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by lm28469 1098 days ago
Probably that part:

> potentially impacting energy metabolism

CICO is mostly true if you already have a balanced diet, if you eat 2000kcal of ultra processed food you'll have side effects you wouldn't have with a cleaner diet. The body is a fine tuned machine, it doesn't process 100kcal of sugar the same way it processed 100kcal of broccoli

2 comments

Whilst that is true, in neither case will it extract the full kcal, since that was calculated by completely burning the food (in a calorimeter). If you burn more than 100kcal you will not gain weight no matter what. You might still get fatter, but your total mass cannot increase if you burn more calories than you consume unless you violate conservation of energy.
I am so weirded out that almost nobody seems to acknowledge that calorie numbers have no actual meaning with the way digestion processes food in a human body. Relying on food consumption advice that's based on calorie numbers and math is invariably wrong, the only way it might happen to have any meaningful impact is because low numbers mean lower overall quantities.

Also the way calories are "counted" in exercise is absolutely bogus for individuals because it rarely takes into account their physiology and basically uses made up numbers of various exercise types.

Creating mass out of nothing is literally impossible.
Unless you're a theoretical water container and you burn the food to heat yourself it's much much much more complicated than that

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-reveals-w...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3396444/

Sure, but creating mass out of calories that would instead go into the toilet is not.
I am guessing that chronic inflammation can lead to weight gain through fluid leakage into tissues (effectively trapping more non-caloric water weight in the body).

https://open.oregonstate.education/aandp/chapter/26-1-body-f...

> Figure 26.1.8 – Edema: An allergic reaction can cause capillaries in the hand to leak excess fluid that accumulates in the tissues.