Why the Calorie Is Broken (arstechnica.com) 425
An anonymous reader writes: Nutrition is a subject for which everybody should understand the basics. Unfortunately, this is hard. Not only is there a ton of conflicting research about how to properly fuel your body, there's a multi-billion-dollar industry with financial incentive to muddy the waters. Further, one of the most basic concepts for how we evaluate food — the calorie — is incredibly imprecise. "Wilbur Atwater, a Department of Agriculture scientist, began by measuring the calories contained in more than 4,000 foods. Then he fed those foods to volunteers and collected their faeces, which he incinerated in a bomb calorimeter. After subtracting the energy measured in the faeces from that in the food, he arrived at the Atwater values, numbers that represent the available energy in each gram of protein, carbohydrate and fat. These century-old figures remain the basis for today's standards."
In addition to the measuring system being outdated, the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person. Differences in metabolism and digestive efficiency add sizable error bars. Then there are issues with serving sizes and preparation methods. Research is now underway to find a better measure of food intake than the calorie. One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods.
In addition to the measuring system being outdated, the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person. Differences in metabolism and digestive efficiency add sizable error bars. Then there are issues with serving sizes and preparation methods. Research is now underway to find a better measure of food intake than the calorie. One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods.
Not the Calories fault? (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA "Nash uses an app to record the calories he consumes and a Fitbit band to track the energy he expends."
Is it possible that the Calorie is just fine and maybe using some cheap piece of electronics strapped to your wrist is just a really piss poor way to track the energy expended?
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Re:Not the Calories fault? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, the Calorie is pretty well defined. 1 Calorie = 1kcal = 1000 calories, with 1 calorie defined as the amount of energy it takes to heat up 1 ml of water 1 degree C. If that's broken, then so is the joule. Now if the number on the side of the box is wrong, that's believable. If they're consuming more then the serving size without realizing it, that's believable (seriously, this small package contains 2.5 servings?). Different peoples digestive systems operate at different efficiencies, thus different people get a different amount of energy out of the food, that's believable. And it's well known the amount of energy you burn depends on your amount of activity and the amount of muscle you have which means that wearing a fitbit to track your energy expenditure is almost certainly worthless. Considering all those things on why losing weight isn't so easy to put into a simple mathematical formula still doesn't imply that the calorie is broken. It does it's job of measuring energy just fine.
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Two units, one 1000x the other, distinguished only by capitalization...WTF does it take to call something broken?
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But this leaves us still with the other piss poor (or - learning about its history - rather literally shitty) method used on the other end of the equation: we can't say how much of the available energy (and here the calories are indeed fine) are actually processed and absorbed by the human body as this varies. (Hint: it's not 100% as there is still energy left in the digestive waste products)
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we can't say how much of the available energy (and here the calories are indeed fine) are actually processed and absorbed by the human body as this varies. (Hint: it's not 100% as there is still energy left in the digestive waste products)
The fact that it is not 100% is well known. The method you decry as "piss poor" explicitly takes this into account by measuring the energy content of the faeces. It might still be a piss poor method due to inter-personal variation, or even variation over time in the same person.
Stupid headline (Score:3)
I don't see how any of that stuff makes the calorie "broken". Sure, "Differences in metabolism and digestive efficiency add sizable error bars." etc etc. Gasoline has 30MJ/L of energy, and the fact that cars have different fuel efficiencies doesn't mean that isn't useful data, or that the joule is "broken" either.
Is it really news to anybody that you need to take account of more than just pure calorie intake when monitoring your diet?
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No, it's saying that the measure of how much calories is in a given serving of food isn't really a good measure of anything.
And all of those things which say how much calories is in a portion are such bad estimates as to be fairly unreliable, because the methods of measuring it are pretty incomplete and sketchy.
The scientific calorie and the nutritional calorie are different things .. the nutritional calorie is, at best, a wild ass guesstimate.
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Right at the top, it seems likely the nutritional content label would be something of an average or mean over many ears of corn or servings of potatoes.
And every one of us is a little the same and a little different, so there's no universal tenet that works for everyone.
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If the weight goes up, I eat less. If the weight goes down, I eat more. For all the complexities of it, it really is simple to track.
That only applies if you eat the same thing every day. The quantities you should/can eat for each form of protein, fat, or carbohydrate vary wildly. So eating a little less refined sugar might make a bigger difference than eating a lot less olive oil.
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Well except that it is saying those things, because calories is highly dependent on how or if you cook something:
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I agree. The Calorie is a useful measurement. If you monitor your health by tracking Calories eaten, weight, and Calories expended then you should be able to control your weight. If your weight is going up, you have few options, reduce your Calorie intake, or increase your calorie expenditure, or some combination of the two. Maybe the numbers on the packaging don't work for you, and you actually get more energy out of the foods you are are eating than what's reported on the label. The fact still holds
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That approach generally works, but it can be hard to maintain a healthy balance if you treat 100 Calories of Coke the same as 100 Calories of steak.
Basic science, broken. (Score:2)
"Then there are issues with serving sizes"
Someone doesn't understand calories.
