[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.