Comment by nommm-nommm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nommm-nommm | Hacker News Reader

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http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.ht...

- Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades.

- Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented.

- Endocrine disruptors, pathogens or temperature changes might play a role and could also factor into human obesity

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-23970219

A study showed that transplanting gut bacteria from obese people into mice led to the animals gaining weight, while bacteria from lean people kept them slim. The findings were published in Science. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, took gut bacteria from pairs of twins - one obese, one thin.

The bacteria were then put into mice which had grown up in completely sterile environments and had no gut bacteria of their own. Mice with the obese twin's bacteria became heavier and put on more fat than mice given bacteria from a lean twin - and it was not down to the amount of food being eaten.

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Ok, so you may need 1300 calories a day to maintain an "ideal" bodyweight but The Minnesota Starvation Experiment shows that amount of food intake causes severe emotional stress and depression. So yeah

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment was such a poorly designed diet that it's not really relevant to the modern discussion of prevent obesity among a relatively prosperous population. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experimen...), the diet was based on "foods that were expected to typify the diets of people in Europe during the latter stages of the war: potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni." In other words, almost entirely carbs, with practically no fat or protein. Almost every reasonable diet I know of (coming from the modern fitness community at least) focuses first on maintaining adequate protein intake as the top priority, usually followed by at least a reasonable amount of fat. While it may have been useful to understanding starvation in a population with food scarcity, it just doesn't apply when looking at obesity in modern America.

Where did the 1300 calories a day number come from? How big is the person that number is for? What is their activity level?

I made it up completely as an example.

I used to exercise 3-4 days a week. Lifting weights, cardio, and yoga. I wasn't losing weight. I started gradually counting and cutting calories and when it didn't help I cut more. The only way I was at a good weight was on 1400 calories/day. This made me completely miserable and anti social (I wouldn't eat outside my house). This may be sustainable for some, but it wasn't for me, eventually I just had to eat more. I kept it up for a couple years though. I didn't have a body image problem either, my weight was a couple pounds below "overweight" BMI.

On the other hand a decade before that I ate junk food every single day and was very thin. Something seems to have changed in my body, but I don't know what. When I was thin my diet was truly horrible!

Even when I was a kid - Every single Halloween I would eat an entire pillow case worth of candy over the course of around 3 weeks, but I never gained a pound.

There is SO MUCH we don't know on this topic!

Yes, one can cut back on food, but willpower and the ability to control are limited to some degree.

Very similar experience here! 4K+ calorie daily average mostly of junk food from ages ~15-21, maybe 30 minutes/day average of weightlifting, rarely some cardio, visible upper ab muscles, call it a "4 pack", full on six-pack abs if I happened to be slightly more active in a week (a few hours of casual swimming, for instance).

Then I decided I wanted to cut down to the six-pack bodyfat level and stay there, so for the initial "cut" phase of that plan I dieted at ~1400 calories a day, every single day (no cheating) for ~2-3 months, and started doing way more cardio. Only lost a couple pounds, little or no visible difference, so, confused and frustrated, I gave up. Makes no damn sense according to any "weight loss calculator" I've ever seen (which all claim that my BMR should sit in the low 2000s), but that's what happened.

Packed on fat immediately when I went back to my usual eating patterns, took me years to get that under control. To this day I seem to easily hit a plateau a bit over what I'd call my healthy range when dieting at any reasonable (not near or under starvation level) caloric intake.

OTOH I've found that strength training's more effective for me than it "ought" to be but requires time, which sucks. I'd love to be able to diet my way to a trim waist, since maintaining an intake under what weight loss tables/calculators say should work for me is something I find easy to do. Too bad it doesn't.

Don't know what the explanation is, but something weirder than the "calories in/calories out, and calories out is fairly easy to guesstimate with useful accurately" orthodoxy is going on.

The laws of thermodynamics still apply. If someone does not lose weight on 1300 calories a day then either their body is a marvel of science and should be studied for its amazing efficiency... or they are completely sedentary.

"Thermodynamics"? There are 120 calories in a tablespoon of olive oil. If I pay you $50 to drink a whole bottle of olive oil, do you think you'll gain several pounds of fat?

To elaborate upon this point, let's say I gave you 10,000 calories of sawdust to eat every day for a week. Would you gain weight or lose weight, ignoring the other health consequences?

