A science based response to the weightloss pusher's mantra
"Calories In = calories Out"
Many people with very little understanding of human biology and it's energy dynamics like to parrot "Calories In = calories Out"... they are rephrasing Physic's First Law of Thermodynamics which is an expression of the principle of conservation of energy - and which states that energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed...
They are implying that all people who are fat must eat more than the government mandated calories per day in order achieve fatness...
Unsurprisingly, these people are wrong!
Mr Blaze sent me this useful article (thanks!) which gives a fair idea of what is going on with human energy dynamics... I've posted my critique/comment below -
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"It is true that the First Law of Thermodynamics must apply to the human body. And, given the simplistic approach which many dull normals take, lots of people are confused about what 'consumed' and 'burn off' mean.
There are active control systems which reduce the amount of energy used involuntarily for many of the body's autonomic functions. There are also significant energy excretion systems which are active in many bodies. A very basic enumeration is as follows; note that in real life you have to add a bunch of interactive arrows symbolizing the feedback controls (hormonal, and also enzyme regulation by product inhibition and allosteric interactions) which connect these systems.
C - N - S1- S2 - S3 - I - H - E - V = 0
C = calories eaten
N = non-absorbed calories excreted in bowels
S1 = calories stored as fat
S2 = calories stored as carbohydrate
S3 = calories stored as proteinI = calories used in involuntary movement
H = calories used for heat generation and other metabolic processes
V = calories used in voluntary movement
E = calories excreted in urine (Examples: fat converted to glucose in the liver, incompletely burned triglycerides and albumin)
Note that there is "manual" control only on C and V.*
Deliberate variation of C and V will immediately cause feedback to all the other systems, and you have absolutely no control over the net outcome.
None of these variables are independent of the others. All adjust to restore equilibrium when any one of them changes.
So you can't say that the amount of energy stored as S1 is "whatever is left over", because there is no such thing as "left over" in a feedback-controlled homeostasis.
So can increasing V and decreasing C result in less S1? Of course, provided that I, H and E don't change enough in response to prevent that outcome. "Just try harder" is useless advice. You have no control over what your personal regulatory processes do with changes in voluntary input and output. And if you spend your life trying ever more drastic alterations of V and C in order to escape continuous public abuse by idiots, you can screw up the regulatory mechanisms even more."
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(*NOTE: there is a good deal of research that shows appetite, eating and activity levels are to some extent controlled by involuntary processes, but that's a subject for another post)
I gave this a careful read through earlier on -
yeah, this is a pretty good summary, well written too... although the use of biochemical terms like "allosteric" are probably a bit confusing for the average guy, those terms make sense in the context of the article, so all good...
I wrote something a little briefer in a reply to a YouTube posting of one RandomInternetAssHat once who was parrotting the "energy out = energy in" mantra... and I saved my response (so it wouldn't be a total waste of time! lol!):
"No-one violates the First Law of Thermodynamics.. the mistake you're making is that the 1st law 1) applies to closed systems and 2) you're assuming that metabolic processes within one human body is the same as the processes within another human body... they're not closed systems and they do vary! I could write a book! - but here's a couple of examples -
- man vs, woman. due to hormones men generally have more % muscle mass than women and women generally have a higher % fat (essential for fertility btw)...
muscle is "metabolically active" tissue - even at rest it burns energy... So a more muscular person (most blokes) will require more energy to maintain body wt. than someone with higher % body fat...
- people vary on how much body heat they produce, in fact when someone diets this is one of the first things the human "famine response" turns down, which is why dieters are very often cold...
- digestive efficiency varies...
...both from one individual to another (different gut lengths, mucus thickness, different gut bacteria) - extreme example - cystic fibrosis sufferers have to eat HUGE amounts of food just to survive because their digestion is so inefficient it's very hard for them to keep their weight up...
and also digestive efficiency varies depending on the type of food ingested: You can burn any food in a "bomb calorimeter" & find that it contains X calories.. that's how they get the numbers on packets... but digestion is not the same as burning! Digestion requires initial energy INPUT - some food takes more "work" to breakdown than others - so NET energy AVAILABLE to the human body from e.g. 1,000 calories of raw celery is different to that available from 1,000 calories of cooked steak... "
I was talking, in the following order, about things that would be equivalent to factors S3, H, and N in the piece above...
I hope this gives you a fair idea of the complexity of human metabolism and of the strong counter arguments available to you should you run into fat haters who are repeating the old "energy in = energy out" mantra....
