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Honest question: how? I've never seen anyone who's obese and having a diet that made me go "huh that's odd how can they be obese?" While the inverse occasional

Honest question: how? I've never seen anyone who's obese and having a diet that made me go "huh that's odd how can they be obese?" While the inverse occasionally has been true, generally people who I consider in good shape appear to eat less, and less greasy food. So while there might be exceptions it seems to be a damn good rule of thumb to me.

jcul 3y ago
Just guessing as to the parent comments meaning. But I suppose that plenty of fats are healthy and part of a balanced diet. And someone who eats nothing but refined sugar is more likely to be over weight that someone with a high % of fat in their diet.
- Hedepig 3y ago
  I think you're right The danger is two fold 1. People don't eat fatty foods which have solid evidence for their benefits (e.g. Virgin olive oil) 2. People substitute the lack of fats with sugar, which I believe (not an expert) has a lot literature linking it with obesity
brettv2 3y ago
> I've never seen anyone who's obese and having a diet that made me go "huh that's odd how can they be obese?" Your question isn't refuting OPs claim: the people you are observing to be fat are fat because of their carb/sugar intake, not fat. i.e. if you just fed someone large amounts of protein and fat they would be lean; it is the sugar and carbs that make them fat.
- jlhf 3y ago
  No they wouldn’t stay lean. If you fed someone more calories than their body uses to maintain its current weight, they would get fat eventually. Regardless of whether they eat carbs, fat or protein.
  - kuschkufan 3y ago
    Let's say you're being fed just the amount of calories your body needs to maintain. What influence on body fat has the distribution of carbs, protein and fat from food then?
    - jlhf 3y ago
      My point was that regardless of what you eat, if you eat more than your body expends, some of the excess will be used to produce fat and you will gain weight. If you lead a sedentary lifestyle and eat 3000 calories of nothing but lean meat per day, you will gain weight. You are right that different foods (macronutrients, more specifically) have different thermic effects and therefore require different amounts of energy to metabolise. Protein takes more energy to process than fat. This does not change my overall point.
    - lobocinza 3y ago
      Not much for getting lean but it's easier to overeat carbs and fats are calorie dense. That said you need to eat a mix of the three to be healthy because they all have important body functions.
  - jbd0 3y ago
    You're so wrong. With only protein and fat, they would not be able to gain much weight. I've tried to gain weight on low carb/high fat, and it doesn't work. I was uncomfortably full after every meal. My tracking showed a significant calorie surplus, but my body wasn't absorbing it. Adding in more carbs made a huge difference. Hormones tell your body when to store fat.
    - Attummm 3y ago
      Did you know that bodybuilders in the 1950's(before anabolic steroids) used the egg and steak diet before contests as cutting diet to get lean? They would eat, as the name suggests, large quantities of steak and eggs with butter and have a carb refeeding day every 4 days. They would get really lean on a very high-calorie diet, think 4000 to 6000 calories. The inventor of diet famously lost a contest for being too lean.
- cies 3y ago
  Humans are bad at lipogenesis: we can only convert tiny fraction of the carbs into fat. Thus: the fat your eat is largely the fat you wear. You cannot explain it otherwise (without showing a undiscoverd way humans can convert carbs into fat). > i.e. if you just fed someone large amounts of protein and fat they would be lean; it is the sugar and carbs that make them fat. This is dangerous. It may work on the short term, but it is very dangerous on the long run.
  - thelittleone 3y ago
    High fat and protein is keto right? What's so dangerous?
    - cies 3y ago
      Ketosis is probably our rudimentary "wintersleep mode". Rudimentary as we are basically tropical animals (look at our lack of fur). We should not eat for ketosis. But we can eat (restricted to fat and protein) and still stay in ketosis, which is marketed as the keto diet and is not well tested in long term studies. You are a guinea pig when you do this long term.
      - imtringued 3y ago
        >You are a guinea pig when you do this long term. As opposed to being reliably obese? What's your baseline? I recently checked the average weight of men and women and I am honestly shocked.
        cies 3y ago
        Short term you can lose weight with ketosis. Long term you are taking unknown risks. The risks of obesity are well known. Also, you do not get obese by lack of a keto diet. One usually gets there with a rubbish diet.
        thelittleone 3y ago
- callmeal 3y ago
  > if you just fed someone large amounts of protein and fat they would be lean; A large amount of protein would make them fat - experiments have shown that about 8% of ingested protein gets converted to glucose in the liver: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636610/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636610/ The authors calculated that ∼18 g (79%) of the 23 g of ingested protein could be accounted for by deamination; thus those carbon skeletons were available for gluconeogenesis and release of new glucose into the circulation. The remainder, presumably, was used for new protein synthesis. The total amount of glucose entering the circulation from all sources was calculated to be 50 g over the 8-h period. However, only 4 g (8%) could be attributed to the ingested protein.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    I think you misread that experiment. It appears that some quantity of protein was converted to glucose, but that it wasn’t dependent in the quantity of protein consumed.
