The stupid explodes: obesity now a disability

[blutoski]

A couple of things I've read recently that relate to arguments had throughout this thread:

First, on the notion that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie - I tried arguing that The Atheist's menu on his blog wasn't particularly conducive to weight loss because it contained a lot of processed foods. I was successfully argued down on the notion that there's no such thing as a fattening food, that it all comes down to a simplified calorie-in calorie-out model. However, this article from academic biologists argues that a calorie is not always just a calorie because the more you process a food the more calories can be absorbed by the body. It makes for some fascinating reading and puts forward a very good case for eating whole and raw foods if you want to lose weight:

https://theconversation.com/why-most-food-labels-are-wrong-about-calories-35081

Secondly, the notion that being fat is the primary risk factor in heart disease. This article is written by an academic health scientist and looks at the problems associated with BMI. One section that caught my eye was the following excerpt that argues that being lean and unfit puts one at greater risk that being fat and fit:

https://theconversation.com/does-my-bmi-look-big-in-this-and-does-it-really-matter-35156



I don't post these as a definitive 'AHA!' gotchya type argument but only to share material that I thought was relevant to previous discussions

Appreciated, but it's claims that are not well supported by the bulk of the evidence, which is the problem that us laypersons get into when we go hunting for support for our pet theses. Generally we can't see the limitations in the claims, and neither do the authors of the articles we may be reading.

For example, the BMI criticisms are red herrings in that the quality research associating obesity with risk does not use BMI, but rather, uses body fat percentage. The limitations of BMI are pretty well known by the professionals.

Regarding the first discussion, it's also a red herring, in that processed foods have more calorie density, yes, but the labels reflect that. So you can still just count the calories on the label when doing a calorie budget, and anyway, it doesn't matter - if you're gaining weight it's because you have a net surplus of calories, you can lose weight by eating fewer, even if the labels are off by 1%. I'll reply to another post that follows this with a specific example.

 

[blutoski]

The problem I see is one of adding an unneeded ambiguity. Everyone knows that eating sawdust isn't going to add to your metabolic budget - even though we could burn wood to extract the calories and heat our houses. So the idea of a "calorie" already assumes it's something available to the body and should account for the "cost."

The reason nutritional labels are simplified is to allow a reasonable comparison between products. Your article mentions the difficulty in giving an actual, valid number, not just as it relates to food processing, but across a population with variable absorption.

Interestingly, the same is true at the other end. I may walk a mile and burn significantly more calories than someone else walking that same mile - how should we calculate the "outs?"

I think the whole kerfuffle springs from the idea that the numbers given provide a level of accuracy which misleads us. However, the solution wouldn't be to abandon the numbers altogether, but to recognize the inherent variability.

On a side note, food processing is a boon when the objective is to get as many calories from your environment with the least effort possible. We should consider abandoning unprocessed foods as a primitive and less effective method of providing sustenance.

This is the main response of professionals: these complaints about 1% here and 1% there are not in any way a valid critique of the theory that 'calories matter'. It's just quibbling about an error bar in the calculation.

Having said that, there remain other reasons to select less processed foods, such as volumetrics (it really is hard to eat 1,000 calories of oranges, but really easy to eat 1,000 calories of orange juice) and the general unknown about unintended side effects of processing. We will probably never know whether there are missing micronutrients from process X until 100 years from now.

 

[blutoski]

The problem I see is one of adding an unneeded ambiguity. Everyone knows that eating sawdust isn't going to add to your metabolic budget - even though we could burn wood to extract the calories and heat our houses. So the idea of a "calorie" already assumes it's something available to the body and should account for the "cost."

Having said that, the calculations used for labelling are not based on bomb calorimeter results. At least not entirely.

The USDA calorie estimates used for food labels are calculated based on knowledge that processing impacts availability, among other factors. Probably the biggest factor is [thermic effect of food]. Caloric cost of digesting a food is subtracted from the calories in the food to give the published net caloric value of the food - this has led to the myth of negative calorie foods, because most laypersons are just not aware that this was already accounted for in calorie estimates. Processed foods often have less thermic effect, and therefore more net calories.

