Hacker News Reader

Comment by queuebert | Hacker News Reader

Serious question -- can you clarify what evidence would need to be released?

The calorie counts clearly add up, because a single non-super-sized McDonald's meal is over half of a grown man's BMR. All that remains is to add up the resulting weight gain from the excess daily calories over a month.

View on HN

You can't really do that though. I mean at a high level, yeah a poor diet and little exercise will almost certainly lead to an adult gaining weight. But it sounds like you're describing the possibility of calculating his expected weight gain based on how much he ate and how much he exercised, and I don't think that's possible. Not to mention that it's been widely reported (iirc even from Spurlock himself) that he was drinking alcohol heavily during this period, which will further complicate this calorie-level reconcilation you're suggesting.

> But it sounds like you're describing the possibility of calculating his expected weight gain based on how much he ate and how much he exercised, and I don't think that's possible.

Why? To a large extent this is possible, and with a bit of experience in how a specific person reacts, it's possible to do this very accurately. Bodybuilders will often have very specific meal plans over months, and know more-or-less exactly how much weight they will gain or lose, sometimes down to the week.

> it sounds like you're describing the possibility of calculating his expected weight gain based on how much he ate and how much he exercised, and I don't think that's possible.

This is a joke right? This is exactly how you calculate expected weight gain/loss.

If you can do this accurately for an arbitrary person, you will be the world's most celebrated dietician so I encourage you to go ahead and publish exactly how you're doing this.

He had more than weight gain, he suffered serious liver problems. That was in the movie despite him hiding his chronic alcohol abuse. Eating tons of fast food is obviously going to be unhealthy, but the results are pretty predictable. There's a scene at the outset where a doctor tells him something like "you'll gain weight and raise your cholesterol but that's about it" and he came back with loads more problems. The extra problems were most likely due to alcohol.

Well, we know now, after many years, that the calories in the logs don't actually account fully for his weight gain, because he was also consuming huge amounts of alcohol during the filming of the movie, which he didn't disclose to either the audience or the doctors he interacted with.

> can you clarify what evidence would need to be released?

A single replication would go a long ways. Eat nothing but McD, and accept any upsell you get, for whatever time he did (a month?), and see if anyone, LITERALLY anyone, gets the same over hyped health problems he reported.

Could he be THE ONE GUY that had some issue? Sure, but it's very doubtful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com