ggm 3y ago
Because of homeostasis: dissolved substances like fats in the bloodstream are regulated within bands, and beyond certain limits the amount ingested doesn't translate to more: it's excreted or winds up elsewhere. Your metabolism may cause states worse than other people, sure. But that pound of butter you ingested isn't directly causing rises in the bloodstream to infinity. It's long-term accumulated burden and excess over time. Cholesterol levels don't track intake directly. Lowering cholesterol and fat in diet needs to be done in consultation with somebody who understands your metabolism. Some vitamins are fat soluble. Some fat is beneficial. Homeostasis is amazing.
- cassepipe 3y ago
  While I always knew that sugars where the main culprit for body fat thanks to a highschool biology class, I have never understood why fat is less of a problem so thank you. Could you link me with sources or search keyword in order to know more of what the body is doing with excess fat ?
  - ggm 3y ago
    I tried "what does the body do with excess fat" and I think it covers it. For sure, you get higher triglycerides floating around in the bloodstream, and the liver is under stress. at the extreme end, its Steatorrhea which is .. unpleasant (olestra goes to the same place) The lymphatic system is also involved. So it's not entirely "eat as much fat as you like" by any stretch. It's more that over time, the body tends back to a baseline model. Continual high levels of fat which cause surplus in the bloodstream are heading to arterial blockage and isn't good, but the relationship of fat ingested to fats in the blood is a more complex path. "it depends" I'm not a bio scientist or a med. Happy to be corrected.
dimask 3y ago
"Being fat" and having too much fat (or the wrong kind of fat) in the blood or brain are not equivalent. Eg people with high cholesterol can be quite slim also.
zamalek 3y ago
> I've never seen anyone who's obese and having a diet that made me go "huh that's odd how can they be obese?" Are they eating fat _or sugar?_ The body will aggressively squirrel away any unused sugar as fat. As one example, a Big Mac contains 7g of _added_ sugar. Fries? Coated in dextrose. Sugar is added to damn-near everything.
- TylerLives 3y ago
  "Starch and glucose efficiently stimulate insulin secretion, and that accelerates the disposition of glucose, activating its conversion to glycogen and fat, as well as its oxidation. Fructose inhibits the stimulation of insulin by glucose, so this means that eating ordinary sugar, sucrose (a disaccharide, consisting of glucose and fructose), in place of starch, will reduce the tendency to store fat. Eating “complex carbohydrates,” rather than sugars, is a reasonable way to promote obesity. Eating starch, by increasing insulin and lowering the blood sugar, stimulates the appetite, causing a person to eat more, so the effect on fat production becomes much larger than when equal amounts of sugar and starch are eaten" From https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml
- cassepipe 3y ago
  Where I live, there's only one beer brand that does not have glucose syrup. Sad.
simonbarker87 3y ago
People get fat through consuming more calories than they burn for energy during the day. There are extra but around the edges but no matter the ratio of fat to carbs to protein, if someone consumes (food or liquid) 3,000 calories a day but only burns 2,500 calories a day then a decent portion of that 500 cal difference will get stored as body fat. You could eat 0 calories of fat but if that total of carbs and protein is over your energy burn then over time you will add body fat. I believe most people gain excess body fat through eating a little bit more than they need each day and then two or three weeks a year they eat and drink much more (holiday, Xmas, birthday etc), rather than consuming vast amounts of food day in day out of the wrong macro nutrient make up.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  The calorie hypothesis isn't the most likely from all the research I've done. The calorie as a unit of measure doesn't even make much sense IMO. A calorie is measured by burning food a specific distance away from a specific amount of water and measuring how much the water temperature rises. It's based on an assumption that the body uses all energy in the food the same, and that fire is analogous to the complex process from digestion to energy use in the cell. The calorie as a measure effectively equates the body to a coal power plant.
  - simonbarker87 3y ago
    Which the body basically is. Anyone who tracks their calories daily for a long period of time will see that when they eat more they gain weight, when they eat less they loose weight. Like I said above, there are other aspects that can factor but “calories in calories out” accounts for 80% of weight loss and weight gain (applying the broad brush of the 80:20 rule)
    - funcDropShadow 3y ago
      > “calories in calories out” accounts for 80% of weight loss and weight gain That is simply not true for people that are already obese.
    - 3y ago
imtringued 3y ago
Your body can't take fat from plants and animals and directly embed it into fat calls. The metabolism of ingested fat takes much more steps than say sugar, which can be directly absorbed into fat cells and also raises insulin resistance. Sugar and refined carbohydrates are a far bigger reason for obesity than fat consumption or "greasy food".

jcul 3y ago

Just guessing as to the parent comments meaning. But I suppose that plenty of fats are healthy and part of a balanced diet. And someone who eats nothing but refined sugar is more likely to be over weight that someone with a high % of fat in their diet.

