This is confusing...if you only eat X calories per day and exercise, you will lose weight, and permanently (assuming you don't give up), is this more of a mental thing they're talking about?
It says nothing about whether an obese individual will lose weight if they do choose to eat less. Clearly they can - gravity is not causing food to fly into their mouth whether they want it or not.
'Traci Mann says the emphasis should be on measuring health, not weight. "You should still eat right, you should still exercise, doing healthy stuff is still healthy," she said. "It just doesn't make you thin."'
So even if you do eat well and exercise, you still won't lose weight because we have evolved to put weight on, not to lose it.
What I take from this is that there is more of a biological component to this. If you take two people one who used to be obese and one who has never been obese, feed them exactly the same food, put them on exactly the same exercise - the ex-obese person will put more weight on than the always skinny person.
The article gives no indication that there is evidence for this.
I'm not suggesting that all causes of obesity are related to a disease, but things are definitely not so cut and dry as expend more energy than you consume and you will lose weight. The body is an exceedingly complex system of chemical reactions which are fairly tightly regulated (see topics around MCA - Metabolic Control Analysis, to understand how systems of reactions don't behave intuitively). Changing one input variable does not always yield the result you are looking for when you simplify the entire human metabalome down to an equation of calories in, fat storage and calories out
antibiotics might have some responsability as well [0] by destroying parts of the gut flora
[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-dru.... reply
Not really. "Calories" is just a physical quantity. It measures the energy that the combustion of something produces after putting it on a calorimeter. This needs a lot of energy.
So for example, you put sugar on a calorimeter, you give it (lots of) energy(making temp go up hundreds of Celsius degrees or pressure of several atmospheres) that you measure with precision to initialize the combustion and then you measure the energy the reaction produces.
So, according to the formula: "calories" of sugar = energy out - energy in [of burning].
Note that in a calorimeter you don't care about the residue.
This is completely different to what metabolism does, in fact the living organism do not raise metabolites hundred of Celsius degrees, they use enzimes, and the byproducts and waste are completely different because living organisms have to get rid of them, so the byproducts have to be something the blood could carry.
So calories are just the UPPER LIMIT of what a metabolic reaction could give the body if the byproduct were to be the same, that are not.
Living organism break molecules link one by one in a series of chained reactions, which is itself called "methabolic reaction".
Every methabolic reaction is DIFFERENT. The human beings do not process pentose sugar the same as glucose sugar or methanol or an oil.
Some process require double or triple the steps of others, some are poisonous to your body(very acidic, or neuro transmitters, like alcohol or whatever) so the body tries to get rid of them as fast as he can.
Industrial processes completely disrupted the food we eat. Omega 6 oil replaced natural Omega 3 intake(as the animals we eat eat fodder), palm and hidrogenated oils anywhere and corn syrup sugar with no fiber(difficult to preserve in the fridge).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD003817...