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I think the issue is with how calories are reported on labels and how much people typically eat in a serving. There was a case a while back where certain cola producers were reporting the calories on the label based on a serving size of 100 mL, even though they knew that nobody only drinks part of the can when consuming it. The serving sizes reported on product labels are usually much lower than a person would typically eat, which makes the calorie count of products appear lower. Sure people should just
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Though I agree with the au
The basics haven't changed (Score:5, Insightful)
If we're talking about obesity, then it's still a case of you only get fat if you eat too much. And here (for those who haven't already clicked Reply and are starting an argument) "too much" means more than your body needs to function, for however much or little exercise you take.
If your weight is increasing and you don't want it to: either exercise more to burn off the excess, or eat less. That is independent of whatever unit of energy you use - or the accuracy of the food labeling.
Re:The basics haven't changed (Score:4, Insightful)
Eat "less" is the part that's in question. how much less to eat depends entirely on what type of calorie you are eating (specific types of fat, protein, or carbohydrate). Cutting out the soda but not cutting out the ribeye steak might make a lot bigger difference than the converse, even if they are the same decrease in overall calories. And there are some arguments that decreasing carbohydrates and increasing fat intake and overall consuming more calories can still result in weight loss (or at least no additional gain), depending on individual biology.
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Still, using calories to measure and "eat less" works as well as anything else out there. Assuming you don't change your diet content or buy different foods, eating less calories will lower the available energy going into your body and lower your weight gain. Further, if you do change the mix of your diet, using the calorie to evaluate what it might do to your weight is a good place to start (Atkins followers aside) in that it generally captures the most important metric about food's energy content availab
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Yes, but nobody who studies nutrition in the 21st century gives a flying fuck about the back of a torn business card energy-balance calculation, because food consumption patterns are tied to human behaviour and performance in a hundred other ways and most people wish to lose weight more for vanity than actual health reasons, while also continuing to cope with life stress—does anyone even take a shit any more without consulting their iDevice?—and maybe even dream a little in their spare moments.
O
Sounds like they're trying to make eating costlier (Score:2)
.
Regardless of metabolism, exercise, how well you digest food, etc, the following always holds true (maybe not precisely true to minute decimal places, but true)
Take all the calories you eat, subtract out the calories you lose, exude, emit, excrete or otherwise eliminate.
If the result is more than the number of calories your body needs to run, you'll gain weight.
For me, I know the magic
Simple Solution (Score:2)
Dump the crap food, eat good stuff with enough "fiber" and eat less overall w/more fiber to lose weight.
Good thing it was then. (Score:2)
If he had done that research today he would have died in the swat raid looking for his bomb.
But its ok, it would be his own fault for making them suspicious enough to put him on the no fly list for his seditious publication about bombs.
Familiar ground (Score:2)
All this should be very familiar by now to anyone who is interested in nutrition. Gary Taubes, in particular, has explained the facts fully and clearly in his books, starting with "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (published, for some strange reason, under the title "The Diet Delusion" in the UK).
It should be obvious that the total chemical energy in a substance is by no means the same as the energy that the human digestive system extracts from it. Otherwise we could consume, and thrive on, hydrocarbons such as
Go to the dietician and ask him. (Score:4, Insightful)
Following the diet at the letter was meaning weigh as much I could all the food I was eating and estimate when I couldn't, say wen I was eating outside, and having one and only one meal per week where I eated a bit more, like pizza or sushi, but without overeating.
Of course some foods were banned, like carbonated dink with sugar or industrial snacks. The doctor said to me that if I wanted to eat say some chocolate, having to eat less was way better to eat the high quality one.
When last week I meet him for the control visit, he complimented me with the result and gave me the maintenance diet, that was similar to the one I was following for loss weight but with some more daily food to eat.
I think that self made diets or read on newspapers aren't going to work. Ask an expert..
US Gov Advice USED to be OK for the masses (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the government's "four food groups" with X servings of 4 groups (meats, dairy, bread, fruits and vegetables)? (http://www.rootedcook.com/visuals/foodguides/ - 1956-1992) It worked (it was even used on game shows) because people could understand and remember four things and whole numbers without units.
Today's government food pyramid? It's 6 different items measured in a mix of "cups" and "ounces" (http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/05/82105-004-3C485EB5.jpg) - not exactly how food is packaged and remembering 6 different figures with units is beyond what people can easily recollect.
If you want the masses to "get" any nutritional advise, I can't see how blowing up a common denominator like the calorie would help.
Yeah, I wonder... (Score:2)
With the way calories are counted... what's the official calorie value of a box of tissues?
'cause cellulose burns pretty well, but contributes a flat 0 to human nutrition.
Nutritionism (Score:5, Interesting)
This sort of story smacks of "Nutritionism" as explained in Michael Pollan's book 'In Defense Of Food'. Generally people do not need to know how many calories, carbs, nutrients, vitamins, etc. are in a piece of food unless you are a nutritionist, and most people aren't. How to eat healthy comes down to one simple rule:
Eat food(1) mostly plants(2) not too much(3).
