Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away from Bad Diets
well.blogs.nytimes.com
well.blogs.nytimes.com
Ironically, the land for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which is located in Atlanta, Georgia was donated by none other than The Coca Cola Company.
I understand the pitfalls of sugar. But I don't think these kinds of analysis by themselves really teach us anything.
It doesn't work with water because you don't care about water.
I don't think this is ironic at all. A company needs living clientele.
Also, the CDC has better epidemics to worry about than the obesity one. I frankly don't care if people want to be fat.
They can worry about more than one thing.
> I frankly don't care if people want to be fat.
No one cares that you don't care.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) serves as the national focus for developing and applying disease prevention and control, environmental health, and health promotion and health education activities designed to improve the health of the people of the United States.
To accomplish its mission, CDC identifies and defines preventable health problems and maintains active surveillance of diseases through epidemiologic and laboratory investigations and data collection, analysis, and distribution; serves as the PHS lead agency in developing and implementing operational programs relating to environmental health problems, and conducts operational research aimed at developing and testing effective disease prevention, control, and health promotion programs; administers a national program to develop recommended occupational safety and health standards and to conduct research, training, and technical assistance to assure safe and healthful working conditions for every working person; develops and implements a program to sustain a strong national workforce in disease prevention and control; and conducts a national program for improving the performance of clinical laboratories.
CDC is responsible for controlling the introduction and spread of infectious diseases, and provides consultation and assistance to other nations and international agencies to assist in improving their disease prevention and control, environmental health, and health promotion activities. CDC administers the Preventive Health and Health Services Block Grant and specific preventive health categorical grant programs while providing program expertise and assistance in responding to Federal, State, local, and private organizations on matters related to disease prevention and control activities.
http://www.cdc.gov/maso/pdf/cdcmiss.pdf
Poor diets are clearly related to “preventable health problems”, and can be mitigated via “health promotion and health education activities”, etc. This falls under the CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, DNPAO. http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/division-information/aboutu...
Here’s the CDC’s nutrition webpage: http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/
No, they're overweight because of their diet and lifestyle. Not all obese people are too stupid to realize this. I don't know what "misleading and manufactured nutritional data", but a) watching caloric input and b) exercise have been known as being primary to weight control since antiquity. No matter what your preferences are, you can tweak those two factors to lose weight.
Nobody has forced Americans to consume complacently. I'm not sure how it's been so hard to see.
A big culprit in recent obesity is the demonization of oils and fats (necessary for health and satiety) as well as the push by industry groups to increase consumption of refined carbs and sugars.
As an example, the food pyramid that many kids were raised on was released in 1992 by the US Department of Agriculture. Not surprisingly, the base of the pyramid is grains... please try to eat the allowed 11 servings a day and not gain weight.
Another example, Stevia (natural, no cal sugar substitute), which has been used for at least 1500 years in South America, was first imported into the states in the early 1900s but sugar lobbies prevented commercial use of it until recently.
And yes, I find the perverse entangling of health and marketing to be nauseous. There is so much crap out there, it is easy to get lost spending time and energy in a terrible place, like a gluten free diet. Many people willingly lie to themselves to convince themselves that "this author knows anything" without thinking critically. If obese people are stupid, so are foodies, workaholics, gamers, drug addicts, consumers of anti anxiety medication, etc...
People need to learn moderation without passing judgement on what others care about. Americans are inhelthily interested in health for no goddamn reason. Do you really think living longer is gonna help anyone?
Just ask the French.
I visit France every year and I am always amazed how well they eat while staying slim. They don't obsess over health as much, they obsess over food quality.
As a result they are ranked 8th in life expectancy vs the US 34th.
No.
No, no, no and no.
This kind of misinformation is -=dangerous=-. It pushes overweight people into a dead end which will result only in frustration and sickness.
What was known was that WHAT you eat can make you fat.
Exercise has no impact on your weight (fat-wise).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0GSSSE4l8U&feature=youtu.be...
