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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

I prefer the other theory I've heard: the body's gauge on starvation is not based on caloric intake, but based on nutritional intake; ergo, low nutrition diets that have sufficient calories (such as the Standard American Diet) make the body think winter is coming soon, and time to get extra plump.

This is mainly the basis of my dieting. I reached a peak of 340, and in exactly a year, while maintaining the same CICO, but changing from the SAD to strict non-Keto Paleo, became 214, and then eventually slimmed down to the 175-185 range.

I now eat mainly focused on nutritional density, and keeping the weight off is easy.

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Did you read the paper in its entirety? Honestly, did you?

It is filled with well researched arguments and quite a few facts that I found highly surprising. I say this as a guy who went from 270 lbs down to 180 then back to 240 then down to 200 and still struggling to stay put. The descriptions of leptin induced neuroses and people's varying mental states is highly accurate. The number of different cultures that don't have this obesity issue, my previous girlfriend who grew far fatter and taller than her peers after coincidently being fed antibiotics for a long term illness as a child.

For goodness sake, did you even get to the part about the Macaques and the standard bmi distribution growing just like humans are? This situation isn't normal and congrats on losing weight but you're one triumphant data point in a growing sea of obesity.

Yeah, I read it. Wasn't a bad paper, just not my pet theory.

Mind you, I did the reverse: I did the thing then researched why I just achieved what is claimed by many to have been vaguely impossible. Discovered a lot of amazing research that nobody really talks about.

Leptin and antibiotic research both are extremely important to this field, to the point I've now watched it go from being obscure to commonly discussed within the now-merging Paleo and Keto communities by the common folk who aren't too big on reading papers.

I'm not against any theory, I'm just favoring the theory that has the best support. Contamination theory isn't invalidated by my own personal point, I very well could have stopped the contamination source (by the methods proposed in the paper) by simply not eating infected food, which Paleo seems to significantly avoid.

The article does a plausible of refuting this and other common theories. It's quite detailed and it's worth a read in detail.

I only read to page 8 or 9 but I don't think the author did a very good job of refuting anything.

In particular the author points out that we are eating about 20% more calories than we were 1970, but then argues that 20% is not all that much and no big deal. They then cite some papers where people ate more and gained weight, then stopped eating and lost the weight.

But 20% is a lot, its huge. Do that every day your whole life, then yeah, your body is going to be different. You stomach is going to be larger, your whole body is going to be different. An yeah, dropping your calorie intake by 20% is going to be hard, really hard when all you have know your whole life is more!

I only read the first chapter of LotR and I don't understand what the big deal is. Hobbiton is a pretty shitty place to stage an adventure novel, seems boring.

My point was that the author did not make a good case for debunking even the first theory, and I had no reason to believe that they would do any better in the rest of the paper. I did wade through 7 pages of "mysteries" which was a kind of annoying way to frame the topic in the first place.

Also, you make a good point, Hobbiton actually actually is a great place to start an adventure, and _is_ a compelling reason to continue reading.

Yeah I agree with you, that's what I was saying, I feel the same way about LotR. First book was a snooze and couldn't finish the rest.

Yeah, the argument "If you don't count CI or CO correctly, CICO doesn't work, therefore CICO is debunked" is pretty silly. As an accounting mechanism, it's basic physics. If CI<CO, you will lose weight -- you might not find it easy, you might not thrive, you might not even survive, but the universe itself will make sure that you lose weight.

I don't think that's really what the authors intended to tangle with, though. I agree it came off that way, but maybe we are all just a bit touchy from 1001 fad diet pitches that all begin by trashing CICO in exactly the way the authors did, because if you get good at CICO you are in a position to actually evaluate whether or not the fad diet is any good, which is a big problem for most fad diets.

Here's why I have less of an issue with CICO trashing in the context of this article: the authors are trying to figure out explanatory mechanisms for the obesity epidemic. They are spot on to point out that CICO says nothing about the feedback mechanisms that control CI and CO, and that figuring out those mechanisms is key to figuring out the obesity epidemic. CICO is correct as far as it goes, but it doesn't go where the authors are going.