(1) Food defined by things your great-grandmother would recognize as being food. Nothing overly processed. Food should spoil. If what you eat will not spoil you should not eat it. Things that are not food, but edible food-type substances: refined sugar (includes soda, twinkies, etc), refined flour (white bread, etc), refined oils of all kinds (peanut oil, sunflower oil, and *gasp* olive oil).
(2) Plants, meaning whole fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. And a variety. Different shapes, textures, colors, whole and fresh if you can get it. This should make up 90% of your diet. Less than 10% of your diet should come from animal products. This includes dairy and meat.
(3) Don't eat too much of one thing. Don't overeat.
If you do this, you don't need to count calories or take vitamins or worry about your riboflavin intake. Just eat and be healthy.
-Matt
Re:Nutritionism (Score:4, Insightful)
Food defined by things your great-grandmother would recognize as being food.
Problem is my great-grandmother was a stay-at-home mother and had plenty of time to prepare meals. It was one of her primary responsibilities. I, on the other hand, have little time to find recipes, shop for ingredients, manage my stock and cook food from scratch.
Plants, meaning whole fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. And a variety. Different shapes, textures, colors, whole and fresh if you can get it. This should make up 90% of your diet. Less than 10% of your diet should come from animal products. This includes dairy and meat.
In Japan fruit is quite expensive, for various reasons. They eat a lot of rice, a hell of a lot of meat, fish, seafood and seaweed. They also have very long life expectancy and are generally pretty healthy if they don't destroy themselves with alcohol or smoking. Obesity is only really much of an issue with the younger generation that has a slightly more western diet.
I find I can't finish most Japanese meals, the portions are too large. Japanese people do okay. I think it's because they are used to the amount of protean. Protean makes you feel full, and meat has plenty of it.
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I prefer eating fruit and vegetables (and I love grains and nuts of all kinds) but to manage my weight I find I have to eat a bunch of meat (more meat than I want). My brothers have found the same thing - as we've all got into our late 30s, we've had to switch to eating more meat (I eat mostly slow-cooker chicken) to keep from ballooning up in weight. But I also have to have carbs in the morning or else I under-perform at work. Anywho, your vague "natural"/"grandma-recognizable" stuff is completely usele
The Hacker Diet (Score:2)
Google "The Hacker's Diet." In it, John Walker explains the basics of how it's all about just doing the math every day. I lost 33 lbs last year with a slightly modified version of this method. When I tell people I lost weight, the first words, almost invariably, are, "What's your secret?"
When I say "I counted calories every day" they are underwhelmed. The only other "secret" is that you have to be willing to be -a little- hungry, but not starving.
Web edition: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackd... [fourmilab.ch]
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Google "The Hacker's Diet." In it, John Walker explains the basics of how it's all about just doing the math every day. I lost 33 lbs last year with a slightly modified version of this method. When I tell people I lost weight, the first words, almost invariably, are, "What's your secret?"
When I say "I counted calories every day" they are underwhelmed. The only other "secret" is that you have to be willing to be -a little- hungry, but not starving.
Web edition: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackd... [fourmilab.ch]
I lost 30lbs in 3 months. Never felt hungry, didn't count calories, didn't even change what I ate. I simply ate less. My dinner meals were basically either beef or chicken with rice almost every day of the week. While I did cut out snack foods (in fact I made sure to keep no snack food in the kitchen), I didn't stop drinking soda or sports drinks. Never starved myself, never went hungry; I ate until I didn't feel hungry then stopped. I also went from doing a workout designed to maintain conditioning a
Much simpler approach (Score:3)
Instead of
One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods.
1) Eat food - food does not list ingredients, but often is listed as an ingredient. A potato is food, A box of scallop potatoes is not. If what you are eating is required to have labels to inform you of what is really in it, then it isn't food. (Note: this applies mainly to packaged food products. Obviously, there are foods that have labels, because they may be packed in water, etc.)
2) Don't change calories - Calories simply measure the maximum amount of energy that may be utilized. People have different metabolisms so that one person may be more efficient at utilizing those calories than somebody else, but that doesn't mean we should change the measure. Different automobiles are more or less efficient at utilizing gasoline, but that doesn't mean we should change how gasoline is labeled.
3) Calories aren't nutrition - Calories are about energy, not nutrition. 100 calorie apple and a 100 calories of sugar both provide the same amount of available energy, but the sugar has zero nutritional value. However, since calories do impact weight as in calories consumed less calories burned will either add to or subtract from one's weight, they can't be ignored. On the otherhand, they shouldn't be obsessed over, particularly since metabolism has a major impact on weight.
4) CICO - Calories In, Calories Out - assuming one is getting adequate nutrition, if the concern is weight, then regardless of ones metabolism, if you are gaining weight more weight than you want, you either a) need to reduce calories or b) burn more calories. Likewise, if you are losing more weight than desired, you need to a) increase calories or b) burn less of them. It doesn't take some database tailored to your specific body or specific flora in your gut. Those may explain why one person loses or gains more than another, but it doesn't alter CICO.
TL;DR - We don't need a national database of each person's metabolic profile or gut flora. We simply need to eat nutritious food and have more active lifestyles.