You can adjust either side of the equation by consuming fewer calories, or by burning more calories.
It is much more effective to restrict caloric intake than to try and burn off a lot of extra calories - it takes a great amount of effort to burn a lot of calories
For example, running 3 miles in a half an hour will only burn around 400 calories, thats a lot more effort than just not eating one double cheeseburger a day.
Food choice (or WHAT you eat) only affects your hunger level, it does not contribute in any meaningful way to how you lose weight, other than helping you feel more/less full for longer/shorter (and thus enabling you to consume fewer calories by consuming less calorically dense food)
You need to look at what is driving the calories consumption/burning.
Suppose I have a problem with my sink and call a plumber. He looks at it for a few minutes and then says: "Sir, your sink is overflowing because more water got in than got out." No shit, I knew that. That doesn't tell me anything useful. I want to know if drain is clogged, or if someone opened a fire hose in it.
The question to ask is 'why'. Why am I overeating?
Think about it: You don't see a deer spontaneously explode because there was too much food around it. When it's full, it stops eating.
What you eat influences how your calories are partitioned; what your body does with them.
If I inject you growth hormones, part of the calories you ingest will be used to make you taller. You'll be hungry because your body is growing.
Similarly, if I inject you an extra dose of insulin, you won't be able to just "exercise it away". The insulin will prevent you from accessing the energy in your fat cells (while accumulating more). And because the body sees less energy 'available', it will shut down excessive energy expenditure while sending you a big hunger signal.
> "(and thus enabling you to consume fewer calories by consuming less calorically dense food)"
I don't know why you shifted from total energy consumption to the energy density, but that's just wrong. You can eat fat and still lose weight.
everything else is only methods of doing this, and has nothing to do with the underlying principle.
If you just blindly go into a caloric deficit, without taking into account any of the hormones, your body might not burn what you want (say, for example, muscles). It will also fight you at every occasions and slow down your metabolism, meaning you'll have to be even more in deficit and feel like crap.
The videos you linked are equally confusing. There is no "debate" over diet vs exercise. They're both metabolic characteristics that interact heavily. If you tell a doctor you want to lose weight without burning calories or restricting caloric intake, he's going to laugh you out of the office. Arithmetic doesn't work like that.
Thus, exercise that increases the gluteus maximus (buttock muscle) in your legs, the largest muscle, will increase resting metabolic rate which results in weight loss.
If you just burn more calories, you'll be hungrier and you'll eat more.
Well sure. If you're eating more calories than you're burning, you're gonna have a bad time.
Exercise is almost always a good idea. It just shouldn't be pushed as something primarily for weight loss.
That's why for most people "diet and exercise" during weight loss, means eating less and exercising more, without any treats to balance out the exercise.
What I think you're saying is that getting overweight people to exercise may yield mixed results because of their lack of discipline or other human psychological factors.
But to suggest that exercise doesn't help with weight loss goes against the laws of physics.
Your comment about laws of physics is true, but misses the point that exercise makes it harder for people to maintain food changes, and it's food changes that are most important for weightloss.
But you might worry that obesity and lack of exercise is a major portion of our health care costs which comes out of your pocketbook through higher taxes for Medicaid, Medicare, Federal, State, and City employee health care costs, retired military, .... Also, your health insurance costs are higher and if your employee pays for your health insurance then your employers health insurance payments are larger meaning less money for salaries.
Because I want to be fat.... health is overrated compared to how it effects quality of life.
"Both controversy and confusion exist concerning fructose, sucrose, and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) with respect to their metabolism and health effects. These concerns have often been fueled by speculation based on limited data or animal studies. In retrospect, recent controversies arose when a scientific commentary was published suggesting a possible unique link between HFCS consumption and obesity. Since then, a broad scientific consensus has emerged that there are no metabolic or endocrine response differences between HFCS and sucrose related to obesity or any other adverse health outcome."
