[MichaelBosworth]

> The article draws up comparison to defining "wealthy" as "People get rich because they take in more money than they spend." But that's actually a perfectly fine definition of wealthy which explains what it is.

In that analogy, I believe, the article's point is that a definition has been masquerading as an explanation.

[robotresearcher]

Imagine you explained to people in the nineteenth century: the way you do heavier than air flight is to deliver sufficient thrust to overcome gravity and drag. Well, yes, that’s quite true. But how to get that done reliably is the ‘rest of the owl’.

How can people reliably eat a balanced diet despite feeling compelled to smash calories, now that calories are very cheap? The thermodynamic explanation has nothing to say on this.

[LanceH]

Yes, but the huge effort to deny the thermodynamic explanation is straight up harmful.

[emmanuel_1234]

I'd really like to be pointed to someone seriously denying the thermodynamic explanation. I've heard that argument time and time over, it's a strawman.

[maximus-decimus]

I've definitely met people, not even fat people, who deny it. They either think they just don't burn many calories because their body is a "different type" or that their body absorbs more calories.

I guess it doesn't deny the physic principle of thermodynamics, but they deny using thermodynamics is a reliable way to predict if you're gonna gain or lose fat.

[BizarroLand]

Well, if their body chemistry is predilected to create fat over healthy muscle or ramping up their metabolism to burn the excess, then there may be a grain of truth to the claim.

Per the article: Carbs + high circulating Insulin + Low Ghrelin+ a certain amount of fat already on the body = body chemistry that prefers to create fat over using the energy for literally anything else.

If that is the case, then that's a hell of a dilemma. If you eat more than your body will burn by the time the food has processed, the excess will go to fat.

Eat one meal a day but have 1,200 calories in a meal (since most dieticians say that no one should eat less than 1,200 calories a day), well, your body can only process so many calories in a certain amount of time, so everything else goes to fat.

True, if your BMR is higher than 1,200 (which it should be if you're not dead) then you will turn around and burn that back away if you stick rigidly to your diet.

But a normal person not afflicted like this might have a body temperature increase as their body ramped up to process the excess calories instead...

[maximus-decimus]

A body temperature increase... as in a fever? If eating food gives you a fever, you have bigger issues than losing weight.

The problem with saying everything goes to fat if you eat 1200 calories in 1 shot is that if that happens, you'll actually burn the fat during the day when you need it, and you'll lose energy during the conversion, meaning your body will be overall less efficient than using it straight away and you'll lose even more weight. I don't know how inefficient that really is, all I remember from my biology classes is this is a lot more efficient than burning muscle, but it sure doesn't increase the total amount of energy in your system. That would be breaking thermodynamics laws.

i.e. Just because you store fat, doesn't mean you need any less calories per day. Your body won't just starve itself to death while leaving your fat alone.

[edanm]

See Gary Taubes, i.e. the article we are discussing.

[gumby]

Taubes isn’t denying it, merely saying it’s not explanatory. If you prefer: necessary but not sufficient.

[zamadatix]

It is an explanation. The article does not propose an alternative to the imbalance explanation rather alternative focus of action to achieve said intake balance. It doesn't even say the existing method of action of enough flat intake reduction as an answer to the imbalance explanation (this action is what the article actually finds flawed not the explanation) won't work just that it is ineffective for the same amount of effort.

[SeanAppleby]

I believe the point is that the answer begs another question of "why".

In their drinking example, alcoholism literally is overdrinking, but we accept that there is an underlying mechanism of physical and psychological dependency that exists outside of "they just consciously choose to drink all of the time and other people don't". At this point we generally recognize it as a disease with more nuance than "overdrinking". We recognize that there is a significant neurological component that is, at the point that they are an alcoholic, not under their total conscious control. Their subsconscious is pushing them to do things that the subconsciouses of people without the disease do not push for.

Similarly, you could ask the question, why do some people eat significantly more than they burn? And it then seems not implausible that the problem could be similar to that of alcoholism, that some neurological system is calling for the body to ingest more food, whereas other people's appetites are fundamentally more accurately calibrated at a subconscious level.

Much more speculative, but this would even seem to make sense from a wider lens. Almost our entire evolutionary lineage existed in a world of food scarcity, not overabundance. The selection pressure necessary to evolve a reliable safeguard against overeating would seem plausibly to not be old enough for that mechanism to have evolved to be as reliable and widespread as the one to prevent us from allowing ourselves to starve to death.

The health problems of the 20th and 21st century are still incredibly new from the perspective of the mechanisms that created our instinctual impulses.

[zamadatix]

Agreed, I'm not sure how any of this disagrees with:

"It is an explanation. The article does not propose an alternative to the imbalance explanation rather alternative focus of action to achieve said intake balance."

I understand the article wishes to point out we should focus on a different action but it spends its time attacking the current definition not because it has a problem with the definition but because it has a problem with the currently popular action associated with the definition.

The popular definition is fine, it's the popular "soluttion" to the definition they attack. The paper is much more clear on this.

[sa1]

There are issues with the imbalance explanation. w.r.t obesity, the least wrong (and most explanatory) equation will relate calories going into adipose tissue, and calories being taken out of adipose tissue.

Then another less wrong equation can relate calories absorbed by the digestive system and the calories burnt by the whole body.

These are not the same equations as calories eaten vs calories burnt. And the quantities are not easily measured.

Depending on exercise, and other potentially unknown environmental or genetic or other conditions, the body will put energy into tissue other than adipose tissue.

Not all energy eaten will be absorbed. There was a recent study which showed how eating fructose expands the gut lining to be able to absorb much more nutrition. We do not know all the regulatory mechanisms that control absorption. Nor all mechanisms that control hunger.

We're far from understanding all aspects of nutrition. The imbalance equations needs to be refined, if people are looking up to laws of physics to explain this matter.