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Weight gain is simple: calorie intake - calorie expenditure. The amount of calories in our food tends to go up over 20 years. Doing the same activities consume

Weight gain is simple: calorie intake - calorie expenditure. The amount of calories in our food tends to go up over 20 years. Doing the same activities consumes the same amount of calories after 20 years. Thus we would have more caloric surplus, and likely gain more weight than people 20 years ago with less caloric food. Pretty simple imo.

zacwest 11y ago
From the article you're writing a comment to: > A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Its strange really. I'm on a ketogenic diet, and hear people preach the caloric balance constantly, that it doesn't matter what my macros are as long as I consume less calories than I burn daily. Yet, I consume close to my previous garbage diet calories and I lose about 2-3lbs/week due to my high fat/moderate protein/very low carb (<15g/day of carbs) diet. Go figure, it appears that caloric energy balance isn't the only factor.
  - jfoutz 11y ago
    It's an absolute limit. Perhaps there are specific modes that are a a few percent more or less efficient. Nonetheless, you eat less than you burn, you lose weight.
    - im3w1l 11y ago
      Him burning it is not the only possibility. Maybe he is shitting it out? Maybe bacteria in his body are burning it for him?
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Gut flora is a big possibility as to the discrepancy. I imagine there are some gut flora that are more adapt at breaking down carbohydrates than others, saturating the body in unnecessary energy to absorb.
  - com2kid 11y ago
    From someone who's been doing keto for several years now. A: Pre-Keto, odds are you we underestimating how many calories you were eating. Unless you were tracking every single thing you ate, there is a high probability you just didn't realize how many calories you were consuming. B: It is super hard to over eat on Keto. It is possible, take lots of liquid calories in (heavy cream can do this easily!), and there are some other real screw ups, but eating 3000 calories of steak is pretty damn hard. C: What you are reporting is common for people who have a lot of weight to lose. At some point it becomes a lot harder, at first you just have to sort of watch things, then you eventually do have to count calories. (Especially if you want a six pack, holy crap do you have to count calories!)
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Thanks for that info! Did you ever experience symptoms similar to eye fatigue? I think I might be not consuming enough sodium and/or potassium; I'm going to up my doses of both to test my theory.
      - MichaelGG 11y ago
        Everyone seems to warn about sodium and potassium while on keto - magnesium too. Apparently the suggested intakes are quite high and supplementing is the only way to get there. It might have just been placebo or drinking a hot cup of broth (with potassium salt in) but it made me feel better some days. I'd also second that it's really hard to eat a massive amount of calories on keto. Water loss and perhaps some changes might make you leaner but most likely, over time, you're simply getting a lot less than, I dunno 3000 that isn't hard to do on a sugary diet.
        com2kid 11y ago
        Magnesium is good. Potassium, I eat leafy greens or Ostrim (http://www.protos-inc.com/ http://www.protos-inc.com/), which is low fat but has no carbs and lots of potassium. They also taste good, they are one of my after gym gotos. Gaining muscle on keto /is/ hard. You can do it (/r/ketogains can help!) but wow you have to stuff yourself, which is sort of odd for Keto!
  - tdylan 11y ago
    From your comment it appears you weren't tracking avurately before, "close to". If you track energy expenditure as well as precise caloric intake you'll lose the same quantity of mass, give or take a few percent.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- tdylan 11y ago
  They didn't control the energy expenditure to any meaningful degree. Essentially worthless.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    The point of the study, from what I can tell, was to show that calories+macronutrients+exercise, the three main current targets of anti-obesity intervention, fail to account for a large portion of observed population-scale changes. They aren't arguing generally against total energy balance being involved, only that those three quantities don't constitute a sufficient measure of total energy balance. The implication would be that there are likely other sources of variation, e.g. changes in digestion, metabolism, etc. (the study doesn't really go out on a limb and speculate on that part).
- tomp 11y ago
  That doesn't mean much... Maybe people who eat the same now ate more in the past, which is why they're still fatter.
hspak 11y ago
I'd recommend reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. He explains how this is not really the case. It was written back in 2007; I'm sure there's more research out there to prove this point.
- tdylan 11y ago
  From what I've seen Garrys hypothesis was proven wrong by Alan Aragon.
  - billjings 11y ago
    Taubes' end-of-the-book hypothesis about Atkins diets and the like isn't that great, but the whole initial portion of the book trashing the fat hypothesis is great. If you enjoy scientific writing, I promise that you will get a lot out of it, whether you agree with him or not. He's a fantastic writer, and an exhaustive researcher.