In sucrose, the fructose and glucose are chemically bonded together in pairs, while in HFCS, they're just mixed together. But this also doesn't help much; although the body must split the sucrose molecule into its parts in order to metabolize it, this doesn't take very long.
The thing you have to watch out for is that lots of people want to find the "good" form of sugar. That's why we see products in the stores with ingredients listed like brown sugar, "evaporated cane juice", etc.
I concede that there might be a bigger difference between sucrose and HFCS metabolism than I was aware, and you did start off your comment with "Sugar would be bad but...". Nonetheless I think it would be easy for someone reading your comment to take away the idea that HFCS is the big problem and sucrose is okay, because people want to do that.
So I think the point that sucrose is not really okay either deserves more emphasis than you gave it.
Eh? http://foodidentitytheft.com/obesity-expert-dr-robert-lustig...
I can't find the actual papers but it seems like his opinion is not exactly conclusive and his wiki page suggests something along those lines as well.
> The thing you have to watch out for is that lots of people want to find the "good" form of sugar.
> Nonetheless I think it would be easy for someone reading your comment to take away the idea that HFCS is the big problem and sucrose is okay, because people want to do that.
I literally said that they both bad. They can takeaway whatever they want but I can't really be blamed for that.
Cheaper and people will consume more? Win! (Well, for someone, anyway...)
I've been using this combination for kool-aid for a while, Generally about 25% of the calories in a pitcher vs sugar. Though I don't do it that often.... sometimes I just want some grape (or black cherry) koolaid.
But there's this cool site where you can do all this research on our own, it's called google.com (or scholar.google.com).
Let's just allow that the point is still debated, even by the scientists.
The bigger thing is the human (and all, really) body is complex and varied. A lot of things play into the nutritional needs of a person. We've also had a lot of migration and mixed heritage the past couple hundred years, much broader and deeper than any point in history before it. It usually takes some time for a society to optimize for certain food sources.
Even then, we have some vary diverse cultures coming together (and I do love great fusion foods)... Combined with mixed family allergies, and a lot of mono-crops and ever limited diets by huge swaths of society. The body does adapt, as it stands though, most people are too sedentary (myself included)...
Once metabolic syndrom sets in, it gets very complicated... I'm at a point where a bit of heavy starch (bread, pasta) throws me off for a couple days... many grains will mess me up too... if I have more than around 100g of net carbs a day, I have issues. Most people have way more than 100g of just sugar any given day.
The "food pyramid" is mostly lopsided.. and subsidies mostly push some of the worst things for us. In general, we get too much grains, more meat than needed, not enough vegetables and fruits (I mean the likes of peppers, tomatoes, squash and cucumber here)... far too many heavily refined foods (from vegetable oils that are really unnatural, to fruit juices). Many people don't gain weight or really show it, but are just as unhealthy from their diets.
I'm really bad at sticking with what works best for me... because I like pasta, and bread, and rice, and potatoes. I just know I shouldn't have them anymore, and when I do (a couple times a week) I really feel it. Not to mention that even if I go weeks with really minimal carbs/sugars, my body is really efficient with gluconeogenesis and starts creating a lot of keytones, which has its' own issues.
It all sucks. I'm over 350#, and excercise is all but impossible with my bad knees... it's all I can do to not gain more weight. Since starting Invokana, my weight and blood sugar levels are at least stable (but elevated), but getting farther is difficult to say the least. I wish I know a lot of what I know today a few decades ago... I would have never started drinking "diet" soda, which is way worse in a lot of ways, and also would have cut most of the carbs back when it would have made more of a difference.
The system being? The digestive tract? What exactly does that imply that it feeds to the same system?
> Fruit smoothies are probably about as bad as soda
Well don't make fruit smoothies then but eat the fruit as is.
> I'm at a point where a bit of heavy starch (bread, pasta) throws me off for a couple days.
