[ulizzle]

So people lost weight and these people have “no idea why?”

Well, ok, it’s calories, but why even bother to have any sort of study about this?

Of course people who don’t know about calories would think they invented a whole new idea and methodology on scientific research

[tobiasSoftware]

The SMTM theory is that obesity is not directly about counting calories, but more like a contagious disease due to a contaminant that causes people to be hungrier and eat more calories. Many people will dismiss this outright, but consider these things:

1. 40% of US adults are obese, which is insanely high for a willpower issue (gambling addiction is 1-2% for example)

2. The vast majority of weight loss attempts fail miserably long term, with success rates somewhere between 5-20%

3. There is precedent for this type of idea with stomach ulcers. We thought they were a psychological cause but the main cause turned out to be H Pylori bacteria

The problem is that even if they are right, it is very difficult to detect a difference between directly eating less calories and not eating a contaminant that makes you hungry so you indirectly eat less calories.

[thomascgalvin]

All weight loss is because of a calorie deficit; that isn't (or shouldn't be) controversial.

The interesting questions are why a diet produces a caloric deficit, and how difficult that deficit is to maintain.

The "don't eat anything and drink nothing but water" diet produces a caloric deficit through a very obvious mechanism, but it isn't something people can adhere to long-term.

Semaglutide produces a caloric deficit by turning off the mechanisms that make people want to eat, and appears to be sustainable long-term (assuming you can financially afford it).

With the potato diet, the question isn't exactly "why did they lose weight?" but more "why did participants reduce their calories?" Were they so sick of goddamned potatoes that they couldn't bare to shove another one down their throat? If so, that indicates that the diet is unsustainable. On the other hand, if people were enjoying the diet and reduced their calories because the potatoes left them feeling fuller, longer, that's a mark in the protocol' favor.

Weight loss studies aren't about finding ways to reduce calories, they're about finding ways to reduce calories that people will comply with. And based on how often diets fail, and how often people regain all (or more) of the weight lost once they stop dieting, I would argue that we actually haven't figured out the answer to this yet.

[WorldMaker]

> All weight loss is because of a calorie deficit; that isn't (or shouldn't be) controversial.

It's very controversial, which is part of why the SMTM blog exists in the first place. If running a calorie deficit were sufficient then any diet in the world should work, and we have so much evidence of obese people struggling with quality of life even living on extreme calorie deficit diets. It's not willpower, not all calories are equal, and there's a lot of questions about how useful calories are as a metric in general.

(I'm of the opinion food calories are the last bastion of Phlogiston Theory in any of the sciences. The Standard Calorie Model was invented at the bizarre Sanitarium at Battle Creek by vegetable-hating vegetarians who religiously thought grains were the one true food from God, and were designed to sell more cereals [Dr. Kellogg and his brother that founded the Kellogg Company], crackers, and even cookies [Dr. Graham who helped found Nabisco]. Food Calories are a poor metric of chemical content. Exercise Calories are worse metric of human energy output: The human body is not an ideal spherical furnace and the moments of highest heat output are dangerous conditions better known as "fevers" and "strokes". The Standard Calorie Model is "replicated science", but most of the replication studies were done by German scientists in the 1930s and 1940s and any replication crisis that involves possible war crimes makes other sciences' p-hacking crises look positively quaint. There is a lot of unsolved controversy around Food Calories.)

[pr0zac]

This post is really confusing. The "Standard Calorie Model" is not a thing. Are you using the term as a shorthand? If so, other people aren't going to know what it means. Regardless, nothing related to the use of calories to quantify energy intake from food or energy burned from exercise comes from Nazi Germany or Dr Kellogg.

Despite other ridiculous beliefs Kellogg was a big fan of vegetables which were a big part of his diets. The only study semi-related to food and Germany in the 30s/40s I can think of is the Warsaw Ghetto Hunger Study, but that was on the physical and psychological effects of starvation not how calories are calculated and was done by Jewish doctors in Poland not Germany.

The use of calorie to refer to energy in food and the first method for measuring the amount came from Atwater in the late 1890s and the first studies on the amount of calories people burned were done in the 1910s resulting in the Harris-Benedict equation, a modified version of which is still in use today for calculating metabolic rates.

Like yes theres still a lot of challenges in how calories in food and calories burned are calculated and a lot of values can end up being wrong on both sides, but thats only a problem of the equation having incorrect numbers and doesn't disprove CICO itself.

I'm seriously confused where you got the ideas you're putting forward here.

[WorldMaker]

Sorry, I suppose that I do have some things mixed up and have listened to too many conspiracy theories. In re-researching now I may have earlier confused a journal with an author and a few other things when researching where some specific exercise calorie numbers come from. I'll retract most of my statements about the "Standard Calorie Model" as bad syncretism and review again further later.

> how calories in food and calories burned

Right or wrong on the specifics of the history of such things, this phrasing continues to bother me that every discussion about calories is still entirely in the vocabulary of Phlogistion. Calories are treated as particles somehow "in" food, and all we care about is how well calories "burn". The metabolism doesn't work as a fire. This just seems to me like a fundamentally bad assumption for how energy works in the metabolism. How is heat energy in food or heat energy during exercise good measurements or metrics for food or for human activity?

It's too over-simplifying as a model. It favors a heat-centric view of energy that both chemistry and physics have since rejected as critically flawed (including all the many times they rejected Phlogiston Theory). Physics has an easy and direct formula for the energy density of mass (E=mc^2) but we'd all have a good laugh if someone proposed we model human food consumption as an ideal fusion or fission reaction. Why is it not equally laughable when we talk about the energy in food based solely on how much heat it creates when food is set on fire or the energy costs of exercise based mostly on how much people exercising raise the temperatures of the rooms around them?

I think that's a bit more strange than just "incorrect numbers". I know that's a rare opinion in general, and I offer my opinions not to "disprove CICO" but to encourage people to explore the controversies themselves more deeply whether they end up agreeing with me after the exploration or not.

I think CICO is somewhat fine first-order approximation. Over-simplifying models are useful sometimes, and a broken clock can be right at least twice a day, especially if your error sensitivity is only plus or minus 10 hours. There are too many anomalies in the current obesity crises that CICO doesn't explain well. I think far too many people assume the over-simplified CICO map is the entirety of the complex territory of human dieting, and have a near religious fervor that too many people in the world simply love eating Phlogiston particles too much and don't have the "willpower" to cut the Phlogiston in their diet nor to exercise their Phlogiston away.

Plus there's a lot of interesting Goodhart's Law controversy in modern food that when a metric becomes the target it ceases being a good metric: have you explored the "zero-calorie" sections of your local grocery store lately? What do you think is the macronutrient benefit of some of those beverages and snacks? Do they actually seem healthier to you than things with plenty of food calories? Those foods certainly seem free enough of Phlogiston, so far as I can tell. But they certainly don't seem free from interactions with the human digestive system to me.

Maybe these aren't controversies that are worth talking about? I'm feeling sorry I brought it up. I'm definitely sorry I mixed up some facts that distracted from the actual points I was making. The obsession with heat energy/fire output as the one metric to rule them all and that can explain "all of food and exercise" is fascinating to me. It seems bad organic chemistry and it seems bad physics to me. CICO is right just often enough (as a high error rate, first order approximation) that it probably isn't worth the effort disproving, but that doesn't mean it is free from controversy.