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Dr Jason Fung - The Useless Concept of Calories
Barry7879
Posts: 62 Member
in Debate Club
Boom! I'll just leave this here 
https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-useless-concept-of-calories-50831730cc81
https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-useless-concept-of-calories-50831730cc81
73
Replies
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^^This.13
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Why are you leaving it here?
26 -
That was a waste of 4 minutes.....
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I stopped reading at Fung41
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He centers his argument around the body not counting calories and the different digestive paths for different foods, but dances around the question of whether the body ends up getting the same amount of energy from different foods of the same caloric content (hint - it does). The body doesn't measure things or do any sort of math; this is true but meaningless. Different foods are broken down different ways; also true and not completely meaningless but at the end of the day the different paths provide the same energy with the same caloric input.31
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Where's "The Useless Concept of Dr. Jason Fung?"50
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Boom! I'll just leave this here
https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-useless-concept-of-calories-50831730cc81
OK. We've all seen countless derp articles like this posted in countless threads. Do you have an opinion, or did you look up the most controversial topic you could find in order to provide yourself with some entertainment tonight?50 -
That was a waste of 4 minutes.....
You actually bothered to click the link?
I'm not interested in anything Fung has to say. He's a woo-spouting crackpot and is a laughingstock amongst evidence-based nutrition/physiology experts.
It was humorous when he popped into the ISSN (International Society of Sports Nutrition) Facebook group. He was absolutely crucified in there.36 -
That was a waste of 4 minutes.....
You actually bothered to click the link?
I'm not interested in anything Fung has to say. He's a woo-spouting crackpot and is a laughingstock amongst evidence-based nutrition/physiology experts.
It was humorous when he popped into the ISSN (International Society of Sports Nutrition) Facebook group. He was absolutely crucified in there.
No *kitten*.
Did not click and feel pretty confident I didn't miss anything useful.13 -
Omg, saw “Fung”, and just came for the drama...
I’ve got my eye on you, thread. I expect to be entertained.
Seriously though, the guy is such a joke.29 -
Boom! I'll just leave this here
https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-useless-concept-of-calories-50831730cc81
Why not sweep it up and throw it in the garbage.23 -
Now I know Fung.1
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OMG, is Fung the guy who periodically creates troll accounts on here and rants about how calories don't exist and we're all morons?? Tell me he is.32
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Alatariel75 wrote: »OMG, is Fung the guy who periodically creates troll accounts on here and rants about how calories don't exist and we're all morons?? Tell me he is.
OMG, Fung is Shouty Guy! You are a genius!26 -
Alatariel75 wrote: »OMG, is Fung the guy who periodically creates troll accounts on here and rants about how calories don't exist and we're all morons?? Tell me he is.
I LOL'ed.
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Alatariel75 wrote: »OMG, is Fung the guy who periodically creates troll accounts on here and rants about how calories don't exist and we're all morons?? Tell me he is.
Does Fung know Stephen Hawking? Shouty Guy (love that name for him BTW) claims to know him.9 -
Alatariel75 wrote: »OMG, is Fung the guy who periodically creates troll accounts on here and rants about how calories don't exist and we're all morons?? Tell me he is.
Is the article in all caps with crazy slurs?8 -
Alatariel75 wrote: »OMG, is Fung the guy who periodically creates troll accounts on here and rants about how calories don't exist and we're all morons?? Tell me he is.
Is the article in all caps with crazy slurs?
Does it contain references to Dr. Feinman?5 -
I'm a little confused by the order of the words, but not at all surprised to see Fung and useless in the same sentence.28
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nutmegoreo wrote: »I'm a little confused by the order of the words, but not at all surprised to see Fung and useless in the same sentence.
"Something something Fung Useless something something".12 -
Alatariel75 wrote: »OMG, is Fung the guy who periodically creates troll accounts on here and rants about how calories don't exist and we're all morons?? Tell me he is.
Is the article in all caps with crazy slurs?
Does it contain references to Dr. Feinman?
I always giggled assuming that was a misspelling of Feynman. A google search tells me there is a Dr Feinman, but he isn't a physicist.6 -
nutmegoreo wrote: »I'm a little confused by the order of the words, but not at all surprised to see Fung and useless in the same sentence.
"Something something Fung Useless something something".