But notice that there are a lot of assumptions involved, and documented individual variation of between 0.5 and 1.5% - dieticians know this, and their analysis and advice takes it into account.

 

[Checkmite]

Having said that, there remain other reasons to select less processed foods, such as volumetrics (it really is hard to eat 1,000 calories of oranges, but really easy to eat 1,000 calories of orange juice) and the general unknown about unintended side effects of processing. We will probably never know whether there are missing micronutrients from process X until 100 years from now.

I would think a varied diet satisfactorily compensates for this unknown in exactly the same way it compensates for nutrients that are factually known to be missing from various specific foods.

 

[blutoski]

I would think a varied diet satisfactorily compensates for this unknown in exactly the same way it compensates for nutrients that are factually known to be missing from various specific foods.

Yes I think this is a good reason to eat a wide range of foods.


What's important, though, is that I don't think eating a wide range of processed foods necessarily is the same as actually reducing exposure to processed foods. Mainly because it's highly likely that even a wide range of processed food products in the diet share a core set of processed ingredients.

Where this discussion peters out a bit is that the phrase 'processed' is pretty open ended. One of the examples above is that a cooked steak is more processed than a raw steak. I don't really consider ordinary cooking to be the same type of 'processing' I would ask people to eschew. I'm thinking more of base ingredients like bleached white flour, or finished products like soups which have high sodium to enhance flavour in order to compensate for less ingredient density.

 

[bit_pattern]

Appreciated, but it's claims that are not well supported by the bulk of the evidence, which is the problem that us laypersons get into when we go hunting for support for our pet theses. Generally we can't see the limitations in the claims, and neither do the authors of the articles we may be reading.

For example, the BMI criticisms are red herrings in that the quality research associating obesity with risk does not use BMI, but rather, uses body fat percentage. The limitations of BMI are pretty well known by the professionals.

Regarding the first discussion, it's also a red herring, in that processed foods have more calorie density, yes, but the labels reflect that. So you can still just count the calories on the label when doing a calorie budget, and anyway, it doesn't matter - if you're gaining weight it's because you have a net surplus of calories, you can lose weight by eating fewer, even if the labels are off by 1%. I'll reply to another post that follows this with a specific example.

Thanks, that's all quite interesting.

A couple of points, although not really relevant to the actual argument; the impression I get from the BMI article is that it is aimed at trying to explain exactly that to the layperson - I don't think it's purpose is to argue that somehow the professionals are wrong because BMI, rather to correct commonly held misapprehensions. The author even says at one point a much better measure for the reader is to have their body fat measured by accredited professionals

As for the calorie thing, I'm sure you're quite correct but, for example, if one is preparing (processing) fresh foods for themselves then it can make a difference. The example I used on the previous page of grilling a steak and slow cooking it can make a difference. Or whether you choose to bake a potato or mash it. Different degrees of processing would result in different calorie intakes. Whether the difference is substantial or not I have no idea.

And, finally, I didn't go seeking out the information, I just happened to stumble across it on a site that I check on a daily basis

Although I will concede that my interpretation of the information was framed around what I wanted to prove in relation to discussion held in this thread - I agree wholeheartedly with you position on laypersons and information in general

 

[bit_pattern]

Where this discussion peters out a bit is that the phrase 'processed' is pretty open ended. One of the examples above is that a cooked steak is more processed than a raw steak. I don't really consider ordinary cooking to be the same type of 'processing' I would ask people to eschew. I'm thinking more of base ingredients like bleached white flour, or finished products like soups which have high sodium to enhance flavour in order to compensate for less ingredient density.

That is the way it is framed by the author of the article cited, so it is the definition I went with. The illustrated example of not-processed to more-processed was: raw potato >> cooked potato >> mashed potato. In each step the availability of calories is increased.

