6 ms·

Probably because it's still irrelevant to CICO. CICO doesn't tell you how much calories go in or out, rather it tells you to measure them wherever possible and

• hammock 10y ago
  It is relevant. You might have thought I meant it debunks it (or supports it), what I meant was it adds color to it. Conversion ratio allows you to quantify the difference from one person to another (the "adjustments based on weight change" you refer to)
  • WorldMaker 10y ago
    I still think calories in health science are the last bastion of phlogiston in any of the sciences. It's a deeply over-simplifying metric that implies a false equivalency. We estimate the calories in food by the amount of heat equivalent they create when burnt. We estimate the calorie usage of a human body by the heat it produces during the effort. None of those estimates do justice to the complex biology and chemistry processes at work: not all calories are equal, they never have been, they never will be. (Humans aren't just heat-producing machines. Digestion is nothing at all like producing raw heat from food.) ETA: It's the health science equivalent of the physics spherical cow fallacy writ large and taken dogmatically.
    • DougWebb 10y ago
      It's kind of like measuring the performance of vehicles by looking only at the chemical energy of the fuel they use and how far they go on a given amount of fuel. Those seem like reasonable measurements, until you try to put jet fuel in a motorcycle or bunker oil in your car. The design, efficiency, and maintenance status of the engine matters a lot.
      • jtuente 10y ago
        Well of course CICO is an oversimplification, it's supposed to be. It's meant to be the basis of the diet. Your analogy is about as useful as saying 2-dimensional kinematics doesn't translate to 3-dimensional kinematics because it doesn't have a component for handling the third dimension.
        • DougWebb 10y ago
          Except it doesn't translate, when you're trying to handle the third dimension. And CICO isn't an effective basis for your diet when there are biological factors with large impacts that CICO simply doesn't address.
          • jtuente 10y ago
            What large factors outweigh calorie content? There are plenty of dietary restrictions for things like Crohn's and diabetes, but they're easily worked around without changing overall calorie consumption. Hypothyroidism and other metabolic diseases can't cause weight gain without an overabundance of calories consumed. The fact that someone's BMR lowers because of them is not a bigger factor than how much calories a person consumes.
    • jtuente 10y ago
      Good job, you've expounded on the obvious short-coming of "simplification". Most people have a hard enough time with algebra, how do you expect them to handle the many complexities of human biology and the digestive process. CICO is meant as a starting point in a diet, not a be-all, end-all encompassing idea. The spherical cow exists to simplify ideas so they can be more easily grasped and learned.
      • jessaustin 10y ago
        The spherical cow is a useful approximation in many contexts. However one wouldn't find many aerospace engineers using it to predict the performance of an aircraft. CICO would be an appropriate approximation for e.g. an ecologist studying food chains. That it's used in the context of human nutrition, however, is nearly as severe an indictment of the field as the fact that all of its studies are sponsored by industry.
        • jtuente 10y ago
          Again most people aren't trying to engineer their diets, what they need is simple concepts that provide a good outline of what they need to do to meet their goals. Self-monitoring and self-correction are far more useful than knowing a precise formula of how much meat, dairy, fruits and veggies one should be eating.
          • jessaustin 10y ago
            Again... Yes you are certainly persistent but we are talking about the state of nutrition as a science not about rules of thumb that average people can use when thinking about diets. The former and the latter are different things.
            • jtuente 10y ago
              Then what point are you actually trying to make here? The original comment I made was that this research is irrelevant in regards to CICO. I stand by that a precise formula for what to eat is largely useless in the everyday sense, unless you're developing something akin to Soylent, which could be considered an engineering endeavor.