[y4mi]

No, that is plain wrong. Calories count, no matter where they are from.

Ketogenic diets might increase your metabolism and reduce your appetite and hunger, which makes weight loss easier, but you'll still gain weight if you eat too many fat calories each day. Even if you cut out carbs entirely.

[renaudg]

"Calories count, no matter where they are from."

This is the exact point the article is proving wrong.

[aaron-lebo]

It doesn't really prove it wrong. If you eat 3000 calories of butter every day, you're gonna get fat. In that sense, a calorie is a calorie.

[coldtea]

>In that sense, a calorie is a calorie.

This has been thoroughly disproven for ages -- starting with the naive assumption that you can just eat X amounts of anything and it doesn't affect anything else in your health/apetite/metabolism.

[aaron-lebo]

I know we like to one up each other on HN, but you're just talking past the main point.

Calories matter. If you eat too many, you get fat. Some calories might be "better" than others, but they are a standard of unit of energy for a reason. A calorie is a calorie.

Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.

[coldtea]

>Calories matter. If you eat too many, you get fat. Some calories might be "better" than others, but they are a standard of unit of energy for a reason. A calorie is a calorie.

That's quite irrelevant though (besides tautological), as we don't just eat calories, we eat food that has calories and tons of other stuff in different arrangements.

A calorie being a calorie doesn't cover whether the food you got the calorie from makes you satiated, or conversely makes you eat more, or makes you feel more energetic, or makes you store it as fat, or brings hormonal changes, etc.

A "milligram is a milligram" too, a standard unit of weight, but 1mg of cyanide can kill a person, and 1mg of water won't do anything to them.

>Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.

Again this presumes that people can just eat, regardless of what they eat -- and continue to eat it without that affecting anything else. I guarantee you if I ate just butter, I'd threw up after several hundred grams, and feel quite bad and stop the diet after some days.

[aaron-lebo]

We're not disagreeing, just talking about different things.

[didgeoridoo]

Surprisingly, you wouldn’t. I basically have been on your “butter diet” for over a year. I get about 80% of my calories from fat, much of it saturated. The rest is protein. I’ve lost about 50 pounds, normalized my blood pressure & cholesterol, and feel amazing.

[aaron-lebo]

How many calories were you eating pre and post diet?

2 sticks of butter is almost 1800 calories, that would be a weird diet with lots of hunger. There probably are a lot of sources of fat that work better than that.

[gtrubetskoy]

To illustrate the point: dietary fiber, which contains a lot of calories, is not digestible. Eat as much as you can, but you will not get one calorie of energy from it. So just based on that, where calories come from matters.

There is a difference between fat metabolism and sugar metabolism. They use different metabolic pathways, in other words the process by which a fatty acid molecule becomes ATP (the ultimate source of cellular energy) is very different from how fructose (which has to first be converted to glucose in the liver) becomes ATP.

[barkingtoad]

"a calorie is a calorie"

This is the exact point the article is... arguing against in a very convincing fashion

[y4mi]

No, the article is saying that people are getting obese and diabetic because of sugar.

Its further pointing out that there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight. I didn't disagree there either.

The article never claims that you can eat any amount of calories as long as you leave carbs from the table. And thats the only thing i pointed out. Because thats just plain wrong. If you eat too many calories, you will gain weight. And if you're predisposed to obesity, you will eat more calories when you're flavouring stuff with sugar. This will, as the author pointed out, cause you to get even more obese and eventually get diabetes.

[WillPostForFood]

You are getting lost in semantics, because if you are saying:

there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight.

Then a calorie isn't a calorie.

[cheald]

Calories are calories (it's literally a measure of energy!) The packages they come in will effect hormonal and psychological responses differently which may affect the amount you would take in if intake is left unmonitored. To that extent, it's wise to take in foods which don't nudge you towards over consuming, but if you can be disciplined and take in a quantity of energy less than you expend on a consistent basis, eating that intake as sugar rather than other macros isn't going to magically make you gain weight.

[analog31]

This is exactly what puzzles me. Increasing your metabolism should increase your body temperature, all other things being equal. I still suspect that sheer reduction of calories is the main driver of weight loss, and if anything, fine-tuning one's metabolism plays a minor role.

[y4mi]

I'm just talking anecdotally here but yes, the body temperature does increase significantly. Keto wasn't for me, especially because of the increased food budget, but it sure did help with my chronically cold feet/hands.

But I'd still agree with your second assessment: the biggest contributor is the decreased hunger/appetite after the first few weeks.