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Comment by notadoc | Hacker News Reader

Taking in more calories than are used causes weight gain.

Using more calories than are consumed causes weight loss.

This is rudimentary physics, there are no new theories needed to explain it.

Your premise is true, but drastically oversimplified. And your conclusion doesn't follow at all. It's clear that there's a huge public health problem with obesity that needs to be corrected. In order to correct it, we need to know why it's happening. Is something causing people to consume more calories than before? Is something causing them to use fewer calories? The "classic" answer is that people are lazy and gluttonous, but there's a distinct possibility that other factors are in play making people crave food more.

> Is something causing people to consume more calories than before?

Yes. For most of human history, food was scarce. People regularly died from starvation.

Today, that is no longer the case. Despite the outrage industry's continued and tired claims that hunger is at all time highs, etc, the truth of the matter is that most people in developed countries -- far more than ever before -- have access to all the nutrition they need at a price they can afford.

Unfortunately, people are not used to that availability, and thus are not able to process it rationally. Instead we binge eat. For example, there is a free box of bagels today at work and I'm going to have one now because cream cheese... yum!

Yes, and the sub heading of the article basically says this.

> “Ultraprocessed” foods seem to trigger neural signals that make us want more and more calories, unlike other foods in the Western diet

Eating more calories than burning them isn't being set aside by the new theory.

Except, that is not how the body works....

Here, for example is a recent study by Harvard Medical School detailing how partipants on a low-carb diet burned more than 250 calories more then people on a high-carb diet.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/bch-ldc11121...

> Here, for example is a recent study by Harvard Medical School detailing how partipants on a low-carb diet burned more than 250 calories more then people on a high-carb diet.

You are countering the claim that diet is about calories in being less than calories out by claiming that, because a low-carb diet causes more calories to be burned, it negates this claim.

I think you are simply trying to qualify the claim by showing also that, while it is true that you will lose weight if you consume fewer calories than you expend, it also so happens that what you eats influences the basal metabolic rate. That is certainly an interesting point, but it ultimately relies on the truth of the claim you're attempting to attack. In order to believe your counterclaim, one must believe that the relationship between rate of caloric expenditure and caloric intake is important.

Falling down faster than you go sideways causes crashes. Falling down slower than going sideways causes getting into orbit. This is rudimentary physics, there are no new theories needed.

Except, well, if you want to actually do any rocketeering.

What factors influence the amount of calories used and taken in (not just eaten)? That's the question, and the answer is hardly rudimentary.

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