bemmu 11y ago
While that's also certainly true, the article says that in this case the calorie intake was the same. They were guessing gut bacteria could be different. Maybe the formula is calories in * bacteria efficiency - calories out?
Guzba 11y ago
A person gains weight because they intake more calories than they expend. Certainly. A room gets more crowded when more people enter than exit. Obviously true. Neither of these statements tell you why that is happening though, and that is important thing. So, why are people eating more calories? Or, since the articles says they aren't, could the sources of calories matter? (They do.)
- theophrastus 11y ago
  This simple thermodynamic model intake minus expenditure leaves out (at least) one dynamic metabolic feature: this engine can change its tendency for storage (weight gain) in a single organism or in a community of organisms given time. A change in the community storage tendency is what is alluded to in the linked article. That is, the organism can allow the excess calories to pass on by, or it can store it as fat (or glycogen). This, for instance, is the holy grail of weigh managing pharmaceuticals: to discover those effectors of "now store every un-expended calorie (as fat)". So finally it's something like: intake - expenditure = available for storage, but might not be stored.
  - DennisP 11y ago
    And the other variable is how well the body turns fat reserves back into available energy. If that mechanism is inefficient then the equilibrium will be higher body fat. People seem to have an idea that every human body can just instantly burn however much fat it needs to burn to meet demand. It seems more likely that there's a limit to how fast the body can burn fat, which for some people is unusually low, and that if there's not enough energy available you'll be forced by thermodynamics to move less, think poorly, and produce less body heat.
com2kid 11y ago
There is a type of seaweed that if your average American eats it, there are zero calories absorbed. If most Japanese citizens eat it, they will absorb calories from it. There is a gut bacteria common in the Japanese population that extracts calories from this type of seaweed. "calories in" is that calories that went down your throat. It is calories that your body was able to digest, and "your body" includes many types of bacteria that are unique to each person and also unique to different population groups (meaning that some populations share commonalities in gut flora). It is possible that certain antibiotics have wipe out some types of gut flora, allowing others to proliferate more. That alone could increase calorie absorption. (Or cause a host of other problems!) It is possible that having a diet too heavily reliant upon one type of food results in an imbalance of some type. The problem is, this is a brand new area of research and we just don't know yet. But it is sure as heck known that it is more complicated than "calories in food down the throat".
- tdylan 11y ago
  Link to data/research?
  - com2kid 11y ago
    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125675700 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1256757... Actual suspected caloric difference is minimal, after all, well, it is seaweed, not a very dense food stuff. :) I'm not going to link to antibiotics causing gut flora problems, it is well known and responsible doctors actually can prescribe a nice little compact pill full of gut bacteria that replaces the ones wiped out as a side effect of antibiotics. The stuff about a biased diet messing up gut bacteria is also hard to find research on (I've read it, but it is a PITA to find again). Basically different bacteria specialize in breaking down different types of food. If you have a diet lacking in some major food group, that stock of bacteria runs low. Vegans can have this issue if they go back to eating meat. There is typically some tiny supply of the needed bacteria left and the population is restored after awhile, but the initial few hamburgers can be somewhat uncomfortable.
    - 11y ago
billjings 11y ago
Right, but physiology, psychology, and even sociology can all influence both calorie intake and expenditure. Send a kid to football camp, and they'll eat more and spend more calories. So: hard problem. Not strictly a technical problem, either.
stevebmark 11y ago
You think it's "pretty simple" because you haven't done any in depth research on the subject. Telling people to eat less and move more to lose weight is a recipe for failure. You have no qualifications but keep repeating the calories in calories out mantra. Until you've told this to hundreds of your patients and watching hundreds of them fail despite your useless advice, stop trying to shove your foot into the nutritional science door.
- nightski 11y ago
  While I respect the knowledge of doctors, often the "wisdom" they have does not agree with one another. We need a better approach than gut feeling. I highly doubt simply telling a mantra like calories in vs. calories out to patients is going to change their behavior much (does the doctor spend months in the home of a patient helping them follow their advice?). It's not a very scientific way to go about it.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> The amount of calories in our food tends to go up over 20 years. RTFA, please. Paragraph five, specifically.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

