[coldtea]

>I have been reading the articles in this blog: http://hypothermics.com/. It is an excellent blog that chronicles many of the findings and the author performs a lot of these tests on himself.

The problem with such blogs is that there's one for all kinds of kooky theories. The hypothermics, the epsom-salters, the music-therapies, the low-carbers, the paleos, the whatevers...

Some theories might turn out validated by scientific research with control groups and everything, but it's hardly worth it trusting such sources until that happens.

[thomyorkie]

Eating a low-carb diet is a kooky theory?

[coldtea]

Eating a low carb diet is just a statement of fact (if one does eat few carbs).

But THE low-carb dies tons of people follow (from specific books, websites, etc.) are just fad diets based on kooky theories that selectively pick partial scientific results, add some cargo cult and personal opinion (e.g. from the late Atkins) as opposed to peer reviewed and agreed upon medical consensus, and promote it as the ultimate solution to weight loss.

Many promoters of dietary schemes would have us believe that a special substance or combination of foods will automatically result in weight reduction. That's simply not true. To lose weight, you must eat less, or exercise more, or do both.

http://www.quackwatch.com/06ResearchProjects/lcd.html

(I follow a low carb diet myself, in the sense of avoiding sugar and white flour etc, but not with the proper scientific adjustments and balances -- e.g. fruit are fine--, not because some late 70s doctor said so, or because some health guru promotes a specific version of it).

[sandworm101]

It is a little more complex than calories in and calories out. It isnt kooky to suggest that some foods (liquid sugar) are absorbed more readily while other calories may pass through without absorbtion (plant fibers). What counts is calories in minus calories flushed away, something nobody really likes to measure.

Take orange juice with or without pulp. Same basic caloric values, but the pulp version carries much of the sugars away.

[emcq]

Liquid sugar also has more calories than plant fibers; it's a bit of a strange comparison.

Many of the details people focus on are second order effects, and I have yet evidence to see that calorie in minus calorie out is a bad model for estimating weight gain.

If you have evidence for the calories being missleading by more than 10% I'd love to see it!

[sandworm101]

I was talking abour two foods with the same calories but with different absorbtion rates resulting in greater or fewer calories passing through the gut undigested. 100cal of coke results in more weight than 100cal of grass clippings. One is easy to absorb and the other passes through almost untouched.

[emcq]

Sure there are plenty of undigested elements that inevitably become waste products, but if it's food that most people are eating, I'm very unconvinced that calories in minus calories out isn't the first order effect to model.

It's difficult for me to find nutritional data for grass clippings; but let's take your example and compare coke to alfalfa sprouts for grass clippings:

* 100g alfalfa sprouts is ~23 calories and would occupy a volume of ~3 cups [0]

* 100g of coke is ~38 calories and occupies a volume of ~.4 cup [1,2,3]

If you wanted to eat enough alpha sprouts to be equivalent to that .4 cup of coke, you would need to eat almost 5 cups worth, ~12x more volume! I can't imagine eating 5 cups of alfalfa sprouts, but half a cup of coke is trivial to guzzle.

Relative energy density seems to limit caloric consumption far before we need to model undigested bits.

[0] https://g.co/kgs/8aUo7E

[1] http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/c...

[2] http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/121Adensitycoke.html

[3] http://depts.washington.edu/chem/facilserv/lecturedemo/Densi...

[coldtea]

>It is a little more complex than calories in and calories out. It isnt kooky to suggest that some foods (liquid sugar) are absorbed more readily while other calories may pass through without absorbtion (plant fibers)

No, but it is kooky to suggest it as a standalone diet, complete with various invalid assumptions, outside of scientific dietary consensus.

Plus, you'd be surprised how far the "calories in/out" goes: http://www.fitmole.org/twinkie-diet/