 

[bit_pattern]

If people were really interested in health rather than appearance, they would promote a healthy diet and exercise as ends in themselves rather than just as means to weight loss. That way you would have not such absurd things as thin people saying they don't need exercise because they are not overweight, or fat people saying they may as well give up exercise because it didn't result in weight loss, or people saying that it doesn't matter whether you use diet and exercise or diet alone, just as long as you lose weight and do it as fast as possible. The fact is, fitness through exercise unequivocally improves health and functional mobility and reduces mortality risks for everybody who is capable of exercising safely, whether or not they lose an ounce. The same cannot be said of merely losing weight without improving fitness; there is a lack of evidence that weight loss per se actually benefits longevity for people who are not severely obese and do not currently have any obesity related health problems:

Thanks!

This is something I've long suspected, that there is a real conflation between 'healthy' and weight that doesn't necessarily hold. It seems to me people make all kinds of unhealthy choices because weight loss is the paradigm through which good health is viewed.

 

[blutoski]

This is something I've long suspected, that there is a real conflation between 'healthy' and weight that doesn't necessarily hold.

The complication in those was largely that they criticize BMI as a singular metric, and the criticism is valid. The correlations for BMI and risk have much larger uncertainties because of reasons that are well documented. But the strawperson is that the professionals don't just use BMI to assess an individual's risk.

In contrast, there is plenty of research that implicates body fat in a causal relationship with medical risks, by measuring body fat percentages directly. Critics of 'fat is unhealthy' models just flat out ignore them. I can only speculate on their motives, but I have mentioned that there are people invested in sports and exercise who do not want to hear that fitness may not provide much protection.

I'll provide a concrete example... Here in Vancouver, the Asian population percentage is very high, and the body morphology is very deceptive. Many of these middle aged ladies that came to me to get some toning have allegedly healthy BMIs but are in the 40% body fat range. I relied very heavily on TANITAs to understand what I was actually dealing with.

It seems to me people make all kinds of unhealthy choices because weight loss is the paradigm through which good health is viewed.

That may be a cultural phenomenon, but it's not the medical approach. A skinny person who smokes two packs a day is pretty universally recognized as at risk.

The interest in adiposity and obesity is the endpoint of many prospective risk factor analyses, even though there is certainly an ugly history of them being a startingpoint. They're looking for factors that can predict future risk, and body fat percentage appears to be heavily weighed.

 

[blutoski]

As for the calorie thing, I'm sure you're quite correct but, for example, if one is preparing (processing) fresh foods for themselves then it can make a difference. The example I used on the previous page of grilling a steak and slow cooking it can make a difference. Or whether you choose to bake a potato or mash it. Different degrees of processing would result in different calorie intakes. Whether the difference is substantial or not I have no idea.

And they may not either. I'd love to see some quantitative information, as up to now, this has appeared to be largely hypothetical, and a few experiments either show no difference in caloric absorption from processing (other than mass loss, such as losing the fat from a steak when cooking) or a few that show some impact to caloric absorption, but have many assumptions and caveats that are themselves unproven hypotheses.

And, finally, I didn't go seeking out the information, I just happened to stumble across it on a site that I check on a daily basis.

That's fair - what I'm getting at is that the authors may not have been making much of an effort to disprove their hypothesis. They don't even have to be malevolently agenda-d to just be vulnerable to a confirmation bias.

My approach is to write down my inclusion criteria before doing a literature search, to hopefully keep myself honest. That way when I reject a study after reading it, I have to justify it to my objective past self.

 

[bit_pattern]

And they may not either. I'd love to see some quantitative information, as up to now, this has appeared to be largely hypothetical, and a few experiments either show no difference in caloric absorption from processing (other than mass loss, such as losing the fat from a steak when cooking) or a few that show some impact to caloric absorption, but have many assumptions and caveats that are themselves unproven hypotheses.

