It's calories. It's always been calories https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
Take an apple or orange juice for example. To eat the equivalent amount of fructose (or calories) that is contained in an orange juice, you will need to eat a lot of fruit, and like feel full before finishing, while the equivalent juice doesn't even register.
The goal is changing weight. The immediate means is to change calorie intake. The hard problem is that doing so requires changing hunger, and we don't have a good (safe, cheap, widely available) way to do so.
CICO is necessary to understanding, but is not sufficient. Any proposed solution that doesn't address hunger is bound to fail.
Of course meal plans are more complicated than just counting calories.
It is scientism and not a science.
I do think there’s a difference, though, between processed and unprocessed foods. My guess is that your body can extract more of the calories from highly processed foods than it can from unprocessed foods, or that extracting the calories from unprocessed foods takes more work, burning calories in itself.
But regardless of the efficiency, if you overfill the tank and the fuel starts to spill on the pavement, that is not going into the milage but straight into the pollution bracket.
The idea that intake is irrelevant is just as ridiculous as the idea that everyone's metabolism is an exact clone.
Regardless of how many calories I burn with exercise, I am also training my metabolism.
My metabolism includes feelings of hunger and satiation, as well as cravings for particular foods. It is plenty capable of going out of whack for all kinds of reasons, but my best tool for bringing my metabolism back to a healthy place is a spate of vigorous exercise, and I've relied on that.
If my metabolism were conditioned to be in an unhealthy place over a long period of time then I would have an uphill battle ahead of me to correct it, and I believe many people are stuck in such a situation.
One observation is a growing class divide between the fat and the fit that saw a sharp uptick over the pandemic. Our culture unfortunately is very poor at accommodating healthy activity and getting poorer. Conversely, the national parks the last 2 years summers were mobbed with people who found healthier lifestyle practices during their downtime and were out to challenge themselves.
Random web hit claims 89% of American women are unhappy with their weight[0]
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/89-percent-of-amer...
Compare advertisement vs the Japanese "fat ban".
The fat acceptance movement in the 2000s changed how we advertise.
The amazing part is that it works: humans are capable to believe two contradicting things at the same time.
Or look at MLB players. They're all Chubby Mc Chubster!
In Japan - we wouldn't dream of putting fat people in ads!
Couldn't possibly have anything to do with its aging population (median age closing in on age 50). Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37878558
Yes, it's nice that we're getting sugar consumption back down to 1970 levels so we don't keep adding more obese people to the cohort, but that doesn't help everybody who gained weight prior to 2020.
From 1995 to 2005, people ate roughly an extra 10 pounds relative to 1970 of bodyweight in sugar every single year. That's an extra 100 pounds in bodyweight over 10 years if you don't adjust something else. That's huge. Literally.
Fact.
> Because sugar drinks made it so easy to take in way too many calories for children and hence became overweight, we now have a big cohort of adults with weight problems.
Speculation.
This isn't completely hopeless, though. Fat cells "remember" the weight you are when they are created and fat cells turn over roughly 25% per year. However, it does mean that you need to hold your weight down for 3+ years for new fat cells to forget about the "fatter" you.
Edit: It doesn’t appear to have had much effect per the data on the same website [1]. I suppose there are a number of reasons why it might not have had an effect on the top level numbers, though.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...
2. Pretty sure calorie intake is not uniformly distributed so if avg dropped bc some folks went from 5000kcal to 4000kcal a day it’s not going to reduce overall obesity rate
The idea that all calories are the same is not even held by people who say "everything is just about calories". Ask them what you need to build muscle and they will say protein. Suddenly not all calories are the same.
Fructose is does not stop hunger as much and is more easily stored as fat.
Dietary fat is even more easily stored as fat, since it doesn't require the added step of de novo lipogenesis (DNL) like carbohydrate does, or the added steps of gluconeogenesis + DNL as protein does. And go look up recent photos of Lustig: he's fat (bordering on obese) himself.
This is not relevant to arguments (with sources and statistics) about systemic obesity he presents.
If dietary fat is more easily stored as fat, why do keto diets work?
Also do you have sources or data that says what you are saying here?
Yes it absolutely is, since he claims he doesn't eat sugar for all the reasons he cites, yet he's fat and looks metabolically unhealthy:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/heresthething/episodes/...
>Robert Lustig: I carry a few extra pounds and I’m not happy about it. I don’t eat sugar.
>Alec Baldwin: You don’t.
>Robert Lustig: No. I have dessert twice a year. When I’m in New York I have a piece of Junior’s cheesecake and when I’m in New Orleans I have bread pudding -
Notice his twice yearly dessert sugar indulgences are high in fat.
> If dietary fat is more easily stored as fat,
You seriously believe your body preferentially uses de novo lipogenesis to convert carbohydrate to fat (which entails some energy loss) rather than just storing fat as fat? DNL on a typical mixed macro diet is rare, to the point that something like 90% of your bodyfat came from fat you ate, and the fatty acid profile of your body mirrors that of your diet: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12324287/
Even in low-carb circles, this is tacitly acknowledged now by warning against eating meat from animals fed a high-PUFA diet, like poultry.
I'm not saying overeating carbs won't make you fat, but arguing that it somehow makes you fatter, calorie-for-calorie, than fat is ridiculous considering that eventually your body runs out of fat and has to use DNL (which is inefficient), and that fats require the least energy for your body to digest of any macro.
> why do keto diets work?
They don't, at least not any better than low-fat diets. They seem to work better initially because keto dieters lose a lot more weight early, but that weight is disproportionately fat-free mass, i.e., water, glycogen, and probably at least some lean body mass (muscle and bone density). See the graph on p. 4 of Kevin Hall's NIH study comparing the diets:
If it was only twice a year why would it matter at all? He also might drink alchohol, but the point he was making was not that you can't get fat unless you eat sugar, it was to explain the systemic rise of obesity.
These two things are completely different.
You seriously believe
I don't 'seriously believe' anything, I was just asking for evidence, which seems to make you upset. Your link also doesn't back up what you are saying, it is only says "Adipose tissue is a suitable biomarker of dietary fatty acid intake"
Even in low-carb circles, this is tacitly acknowledged now by warning against eating meat from animals fed a high-PUFA diet, like poultry.
Says who? This is another claim you aren't backing up.
They don't, at least not any better than low-fat diets.
You should tell that to thousands of people that post non stop about their 50-150 pound weight losses while exclusively doing keto diets.
Also you seem to be saying a high fat diet and low fat diet work the same, but then you're also trying to say that fat is treated differently by your body.
* They seem to work better initially because keto dieters lose a lot more weight early, but that weight is disproportionately fat-free mass,*
Anyone who looks at a keto forum like /r/keto can see that that isn't true. People slim down to half their weight, that isn't 'water and glycogen'.
Alcohol is also very caloric, and the human body can process small amounts of it. But replacing cola with alcohol won't have the expected effect either.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-total-daily-smo...