I mean starches are pretty bad for your body so it's probably trying to tell you something.
My point is that what is advertised, subsidized and promoted by the government is lopsided from what's really ideal. The food industry is both part of the problem and responding to consumer demand. As to my body telling me something, that's another point.... That being that not everyone notices or feels the affect as significantly even though it's there.
It's not just sugar, it having too much starch/grains in our diet as well... mostly the heavily refined foods. People are also mislead into believing that some things are healthier when they really aren't... fruit snacks, smoothies, etc are just about as bad as the sugary stuff, or worse if you consider the deceptive marketing.
I don't think we should, as a society, ban any given food, but the marketing allowed, and the information distributed in education really needs to change.
For example, from the OP:
> Last week, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana announced the findings of a large new study on exercise in children that determined that lack of physical activity “is the biggest predictor of childhood obesity around the world.”
> The news release contained a disclosure: “This research was funded by The Coca-Cola Company.”
This is the link to the press release, which contains the Coca Cola disclosure in the last line:
https://www.pbrc.edu/news/?ArticleID=284
The press release links to the PubMed page for the study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26173093
...Maybe I'm missing it but I don't see the Coca-Cola disclosure in the PubMed abstract. However, the Coca-Cola mention is in the full text of the study: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/oby.2115...
(note: this above link is visible for me because I'm on a university network. It may not work for you otherwise)
On the other hand, the full text of the study also mentions the ClinicalTrials.gov ID number: NCT01722500.
Which means it can be found here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01722500
So maybe the data collection approach should begin with ClincalTrials.gov, which does have endpoints intended for convenient bulk data analysis: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/resources/download
>Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is that they’re [...]blaming sugary drinks and so on. And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that in fact is the cause. [...]
The big problem is we don’t really know the cause other than, well, too many people are eating more calories than they burn on too many days. But maybe the reason they’re eating more calories than they need is because they’re not burning many."
So - he does know the cause. A combination of inactivity and overconsumptiom, both of which are remediated with lifestyle changes that invert their prefixes. Why abandon the latter, simply because each is well reported?
[0]:http://www.sharewik.com/portfolio-items/the-global-energy-ba...
Fixed that for you, although it should not be a novel realization.
To give you a TL;DR I'll quote from [1]:
In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
WHO recommend getting it below 50g, ideally 25g per day. I looked on the side of some of the staple things I consumed (milk, bread etc.) and it is tough with modern processed foods to get that low.
If everyone followed the WHO recommendation then full sugar coke is out of business!
Really? Because that is how you get into ketosis. That is not just low carb, that is ultra low carb.
I think you may be mistaken. I have been in that range and it is extremely difficult.
I've said it out loud but it doesn't quite ring true.
exercise is super-important, as are food calories from stuff like hamburgers and fries, that don't HAVE a diet version.
why does Coca-Cola care so much? Article would make more sense if it read "mcdonald's", but that's not what's stated - it says it's about coke.
it just doesn't make that much sense to me. where's coca cola's incentive?
(fwiw I thought I'd mention I have absolutely no disclaimer to make, no connection whatsoever with coca cola.)
"What we've seen from animal data is there is something metabolic that changes when you consume artificial sweeteners," says Bleich. "The brain is tricked into thinking it is less full."
So what's going on? Basically, when we eat sweet-tasting foods, that signals our brains to release hormones to process the sugar. It's part of a mechanism that tells the body how much energy it's just taken in, and when it's had enough.
But in people who are regular drinkers of diet sodas, the theory goes, the body gets confused and no longer releases enough hormones. As a result, researchers suspect, diet drinkers end up eating more — and gaining weight.
Ultimately it might not be any better than drinking normal soda. I'd be pretty terrified of this if I ran a soda company.
Because popular interest groups have been specifically demonizing soda. Compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_Drinks_Portion_Cap_Rule
- http://fortune.com/2015/04/22/diet-coke-sales-fizzle/
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/23/am...