These are the links embedded in the original article

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/48/19199

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248409001262

These two are the original research from the authors of the article in The Conversation

http://jdr.sagepub.com/content/82/6/491

This one is a study that showed rats expended differing amounts energy digesting foods of different texture.

 

[blutoski]

These are the links embedded in the original article

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/48/19199

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248409001262

These two are the original research from the authors of the article in The Conversation

http://jdr.sagepub.com/content/82/6/491

This one is a study that showed rats expended differing amounts energy digesting foods of different texture.

Yeah I saw the abstracts. Two are by Rachel Carmody, and I remember when she was interviewed on CBC's Quirks & Quarks she was asked the same question I asked here, and she 'couldn't remember' what the actual caloric differences were, which I found suspicious.

The other thing is that as far as I can tell, two of those (Rachel Carmody's) are one experiment sliced and diced to create two papers (effect of cooking's implications for paleolithic, effect of cooking). So no independent replication yet, which is usually one of my criteria for elevating an hypothesis from 'interesting' to 'probable'.

Another thing that would help elevate from 'interesting' to 'probable' would be human trials, as mastication and digestion is a considerably smaller portion of our BMR compared to mice, which may diminish the effect a la Kleiber's law. We also have different meat digestion enzymes, so that may even neutralize the effect of calorie benefits of cooking, since the theory is that it's essentially predigestion.

I downloaded Energetic consequences of thermal and nonthermal food processing and it's hard to interpret percentages from the net results, because they don't quite say how may calories would normally be in the foods that were used to create the 1.5g difference in adiposity when processed differently. If they matched their protocols, they were feeding 34 calories per day for 4 days, which was 136 calories total (per literature), of which mashed vs unmashed created 1.5g difference in adiposity, which is 17 calories, or 12.5% difference. Using Kleiber's law to 'upscale' that to human metabolisms, the factor is 0.177827941, so 2.22% calorie difference for humans, all things being equal. And that's kinda small and well within the existing convention among registered dieticians to assume calorie counts on packaging are off by up to 10% at all times due to uncertainty in Atwater general factors, which is why Carmody may have been a bit evasive about this in her press release and media appearances.

However, Kleiber's law is a really rough scaling factor, and as mentioned, we have different meat digestion enzymes, so actual human experiments would be the best way to quantify what happens in humans.

 

[Nihilianth]

Bingo!

Whenever I see a really gigantic person, I wonder where they find the time to eat that much. It must take a real effort to pack on 300 extra pounds.

You really do not much understand biology, do you?

 

[Nihilianth]

Wow, even in a sea of fallacies, that stands out as an extreme example of misinformation.

It certainly takes more effort to gain weight than lose it. Losing weight requires no effort at all, just a change of mind-set. Stopping eating crap is not "effort".

This is the biggest pile of steaming horse manure I have read in a thread of nothing but big piles of steaming horse manure.

Apparently, The Atheist knows very little to nothing at all about biology. So lemme give a (VERY!) brief synopsis here:

Evolution:

Humans have evolved, over the course of over a hundred thousand years, to quickly and easily put on weight in the form of fat. Like almost all other animals, during times of food scarcity, you have a storage of fat that your body can rely on for energy. And let's face it: For the vast majority of human history (up until about 150 years ago,) food has always been very, very scarce. The vast majority of all humans who have ever lived, have died from starvation than any other cause.

So yes. It is, in fact, a HELL of a lot easier to put on weight, than to lose it! 100,000 years of evolution that led to you, ensures that is so.

Biology:

Each individual person is different. Some people have lighter colored skin, and others have dark colored skin. There are various shades of skin color in between. Likewise, some people have blue eyes, some brown, some green. Some people have blond hair, some brown, some red. Everyone has different facial features. Some people have big noses, some people have small ears. Some people have high cheek bones. Some people are tall, some are short. Some people have broad shoulders, and some people have wide hips.

Those are just external differences that one can very easily see at a glance.

