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Comment by ramenmeal | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen poop included in the "calories in, calories out" diet talk, which seems strange. The argument for it is it's a 0 sum game, but they never mention poop as part of the equation. There seems to be an assumption that all food is absorbed at the same rate and across all people. Seems unlikely to me.

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I wonder where/when this calories-in-calories-out trope ever made sense. Metabolism is so complex that the energy lost during reactions between and into metabolites cannot be measured - they happen inside cells mostly, at an insane rate. The mere presence of increased active thyroid hormone (T3) will elevate body temperature, leading to increased heat loss. Muscles become more efficient when used often. Muscles load glycogen after sports. Energy is conserved by warm clothing. Low room temperature leads to extra energy loss. Etc

How is one supposed to even approximate the energy balance without a fully body composition (dexa) scan every week?

I think calories in/out is just propaganda used to help the average person not overeat. Like most of the medical stuff were taught, it's a half truth because the systems are so complex that even the experts don't truly know.

Like sibling said, energy must be conserved. No matter how complicated the system is, calories in = calories out - the problem is that measuring (especially) the calories out part is tricky. What if you poop out your food mostly undigested? What if you spend your days half naked in a freezing cold unheated home? Etc

And because not even the experts know all the possible variables, from a practical perspective it's a half truth... so what there's conservation of energy, that doesn't give us any meaningful information to use for the application at hand.

There is if you expand eating less and moving more to being a surrogate endpoint instead of just being dials. If simply eating less causes a spontaneous reduction in activity that’s a signal. If changing what you eat lets you consume fewer (or desire more) calories for the same appetite/satiety that’s a signal. Paying attention to CICO is like having a gyroscope and accelerometer to help with navigation: leading indicators of where you’re heading until actual measurements (i.e. position/weight) confirm where you actually are. In fact it’s even better in this case because of how noisy weight is and needing multiple days (at least) to reliably judge the effect of an intervention.

For many people, those signals can be wrong and shouldn't be listened to.

due to conservation of energy, energy lost during reactions between and into metabolites becomes body heat, which can be measured; also virtually all of it consumes inhaled oxygen, which can also be measured

Body heat can't be accurately measured. You can just measure heat loss via the surface. But there's variations on the cell level. Since heat can be stored inside the body for a longer period, measuring heat loss over a short period of time is not representative.

you are correct, but only for cold-blooded animals like reptiles

Why would that be? Eg Organs are warmer than hands etc - there certainly is a gradient. The heat from metabolic processes will not become obvious immediately because it’s redistributed before it’s lost to the environment.

in warmblooded animals core temperature is homeostatically regulated to high precision, preventing the kind of heat storage you're talking about

Besides heat loss, there’s also kinetic energy (muscle contractions, peristalsis etc), various pumps (eg sodium/potassium), fluid flow (blood, lymph etc) and weird things like biophotons.

it sounds like you are unclear on the concept of energy

Is that an insult or? Your ten word comments are way too short to grasp the meaning you might be trying to convey.

I think we were referring to different sites of energy conversion.

think of it as a curriculum

Here's something that's always puzzled me. It seems almost inescapable that if two people of the same size have radically different metabolism, their body temperatures must be different. If anything, a skinny person should consume less energy because they have less skin.

Granted, this is me, a physicist, thinking simplistically. But it's what's always made me skeptical about metabolism.

There are too many aspects. Like gut flora and even enzymes present. Those could affect how and to what input is broken down. And then there are hormone responses and how body responses to those. In the end we are probably very far away of having complete understanding what is going on. And differences might be minute, but will add over years.

If your body temperature is too high you sweat to lower it. Thus you can have two people with the same body composition and yet different metabolism.

That seems possible -- it allows the rate of heat loss from the skin to be variable.

> Metabolism is so complex

There's really not much variation in metabolism. Most peoples' metabolisms are within ~10% of the average. [0]

Of course, even a very small variation adds up when compounded over years. 100 extra calories a day is a 10 pound weight gain per year.

But the variation itself is actually small. No one can "eat twice as much and not gain weight."

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15534426

No it isn't the same for everyone. So what you do is: if you're gaining weight, eat less. If you're not, you're good.

Think that gets included in the calories out term.

It’s accounted for in the “calories in” component: the calories printed on the side of a package are the calories absorbed by an average body, not the total chemical potential energy of the food.

It doesn’t account for the thermocouple effect of food, otherwise protein would count for less than 4 kcal/g

That would require some sort of bioavailable calories metric that is specific to the person eating the food because I doubt people recalculate ther basic metabolic rate every single day.

At first I thought you were talking about the rats/mice/rabbits eating their own poop.

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