Why did he collected their faces (Score:2)
Re:I guess it's easier... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.
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What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.
They then also claim BMI is innacurate because "it doesn't take into account muscle mass". Yeah, you might have some obscure medical thing that makes your body inexplicably pile on muscle as you scoff biscuits from your office chair, just like 99% of the rest of the overweight population, really.
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You're making several errors, the first of which is that it's overweight people whining about BMI. It is not, from what I've seen. Fit people talk about BMI. I was one of them, and I was borderline overweight despite being a very thin person.
The second is that one's daily schedule is irrelevant if they are careful about what they eat. A full meal can be very low in calories, and a lack of exercise does not necessarily lead to obesity. There are many, many more factors at work here.
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You're making several errors, the first of which is that it's overweight people whining about BMI. It is not, from what I've seen.
I've seen it plenty. Especially overweight people actively deluding themsleves by claiming that BMI doesn't apply.
Fit people talk about BMI. I was one of them, and I was borderline overweight despite being a very thin person.
I'm a fairly average build (currenty just overweight according to BMI and undeniably I have a few lb to spare). If you're anything approaching a normal buil
Re: I guess it's easier... (Score:2)
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Good rule of thumb: if your BMI says you're overweight and you don't have a 6 pack, then I'll bet you've got plenty of squidgyness where that 6 pack ought to be.
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That said I've known plenty of athletic people, especially females, who BMI does not give an accurate indicator for. For instance I know quite a few girls in roller derby. If you looked at BMI or pure body weight they are grossly overweight b
BMI is a poor tool (Score:4, Interesting)
Especially overweight people actively deluding themsleves by claiming that BMI doesn't apply.
BMI is pretty useless for many people. Taking myself for example. I'm about 5'10 and weigh around 175-180lbs with body fat % somewhere in the low teens. I coach a wrestling team and I'm in reasonably good shape and stronger than average for my weight. If I were to cut to competition weight I would be 150-160 and I competed in college at 150 many years ago. Anything lower than that and I'd be well into unhealthy - certainly nothing sustainable. But according to BMI calculators I would have to get down to around 130lbs to be considered underweight. Last time I weighed that much I was cutting weight as a junior in high school and was under 6% body fat. You'd have to put me in a concentration camp or give me cancer to get me that low again. BMI calculators put me now at borderline overweight at my current weight and that description doesn't make sense. My waist size is the same as it has been since college and while I could shed about 5-10% of my body mass without ill effect that's hardly overweight. I'm not delusional about my weight - I actually have a better idea of my body composition than most people do. Basically BMI is too crude a measure to be much use for a large swath of the population. It does have some utility but it can be pretty misleading too.
Re:BMI is a poor tool (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, a small swath of the population. People with lots of muscle and little body fat are a very small minority of the population. For nearly everyone else, BMI is a perfectly good rule of thumb. For instance, looking around the room now I can see about 20 people, all of which if you calculated their BMI would give a perfectly good rough idea of where they fit.
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Gerat, at least one other person gets it here!
It's funny half of the threads people are complaining that everyone wants to be a special snowflake. Then BMI comes up and everyone claims to be a special snowflake.
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Or, everyone is complaining that BMI is a bad metric for its intended purpose. Your "special snowflakes" are anecdotes, and once enough anecdotes exist (and it extends FAR beyond this small discussion thread) they are no longer exceptions, but tend to become a rule.
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Or, everyone is complaining that BMI is a bad metric for its intended purpose.
Yeah and they're wrong. No, it doesn't apply well to people who hit the gym to bulk muscle, but that's a tiny fraction of the population. For the 99% who have a normal musculature, it applies pretty well.
Your "special snowflakes" are anecdotes
er huh?
and once enough anecdotes exist (and it extends FAR beyond this small discussion thread) they are no longer exceptions
There are 300 million people in the US. You can have 1 MILLION ane
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Your "special snowflakes" are anecdotes
er huh?
http://dictionary.reference.co... [reference.com]
5 or 6 anecdotes in a slashdot story hardly qualifies.
Did you even read what I wrote? The part about it NOT being limited to these few Slashdot comments? Go ahead, read it again, come back once you're done.
It it applies well to 99.7% of the population or even 95% it's still a really good measure.
[citation needed]
You claim that it is good for that portion of the population. Back it up with data.
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Actually, considering that YOU are pretty much the only loud voice backing BMI in this discussion, I'm giving YOU the title of "special snowflake".
Hope it doesn't get too warm for you, you might melt.
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BMI is terrible. I'm a desk jockey and am a regular gym goer. I'm 5'10 and 185 and while I don't have a six pack I can see my belt buckle.
I'm 5'11 and probably 190. I can see my belt buckle. I can run 7 miles comfortably. I'm also slightly overweight and can squidge plenty of fat in various places. You're confusing overweight with obese. I'm not obese and I'm not especially fat but I am overweight, in that I have squidgy bits of fat to spare.
Overweight is not having a great big bulging belly. That's obese.
Measuring healthy body composition (Score:2)
People with lots of muscle and little body fat are a very small minority of the population.