"Calories In = calories Out"
Many people with very little understanding of human biology and it's energy dynamics like to parrot "Calories In = calories Out"... they are rephrasing Physic's First Law of Thermodynamics which is an expression of the principle of conservation of energy - and which states that energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed...
They are implying that all people who are fat must eat more than the government mandated calories per day in order achieve fatness...
Unsurprisingly, these people are wrong!
Mr Blaze sent me this useful article (thanks!) which gives a fair idea of what is going on with human energy dynamics... I've posted my critique/comment below -
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is true that the First Law of Thermodynamics must apply to the human body. And, given the simplistic approach which many dull normals take, lots of people are confused about what 'consumed' and 'burn off' mean.
There are active control systems which reduce the amount of energy used involuntarily for many of the body's autonomic functions. There are also significant energy excretion systems which are active in many bodies. A very basic enumeration is as follows; note that in real life you have to add a bunch of interactive arrows symbolizing the feedback controls (hormonal, and also enzyme regulation by product inhibition and allosteric interactions) which connect these systems.
C - N - S1- S2 - S3 - I - H - E - V = 0
C = calories eaten
N = non-absorbed calories excreted in bowels
S1 = calories stored as fat
S2 = calories stored as carbohydrate
S3 = calories stored as proteinI = calories used in involuntary movement
H = calories used for heat generation and other metabolic processes
V = calories used in voluntary movement
E = calories excreted in urine (Examples: fat converted to glucose in the liver, incompletely burned triglycerides and albumin)
Note that there is "manual" control only on C and V.*
Deliberate variation of C and V will immediately cause feedback to all the other systems, and you have absolutely no control over the net outcome.
None of these variables are independent of the others. All adjust to restore equilibrium when any one of them changes.
So you can't say that the amount of energy stored as S1 is "whatever is left over", because there is no such thing as "left over" in a feedback-controlled homeostasis.
So can increasing V and decreasing C result in less S1? Of course, provided that I, H and E don't change enough in response to prevent that outcome. "Just try harder" is useless advice. You have no control over what your personal regulatory processes do with changes in voluntary input and output. And if you spend your life trying ever more drastic alterations of V and C in order to escape continuous public abuse by idiots, you can screw up the regulatory mechanisms even more."
----------------------------
(*NOTE: there is a good deal of research that shows appetite, eating and activity levels are to some extent controlled by involuntary processes, but that's a subject for another post)
I gave this a careful read through earlier on -
yeah, this is a pretty good summary, well written too... although the use of biochemical terms like "allosteric" are probably a bit confusing for the average guy, those terms make sense in the context of the article, so all good...
I wrote something a little briefer in a reply to a YouTube posting of one RandomInternetAssHat once who was parrotting the "energy out = energy in" mantra... and I saved my response (so it wouldn't be a total waste of time! lol!):
"No-one violates the First Law of Thermodynamics.. the mistake you're making is that the 1st law 1) applies to closed systems and 2) you're assuming that metabolic processes within one human body is the same as the processes within another human body... they're not closed systems and they do vary! I could write a book! - but here's a couple of examples -
- man vs, woman. due to hormones men generally have more % muscle mass than women and women generally have a higher % fat (essential for fertility btw)...
muscle is "metabolically active" tissue - even at rest it burns energy... So a more muscular person (most blokes) will require more energy to maintain body wt. than someone with higher % body fat...
- people vary on how much body heat they produce, in fact when someone diets this is one of the first things the human "famine response" turns down, which is why dieters are very often cold...
- digestive efficiency varies...
...both from one individual to another (different gut lengths, mucus thickness, different gut bacteria) - extreme example - cystic fibrosis sufferers have to eat HUGE amounts of food just to survive because their digestion is so inefficient it's very hard for them to keep their weight up...
and also digestive efficiency varies depending on the type of food ingested: You can burn any food in a "bomb calorimeter" & find that it contains X calories.. that's how they get the numbers on packets... but digestion is not the same as burning! Digestion requires initial energy INPUT - some food takes more "work" to breakdown than others - so NET energy AVAILABLE to the human body from e.g. 1,000 calories of raw celery is different to that available from 1,000 calories of cooked steak... "
I was talking, in the following order, about things that would be equivalent to factors S3, H, and N in the piece above...
I hope this gives you a fair idea of the complexity of human metabolism and of the strong counter arguments available to you should you run into fat haters who are repeating the old "energy in = energy out" mantra....