zacwest 11y ago

From the article you're writing a comment to: > A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Its strange really. I'm on a ketogenic diet, and hear people preach the caloric balance constantly, that it doesn't matter what my macros are as long as I consume less calories than I burn daily. Yet, I consume close to my previous garbage diet calories and I lose about 2-3lbs/week due to my high fat/moderate protein/very low carb (<15g/day of carbs) diet. Go figure, it appears that caloric energy balance isn't the only factor.
- jfoutz 11y ago
  It's an absolute limit. Perhaps there are specific modes that are a a few percent more or less efficient. Nonetheless, you eat less than you burn, you lose weight.
  - im3w1l 11y ago
    Him burning it is not the only possibility. Maybe he is shitting it out? Maybe bacteria in his body are burning it for him?
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Gut flora is a big possibility as to the discrepancy. I imagine there are some gut flora that are more adapt at breaking down carbohydrates than others, saturating the body in unnecessary energy to absorb.
- com2kid 11y ago
  From someone who's been doing keto for several years now. A: Pre-Keto, odds are you we underestimating how many calories you were eating. Unless you were tracking every single thing you ate, there is a high probability you just didn't realize how many calories you were consuming. B: It is super hard to over eat on Keto. It is possible, take lots of liquid calories in (heavy cream can do this easily!), and there are some other real screw ups, but eating 3000 calories of steak is pretty damn hard. C: What you are reporting is common for people who have a lot of weight to lose. At some point it becomes a lot harder, at first you just have to sort of watch things, then you eventually do have to count calories. (Especially if you want a six pack, holy crap do you have to count calories!)
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Thanks for that info! Did you ever experience symptoms similar to eye fatigue? I think I might be not consuming enough sodium and/or potassium; I'm going to up my doses of both to test my theory.
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      Everyone seems to warn about sodium and potassium while on keto - magnesium too. Apparently the suggested intakes are quite high and supplementing is the only way to get there. It might have just been placebo or drinking a hot cup of broth (with potassium salt in) but it made me feel better some days. I'd also second that it's really hard to eat a massive amount of calories on keto. Water loss and perhaps some changes might make you leaner but most likely, over time, you're simply getting a lot less than, I dunno 3000 that isn't hard to do on a sugary diet.
      - com2kid 11y ago
        Magnesium is good. Potassium, I eat leafy greens or Ostrim (http://www.protos-inc.com/ http://www.protos-inc.com/), which is low fat but has no carbs and lots of potassium. They also taste good, they are one of my after gym gotos. Gaining muscle on keto /is/ hard. You can do it (/r/ketogains can help!) but wow you have to stuff yourself, which is sort of odd for Keto!
- tdylan 11y ago
  From your comment it appears you weren't tracking avurately before, "close to". If you track energy expenditure as well as precise caloric intake you'll lose the same quantity of mass, give or take a few percent.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
tdylan 11y ago
They didn't control the energy expenditure to any meaningful degree. Essentially worthless.
- _delirium 11y ago
  The point of the study, from what I can tell, was to show that calories+macronutrients+exercise, the three main current targets of anti-obesity intervention, fail to account for a large portion of observed population-scale changes. They aren't arguing generally against total energy balance being involved, only that those three quantities don't constitute a sufficient measure of total energy balance. The implication would be that there are likely other sources of variation, e.g. changes in digestion, metabolism, etc. (the study doesn't really go out on a limb and speculate on that part).
tomp 11y ago
That doesn't mean much... Maybe people who eat the same now ate more in the past, which is why they're still fatter.

hspak 11y ago

I'd recommend reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. He explains how this is not really the case. It was written back in 2007; I'm sure there's more research out there to prove this point.

tdylan 11y ago
From what I've seen Garrys hypothesis was proven wrong by Alan Aragon.
- billjings 11y ago
  Taubes' end-of-the-book hypothesis about Atkins diets and the like isn't that great, but the whole initial portion of the book trashing the fat hypothesis is great. If you enjoy scientific writing, I promise that you will get a lot out of it, whether you agree with him or not. He's a fantastic writer, and an exhaustive researcher.

bemmu 11y ago

While that's also certainly true, the article says that in this case the calorie intake was the same. They were guessing gut bacteria could be different. Maybe the formula is calories in * bacteria efficiency - calories out?

