You're talking about calorie differentials amounting to 40 or 80 per day. Hardly something worth considering for the average person, but I'm sure it gives you easy grant money to chug out reports.

If you think obesity is due to the difference between 80 calories or so, you have other drastic immediate concerns (the terrible mental model being one). People aren't becoming obese because their body isn't "processing" fat calories compared to carb calories, they are obese because people eat obscene amounts of food daily.

Countries like France and Italy eat massive amounts of carbs in their diets and they don't have obesity issues on the scale of the United States.

It's still CICO. It's just that the way we currently measure the caloric content of a food does not represent what is actually bioavailable.

It does a good enough job at modeling reality that we can make decent predictions with it. While the details of CICO may be more complicated, for someone who is obviously out of shape, the advice of "Eat some extra protein and make sure you are consuming below maintenance calories" works 9/10 times.

Calories that not abosorbed are calories-through, not calories -in.