Hacker News Reader

Comment by ruffrey | Hacker News Reader

If you eat only fruit, veggies and lean meat, it makes sense that your gut bacteria would be different from someone who eats high levels of processed carbs and sugars. The things you eat already are known to cause body fat.

Links like this do not seem like a leap forward, to me.

Did they control for the critically important variable: the subject's diet?

View on HN

That's assuming that slim people are always people who eat perfectly healthy. Yet seems we all know that one skinny person who eats the worst food ever, and never gets fat.

Probably because that one skinny person eats jack-all outside of the times you are observing them.

No, it's that some extreme outliers have insane BMRs. It's still a calories-in-calories-out situation, it's just their base calories out is so high without doing anything special it's like a superpower. I've only met a few, but it's a real thing! Most of us go through something similar (but to a lesser extent) in our teen years. A few seem to keep it forever.

I'm curious whether anyone can provide some scientific evidence supporting the theory that these people actually burn calories faster? Seems like it should show up very clearly on their core body temperature (thermodynamics and all).

An alternative hypothesis would be that these people have a less efficient digestive system, so more of the calories just pass through.

Here ya go:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4535334/

Oh neat, they use oxygen consumption as a proxy for metabolism rate. That's actually really clever.

Still would be interesting to see whether it's correlated with body temperature, or if people with high metabolism naturally shed heat faster.

Most people were simply far more active in their teen years, whether they realize it or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com