There's nothing in the article that claims to defy thermodynamics. Consider this: anything you ingest can either be 1) absorbed by the body or 2) pass right thr

There's nothing in the article that claims to defy thermodynamics. Consider this: anything you ingest can either be 1) absorbed by the body or 2) pass right through you. This is determined by the digestive processes occurring in your body. If I feed you a bucket of pure sugar it will be metabolized differently than if I put the equivalent amount of sugar in non-digestible plastic pellets and had you swallow the pellets instead. Hence, it is obvious that weight gain and loss depends on more than just what you eat, it also depends on how your body digests what you eat. I love how armchair physicists love to repeat this thermodynamics claim as if it's some kind of revelation or even remotely relevant to nutrition science, when a growing body of research is showing that the body's metabolic processes affect weight gain/loss in ways far more complex than originally thought. For example, studies have shown that gut bacteria can have an effect on fat absorption and hence how many calories are extracted from the food you eat. This means that two people, eating the exact same thing, may absorb different amount of calories from it, and hence may gain/lose weight differently. Thermodynamics is completely irrelevant here. It tells us nothing meaningful at all.