If there are external features that mark each human being as being "different," it follows that inevitably, there are INTERNAL differences as well. Some people have higher blood pressure than others. Some people have messed up nasal passages, and some have deformed ear canals.

And, this is my main point, some people have higher metabolism than others.

There are also eating disorders, and not through any fault of anyone. One in particular is called Prader-Willi syndrome.

When you never feel full, how in the world can you blame a person for wanting to eat?

Now for a personal anecdote:

Comparison between myself, and my best friend:

I am 6'0 tall even. At my heaviest, I weighed in at 300lbs. I was a pretty good athlete most of my life. I have always exercised, and lifted weights. Around age 25, I started putting on weight as soon as I got out of my regular exercise regimen. (And honestly, my diet was never all that bad. I literally only ate at McDonald's like a handful of times in my life. I eat a lot of vegetables and fruits. I just enjoy eating those foods. Once in a while, I would partake in a really nice steak dinner. Not too often, as steak can be downright expensive.)

My best friend, on the other hand, is 6'3. He probably weighs all of about 200 pounds. Maybe. A veritable bean pole. This guy can easily down an entire pizza, 12' hoagie, and drink a 2 liter Pepsi by himself. I would gain about 10 pounds just for sniffing said pizza. Nevermind touching it.

I have two jobs: One as a freelance web designer, and another working at a circuit board manufacturing plant where I am on my feet 8+ hours a day. My friend only has one full-time job where he sits in front of the computer virtually all day. Then he comes home, and is a gamer. Whereas, I get home, and I hit the gym for an hour each day.

After reaching my max weight of 310 lbs, it took me the better part of a year of getting back into working out every single year to get back down to 270. Another year to get down to 250. And I have to work very, very hard and pay very close attention to what I eat in order to maintain my weight at 250 at the height of 6 ft.

My friend literally does nothing, and is barely 200 lbs at the height of 6'3.

So no. Weight can have very, very little to do with "choices." Sure, you can maintain good health, and some people have to work very hard at maintaining a healthy weight. Some people have to do nothing at all to remain skinny. (Although, eating nothing but pizza, hoagies, and Pepsi....no matter how fast your metabolism....is never healthy.)

So, yeah. You are so full of BS when you make the idiotic claim that "it requires no effort to lose weight." Yes. It does. For many people, it requires nearly Herculean effort to lose even an ounce of fat.

 

[marplots]

(much snipped to get to claim)

So, yeah. You are so full of BS when you make the idiotic claim that "it requires no effort to lose weight." Yes. It does. For many people, it requires nearly Herculean effort to lose even an ounce of fat.

How about weight loss with zero effort?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/mo...cher-has-lost-25-per-cent-of-body-weight.html

Are you disputing that people in comas lose weight? Are you claiming that gaining weight requires less than zero effort? Shades of Breatharianism!

"But it's hard and I feel bad when I don't eat" is not the same as "effort." You burn more calories when you eat (with all the associated processes) than you do by not eating at all. Eating takes effort. You may net out higher by eating, but that doesn't mean metabolic work wasn't expended.

What does this tell us? It tells us that, if being lazy can make someone fat, being even more lazy (too lazy to eat) can make them thin again.

Person A gets off the couch, hauls their 300+ pounds over to the fridge and gorges.
Person B stays on the couch.

Repeat ad nauseam. Who is burning more calories? Who loses weight?

 

[kerikiwi]

Person A gets off the couch, hauls their 300+ pounds over to the fridge and gorges.
Person B stays on the couch.

Repeat ad nauseam. Who is burning more calories? Who loses weight?

And person B will burn even more by hauing themselves off the couch, walking around the couch and sitting down again, without the detour to the fridge.
I really don't understand why people find this so hard to understand.

 

[marplots]

And person B will burn even more by hauing themselves off the couch, walking around the couch and sitting down again, without the detour to the fridge.

Yeah, but the point was to show that eating requires more physical effort than not eating. So the variable of interest is food consumption and the effort it takes to perform the act.