I'm too lazy to do number-hunting right now, but those articles state that the total revenue of all low calorie soda sales is in the $7.0 billion range (and declining). Sales for the Coca-Cola company alone is $45+ billion.
So even if Diet Coke is a healthy solution and alternative to regular Coca Cola, its sales are nowhere near enough to sustain the company. Thus, the allegation that Coca-Cola can potentially benefit from a mindset that high caloric intake is not the main cause of obesity.
People perceive a lot of things. The number of peer reviewed studies on this is astonishing, and they have all found the same thing - they aren't harmful in any way we can possibly measure, in any sane amounts.
If you feed rats ridiculous amounts of sweetener, they have issues (it's something like the equivalent of 5 gallons a day of sweetener)
But if you feed rats ridiculous amounts of water, or apples, or anything "more natural", they have the same problem.
Well, there's literally no accounting for taste. Coke Zero is a fantastic tasting diet soda.
> others perceive it to be harmful due to the artificial sweeteners
These people should be ridiculed, like Jenny McCarthy is, since there's no reputable scientific or epidemiological basis for their beliefs.
You think that is why Jenny McCarthy is ridiculed?
Pretty good demonstration that everyone (EVERYONE!) has some religious beliefs they can't stand to have someone call into question, even if they are likely the type who points out when others have the same problem.
Both communities are full of people who may have substantial expertise in their own fields, but who also enjoy pronouncing sweeping and groundless religious edicts in other fields that they don't actually know anything about.
I don't get why they don't just make a fizzy drink which contains at most 10-15g sugar per 500ml (and not fill it with artificial sweetener).
I suppose they could still add ridiculous interpretations (as is often the case when people's livelihood depends on their work being seen to promote a given side), but at least you could trust the data.
great book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt ok doc: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3675568/
Yay progress!
It doesn't matter an iota if it's "surprising"...
It's silly to imagine that Coke is doing something nefarious (like Phillip Morris denying that smoking causes lung cancer, or Exxon Mobil FUD-ing solid climate science) by encouraging people to get more exercise so that they can consume what they want.
We have billions of complex chemical processes involved in all of this, and know things like "absorption rates of medicine, vitamins, and nutrients" are affected by everything from random vitamins to environmental factors to whatever else.
But body mass, that we have down 100% for-sure, and it's just that simple formula, no variables, no possibility for any other affecting factors. Sure.
Fat tissue is no exception. Your body is only able to make it if you give your body sufficient raw materials to make it.
Similarly, if your body is doing work, it is burning energy. Human bodies are not perpetual motion machines, they exploit energy stored in chemical bonds. You don't get that for free, you get that from the food you eat.
You do not need to fully understand every nook and cranny of a system to examine it from first principles.
What is your proposed mechanism for counting calories in and out for a given person (Note: nutrition labels will 100% fail you here, because of how they are calculating)?
It doesn't matter if they are exact for a given person so long as the labels are consistent. They are sufficiently consistent.
I'm curious - have you tried losing weight, and is this from personal experience? Because I found it trivial by just counting calories and keeping a watch on my weight. I don't doubt that sometimes the calories I absorbed were less or more than what I wrote down, but that doesn't really matter in the long run - they're sufficiently accurate.
You argue this with literally no data, and all available data says the opposite.
The people charged at the FDA with coming up with the mechanism for these labels disagree with you, and have found 30-50% variance for a ton of foods.
"I'm curious - have you tried losing weight, and is this from personal experience? "
I can lose weight fine (and i'm actually at a normal BMI, FWIW :P), and i don't violate the laws of thermodynamics.
However, counting calories from labels was the most useless thing i could ever do.
I literally burned 1500+ calories in exercise a day, and ate less than 1500 calories by nutrition label calculations, and did not lose weight. I tried a variety of different foods/etc. I'm a scientific guy, i have logs of data :P I didn't cheat, kid myself, whatever.