Short of putting someone within a closed system vessel and counting the energy which goes into the vessel and the energy which comes out of the vessel you will never get an accurate measurement of CICO.

It is relatively easy to measure the calories you intake via food/drink since that can be roughly approximated using lab tests, but there is basically no accurate way to calculate the amount of calories somebody expends. I haven't heard of anyone counting calories running their shit and urine through a calorimeter to figure out how much of the energy in their food was absorbed by their body and this isn't even counting energy expended through heat, skin/nail shedding, and breath.

The article should have said "true CICO is impossible since measuring calories out is practically impossible" instead of "CICO doesn't work".

> there is basically no accurate way to calculate the amount of calories somebody expends

Eh, you can get pretty close. Still, you're technically correct. Practical CICO "only" gives you a lower bound for how much weight you will lose. You might lose more.

Here's the thing, though: stepping on a scale is pretty easy. If you lose too much weight with CICO, you'll know, and I bet you can figure out how to gain it back.

In a resource scarce world there are several valid "control loops" for hunger that result in survivable subjects. Always being hungry for instance.

I'm surprised there isn't more studies on what exactly are the biochemical processes and neural input that leads to hunger. Having the body react to nutrient intuitively makes sense, since it can't really count calories but can easily detect a higher concentration of chemicals.

> can't really count calories

Sure it can. Your body knows whether it's putting glucose on the shelf or taking glucose off the shelf, because it's the one doing it. It knows how many reserves it's keeping, because it's the one keeping the reserves. See: leptin, but in general the problem of reliable energy storage/retrieval is a strict superset of the energy accounting problem and yet our bodies accomplish the storage/retrieval problem with many 9s of reliability.

https://theconversation.com/chemical-messengers-how-hormones...

As far as I understand, the average person is not deficient in most dietary nutrients. It doesn't take a lot to get to sufficient levels, if you eat an orange here, some tomato sauce on your pasta there, one small salad or serving of vegetables with your dinner every couple of days, etc. you'll mostly be fine.

> As far as I understand, the average person is not deficient in most dietary nutrients

Even one or a few might be enough to cause a problem.

I’d reckon most modern diets are at least deficient in magnesium and potassium. Possibly b vitamins too.

while i more or less agree with your general thesis (bodies are good at grabbing what they need), tracking a few days of eating on cronometer or some other site that breaks out micronutrients is worth the effort in terms of getting an idea of your real intake and any holes. finding dietary sources you like for those blind spots can be tricky, but is far better than tossing a multivitamin over the wall and assuming you are good, imho.

The article nicely refutes this by comparing very reduced diets e.g. "only milk and red meat" to very variable diets and finding no significant difference.

CICO meaning calories-in-calories-out? Please avoid undefined and uncommon acronyms.

Did you do food diaries/journals as you increased weight, and as you lost weight? I have lost significant amounts of weight by reducing caloric intake, and noticed that my records on the way up and down were very different.

I believe so. It sounds like he doing paleo without keto. I may be wrong, but basically just eat food on the perimeter of the super market. Veggies, meat, dairy. Nothing processed.

In this context, it's a common acronym. Maybe you are just not as well read in this area as in others?

Googling CICO on an incognito window are 100% hits for calories-in-calories-out.

That's how I figured it out, but I consider 'this context' to be Hacker News, where 'API' is common, but 'CICO' is not.

Reading the linked article is a prerequisite for discussion of said article. The term is defined in the article.

Highly recommend it by the way.

It's defined in section two, on page seven, and only used three times. I will admit that I only read the introduction and conclusion, as I didn't want to spend two hours reading the 80-page paper.

I see your point, but if you’ve got a question over acronym usage, the right answer is not to ask somebody to do the prerequisite reading for you. You made it seem like it was their failing for using an acronym that you couldn’t be bothered to search for within the article in question.

it's a common acronym and also mentioned in the article

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