[dabadoo]

The math does not add up.

40 grams of sugar does not have enough calories for you to gain 3 kilograms in 12 days, or 8.5 kilograms in 21 days.

Moreover, if he ate as much as the average American eats, how is it that the average American has not experienced what he has? The guy almost gained 1 pound a day.

[ryanobjc]

What else did he eat? Sugar will raise your insulin level, which directs more blood sugar to fat cells.

So it's not just a case of calories in calories out.

[dabadoo]

It is a matter of calories in calories out.

He didn't just increase his concentration of fat, he straight up gained 8.5 kilograms of mass.

[dualogy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin

> promoting the absorption of, especially, glucose from the blood into fat, liver and skeletal muscle cells

> in the tissues that can carry out these reactions, glycogen and fat synthesis from glucose are stimulated

> The breakdown of triglycerides by adipose tissue into free fatty acids and glycerol is also inhibited

> Increased lipid synthesis – insulin forces fat cells to take in blood glucose, which is converted into triglycerides (aka fat)

> Increased esterification of fatty acids – forces adipose tissue to make neutral fats (i.e., triglycerides) from fatty acids

> Decreased lipolysis – forces reduction in conversion of fat cell lipid stores into blood fatty acids and glycerol

Kcals in kcals out fails practically every overweight person over 30 I know. But they won't hear about biochemistry. Poor folks aren't even eating that much, but what they do eat sufficiently inhibits liberation of the many-months-worths of energy stores they carry around all day. Don't envy them, full of energy yet out of energy!

[dabadoo]

Kcals in/out is literally the conservation of mass.

Increasing fat synthesis doesn't mean your body can magically make up mass.

[dualogy]

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." - Albert Einstein

[123jfeichabc]

The human body is a complex system, with hormones controlling how energy is stored and made available, and nutritional content continuously altering the levels of those hormones.

Your statements completely ignore variables such as:

Bioavailability of the calories - how much of it remains in the waste (urine/feces) or is being metabolized by gutteral bacteria, for example. These variables strongly depend on the types of calories consumed, particularly the presence of dietary fiber. Soluble fiber for example is especially effective at capturing sugars and preventing their absorption in the small intestine, resulting in flatulence after arrival in the large intestine.

Insulin levels - when insulin levels are high energy is stored as fat. Hormones like insulin also influence mood and activity levels. Obese people are generally lethargic and low-energy/low-activity individuals, regardless of what is obviously an excess of energy available. This is due to the hormonal dysfunction. Hormones can cause a person to be internally starving when they're ingesting excessive calories, simply because their hormones are signaling the fat stores to effectively steal all the energy in the blood stream.

[dabadoo]

Bioavailability of calories isn't relevant here. There literally is not enough energy in that amount of sugar. Why does it matter if 80% of the available calories is absorbed of 90%?

"Insulin levels - when insulin levels are high energy is stored as fat."

It doesn't matter where energy is stored. 100% of it could have gone to fat.

[DiThi]

He was already eating more calories than he needed. The difference is that after changing his diet he was excreting less calories, since sugar (specifically fructose in the absence of fiber) is absorbed quickly and almost entirely.

[jonsen]

The main part of the kind of body mass you can gain is water.

[aidenn0]

The more sugar I eat at one meal, the hungrier I am at the next meal. It's entirely possible that his caloric intake went up by a lot more than the 619kCal per day he got of sugar.

[thomyorkie]

He ate 40 teaspoons which is 160 grams of sugar. Also, perhaps the fact that he went from very little sugar to 160 grams a day caused rapid weight gain. I know for instance that your body changes over time to burn fat more efficiently if you are on a lower carb diet, perhaps the reverse is true as well.

[dabadoo]

Weight gain is impossible without the necessary amount of calories. It is the simple law of conservation of mass/energy.

160 calories * 21 days = 3360 calories. This is enough to gain about 1 pound of weight, not 19.

[thomyorkie]

Its 160 grams of sugar which equals 619 calories which leads to 12999 calories in 21 days. Still less than 4 pounds though.

However, you're really oversimplifying weight gain. Hormones play an important role in how much fat is stored and how much your metabolism burns. And the type of food you eat can affect your hormones.

[darpa_escapee]

Hormones, food, stress, mood, sleep, exercise, medications etc all affect your metabolism and how fat is stored.

[dabadoo]

Yes my mistake. 13k calories is roughly 4 pounds.

>Hormones play an important role in how much fat is stored and how much your metabolism burns. And the type of food you eat can affect your hormones.

It doesn't matter if 100% of the calories he ate was turned into fat.

>how much your metabolism burns.

Eating sugar causes your metabolism to slow down by 4x? You'd die.

[thomyorkie]

You're talking about that 13k calories of sugar as if it exists in a vacuum. That extra sugar could have caused more of the other non-sugar food he was consuming to turn to fat.

[dabadoo]

Turning to fat doesn't mean mass will come out of nothing

[DesiLurker]

I dont think thats the central message of the film at all. the problem with human digestive system is that it evolved for very different set of conditions & has very limited 'floating' capacity for carbs. so when you eat highly processed food with short chain carbs what you get is sudden overload in carrying capacity of blood stream. body responds by storing it away as fat. OTOH when you are short on energy body produces hunger signals before tapping into fat reserves so eat again & cycle repeats. the message IMO is about composition of what you eat (centered around sugar).

[dualogy]

A good time for you to prove that every single one out of trillions of living mammalian bodies satisfy your robotic maths to any degree of confidence!

[in_cahoots]

1 teaspoon is 16 calories, so you're off by a factor of 4 here though you're still in the same ballpark.

[chinathrow]

Well, he also ate other stuff "around" those sugar calories, not?

[oculusthrift]

probably spiked his blood sugar causing him to eat more food in general. pretty poor article missing a million confounding variables

[mping]

Was under the impression he ate food with sugar, hidden sugar as he call it. Plus, he went from no sugar to 40g so it's not not comparable to the avg person

[shamaku]

40 grams of sugar? 40 teaspoons is closer to 160+ grams.

[DanBC]

He completely changed his diet from cooked from scratch to "foods perceived as healthy but which contain hidden sugar". He claims he controlled for fat intake.

It's likely that taking on that much sugar all of a sudden would require him to increase his fluid intake, and so some of the weight may be water.