It turns out, for various medical reasons i won't get into, i am not in the "vast majority" for whom these labels are targeted, and so the numbers on them are simply wrong by about 20-30% for me (this is factual, and was actually part of a controlled study). The out calculation was accurate enough (IE the exercise part of it). But as you can imagine, when trying to lose weight, 20-30% in variance matters a lot.
You can argue "i'm outside the norm", but i suspect, based on what i saw, that i am not.
I was not fitbiting or any crazy mechanism to count getting up from the couch as exercise, or counting anything other than the actual exercise calories as "calories burned". Thus, it should have been a significant underestimate due to resting calories burned, etc.
In any case, it was running 5 miles a day, as reported by GPS, at 8:15 pace (which is roughly 120-150 calories per mile, depending who you believe, but i took the low side), and then running 1000 calories on an elliptical (which is about 1-1.5 hours at high resistance and fast pace, depending on pace).
The elliptical i used was one which slightly underestimates calorie count (by about 3%, at least according to two peer-reviewed studies), unlike most, which overestimate (by about 15-20%).
Also, doing that much exercise, you can maintain a calorie deficit (a real deficit of calories absorbed vs. burned) and not lose weight by gaining muscle as fast as you are losing fat (muscle has a lower stored-energy content than fat); you'd need more than just stepping on a scale to distinguish that.
AFAIK, the main reasons that the calorie counts are not accurate for all people is variations in absorption for particular nutrients due to metabolic variations. These variations between people are specific to particular categories of nutrients (some are at the level of macronutrients -- particularly that I've heard of, differences in general fat or carbohydrate metabolism -- some more narrow.)
This would make the top-line calorie counts (or, more precisely, the relationship between top-line calorie counts of different products) inconsistent as well, in that for a person with absorption different than that targeted by the labeling, product A with 500 Cal and product B with 600 Cal might not merely provide different Calorie counts than 500/600 to that person, but product B might provide less Calories than product A, depending on the specific nutrient composition of those calories.
Guys, metabolism is just too complicated for humans to understand, so there's nothing at all I can do about being overweight, it's literally beyond my control
There's got to be some kind of cognitive dissonance or something at play; how else could a rational mind convince itself that the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to the human digestive system?
Or the justifications that say, nutrition labels are not PERFECTLY accurate so it's hopeless from the start. I personally guarantee if you drink one can of Coke a day and eat nothing else, you will lose weight; I don't care whether the nutrition label is perfectly accurate.
I really wouldn't have expected that sort of reaction on this forum ahead of time. It's a bit disappointing.
You have presented literally no evidence to support your argument, which boils down to "it's close enough, if everyone just did hard work and tried harder instead of being fat and lazy, they'd lose weight, and anyone who says otherwise is just being fat and lazy".
I am neither fat nor lazy (I'm actually probably one of the most in-shape adults you'll meet). I can literally prove that your argument is wrong for me.
Instead, what i see is "oh, well, it's sad everyone but me is wrong". With no evidence to back this up.
Now, if your BMR is 2000 and you eat 2100, poor absorption can still cause you to lose weight.
But if your BMR is 2000 and you eat 1000, there is no possible way you can gain weight.
If you know how to gain weight on a calorie deficit, there's a lot of starving people in this world that would love to learn how.
Sure, but both the absorption and the burn rates are affected by other factors.
So calculating calories out is not as simple as looking at a nutrition label.
In fact, it's infinitely more complex: "Instead, the total caloric value is calculated by adding up the calories provided by the energy-containing nutrients: protein, carbohydrate, fat and alcohol. Because carbohydrates contain some fiber that is not digested and utilized by the body, the fiber component is usually subtracted from the total carbohydrate before calculating the calories."
IE note: these are all things that are going to be digested or not digested (and thus, really count or not really count as calories) at different rates in different people.
(Certainly, there is a max value, but this method won't give you that either :P)
Your burn rate doesn't drop below your BMR.
