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Comment by tomkarlo | Hacker News Reader

"Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet. You can eat all kinds of, well, crap, and if you exercise, you'll still be physically fit and probably even look healthy."

Can you support this? I feel like most things I've read and most of what I've learned myself while training has been that diet in fact is a much bigger factor, to a level of say 75%/25%. It's very hard to exercise enough to undo a bad food decision, and even if you do exercise a ton, that's not going to reverse vitamin and nutrient deficiencies that may result from eating predominantly processed foods.

Moreover, the type of food you're eating has at least as much effect as its theoretical caloric content. 300 calories of raw carrots is not equal to 300 calories of potato chips, as far as your body is concerned. We're not calorimeters.

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Have any of you guys ever seen pictures of the Woodstock festival in the 60s? Everyone is skinny. It's something besides "The western diet" and meat-eating that's causing obesity to increase. A lot of diet news these days has the appearance of vegetarian activism with a severe case of confirmation bias, in that any study that remotely hints that meat eating is bad for health gets front page coverage.

The exercise issue is a red-herring. Sure you can run for an hour and burn 600 calories, or you can just skip a meal. What's gone wrong with our diet is most likely occurring at the metabolic level with the types of processed foods we eat.

Or maybe there was a lot less industrial food around in the 60ies?

Seems McDonalds only started to grow in the early 60ies, and frozen pizza didn't take off till the 90ies according to this:

"through the 1980s, frozen pizza occupied an increasingly tight niche. Sales growth averaged a sluggish one percent a year, even with innovations such as French-bread and microwaveable pizzas." http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2005/3/...

People are radically underestimating just how much these high glycemic index calories, on demand, are contributing to the obesity explosion.

Whether you stop in for lunch at McDonalds or Subway, you are probably tossing back at least 1,200 calories. Stop at Starbucks and add dairy to your drink and you've got may be another 300-400 calories that aren't going to fill your stomach up. On top of all of this, certain demographic segments are consuming large volumes or alcohol 2+ times a week. The average person should be consuming under 2,000 calories a day, not in an afternoon.

Once you do gain that extra weight thanks to a careless few months of eating (may be in college, may be at your first real job), its a lot easier to add to those pounds than drop.

I suspect that its not just the proliferation of on demand food that is causing the problem, but in the disinformation coming from the US government regarding healthy diet. People that want to eat healthy have no idea what they are doing. Decades of hysterical news stories about how XYZ is an amazing superfood and ABC is terrible and will kill you have just left a confused population that doesn't know what is good or bad for themselves.

In line with the whole low glycemic index thing, I've been doing Tim Ferris's slow carb diet lately. The main thing about it that gets me endless ridicule is that Tim is big on eating the same few simple meals over and over again. This is absolute sacrilege in west coast foodie culture.

It's popular to blame fast food in general and McDonalds in particular for the obesity epidemic, but probably wrong.

In Taubes' books, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and "Why We Get Fat" he gives examples of populations which did not have access to fast food or supermarkets, but which nevertheless had high rates of obesity: early 20th century Pima Indians; many children in 1930s New York (pre-video games); 1970s Prague; 1960s to 1970s Jamaica.

In fact, with the latter there were many cases of obese mothers with stunted, malnourished children. How to account for that?

An early 1980s study of Mexican-Americans in Starr County, Texas found 40% of men in their thirties were obese, despite their working in agriculture or oil-fields.

Look, a lot of us middle class folks get our only physical activity from exercise. But many people do physical labor for a living. Ever seen a fat construction worker or a chubby motel maid? I have.

Physical activity has definite health benefits, but weight loss is not one of them.

Diet will get rid of weight, exercise will determine what will be underneath.

  > Moreover, the type of food you're eating has at least as
  > much effect as its theoretical caloric content. 300
  > calories of raw carrots is not equal to 300 calories
  > of potato chips, as far as your body is concerned.
  > We're not calorimeters.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

Okay, but he was eating 1,800 calories of twinkies and lost weight, which is unsurprising. How much weight would he have lost if he ate only 1,800 calories of carrots, or maybe just a normal diet?

This was an experiment without a control. Not sure it proves anything.

My own anecdotal experiences support it. Back when I was running seriously (i.e. 80-200km/week), I regularly got triple burger combo meals with huge fries at fast food places, drank soda like water, ate candy during my long runs and occasionally even dipped pizza in mayo or melted butter when I felt like it. Bacon was life.

I had a BMI a 21, a resting pulse of 47, incredibly good lipid levels and lower than average blood sugar.

We are calorimeters. 300 calories of raw carrots is by definition the amount of carrots we would have to eat in order to extract 300 calories of energy from them.

(but Taubes is right about the fallacy of the calorie counting-obesity connection).

I'm pretty sure the way calories are measured is using a calorimeter. There's no correction for the ability of our body to absorb calories from a particular food, because 1) it would be really subjective and controversial and 2) the junk food industry would go bonkers over it.

Here's how the FDA site defines it: Calories — on the Nutrition Facts label are the measure (amount) of energy in a serving of food. For example, there are about 110 calories in 1 cup (8 fluid ounces) of orange juice.

Note that they describe it as the "energy in a serving"... not the "energy absorbed from a serving." The measure is independent of our body's ability to extract that energy, which can vary wildly.

he can't support it.

you're discussing the concept of "empty calories", just like alcohol has.

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