Not to the point of statistical insignificance. Furthermore a tool that purports to measure what constitutes healthy body composition should at a minimum be able to work for people who actually DO have a healthy body composition. Telling someone they are "overweight" when actually what happened is they found the squat rack means that it isn't a very good tool. It can't tell the difference between healthy amounts of muscle and unhealthy amounts of fat. You don't even have to go to extremes (I'm certainly
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Not to the point of statistical insignificance.
Never claimed that. BMI applies to most of the population. And if you have little body fat and enough muscle to put you into a high BMI then you're almost certainly heavily into exercise and have better methods at your disposal.
If you're not seriously into your lifting then BMI almost certainly applies to you.
BMI has some utility but it's over used and misapplied quite a lot.
I'd say it's underused rather than over used.
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It is a rule of thumb, but a very inaccurate one. If the BMI of someone is 30, it is extremely likely that he or she should lose weight. But if the BMI is 25-28, then it is very unclear. Depending on muscle mass, fat distribution, blood pressure, sugar levels, he or she might be perfectly fine and healthy or too fat. Some people with a BMI of 25 should lose weight, while others with a BMI of 27 are perfectly fine. So basically BMI does not tell you anything that most people would not know without the BMI. S
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BMI is pretty useless for many people.
Not as a fraction of the population.
I'm about 5'10 and weigh around 175-180lbs
That puts you into the "OK" category. High end, but OK nonetheless.
I coach a wrestling team and I'm in reasonably good shape and stronger than average for my weight.
And you have a wrestlers physique!
I actually have a better idea of my body composition than most people do
Great, so the BMI isn't for you. You have something better.
Basically BMI is too crude a measure to be much use for a large
Statistical significance (Score:2)
Not as a fraction of the population.
Yes even as a fraction of the population. I'm not saying BMI is without utility or that it doesn't apply to many people but it's misleading for probably somewhere north of 10% of the population. That's a significant amount for such a widely used tool.
You're a fairly extreme case. You're a wrestler and clearly do a lot of excersise etc. And you come out mostly OK.
I'm really not a particularly extreme case and there is plenty of data to support that. I'm probably more active than average but I assure you I don't work out enough to be considered an extreme case physically. I'm probably something like 70-90ith percenti
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Especially overweight people actively deluding themsleves by claiming that BMI doesn't apply.
BMI is pretty useless for many people.
I agree, but 99.99% of the people saying that are morbidly obese. You're the .01%.
Re:I guess it's easier... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people claim that BMI is inaccurate because...it's inaccurate. Professional athletes whose bodies are the epitome of fitness perfection are rated obese by BMI. The BMI was designed to determine the overall fitness level of a large group of people, like a nation. It was never meant to be used as an index for an individual level of fitness. It's used because it's a simple number that most people can understand, but human physiology is complicated. Most people are not smart enough to deal with the level of complexity, all the variables, to make intelligent decisions.
Re:I guess it's easier... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet and getting exercise?
What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.
Well that is one question that the conventional research does not adequately address.
If someone is a diabetic, all of the numbers are skewed towards fat storage being a priority in general. If this were not the case, and you could validly shift all the blame onto the "people are overeaters and lazy " as a 100% valid and testable explanation of the problem, then you have been hiding under a rock in the US for about 40 years now and are not paying attention to any evidence.
Here are some things we know now that are not being acknowledged that is along this line of questioning and you can see results with today (and the calorie as a concept is only partly to blame, the proper question being "What sorts of calories are needed and what sorts of calories cause a problem?")
1- Since the 1950s, the poor conclusions of research by Ancel Keys was treated as gospel, and yet he cherry picked his evidence, that the best diet to prevent heart disease was a high carb , low fat diet. This failed to explain the Innuit people, the French and the Japanese, who eat high fat moderate protein diets and had anomalously low rates of heart disease and obesity despite eating high fat diets.
2- It is nearly impossible in the US to find foods that do not have carbohydrates added to them.
3- Mountains of research have shown that high carbohydrate diets lock down your stored fat such that you cannot access it even if you do enough exercise in a day that would kill an olympic athlete, it is not laziness that is the problem because if you run the numbers on how many calories you eat and how many you expend, on the normal american diet, you would have to kill yourself to lose the average of a fraction of a pound a day. Exercise, in general is not an effective method of weight loss, and your body will actively fight you on it if your macronutrients (how much fat, carbohydrate and protein) are skewed toward energy being derived from carbohydrates.
4- despite all the claptrap, there is no such thing as an "Essential Carbohydrate". This has been shown over and over..
