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You forgot progressive lipodystrophy. Also, people still take insulin today and still gain weight from it. They're called 'diabetics.' And if a person has a hug

by thras 17y ago

You forgot progressive lipodystrophy. Also, people still take insulin today and still gain weight from it. They're called 'diabetics.' And if a person has a huge fat store (and if fat is really just an 'energy battery') why should there be any damage from starvation in the presence of proper nutrients? How does the thermodynamics theory explain weight homeostasis? The vast majority of people throughout history were able to maintain fairly constant weights throughout their lives. If it's just calories-in, calories-out, they would have to be regulating what they ate to within 10 calories a day to maintain their weight over a decade. I'm sorry, but this is silly science. You can't explain obesity by simple thermodynamics any more than you can explain growth at puberty by simple thermodynamics. Energy conservation, although true, tells you very little about self-regulating systems w.r.t. the environment.

Evgeny 17y ago
"Also, people still take insulin today and still gain weight from it." I'm wondering if it is possible to inject some insulin into a person, then put him on the scales (denying him any food/drink) and observe the weight increase. Obviously that is not possible. What if we take a person, force him to do some exercise so that he loses 1kg of weight, and then provide him with food/drink that weighs 900g combined? Will this person gain weight over the initial amount? What I'm trying to say, I think, is that while the simple calorie calculations may not be able to explain everything, surely weight increase can not come "from nowhere" without the abundance of food/liquid.
- radu_floricica 17y ago
  > I'm wondering if it is possible to inject some insulin into a person, then put him on the scales (denying him any food/drink) and observe the weight increase. Obviously that is not possible. This is not intellectually honest. It's not what he means, and you know it. Of course weight-gain comes from food, the problem is the relation between what you eat and what you store. If insulin or lack of can change the scales from 1:1 to 10:1, then it doesn't matter very much how much you eat any more, does it? Since you can realistically change only about 20-30% of both eaten food and burned calories. I'm not saying insulin does this (though it might very well) but for the sake of the discussion please don't fight the wrong idea.
  - Evgeny 17y ago
    I know what he means, but it's just an imaginary experiment. If we can control the person 24/7, provide him with reasonable diet/exercise program, but strictly control his food/liquid intake so that his body mass decreases for a mere 50g per day. How likely would it be for the person to die from starvation while maintaining the huge percentage of body fat? I personally think it would be highly unlikely, but that's just a guess.
- thras 17y ago
  If the insulin affects your fat tissue to increase energy pick up by the tissue itself (which we know it does), the result will be hunger. That hunger will lead to a) increased food intake, b) lower activity levels, or c) breakdown of other tissues to feed the fat. Thermodynamics holds, but the insulin is the driver in the process. Two things I suggest you look at: Zucker rats. An obese strain of rat. You can semi-starve it from infancy and it will get just as obese. It will be smaller, but the body fat percentage will be the same. The second thing to look at are overfeeding studies. It's very hard to overfeed people with protein. The only successful studies had to be done on prisoners, and they barely gained weight. With carbohydrates, it's the opposite. People would eat 10,000 calories a day and complain of being hungry. Weight gain is easy to introduce.
fatdog789 17y ago
- Throughout most of human history, people were pretty damn active. It's only recently, within the past 5 decades, that inactivity has become the norm. - Diabetes is chronic resistance to insulin; it is not "taking insulin". Diabetics gain weight not because of insulin, but because they are resistant to insulin, so the body is unable to properly break down food; more of it ends up being converted to fat so the body can try to break it down later. - Fat is not an energy battery. Carbohydrates are for energy. Fat is for providing nourishment when food is not readily available, and for warmth. - Damage from starvation is not to fat, it's to muscles. Muscles are high-maintenance tissues. If there aren't enough nutrients to maintain them, they break down. It only takes a day or two of fasting for this to occur; the longer the fasting period, the greater the damage. - Weight management is about calories consumed versus calories expended. If you want to call that thermodynamics, so be it, but it demonstrates that you don't understand what thermodynamics is, or that you don't understand how the human body works. - My science is medical science. It's backed by prevailing medical opinion. Hell, I made sure to check WebMD and various other medical sites to make sure i wasn't pulling it out of my ass. It's very simple: eat more than your body can convert into energy or expel through various bodily functions, and that remaining mass remains in your body, as fat. Too much of that fat, and you have "obesity". Puberty is red herring. However, medical science has shown that puberty is triggered by the quantity of food one eats -- suggesting a mass trigger for puberty, which explains why fat little boys and girls hit puberty early, but gymnasts look like little girls into their 20s.
- thras 17y ago
  "Weight management is about calories consumed versus calories expended." Yeah. That's about as useful as saying that alcoholism is caused by over-drinking. There are all sorts of diseases and conditions that cause obesity, and we know for a fact that the primary cause is not eating too much (eating too much or too little is the effect): menopause-induced weight gain, drug-induced weight-gain, cancer-induced weight loss. The idea that the recent (post-1970) epidemic of obesity might have something to do with the massive amounts of refined carbohydrates we began consuming (in response to low-fat hysteria) is not a bizarre one. Sugar is a brand-new element to the human diet and now we're eating 100 pounds per year per capita. And with your last statement, you aren't seriously denying the primacy of growth hormone in childhood growth, are you? Because otherwise, your argument about mass triggers is rather tangential.