 

[Nihilianth]

How about weight loss with zero effort?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/mo...cher-has-lost-25-per-cent-of-body-weight.html

Are you disputing that people in comas lose weight? Are you claiming that gaining weight requires less than zero effort? Shades of Breatharianism!

Nowhere in my entire post did I ever say that, nor allude to that. That is a strawman of the highest order. (A person in a coma? REALLY!? Ugh. A person in a coma is in a TOTALLY different state than one not in one. You are literally comparing apples to orange trees there.)

I was responding to the completely assinine and ridiculous broad-brush claim that "it is easier to lose weight, than to gain weight." The entire premise of my post was predicated on the fact that everyone's body and body chemistry is different. For some people, it is incredibly difficult to gain weight, but very easy to keep it off. For others, it si very easy to gain weight, but incredibly difficult to lose it. How in the world this point was lost in translation, is beyond me.

"But it's hard and I feel bad when I don't eat" is not the same as "effort." You burn more calories when you eat (with all the associated processes) than you do by not eating at all. Eating takes effort. You may net out higher by eating, but that doesn't mean metabolic work wasn't expended.

Another strawman. Nowhere in my post did I make the claim that "eating doesn't require energy." That is a ridiculous claim that I never made.

-------------------------

BTW. No. You most certainly do NOT "burn more calories when you eat." Yes, eating does require energy. But eating itself does not, in fact, "burn more calories." There are a few foods out there that would burn more calories by eating it. But only a few. And if you were to eat only those foods, guess what: You would begin to starve quite rapidly within a few days.

And in fact, your claim makes no logical sense. The entire point of eating is to RESTORE energy. Not burn MORE energy.

What I think you just did here, was to confuse "metabolism" with "eating less." What happens when you cut your caloric intake as well as vital nutrients, your metabolism would drop. Your body would go into "preserve as much fat as possible" mode for a lean time. So someone with the intent to lose weight, should not necessarily just "stop eating." Or even necessarily to "eat less." Rather, they should eat more high-energy, primary foods such as fruits and vegetables. Especially vegetables. Eat less per meal, and eat more often throughout the day. This would preserve your metabolic rate at a higher level.

Someone who is morbidly obese, eats a HELL of a lot of food. And very bad foods. They also may be predisposed to having a very low metabolism. And they probably most likely have Prader-Willi syndrome, where they cannot feel "full." Most people have a trigger in their brain that can detect when their stomach is just beginning to stretch out like a water balloon. The morbidly obese do not have such a trigger. Therefore, they cannot tell that they have eaten enough. It's kind of like a paralyzed person not being able to feel a pin poking their toe. Or like unplugging a piece of electronics from a power source. That, in itself, most certainly is a disability.

The reason why such a person goes for really bad foods, is because they ARE high-calorie foods. They are full of fats and sugars. They naturally feel the need to eat those foods, because they are always feeling hungry all the time. It is the brain's natural reaction to attempt to prevent starvation, because it feels like they are hungry.

Those foods certainly pack in a lot of calories. The simple act of eating those foods, does not burn more energy. That's why they gain so much weight so easily.

Now, had you actually READ my post, you would realize that I stuck a little personal anecdote in there. A comparison between myself, and a good friend. I was illustrating the point that people are different. Individual humans are very, very different from one another. The point being, my friend would have to expend a ton of effort to gain 5 - 10 pounds. He has a VERY HIGH metabolism. Whereas, I eat a few slices of pizza, I gain several pounds of fat. I have a much lower metabolism. I would have to expend a ton of effort to LOSE weight.

You are taking up only one side of the story, and using that as a narrative of how every single human being on the planet works. You are wrong. You are dead wrong. Some people have darker skin than others. Some people have blue eyes, some have green. Some have blond hair, some red.