So if you want to lose weight and you are the supposedly lazy office worker you talk of, perhaps you could:
1- limit carbohydrate intake to as low as possible. .6 to 1 gram of protein for every pound of lean body weight, which every is closer for your activity level)
2- get adequate protein in your diet (20% of daily calories or enough that you have
3- Consume saturated fat for energy and put this up to somewhere around 75% of daily caloric intake.. and of these fats have 1/2 of your fat intake from short chain fatty acids and about 46% from mono-unsaturated fatty acids which would be your olive oils etc and limit your poly-unsaturated fatty acids in a 50/50 mixture of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids totaling your intake of poly-unsaturated fats to no more than 4% of total caloric intake per day.)
if you can do those 3 things correctly every day, you will lose body fat, even if you are eating over your magic number of essential calories. I have done it and I am a diabetic who many doctors just throw their hands up and say that this is a chronic problem I will never be able to fix (they being fat themselves) and then when I come back and give blood they have no idea how I am able to control my blood sugar so tightly , keep my cholesterol numbers so fantastic and lose fat without losing lean body mass and then their explanation turns to some vague mention of being "Genetically lucky". All the while all I am doing is Ignoring the bullshit bad science being pushed on us by Ancel Keys.
Oh and by the way, in summary the concept of a "Balanced Diet" is a snow leopard, there is 0 consensus on what a "balanced diet" is. Never has been, yet you hear
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Most people do not eat carbohydrate, protein, or saturated fat, they eat foods most of which contain several of them, and they have meals which contain a variety of foods
Some carbohydrates give humans no energy, some lots, and restricting intake to extremes has been shown to be harmful (as is too much)
Your recommended diet is impossible for most people to understand or follow, and is by anyone's information unbalanced, it is likely (with some exercise) to allow you to lose weight, but is not a diet you
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... Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods. ...
Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet...?
My guess is that if you eat fresh/raw foods (i.e. not processed junk), or foods that have been "processed" via age-old traditional methods like Lactobacillus fermentation preservation as well as sprouting, you may be getting a whole lot closer to both goals.
50 extra calories day are >5 lbs gain per year (Score:2)
Everyone can figure out why someone who is overeating more than 500 calories a day gets fat. But even if someone consumes just 50 calories (a small apple) each day too much, he or she gains 5 lbs each year, in ten years he or she can easily go from normal weight to obese. It is almost impossible to estimate both calorie intake and use to such a high accuracy.
Calorie counting only works because people will also constantly monitor their weight and adjust calorie intake accordingly. People can usually not get
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Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet and getting exercise?
Define balanced diet precisely and universally, Einstein.
You aren't a very good source of wisdom if you don't read anything but the headline.
What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.
What I don't get is strawman arguments. As a person who has struggled with keeping my weight in line most of my life, what I don't get is people like yourself thinking it's oh so simple. My metabolism doesn't handle carbs well, my lowest adult weight was achieved by running several miles a day, bicycling 25 miles a day, another half hour of weights, and a half hour
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And there's the problem: you guessed wrong.
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Re:I guess it's easier... (Score:4, Interesting)
Exercises is fun and pleasant, but when it comes at the cost of not seeing kids at all that day which is reality of many crunch or full-time+ working guys, I guess they favor being present fathers over having fun with friends.
So why can't you exercise with your kids? There are different kinds of exercise. You only need the extreme variety if you're training for the Olympics or are a professional athlete. If playing with the kids is not your bottle of beer, you can do simple light calisthenics before and even after every meal. Just don't eat a horse or you might throw up. You can also try old-fashioned walking. If you work in a high-rise, use the fire exit for part of your journey to your office. If all else fails, do what bonobos love to do when they're not eating bananas.
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Absolutely false. When I'm not "on diet" IE eating three square meals full of traditional American junk, I feel like garbage, my brain is fuzzy, and I'm generally rubbish at my job. Cut out the sugar & starch, eat enough protein, and I can easily eat only one or two meals a day (approx 1200Kcal), and work several times better. My brain has plenty of fuel between those limited calories and the lard on my ass that's gett
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The calorie works great. Weight is calories in vs calories out. It's simple, effective, and efficient.
Health, otoh, is complicated. Eating balanced meals, exercise, etc. People keep confusing the two.
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The calorie works great. Weight is calories in vs calories out. It's simple, effective, and efficient.
Weight is calories absorbed vs calories spent. It is deceptively simple if worded like this, but in practice it's anything but simple. Based on genetics and gut fauna (and other factors), you may absorb a different number of calories than someone else despite eating an identical diet. WOW chips and the like can claim to be zero calorie because 99% of the population isn't able to absorb their calories. Likewise, your metabolism, weight, body composition, etc, affect how many calories you use to do different
Re:I guess it's easier... (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is a confused mishmash of different topics.
1. They present nothing wrong with the basic method used by Atwater, despite calling it "outdated". Discrepancies like the issue with nuts having 20-30% fewer calories than thought isn't due to a flaw in the Atwater method, it's due to them not actually being tested - they were simply grouped together with legumes and the calories just estimated based on fat, carbohydrate and protein present in them. The solution has nothing to do with there being "something wrong with the calorie" - the solution is that they need to test better and get better data.
2. Individual differences are generally small, and the only potential for significant deviation from the norm is towards those who get unusually few calories, not unusually many. I don't have time to dig up the numbers yet again right now, but they're in the ballpark of the average person's digestive system consuming ~94% of the protein that they eat, 97% of the fats that they eat and 99% of the carbohydrates that they eat. So a person's digestive system could potentially be much less efficient than average in some regard - although that's not normal - but it can't be much more efficient than average. You can have some more relevant variation on the breakdown of fiber to SCFAs but that's only a very small portion of daily calories. This excuse that the article is pushing people towards of "my body is just a much more efficient digester than the average person, that's why I'm fat" is simply not realistic.