Hedepig 3y ago
I think you're right The danger is two fold 1. People don't eat fatty foods which have solid evidence for their benefits (e.g. Virgin olive oil) 2. People substitute the lack of fats with sugar, which I believe (not an expert) has a lot literature linking it with obesity

brettv2 3y ago

> I've never seen anyone who's obese and having a diet that made me go "huh that's odd how can they be obese?" Your question isn't refuting OPs claim: the people you are observing to be fat are fat because of their carb/sugar intake, not fat. i.e. if you just fed someone large amounts of protein and fat they would be lean; it is the sugar and carbs that make them fat.

jlhf 3y ago
No they wouldn’t stay lean. If you fed someone more calories than their body uses to maintain its current weight, they would get fat eventually. Regardless of whether they eat carbs, fat or protein.
- kuschkufan 3y ago
  Let's say you're being fed just the amount of calories your body needs to maintain. What influence on body fat has the distribution of carbs, protein and fat from food then?
  - jlhf 3y ago
    My point was that regardless of what you eat, if you eat more than your body expends, some of the excess will be used to produce fat and you will gain weight. If you lead a sedentary lifestyle and eat 3000 calories of nothing but lean meat per day, you will gain weight. You are right that different foods (macronutrients, more specifically) have different thermic effects and therefore require different amounts of energy to metabolise. Protein takes more energy to process than fat. This does not change my overall point.
  - lobocinza 3y ago
    Not much for getting lean but it's easier to overeat carbs and fats are calorie dense. That said you need to eat a mix of the three to be healthy because they all have important body functions.
- jbd0 3y ago
  You're so wrong. With only protein and fat, they would not be able to gain much weight. I've tried to gain weight on low carb/high fat, and it doesn't work. I was uncomfortably full after every meal. My tracking showed a significant calorie surplus, but my body wasn't absorbing it. Adding in more carbs made a huge difference. Hormones tell your body when to store fat.
  - Attummm 3y ago
    Did you know that bodybuilders in the 1950's(before anabolic steroids) used the egg and steak diet before contests as cutting diet to get lean? They would eat, as the name suggests, large quantities of steak and eggs with butter and have a carb refeeding day every 4 days. They would get really lean on a very high-calorie diet, think 4000 to 6000 calories. The inventor of diet famously lost a contest for being too lean.
cies 3y ago
Humans are bad at lipogenesis: we can only convert tiny fraction of the carbs into fat. Thus: the fat your eat is largely the fat you wear. You cannot explain it otherwise (without showing a undiscoverd way humans can convert carbs into fat). > i.e. if you just fed someone large amounts of protein and fat they would be lean; it is the sugar and carbs that make them fat. This is dangerous. It may work on the short term, but it is very dangerous on the long run.
- thelittleone 3y ago
  High fat and protein is keto right? What's so dangerous?
  - cies 3y ago
    Ketosis is probably our rudimentary "wintersleep mode". Rudimentary as we are basically tropical animals (look at our lack of fur). We should not eat for ketosis. But we can eat (restricted to fat and protein) and still stay in ketosis, which is marketed as the keto diet and is not well tested in long term studies. You are a guinea pig when you do this long term.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      >You are a guinea pig when you do this long term. As opposed to being reliably obese? What's your baseline? I recently checked the average weight of men and women and I am honestly shocked.
      - cies 3y ago
        Short term you can lose weight with ketosis. Long term you are taking unknown risks. The risks of obesity are well known. Also, you do not get obese by lack of a keto diet. One usually gets there with a rubbish diet.
        thelittleone 3y ago
callmeal 3y ago
> if you just fed someone large amounts of protein and fat they would be lean; A large amount of protein would make them fat - experiments have shown that about 8% of ingested protein gets converted to glucose in the liver: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636610/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636610/ The authors calculated that ∼18 g (79%) of the 23 g of ingested protein could be accounted for by deamination; thus those carbon skeletons were available for gluconeogenesis and release of new glucose into the circulation. The remainder, presumably, was used for new protein synthesis. The total amount of glucose entering the circulation from all sources was calculated to be 50 g over the 8-h period. However, only 4 g (8%) could be attributed to the ingested protein.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  I think you misread that experiment. It appears that some quantity of protein was converted to glucose, but that it wasn’t dependent in the quantity of protein consumed.

