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Comment by thomyorkie | Hacker News Reader

He ate 40 teaspoons which is 160 grams of sugar. Also, perhaps the fact that he went from very little sugar to 160 grams a day caused rapid weight gain. I know for instance that your body changes over time to burn fat more efficiently if you are on a lower carb diet, perhaps the reverse is true as well.

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Weight gain is impossible without the necessary amount of calories. It is the simple law of conservation of mass/energy.

160 calories * 21 days = 3360 calories. This is enough to gain about 1 pound of weight, not 19.

Its 160 grams of sugar which equals 619 calories which leads to 12999 calories in 21 days. Still less than 4 pounds though.

However, you're really oversimplifying weight gain. Hormones play an important role in how much fat is stored and how much your metabolism burns. And the type of food you eat can affect your hormones.

Hormones, food, stress, mood, sleep, exercise, medications etc all affect your metabolism and how fat is stored.

Yes my mistake. 13k calories is roughly 4 pounds.

>Hormones play an important role in how much fat is stored and how much your metabolism burns. And the type of food you eat can affect your hormones.

It doesn't matter if 100% of the calories he ate was turned into fat.

>how much your metabolism burns.

Eating sugar causes your metabolism to slow down by 4x? You'd die.

You're talking about that 13k calories of sugar as if it exists in a vacuum. That extra sugar could have caused more of the other non-sugar food he was consuming to turn to fat.

Turning to fat doesn't mean mass will come out of nothing

Its not coming from nothing. If a higher percentage of the total calories he consumes turns to fat instead of being used as energy, then he will have extra mass on his body.

I dont think thats the central message of the film at all. the problem with human digestive system is that it evolved for very different set of conditions & has very limited 'floating' capacity for carbs. so when you eat highly processed food with short chain carbs what you get is sudden overload in carrying capacity of blood stream. body responds by storing it away as fat. OTOH when you are short on energy body produces hunger signals before tapping into fat reserves so eat again & cycle repeats. the message IMO is about composition of what you eat (centered around sugar).

A good time for you to prove that every single one out of trillions of living mammalian bodies satisfy your robotic maths to any degree of confidence!

1 teaspoon is 16 calories, so you're off by a factor of 4 here though you're still in the same ballpark.

Well, he also ate other stuff "around" those sugar calories, not?

probably spiked his blood sugar causing him to eat more food in general. pretty poor article missing a million confounding variables

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