Basically there's lots of variability when you are eating more than your BMR- you could gain weight, or you could not.
But when you eat less than your BMR, you have a calorie deficit. Period. It doesn't matter if your digestion is working well or poorly, or if you exercised or if you didn't. You have a deficit.
As for nutrition labels, I'm not aware of any hidden calories that aren't counted in the label but will be digested. Like I said, humans cannot digest fiber, at all.
There's also a given persons reaction to different macros over time... sugar vs fat vs protein have different chemical reactions in the body, where too much sugar in some will have different affects over time. Some will gain weight, and show signs of metabolic syndrome, others may have the issues, but not outwardly show via weight gain. Others still won't develop diabetes.. and this can be on roughly the same diet.
BMR isn't in and of itself the only measure... while it's true that you will gain/lose weight depending on how many calories you take in/out... but beyond that is what types of mass are gained/lost. Most fat people don't have enough lean muscle once they're over 35-40, which means losing too much muscle (or any) is a detriment. If you start losing more than a sustainable muscle mass, you can actually be worse off. You need to take in a minimal amount of protein to maintain/gain muscle (combined with exercise to promote gaining/maintaining muscle)... with a calorie deficit enough for weight loss, but doesn't cause starvation response and metabolic slowdown.
All of these are definitely variable by person.
Are your macros important to health and good body composition? Yes. I usually skip that part because someone inevitably jumps in and explains how sugar is metabolized differently than fat, and then try to use that to "prove" that sugar will make you gain weight no matter what your caloric intake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_fiber#Fiber_and_calori...
More money quotes:
Insoluble fiber does not change inside the body, so the body cannot absorb it and it provides no energy. Soluble fiber is partially fermented, with the degree of fermentability varying with the type of fiber, and contributes some energy
In the US, soluble fiber must be counted as 4 kcal/g (17 kJ/g), but insoluble fiber may be (and usually is) treated as not providing energy and not mentioned on the label.
So it's technically accurate that the human body cannot digest fiber, but bacteria in the gut can break soluble fiber down allowing us to extract some small amount of energy.
Unfortunately calorie restriction that goes too far may have other negative affects... and most people don't track their diets closely enough to really tell how many calories they take in on any given day. I've gotten really good at estimating, and as long as I stay below 2500-3000/day and get at least 100g of protein, I tend to do okay as far as staying in the range I am in.
On the down side, when I try to make too much of a shift it winds up badly in one way or another (experiencing ketoacidosis is something I never want to experience again). Eating once a day a couple days a week (roughly 23.5 hrs between meals) I feel pretty good with. Eating too close to bed and I get an upset stomach. It's funny, but my own body has been a pretty big experiment in terms of trying different things to see what works, and what doesn't.
I tend to either have every negative affect to medications, or my body stops responding to them after a while. Byetta lasted about 6 months before my body stopped responding to it, Victoza about 2. Invokana is the first diabetes medication that doesn't make me incredibly ill, and actually keeps my blood sugars stable (though I've been a little more sensitive to light, and more headaches).
I truly wish I could go back a couple decades knowing what I do now. I also wish I could smack whoever started the "low fat" fad in the 70-80s, or the people behind the food pyramid.
It's not that hard, really...
* Get enough protein
* don't eat too much
* avoid too many refined foods/ingredients
* Have some raw fruits and veggies
* Avoid too many sweet fruits and candy
I don't know what the solution is, I do no that limiting personal freedom and choice isn't a good answer. Improving education and reducing religious-like or commercial interests as such would be a good start though.
Oh, sure, it's difficult to say with certainty that 100 calories on the label will be exactly 100 calories for every person ever - but there's really not a gigantic amount of variance. Certainly it's a good enough guideline for use.
It's a matter of thermodynamics more than anything else. You can't get energy from nothing. Quantifying the exact amount of energy you'll get from a food is difficult to do precisely, but the guidelines we have are good enough for use for the vast majority of people. You can be pedantic about it, but that won't change the fact that it is that simple to lose weight, as proven time and again.