Guzba 11y ago

A person gains weight because they intake more calories than they expend. Certainly. A room gets more crowded when more people enter than exit. Obviously true. Neither of these statements tell you why that is happening though, and that is important thing. So, why are people eating more calories? Or, since the articles says they aren't, could the sources of calories matter? (They do.)

theophrastus 11y ago
This simple thermodynamic model intake minus expenditure leaves out (at least) one dynamic metabolic feature: this engine can change its tendency for storage (weight gain) in a single organism or in a community of organisms given time. A change in the community storage tendency is what is alluded to in the linked article. That is, the organism can allow the excess calories to pass on by, or it can store it as fat (or glycogen). This, for instance, is the holy grail of weigh managing pharmaceuticals: to discover those effectors of "now store every un-expended calorie (as fat)". So finally it's something like: intake - expenditure = available for storage, but might not be stored.
- DennisP 11y ago
  And the other variable is how well the body turns fat reserves back into available energy. If that mechanism is inefficient then the equilibrium will be higher body fat. People seem to have an idea that every human body can just instantly burn however much fat it needs to burn to meet demand. It seems more likely that there's a limit to how fast the body can burn fat, which for some people is unusually low, and that if there's not enough energy available you'll be forced by thermodynamics to move less, think poorly, and produce less body heat.

com2kid 11y ago

There is a type of seaweed that if your average American eats it, there are zero calories absorbed. If most Japanese citizens eat it, they will absorb calories from it. There is a gut bacteria common in the Japanese population that extracts calories from this type of seaweed. "calories in" is that calories that went down your throat. It is calories that your body was able to digest, and "your body" includes many types of bacteria that are unique to each person and also unique to different population groups (meaning that some populations share commonalities in gut flora). It is possible that certain antibiotics have wipe out some types of gut flora, allowing others to proliferate more. That alone could increase calorie absorption. (Or cause a host of other problems!) It is possible that having a diet too heavily reliant upon one type of food results in an imbalance of some type. The problem is, this is a brand new area of research and we just don't know yet. But it is sure as heck known that it is more complicated than "calories in food down the throat".

tdylan 11y ago
Link to data/research?
- com2kid 11y ago
  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125675700 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1256757... Actual suspected caloric difference is minimal, after all, well, it is seaweed, not a very dense food stuff. :) I'm not going to link to antibiotics causing gut flora problems, it is well known and responsible doctors actually can prescribe a nice little compact pill full of gut bacteria that replaces the ones wiped out as a side effect of antibiotics. The stuff about a biased diet messing up gut bacteria is also hard to find research on (I've read it, but it is a PITA to find again). Basically different bacteria specialize in breaking down different types of food. If you have a diet lacking in some major food group, that stock of bacteria runs low. Vegans can have this issue if they go back to eating meat. There is typically some tiny supply of the needed bacteria left and the population is restored after awhile, but the initial few hamburgers can be somewhat uncomfortable.
  - 11y ago

billjings 11y ago

Right, but physiology, psychology, and even sociology can all influence both calorie intake and expenditure. Send a kid to football camp, and they'll eat more and spend more calories. So: hard problem. Not strictly a technical problem, either.

stevebmark 11y ago

You think it's "pretty simple" because you haven't done any in depth research on the subject. Telling people to eat less and move more to lose weight is a recipe for failure. You have no qualifications but keep repeating the calories in calories out mantra. Until you've told this to hundreds of your patients and watching hundreds of them fail despite your useless advice, stop trying to shove your foot into the nutritional science door.

nightski 11y ago
While I respect the knowledge of doctors, often the "wisdom" they have does not agree with one another. We need a better approach than gut feeling. I highly doubt simply telling a mantra like calories in vs. calories out to patients is going to change their behavior much (does the doctor spend months in the home of a patient helping them follow their advice?). It's not a very scientific way to go about it.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

> The amount of calories in our food tends to go up over 20 years. RTFA, please. Paragraph five, specifically.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]