3. Like in #1, there can be a difference between cooked and uncooked food in terms of availability of various nutrients - but again, this is not a problem with the concept of calories, it means that labels need to be accurate in regards to the preparation method. And it has very little impact on meat, contrary to the article's emphasis; it's mainly a plant thing (see the example of the nuts above). The human body is exceedingly good at breaking down cell membranes (animal cells), but not so great at getting through cell walls (plant cells), and it has more effect on non-caloric nutrients (many types of vitamins and minerals) than caloric ones. A lot of the energy loss in cooked meat is simply a fraction of the meat destroyed or otherwise lost (such as grease) in the cooking process. A steak shrinks dramatically when you cook it because it's losing ~45% of its water and a ~30% of its fat in the cooking process. The same steak has fewer total calories cooked, but more calories per gram.
4. Of course how you prepare food has an effect on what sort of nutrients it has, but since when is this news? Broiled, fried, steamed, etc - your mind is immediately jumping to pictures of how healthy that preparation method is when you see those words, isn't it? When you eat meat do you leave the skin on or take it off? Do you cut off gristle? Do you not expect these things to change the ratio of fats and proteins in the meat? We all know that how you fix a meal is going to influence the final picture. You don't calorie count a prepared meal by looking up the raw ingredients, you look up the prepared meal as a whole.
5. Their conflating the issue of cooked rice with the above about "cooking freeing up calories" is totally off mark, and actually backwards. Many types of starches (not just rice - potatoes, for example) partially convert from digestible starch to indigestible starch after cooling for several hours after cooking. There could be a general point to be made about how people should be better informed about the many ways in which preparation can alter the number of calories (though we already are generally rather aware of this), but it's not that the concept of the "calorie" is broken.
6. Metabolic consumption has nothing to do with the calories present in food. And yes, there are variations in basal metabolic rate. But the standard deviation is only 5-8% [nih.gov]. Variations in metabolism from exercise betwe
Re:I guess it's easier... (Score:5, Interesting)
How much exercise? What is the correct balance of food? What is the baseline and how do we adjust for age, height, climate, altitude and yes even ethnicity? These are the questions that should be addressed. One hugely effective thing that seems to be proven over and over again only to be immediately forgotten a month latter is that you need to time your meals with your circadian rhythm i.e. only eat at certain times of the day based op when you wake up and when you go to bed. These are the kinds of improvements on efficiency that the rest of us are looking for.
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Aw come on... This is not hard...Exercise a couple of times a week and try to eat a variety of things in your diet.
If you are gaining weight, exercise more and/or eat less calories.
Have any questions, hit up the "food pyramid" on Google and/or ask your doctor for information. After they drop dead from shock, I'm sure they will happily load you down with materials on nutrition and exercise.
Re:I guess it's easier... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would recommend reading the article. For once they actually linked to an in depth discussion of the topic and the author cites a lot of useful information. For inctance, there is wild variance in calories based on whether or not the food you eat is completely cooked. Large pieces of meat can be potentially hundreds of less usable calories if prepared rare instead of well done.
It is this evidence that the article uses to criticize the calorie because a calorie is a measure of the absolute value of energy in the food you eat not the measurement of what the usable amount of energy is. Furthermore the article delves into how those calorie measurements are taken, and cites several pieces of evidence that those calorie amounts are highly inaccurate.
The article also disuses the role that gut bacteria play in our digestion, citing an example where a mother had gut bacteria transplanted from here obese daughter and gained 40 lbs without any change to diet an exercise. Thus diet and exercise are not the only influences of what we gain and how much. The article is littered with such evidence.
It is not just as simple as the food pyramid which, btw has been a broken model since its inception. Protein is supposed to occupy the lowest rung not carbohydrates and this has been well understood for years. Any doctor should be able to tell you that.
In the end I do understand where you are coming from. After all I am someone that lost 60+ lbs just by counting calories, but there are a lot of things that I could verify within the article based on my experiences. Such as continued unexplained weight loss even when I seemingly exceeded the maximum calories per day that I should have been eating. The article is definitely worth your time to read and even if you disagree with the assertion that the calorie is a broken method of measurement there is still a lot of useful information present.
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Yea the humble Calorie is obviously not a totally accurate measuring stick, but it is a useful tool to gauge the energy content of similar foods that is simple and fast. Are their times when the vagaries of digestion and preparation techniques might cloud the accuracy of what it measures? Yep. However I think anybody who understood what it was actually measuring would quickly understand it's limitations and why they exist.
So, for the person watching their weight, it's a good tool to start on, but you ar
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Your body is going to process everything you put into it until it has everything it ne
Re: I guess it's easier... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Interesting bit about circadian rythms but I believe (or was indoctrinated) that social eating during the course of a long meal is very important. You have to start at the same time but you have plenty leniency and time regarding the speed at which you eat (and the quantity). You also derive much more pleasure and eating pleasure likely correlates well with eating well.
