Can You Change Your Metabolism?
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Note: the source of the quote for anyone curious to read more:
Humans probably have wildly different nutrition needs depending on how physically active they are, how hot it is in their part of the globe, which foods are available in their area, their gut microbiome, etc.
Nutritional Science seems based on the idea that relatively minor tweaks to diet can influence health outcomes. After several decades of failing to find what those tweaks might be, it always seems strange to me that people don't seem to consider that they might just not exist, and that the human body is fine with whatever food it gets, within some broad range.
If you don't eat meat, it will be hard to get iron and B12 and carnitine and some other things. It will also be harder to get enough calories.
The metabolism of vitamin C in particular is pretty well understood, and no magical benefits of getting huge doses has ever been proven to have any of the claimed positive effects (despite many prominent supporters' efforts, including Mr Pauling).
Or for example I usually avoid sausage and fat meat as it is heavy on the stomach and weight. But the last days I have been in the mountains, walking over ice and snow. Fat meat was excellent, because with the cold, I burned lots of energy.
Also might have something to do with how many tens of millennia some peoples' isolated ancestors spent surviving on relatively limited local items available or cultivated, compared to what is now considered mainstream.
In my case I lowered my metabolism considerably so I could thrive in Texas without air conditioning in the summer. When everyone else was complaining about the heat this week, all I could do is remind them "it's not even summer yet".
Definitely was not as much progress during the first decade.
Since we don’t actually know anything about nutrition, it’s impossible to know whether the new engineered food products are unhealthy.
"We don't understand how the body metabolizes what it ingests, and what is healthy and what isn't! Every theory is wrong and has been overthrown! Therefore it's impossible to say whether eating this arsenic pill will be bad for you!"
My impression is that there is pretty solid evidence that eating highly processed foods correlates with worse health outcomes.
That is the conclusion of the Nutrition piece as well. But, crucially, it's important to recognize that we don't really know why that is, and we don't know many of the particulars. To take just two examples:
- Even our distant hominid ancestors had discovered fire and were using it to heat food, so it seems very unlikely that eating raw food would be significantly better for us than eating cooked food (by evolutionary arguments)
- Cutting food is often not even considered processing, and yet it's something which has a clear negative effect on our teeth at the very least (and is a much much more recent innovation than cooking)
So yeah, don't eat a Mars bar or a Chicken McNugget if you can at all help it - and gods help you if you like Spam. But beyond the worst of these foods, the story is actually quite unclear.
Edit: the specific quote about the exact point you're making:
> One of the trial new messages being tested by the nutrition establishment is “avoid processed food,” which has the big advantage (for their future credibility) that no one is likely to adopt it. Cooking has become an unacceptable hassle.[9]
> [9] Disclosure: I do avoid processed food, and most of what I eat I cook from scratch. This is not advice.
This is one of the problems of this idea of processed foods - many things which don't actually seem to be a significant problem are in fact highly processed, we just don't tend to think of them like that.
Not to mention, there are processed staples eaten all over the world for hundreds or thousands of years without leading to widespread obesity or addiction - bread and beer being some of the oldest such examples.
Many veggies can be delicious with just some heat + salt; though adding a few spices certainly helps.
I'd much rather eat a perfectly cooked skirt steak with home made chimichuri and a side of veggies than a domino's pizza.
Not everything that is processed is poisonous, and most “fresh” food today is full of chemicals or lacking in nutrients, so most food you would eat is not that healthy.
I think what you mean is they are not meaningful to guide health decisions as they are too broad and can be further subdivided into more specific categories.
Dieticians, on the other hand, are officially qualified and registered.
So, it's not hopeless; any emergent system that is as flexible as the human body will be really complex, with balances, counterbalances, and even counter-counterbalances. It's built to survive almost any climate and adapt to changes in climate within a short time span.
Be aware that bodybuilders have been using different metabolic states since the time of Vince Gironda, around the 1960s. The human body is made for many ranges, contexts, and different diets. So searching the best diet won't yield much.
It has become a mere shadow of its former self, resorting to sensationalism for online engagement.
I understand the need for the magazine to cater to an audience, but how was this article even approved? It lacks specifics, relies on common knowledge, lacks relevant studies or investigations. It's nothing but clickbait.
Re topics, it is a shame for the regular readers if they have limited themselves to the short list of high SEO performing topics. But it would be hypocritical to complain about it from a link aggregator site where the article has only reached the front page due to this choice of a popular interest topic. When did you cancel your subscription?
The other commenter argued that it relies on common knowledge as opposed to scientific knowledge. That's the harm. Especially for a journal claiming to be scientific.
damn. turns on its head the common notion exercise is good for weight loss. maybe instead of making exercise predictable and routine, it should be done randomly to prevent this adaptation from occurring?
I'm not one to worry too much about my weight, it's just something my doctor told me because he weighs me every appointment.