Some people have high metabolism, some people do not. Some people have acid reflux issues where a cup of coffee makes them sick; some people can eat a dozen habanero peppers with vinegar without the slightest effect. Each individual human body can treat foods vastly differently. As differently as there are different colored skin tones, hair, and eyes. As different as your fingerprints are from someone else's. So you cannot sit here in all seriousness and make the ridiculous claim "putting on weight takes a lot more work than losing it." For some people, that may be true like my good friend I gave an example of. For others, it is utterly false.

What does this tell us? It tells us that, if being lazy can make someone fat, being even more lazy (too lazy to eat) can make them thin again.

Person A gets off the couch, hauls their 300+ pounds over to the fridge and gorges.
Person B stays on the couch.

Repeat ad nauseam. Who is burning more calories? Who loses weight?

See my monologue above.

------------------------

(BTW, I weighed 310 pounds at my heaviest. Again, to illustrate your ridiculous notion of broad-brush-painting, my 310 pounds was able to scale a mountain up and back. I was able to swim a half dozen laps in an Olympic sized swimming pool. I was able to jog 5+ miles at a time. I probably did have a bit of a gut, but I was (am, but at a lower weight now) healthy as an ox. A weight of a person means about as much as a batting average for a baseball player: Not a whole lot. Especially when you take into consideration height, bone density, water percentage, fat percentage, etc.)

 

[marplots]

I was responding to the completely assinine and ridiculous broad-brush claim that "it is easier to lose weight, than to gain weight." The entire premise of my post was predicated on the fact that everyone's body and body chemistry is different. For some people, it is incredibly difficult to gain weight, but very easy to keep it off. For others, it si very easy to gain weight, but incredibly difficult to lose it. How in the world this point was lost in translation, is beyond me.

Alright, I'll bite. Explain to me what magical body chemistry has someone who exerts no effort at all, gaining weight?

It's pretty simple really. The very act of mastication requires effort. Chewing burns more calories than not chewing. If you don't like the coma example, just ask yourself who gains more weight - someone awake and eating or someone asleep and not eating? Who is expending more effort?

No matter how you want to spin it, eating requires some outlay in calories that not-eating avoids. The fact that "people are different" doesn't mean they have magical powers to gain calories from the air (or sun). It's even true of animals in general - many of which are very different from us.

The argument you make reminds me of someone who claims they've saved a pile of money by buying on sale - overlooking the fact that not buying at all saves even more.

 

[Nihilianth]

Alright, I'll bite. Explain to me what magical body chemistry has someone who exerts no effort at all, gaining weight?

It's pretty simple really. The very act of mastication requires effort. Chewing burns more calories than not chewing. If you don't like the coma example, just ask yourself who gains more weight - someone awake and eating or someone asleep and not eating? Who is expending more effort?

No matter how you want to spin it, eating requires some outlay in calories that not-eating avoids. The fact that "people are different" doesn't mean they have magical powers to gain calories from the air (or sun). It's even true of animals in general - many of which are very different from us.

The argument you make reminds me of someone who claims they've saved a pile of money by buying on sale - overlooking the fact that not buying at all saves even more.

This, again, is a strawman. You have failed to respond to my post. Again, I will point you to post number 498. Particualrly, this line:

Another strawman. Nowhere in my post did I make the claim that "eating doesn't require energy." That is a ridiculous claim that I never made.

For the second time in a row, I never said it doesn't require any energy to eat. I am saying, that people's metabolic rates are different. Meaning, they burn fats, sugars, starches, and calories at different rates!

I also explained that if you were stop eating altogether, your metabolic rate would necessarily drop. It is an evolutionary necessity for your body to conserve as much energy as possible during lean times.

But that does not mean that "eating more will cost you more energy than you are taking in." That would be a ridiculous notion, as, again, the entire point of eating is to RESTORE energy. Not burn more energy than you ate. THAT is what I was responding to!

And the coma example is utterly ridiculous. Again, a person in a coma is in a totally different state from one not in a coma. Body chemistry is different. The nutrients the doctors use to feed your body is totally different. Apples to orange trees there.