Maybe a one-hour lunch is useful even so that you can tie to your circadian rhyme (if you've begun eating your salad too early it's no big d
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After all, if the medical community is so confused who can say if it is or isn't a good idea to tuck into another sleeve of Oreos? The definition of a calorie isn't
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As the experiment of Mark Haub has shown (the famous Twinkie diet [cnn.com]), even a very loop sided diet taken for several months can be ok and actually improve your health if you take care of what
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The lack of empathy is quite remarkable, but I'll give that a miss and just suggest that the size of servings is influenced by bad habits and by expectations from food sellers. In the same way that toothpaste manufacturers hoped to increase sales by increasing the size of the toothpaste lid opening, food suppliers are can adjust the size of servings to promote sales growth.
Have a look at the sizes of servings in restaurants in different countries and you might see correlation with obesity in the population.
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This is the key stumbling block for many. They might think they're being healthy by having whole wheat pasta with veggies, but they pile so much pasta on their plate that they wind up eating five servings instead of one. Then, they wonder why they aren't losing weight. Combine this with mindless eating (open bag of chips and "I'll just eat one... and another... and another... how did this bag get empty so quickly?") and people's best intentions can be thwarted.
This is why I recommend th
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as the token skinny guy that sits in the office and only does fifteen minutes of low impact exercise intended to keep my back in good shape.
Here are the rules I follow... Drink water, stay away from soda or any other drink that has corn syrup it really hard to tell how much of this you are taking in so limit it. Stay away from artificial sweeteners and diet soda like they are the plague. take a slightly larger portion of meat at meal time, eat the higher protein foods first that way if you are full and le
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"Shit foods" aren't always clear to the consumer. To some degree, they vary between people as well.
All told though, it isn't rocket science: reduce carbs, eliminate refined sugars, and get exercise. Avoid comfort food habits.
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They apply more than you understood:
We can't use 100% of the chemical energy available in food. So it has to be a lower number. And there is no indication why that efficiency should NOT be individual.
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Of course it's individual.
However the gutbuster 3.2387490e+47 calorie lasagne and chips caff special (which is sodding awesome by the way) is going to give you more energy than that little salad from Pret.
So yes, if you're measuring your energy expenditure very accurately (you're not) then the precise calories matter (so they don't).
However they give approximate answers. Count up calories. If you're fat, try reducing the numbers while eating the same sort of stuff. The thing is the absolute numbers aren't i
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If you're fat, try reducing the numbers while eating the same sort of stuff.
That's what I did. Cut back on how much I ate, added a little bit more exercise than I was already doing (changed the type of workout too though, went from working out for football to working out to lose weight) and lost about 30lbs over 3 months. Of course, spending a semester with my school's rugby club probably didn't hurt either. Sadly, I then went to grad school and managed to gain it all back and then some over the next few years.
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Sadly, I then went to grad school and managed to gain it all back and then some over the next few years.
Aah you got a thesis gut. Yep, I got one of 'em too.
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And there is no indication why that efficiency should NOT be individual.
Given that we are all the same species, it is not a bad assumption that we process food in roughly the same way. It might be wrong, it should be tested, but to say that there is no indication why it should not be individual is misleading.
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Because lots of our body attributes are individual, height, weight (even with similar diets and workloads).
Ok, not individual as in completly random, but spread out probably in the good old bell curve way.
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somehow, the laws of thermodynamics don't apply just to them.
They might be the same people who think the 2nd Law of Thermo disproves evolution...
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Sorry to be presumptuous, but that can not be right. Assuming by exercise you mean something at least as vigorous as walking, two hours of that will burn ~500 calories alone. That leaves you with around 500 calories of energy to keep your body alive. Your body would not be able to cope with that for extended periods of time, and there's no chance it would reserve those precious calories as body fat.
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counting calories from feces is horribly inaccurate
Well sure - it's exactly the opposite of the energy your body actually took in. I can't see how it makes any sense at all to assume it's proportional.
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Wait, is there any nutritional content that gets lost through sweat?
I mean, I ate 3000kcal worth of food, shat out 1000kcal worth of shit, that would mean I acquired 2000kcal of energy which I either burned through activity or accumulated in fat or blood sugar.
Or do you imply, if I in the meantime, sweated out 500ml of sweat, if we dehydrate that sweat, what is left can be burned for any reasonable amount of calories?
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Except, as was noted in the article, people don't work like bomb calorimeters and don't extract all of the available energy out of food.
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A "calorie" is a depreciated unit of measurement
You mean it used to be worth more money? The word is "deprecated".
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Wait a min, the Calorie is NOT useless here, in fact it's served its purpose for decades.
What has really changed (and it didn't really change, everybody should have known it was an estimate to start with) is how our culture defines nutrition, how we generally diet and why we think we gain or loose weight.
Where your 1200 calorie diet and mine may have totally different results based on how well we can digest what goes into our mouths, the FACT remains that if I'm gaining weight at 1200 calories and I drop