer and plate of nachos would probably be a. 50% leftover at the end of the night, and b. the only thing she ate that day.

I would say from my own experience in watching other people eat, the thinner people tend to consume less calories than their heavier counterparts. They might not be eating healthy food, but they are eating it in smaller amounts.

Thermodynamics, people: it's the law.

The first Law of Thermodynamics in real life

A doctor leading a weight loss group responded to a question posed by her group as to why they were unable to lose weight. She said it was all because of the Law Of Conservation of Mass, also known as the Law of Thermodynamics. “This law of physics,” Dr. Val Jones wrote, “states that matter cannot be created or destroyed, although it may be rearranged.” That means that to lose weight, someone else has to gain it, since fat cannot be destroyed only rearranged. So, give your fat to someone else, she said. To that end, she’s been baking cookies. :-)

Of course, that was all in fun and the law of thermodynamics doesn’t really work that way. But Dr. Val was right about one thing: A lot of students probably slept during their pre-med physics class and don’t remember their professor’s lecture on the Law of Thermodynamics. That is evident, just as she quoted, by the fact that the most important part of the Law of Thermodynamics is usually left off.

Did you catch it?

As is often the case when science is dummied down into soundbytes, it becomes wrong. Such is the case in the distortion of the Law of Thermodynamics which has been simplified into the popular wisdom: “Calories in = calories out.” This simplistic adage has become something “everyone knows” to be true. It’s behind widely held beliefs that managing our weight is simply a matter of balancing calories eaten and exercise. While that’s been used to sell a lot of calorie-reduced diets and calorie-burning exercise programs for weight loss; sadly, it’s also been used to support beliefs that fat people “most certainly must be lying” about their diets and activity levels, because otherwise their failure to lose weight would seem to “defy the Law of Thermodynamics.”

While it might seem inconceivable, this simplified maxim is little more than superstition and urban legend. To realize this fact requires us to first go back to physics class and fill in the missing parts of the first Law of Thermodynamics.

The first Law of Thermodynamics, or energy balance, basically states that in a closed system, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed or transferred.

The human body is not a machine. There are countless, wildly varying, variables (external and internal) involved and that affect the efficiencies of a system and for which we have no control over. Understanding this helps to explain why calories cannot be balanced like a checkbook, and why people never seem to gain or lose precisely as calculated.

Balance in an open system, like the human body, is when all energy going into the system equals all energy leaving the system plus the storage of energy within the system. But energy in any thermodynamic system includes kinetic energy, potential energy, internal energy, and flow energy, as well as heat and work processes.

In other words, in real life, balancing energy includes a lot more than just the calories we eat and the calories we burn according to those exercise charts. The energy parts of the equation include: calories consumed; calories converted to energy and used in involuntary movement; calories used for heat generation and in response to external environmental exposures and temperatures; calories used with inflammatory and infectious processes; calories used in growth, tissue restoration and numerous metabolic processes; calories used in voluntary movement; calories not absorbed in the digestive tract and matter expelled; calories stored as fat, and fat converted in the liver to glucose; and more. Add to that, to put it simply, each variable affects the others, varies with mass and age, involves complex hormonal and enzyme regulatory influences, and differs in efficiency.

Calories eaten and calories used in voluntary movement are only two small parts of energy balance and are meaningless by themselves, unless all of the other variables are controlled for, as our metabolism… which they can never be as they aren’t under our control.


Engineering

These principles are well recognized by engineers and scientists who design thermodynamic systems. To better understand the Laws of Thermodynamics, as healthcare professionals we can learn a lot from engineers. Here’s an especially good explanation from Engineers Edge. [The entire book is available online here.] When balancing all of the energies-in to all of the energies-out plus energies stored within a system, engineers begin by considering:

If all of these energies interact within the system, then it’s an isolated system. But, of course, the human body is not an isolated system, exactly. It’s exposed to countless external influences and stresses. [Such as infections or external temperatures which can affect metabolism.]


There’s also a second Law of Thermodynamics, by the way, which explains the efficiencies of a closed system. This law dates back to the mid-1800s and basically says that it’s impossible to create a system that has perfect efficiency of energy conversion, as there are always some losses in the conversion process. The maximum possible efficiency is different than the observed efficiency. Over time, entropy increases and a system becomes more disordered and less efficient. Early in the developing science of thermodynamics, explains Engineers Edge, researchers realized that while work could be converted completely into heat, the converse is never true for a cyclic process. “Certain natural processes were also observed always to proceed in a certain direction” (such as heat always moves from hot to cold). A machine that converts heat from a warm body into work, without losing heat to a cooler body, would violate the second law of thermodynamics. The second Law of Thermodynamics is why physicists know that a perpetual motion machine is impossible (and not so simple, either).


Biology - Back to our bodies

The human body is a remarkable and incredibly complex and sophisticated system that normally keeps all sorts of things in balance, such as our fluid and electrolyte levels, our body temperature… and, yes, even our fat stores. When fat levels deviate from each body’s natural range, compensatory mechanisms kick in over weeks to return the body to its individual normal state, all without us having to think about it or having much to say about it. Even when eating a range of calories, our body weights stay within a surprisingly narrow range. The Law of Thermodynamics is more complicated than just calories eaten and burned in exercise, but it works in the body just like any other system.

“Body weight is remarkably stable in humans,” explained Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University in New York. “The average human consumes one million or more calories per year, yet weight changes very little in most people. These facts lead to the conclusion that energy balance is regulated with a precision of greater than 99.5%, which far exceeds what can be consciously monitored.” In fact, error ranges in food calorie labels, assessed by calorimetry, are typically greater than 10%!

Scientists at Rockefeller University have conducted some of the most detailed, complex and precise metabolic research on energy balance and the biochemistry of fat, and shown in their renowned studies that fat people are metabolically no different from lean people, except they’re bigger. When within the weight range genetically normal for them, a fat person’s energy (caloric) balance per unit of lean body mass is indistinguishable from that of a ‘normal’ weight person. Fat people eat and burn calories no differently than naturally thinner people.

“A four hundred pounder who is maintaining his weight at his set point is no more a glutton than a hundred-fifty pounder at his set point,” wrote Robert Pool of his interviews with the Rockefeller researchers. Each body is eating and burning calories in energy balance.

Naturally fat and thin people are also alike in another way: It’s just as difficult for us to consciously vary our weights significantly — be it to lose OR gain — from what’s natural for our individual bodies and to maintain it for any length of time. Our bodies’ regulatory mechanisms work hard to preserve our bodies in their normal states — and biology nearly always wins. Research has shown that through willpower, diet and exercise, people have a long-term control over their weights within a 10- or 15-pound range, said Dr. Friedman. That's not going to ever change someone into a different body type -- make a naturally fat person thin or a genetically lean person obese.

This is a troll, right?