It doesn't really prove it wrong. If you eat 3000 calories of butter every day, you're gonna get fat. In that sense, a calorie is a calorie.
This has been thoroughly disproven for ages -- starting with the naive assumption that you can just eat X amounts of anything and it doesn't affect anything else in your health/apetite/metabolism.
Calories matter. If you eat too many, you get fat. Some calories might be "better" than others, but they are a standard of unit of energy for a reason. A calorie is a calorie.
Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.
That's quite irrelevant though (besides tautological), as we don't just eat calories, we eat food that has calories and tons of other stuff in different arrangements.
A calorie being a calorie doesn't cover whether the food you got the calorie from makes you satiated, or conversely makes you eat more, or makes you feel more energetic, or makes you store it as fat, or brings hormonal changes, etc.
A "milligram is a milligram" too, a standard unit of weight, but 1mg of cyanide can kill a person, and 1mg of water won't do anything to them.
>Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.
Again this presumes that people can just eat, regardless of what they eat -- and continue to eat it without that affecting anything else. I guarantee you if I ate just butter, I'd threw up after several hundred grams, and feel quite bad and stop the diet after some days.
2 sticks of butter is almost 1800 calories, that would be a weird diet with lots of hunger. There probably are a lot of sources of fat that work better than that.
There is a difference between fat metabolism and sugar metabolism. They use different metabolic pathways, in other words the process by which a fatty acid molecule becomes ATP (the ultimate source of cellular energy) is very different from how fructose (which has to first be converted to glucose in the liver) becomes ATP.
This is the exact point the article is... arguing against in a very convincing fashion
Its further pointing out that there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight. I didn't disagree there either.
The article never claims that you can eat any amount of calories as long as you leave carbs from the table. And thats the only thing i pointed out. Because thats just plain wrong. If you eat too many calories, you will gain weight. And if you're predisposed to obesity, you will eat more calories when you're flavouring stuff with sugar. This will, as the author pointed out, cause you to get even more obese and eventually get diabetes.
there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight.
Then a calorie isn't a calorie.
Does our body digest things by acting like a furnace? No. There are different ways to extract energy from food and our body does things that aren't accounted for by the nutrtional facts blurb on the box. In some cases the food will just go straight through you, such as when you eat loads of fat. All those "calories" don't necessarily translate into x pounds on your body in new fat.