Similar - I saw an episode of Superfat vs Superskinny where the superskinny guy ate almost nothing but chocolate. His calorie intake was probably 4000 calories a day or more yet he was unhealthy skinny. Do you think he was lying?

I did not watch this show so I have are some questions.

  1. Was the skinny individual monitored the entire time? He could have regurgitated his food. 

  2. Was the skinny person's poop analyzed for complete digestion of the 4000 calories?

No, its not some sort of science experiment, its mindless entertainment. 4000 calories was a wild gestimation of something I saw probably 5 years ago.

The premise of the show is they bring in two people - one superfat and one superskinny. They weight them and each person tells what a typical day's food intake is for them. Then they switch diets for a couple weeks and are weighed again at the end.

Yes, its possible he lied about eating all that chocolate. Yes, he could be throwing up every day. This isn't a controlled experiment, its a TV show. It seems odd someone would do that though.

> Do you think he was lying?

Yes. If there's anything reading diet studies has taught me, it's that people lie, to themselves even, and people are very bad at estimating calories. Things like MyFitnessPal have been a boon to countless people trying to lose weight because they can actually get a handle on what their intake really is. Bonus, they can compare across food choices to see what will fit in their caloric budget but still be filling or satisfying.

I'll issue you a counter-challenge: watch "Secret Eaters".

Yes, they typically under report their calorie intake, not over report it. Its not really socially acceptable to eat like 10 chocolate bars a day and hardly anything else so why say you do when you really don't?

The question is moot; sawdust is basically pure undigestible fiber (poor mans Metamucil), so since the caloric content of it is virtually nil, it would be impossible to consume 10,000 calories of it.

The caloric content of olive oil is not virtually nil, and you can in fact consume a whole bottle of olive oil. Does "thermodynamics" dictate that you'll gain several pounds of fat after you do that?

Your answer, of course, is "no". So just to move the conversation forwards: do you think if 3 random people consumed a bottle of olive oil, they would necessarily gain an equivalent amount of weight? Why or why not?

This question is facetious, almost as facetious as the "10,000 calories of sawdust". Almost. The human body can only process so much fat at once based on bile production. On top of all that, I would say no, I wouldn't gain several pounds of fat after consuming a whole bottle of olive oil because it wouldn't be 3500 calories (12floz = 24 tablespoons * 119 calories = 2856 calories), even assuming I don't poop most of it out (as can be seen on Youtube videos). That doesn't change the fact that a tablespoon of olive oil contains 119 calories and up to a certain volume the human digestive tract will extract energy from it.

Second, I don't think three random people would gain the equivalent amount of weight; that's one of my points I've made elsewhere. TDEE for different people is different, based on height, weight (heavier people have higher TDEEs, which is ironic because it makes it easier for them to lose weight), and activity level. If you're talking three people of the same height, weight, strictly controlled activity level and strictly controlled intake, then I would expect their weight gain to be as close to identical as to make no difference. There's always some variance (within 200-300 Kcal: http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...)

Since we're cherry picking completely unrealistic intakes, I'll pose back to you: if three random people consumed 3500 calories worth of refined sugar, and that exceeded their TDEE by 3500 calories, then yes, each and every one of them would gain 1lb of adipose tissue. Seeing that many in the US easily approach an intake of this much refined sugar in the form of soda, the results (of the population, 2/3 is overweight, and 1/3 is obese) should not be surprising.

It's not my argument that the environment plays no role in obesity. It clearly does. I too think liquid calories are a major culprit.

I just think the "thermodynamics" argument oversimplifies immensely. Even the variance in resting metabolic rate is unlikely to capture the whole difference between multiple subjects consuming 3500 calories of oil (or, for that matter, bacon or butter), because resting metabolic rate captures the variance you'd see between people consuming refined sugar, and there are more variables involved in metabolizing fat.

Later, because this is bugging me a bit

And that's all before we get into satiety, which is a hormonal response. I had some cheese and rillettes for lunch. I'm not going to be hungry for the rest of the day. If I'd had the equivalent calories in carbohydrates, I'd be hungry in an hour. Upthread, the term "willpower" is being bandied about as if people can simply will themselves to eat a fixed number of calories. That's true only if you eat carefully, and if you don't have any hormonal dysfunction; it's as true as saying I could will myself into coding for 48 hours straight, if I just focussed my "will" on it.

I didn't say they weren't losing weight on 1300 calories a day.

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