ggm 3y ago

Because of homeostasis: dissolved substances like fats in the bloodstream are regulated within bands, and beyond certain limits the amount ingested doesn't translate to more: it's excreted or winds up elsewhere. Your metabolism may cause states worse than other people, sure. But that pound of butter you ingested isn't directly causing rises in the bloodstream to infinity. It's long-term accumulated burden and excess over time. Cholesterol levels don't track intake directly. Lowering cholesterol and fat in diet needs to be done in consultation with somebody who understands your metabolism. Some vitamins are fat soluble. Some fat is beneficial. Homeostasis is amazing.

cassepipe 3y ago
While I always knew that sugars where the main culprit for body fat thanks to a highschool biology class, I have never understood why fat is less of a problem so thank you. Could you link me with sources or search keyword in order to know more of what the body is doing with excess fat ?
- ggm 3y ago
  I tried "what does the body do with excess fat" and I think it covers it. For sure, you get higher triglycerides floating around in the bloodstream, and the liver is under stress. at the extreme end, its Steatorrhea which is .. unpleasant (olestra goes to the same place) The lymphatic system is also involved. So it's not entirely "eat as much fat as you like" by any stretch. It's more that over time, the body tends back to a baseline model. Continual high levels of fat which cause surplus in the bloodstream are heading to arterial blockage and isn't good, but the relationship of fat ingested to fats in the blood is a more complex path. "it depends" I'm not a bio scientist or a med. Happy to be corrected.

dimask 3y ago

"Being fat" and having too much fat (or the wrong kind of fat) in the blood or brain are not equivalent. Eg people with high cholesterol can be quite slim also.

zamalek 3y ago

> I've never seen anyone who's obese and having a diet that made me go "huh that's odd how can they be obese?" Are they eating fat _or sugar?_ The body will aggressively squirrel away any unused sugar as fat. As one example, a Big Mac contains 7g of _added_ sugar. Fries? Coated in dextrose. Sugar is added to damn-near everything.

TylerLives 3y ago
"Starch and glucose efficiently stimulate insulin secretion, and that accelerates the disposition of glucose, activating its conversion to glycogen and fat, as well as its oxidation. Fructose inhibits the stimulation of insulin by glucose, so this means that eating ordinary sugar, sucrose (a disaccharide, consisting of glucose and fructose), in place of starch, will reduce the tendency to store fat. Eating “complex carbohydrates,” rather than sugars, is a reasonable way to promote obesity. Eating starch, by increasing insulin and lowering the blood sugar, stimulates the appetite, causing a person to eat more, so the effect on fat production becomes much larger than when equal amounts of sugar and starch are eaten" From https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml
cassepipe 3y ago
Where I live, there's only one beer brand that does not have glucose syrup. Sad.

simonbarker87 3y ago

People get fat through consuming more calories than they burn for energy during the day. There are extra but around the edges but no matter the ratio of fat to carbs to protein, if someone consumes (food or liquid) 3,000 calories a day but only burns 2,500 calories a day then a decent portion of that 500 cal difference will get stored as body fat. You could eat 0 calories of fat but if that total of carbs and protein is over your energy burn then over time you will add body fat. I believe most people gain excess body fat through eating a little bit more than they need each day and then two or three weeks a year they eat and drink much more (holiday, Xmas, birthday etc), rather than consuming vast amounts of food day in day out of the wrong macro nutrient make up.

_heimdall 3y ago
The calorie hypothesis isn't the most likely from all the research I've done. The calorie as a unit of measure doesn't even make much sense IMO. A calorie is measured by burning food a specific distance away from a specific amount of water and measuring how much the water temperature rises. It's based on an assumption that the body uses all energy in the food the same, and that fire is analogous to the complex process from digestion to energy use in the cell. The calorie as a measure effectively equates the body to a coal power plant.
- simonbarker87 3y ago
  Which the body basically is. Anyone who tracks their calories daily for a long period of time will see that when they eat more they gain weight, when they eat less they loose weight. Like I said above, there are other aspects that can factor but “calories in calories out” accounts for 80% of weight loss and weight gain (applying the broad brush of the 80:20 rule)
  - funcDropShadow 3y ago
    > “calories in calories out” accounts for 80% of weight loss and weight gain That is simply not true for people that are already obese.
  - 3y ago

imtringued 3y ago

Your body can't take fat from plants and animals and directly embed it into fat calls. The metabolism of ingested fat takes much more steps than say sugar, which can be directly absorbed into fat cells and also raises insulin resistance. Sugar and refined carbohydrates are a far bigger reason for obesity than fat consumption or "greasy food".