Actually it was ...Fung - The Useless... :laugh:2 -
nutmegoreo wrote: »Alatariel75 wrote: »OMG, is Fung the guy who periodically creates troll accounts on here and rants about how calories don't exist and we're all morons?? Tell me he is.
Is the article in all caps with crazy slurs?
Does it contain references to Dr. Feinman?
I always giggled assuming that was a misspelling of Feynman. A google search tells me there is a Dr Feinman, but he isn't a physicist.
There's a Dr. Richard D. Feinman who has "research" (and I say that in the most derisive sense possible) published on PubMed saying "a calorie is a calorie violates the second law of thermodynamics" and preaching metabolic advantage from keto diets. I always figured that's who shouty guy was talking about.4 -
nutmegoreo wrote: »Alatariel75 wrote: »OMG, is Fung the guy who periodically creates troll accounts on here and rants about how calories don't exist and we're all morons?? Tell me he is.
Is the article in all caps with crazy slurs?
Does it contain references to Dr. Feinman?
I always giggled assuming that was a misspelling of Feynman. A google search tells me there is a Dr Feinman, but he isn't a physicist.
There's a Dr. Richard D. Feinman who has "research" published on PubMed saying "a calorie isn't a calorie" and preaching metabolic advantage from keto diets. I always figured that's who shouty guy was talking about.
That makes sense. I thought it was a misspelling of Feynman because he was always on about the physicists agreeing with him and how us sheeple don't know any better.4 -
Either way, Fung is a nephrologist who has woven just enough actual science into all his pseudo/junk science to almost sound convincing, but he's been torn apart by plenty of experts with actual knowledge about physiology and nutrition. He's another Dr. Oz - a physician who's sold his soul to the almighty dollar, peddling snake oil and shoveling in money by the bucketloads from gullible, desperate people.
It's rather telling that when you Google his name, some of the first links to his "work" are to dietdoctor.com, Jimmy Moore's keto site and Mercola's site. You can almost fill up your woo bingo card from that first page of search results.14 -
"Or look more closely at metabolic pathway for glucose. There are even more detailed pathways for protein and fat. My question is this: Do you see “Calories” mentioned on any part of these simplified pathways? We’ve spent the last hundred years detailing the intricacies of human metabolism. And nowhere in all of this work do you see the word “Calories”
Yeah okay. Um, the metabolic processes in our cells...the ones detailed in this article...produce energy from the chemical metabolic breakdown of fats, proteins and carbohydrates. That energy is stored in energetic bonds in ATP molecules or in the transport of electrons in NADH and FADH2 molecules that are then used by electron transport to again generate ATP. That is the energy used for the day to day operation of our bodies and it is supplied to us through both our food and our stores of those molecules in the form of fat and glycogen etc. To see this in those diagrams you kind of have to know what you are looking at. But where are calories, I don't see calories....case closed. Yeah, uh, calories...calories are just a unit of energy. Kind of like how a meter is a unit of distance and a kilogram is a unit of mass. So if you are talking about energy, you can talk about it in terms of calories. Saying "I don't see calories in this diagram so calories are irrelevant" is kind of like looking at a map that has distances in miles and saying "I don't see kilometers on here so kilometers are irrelevant!" Biochemical metabolism is about the transfer of energy...so yeah, calories (or whatever your favorite unit for measuring energy is) are relevant.
Weightloss happens when the amount of energy your body expends is greater than the amount of energy you intake. As the energy books always have to be balanced the energy comes instead through the processing and consumption of stored molecules within your body. If you want to be accurate at predicting weight loss, track energy. In terms of food energy is typically measured in calories...hence the relevance. But if you don't like the word calories for some reason feel free to track the energy in joules or in horsepower or w/e your favorite unit is.
Might need to work on that biochemistry of calories post I was thinking about making.40 -
Well. That was quite a lot of blither for just one idiot.13
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I guess we should plan our meals according to the concept of how much money we spend on each grocery. It's funny how everything is always seen through the monetary analogy.
No our body doesn't care about calories and doesn't "count them" since the concept of calories is a socially agreed upon concept through which we humans represent the changes in energy levels and patterns included in bodily mechanisms involved in feeding the body and energy transformation needed to sustain life (or some sort like that). Giving this sort of a concept a quantitative measure make it easier for us humans to wrap our heads around it.3
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