It's very funny to see people then claim that the story stops at CICO or that your calories in and/or your calories out are entirely within your conscious control.
The evidence for any kind of nutrition finding is slight. CICO has the advantage that it matches very basic thermodynamic principles, so it has to be true to some extent. But beyond this basic level, all you get in reality are some broad strokes. We know how much calories maximum can be extracted from a piece of food. We know how much energy minimum you need to consume to perform a particular excercise. But no one really knows how much calories one particular person will actually get from eating one particular piece of normal food, no one knows how much it will actually vary between people, no one knows what might affect that difference. No one also knows how much energy you'll actually use for doing a particular exercise given efficiency losses from your movements; and no one actually knows how much energy your body is passively consuming - nor everything that affects both of these.
Beyond the problem of actually measuring CICO, there is the additional problem of treating humans as fre will agents when it comes to food, when we know full well we are biological machines that have biological imperatives. We may be able to suppress our base instincts to achieve longer term goals, but this ability is obviously limited. Things like appetite are not within our control, and our ability to prioritize the longer term goal versus the short term need that our body is signaling is also obviously limited.
And not only are these limited, we know very well that they are affected by all sorts of internal processes. There are many psycho-active medications that are very very strongly proven to have an effect on appetite (lithium, SSRIs), as are certain diseases (thyroid issues for example).
But sure, keep blaming people for their diseases. It worked great for curing AIDS, so I'm sure it will work on obesity any day now.
Reducing things to thermodynamics is not useful to people trying to lose weight. Any more than talking about the speed of light is useful to people trying to run faster.
Metabolism influences passive weight loss. Fiber influences caloric absorption. Muscle mass influences calorie burn. Gut microbiome impacts fat and caloric absorption by the body. Food quality and type influences all of the above.
Say it with me: CICO is harmful, reductive bullshit. If it helped you lose weight, great; it doesn’t help most people though and there is an obesity epidemic to handle.
It’s technically correct that computer instructions are all in binary. Yet learning binary is not useful to people trying to code in Python.
If the python community started to tell learners “it’s all binary in the end”, it being true wouldn’t make it any less of an unhelpful reductive bullshit claim.
1. The broad idea that your weight loss/gain is affected by the caloric content of the food you eat and the amount of excercise you get. This is almost trivially true from simple thermodynamic arguments, and no one contradicts it.
2. The specific belief that weight loss is completely reducible to using your free will to eat less calories and do more sports, and that there is no further discussion to be made on how to help someone lose weight (e.g. no medical checkups for hormone issues, no therapy for mental health, no look at the fattening effects of medication or pollutants, no caring about microbiomes, etc.). This part is what is harmful bullshit, since it posits that human beings of strong moral character should not let their basic biology affect their behavior.
I would recommend you check out a book called” The Hungry Brain“ by Stephan Guyenet. It changed my perspective on this topic and made me much more empathetic to people who struggle with weight issues.
Yeeeep. Stimulants make me lose track of time and also forget to eat. Even when I start getting hungry, I don't feel the actual urge to eat anymore.
and there's also the thing where putting a certain amount of stuff into your mouth doesn't necessarily guarantee a corresponding CI, and CO varies based on basically anything you do.
One of the easiest ways to increase basal metabolic rate is to be colder. But it's not that much easier than being hungry. It's so easy to "cheat" and put on a sweater, or turn the HVAC to a higher temperature. Just as it's easy to serve a slightly larger portion, or have a snack.
And just as it's completely obvious, I also think it's completely useless for understanding how to live a good life at a desired body weight. There is clearly a lot more going on, as can be seen by the plethora of different medications, organisms and substances that cause weight change in every conceivable direction.
Also despite hydrating there's slightly less water in my body, so I appear somewhat leaner.
On the other hand, over the long term, more muscle weight will passively consume more calories and thus can help maintain your (lean) weight, especially for people who like eating a lot.
This is misleading - the amount of additional energy passively consumed by muscle mass is pretty insignificant - 10-15 kcal per kilo of muscle mass.^[1]
Resistance training is still good, but definitely not good for this particular purpose.
[1] https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
Also there is the longterm benefit due to increased metabolism.
Then you can walk into Chipotle and see a burrito is 900 calories and do the math that you'd need to run 3 times a week to burn off an extra burrito.
But yes, most fitness proponents will almost always say that weight is controlled in the kitchen. Where do you see that people say you should only workout to lose weight?
> Saying that losing weight is simply a matter
I never said that. But yes if you’re at a stable weight adding regular exercise to your routine might be enough to tip the scales. It’s not going to be simple though.
> s like saying people should avoid avocado toast to get rich
Nonsensical analogy.
I cycle I lose weight...and I also eat more. The real myth is that what suits me suits others - it mostly doesn't.
Yes! We are all individuals!