And you are suggesting it's simple with no actual data to back it up. Can you cite a single study that shows that nutrition label calories were anywhere close to actual calories burned by a person. Or any mechanism people have to find calories:
Here's one that says the opposite: http://www.livescience.com/26799-calorie-counts-inaccurate.h...
For example, for most people, they discovered almonds have 20% less calories than "estimated".
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/96/2/296.abstract
That's a huge variance.
"but there's really not a gigantic amount of variance." Citation needed :)
"Quantifying the exact amount of energy you'll get from a food is difficult to do precisely, but the guidelines we have are good enough for use for the vast majority of people."
What do you think vast majority is? Given the variance in everything else, we are probably talking 20-30% of the population.
"You can be pedantic about it, but that won't change the fact that it is that simple to lose weight, as proven time and again."
I'm not being pedantic about the mechanism. I'm being reasonable about the fact that the method most people have to figure out whether what they have is going to be successful is useless (IE if they can't determine how many calories they eat/burn, they can't possibly change the numbers :P)
Some researchers say that, on the whole, the inaccuracies in calorie estimates don't make a big difference. "For most uses, I think they're good enough," said Malden Nesheim, professor of nutrition emeritus at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., and co-author of the book "Why Calories Count" (University of California Press, 2012).
People tend to eat a variety of foods, not just almonds or starches. So overestimating or underestimating the calories in one particular food will likely not have a huge impact on a person's daily calorie intake, Nesheim said.
And generally, the omissions in the Atwater system tend to result in overestimates, meaning they likely wouldn't interfere with weight loss.
"It would only be a problem for people who want to gain weight," said Mary Ellen Camire, a professor at the University of Maine's Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition in Orono.
The problem isn't with nutritional labels of varying accuracy, but with people under-estimating the calories per portion (without reading the label) and who serve enormous portions.
The most difficult thing about weight management is willpower management. People (especially techies) love to ignore willpower. They'll say, if you want to lose weight, just eat less. Completely ignoring the fact that "just eat less" is an enormous challenge for many people.
By calling into question the importance of calories, Coke is basically undermining people's willpower, which is a precious resource even under optimal conditions. Promoting exercise as a substitute is useless. On its own, exercise will do nothing to help you lose weight, because the extra calorie burn will just make you hungrier!
We don’t get fat because we over eat. Meaning that overeating isn’t the cause of obesity, it’s an effect. If a room has a maximum occupancy of 20 people and the fire marshal gets upset and wants to know why it happened – you’re not going to say “well, it’s because more people came into the room than left.” Well duh, that’s what happened but that’s not the cause, the reason for the overcrowding. Rooms get overcrowded when more come in than leave and I get fat when I eat more than I burn; but that isn’t the cause.
https://www.thebairs.net/series/ketogenic-soylent/
We get the thermodynamic argument, really we do... but if you're ignoring the metabolic effects of the insulin cycle upon weight gain in the modern diet, you're not really grasping the important details.
Except a Big Mac Combo with a Large Coke is 1580 calories so even that is a bit much of dinner. And it took an hour and forty minutes to actually run that distance, almost two hours in total with getting my running gear on, warm up and cool down.
It's silly to assume it's OK for Coke to pay scientists to promote any theory or results in scientific journals. Coke can pay scientists to work on their products and labs. Getting from there to paying to influence what goes to the diet/medical journals and the general public is downright fraud.
As for "encouraging people to get more exercise so that they can consume what they want" that's not Coke's business to do.
And it's BS anyway, since the message "diet doesn't matter much" (which is the inverse of what you started your comment with), will also stick to people not able or willing to exercize.
Exercise provides a myriad of benefits, the most important actually contributing to mental health. But if you are looking to lose weight, a proper and healthy diet should be your priority.