by thras 17y ago

Evgeny 17y ago

"Also, people still take insulin today and still gain weight from it." I'm wondering if it is possible to inject some insulin into a person, then put him on the scales (denying him any food/drink) and observe the weight increase. Obviously that is not possible. What if we take a person, force him to do some exercise so that he loses 1kg of weight, and then provide him with food/drink that weighs 900g combined? Will this person gain weight over the initial amount? What I'm trying to say, I think, is that while the simple calorie calculations may not be able to explain everything, surely weight increase can not come "from nowhere" without the abundance of food/liquid.

radu_floricica 17y ago
> I'm wondering if it is possible to inject some insulin into a person, then put him on the scales (denying him any food/drink) and observe the weight increase. Obviously that is not possible. This is not intellectually honest. It's not what he means, and you know it. Of course weight-gain comes from food, the problem is the relation between what you eat and what you store. If insulin or lack of can change the scales from 1:1 to 10:1, then it doesn't matter very much how much you eat any more, does it? Since you can realistically change only about 20-30% of both eaten food and burned calories. I'm not saying insulin does this (though it might very well) but for the sake of the discussion please don't fight the wrong idea.
- Evgeny 17y ago
  I know what he means, but it's just an imaginary experiment. If we can control the person 24/7, provide him with reasonable diet/exercise program, but strictly control his food/liquid intake so that his body mass decreases for a mere 50g per day. How likely would it be for the person to die from starvation while maintaining the huge percentage of body fat? I personally think it would be highly unlikely, but that's just a guess.
thras 17y ago
If the insulin affects your fat tissue to increase energy pick up by the tissue itself (which we know it does), the result will be hunger. That hunger will lead to a) increased food intake, b) lower activity levels, or c) breakdown of other tissues to feed the fat. Thermodynamics holds, but the insulin is the driver in the process. Two things I suggest you look at: Zucker rats. An obese strain of rat. You can semi-starve it from infancy and it will get just as obese. It will be smaller, but the body fat percentage will be the same. The second thing to look at are overfeeding studies. It's very hard to overfeed people with protein. The only successful studies had to be done on prisoners, and they barely gained weight. With carbohydrates, it's the opposite. People would eat 10,000 calories a day and complain of being hungry. Weight gain is easy to introduce.

fatdog789 17y ago

- Throughout most of human history, people were pretty damn active. It's only recently, within the past 5 decades, that inactivity has become the norm. - Diabetes is chronic resistance to insulin; it is not "taking insulin". Diabetics gain weight not because of insulin, but because they are resistant to insulin, so the body is unable to properly break down food; more of it ends up being converted to fat so the body can try to break it down later. - Fat is not an energy battery. Carbohydrates are for energy. Fat is for providing nourishment when food is not readily available, and for warmth. - Damage from starvation is not to fat, it's to muscles. Muscles are high-maintenance tissues. If there aren't enough nutrients to maintain them, they break down. It only takes a day or two of fasting for this to occur; the longer the fasting period, the greater the damage. - Weight management is about calories consumed versus calories expended. If you want to call that thermodynamics, so be it, but it demonstrates that you don't understand what thermodynamics is, or that you don't understand how the human body works. - My science is medical science. It's backed by prevailing medical opinion. Hell, I made sure to check WebMD and various other medical sites to make sure i wasn't pulling it out of my ass. It's very simple: eat more than your body can convert into energy or expel through various bodily functions, and that remaining mass remains in your body, as fat. Too much of that fat, and you have "obesity". Puberty is red herring. However, medical science has shown that puberty is triggered by the quantity of food one eats -- suggesting a mass trigger for puberty, which explains why fat little boys and girls hit puberty early, but gymnasts look like little girls into their 20s.

thras 17y ago
"Weight management is about calories consumed versus calories expended." Yeah. That's about as useful as saying that alcoholism is caused by over-drinking. There are all sorts of diseases and conditions that cause obesity, and we know for a fact that the primary cause is not eating too much (eating too much or too little is the effect): menopause-induced weight gain, drug-induced weight-gain, cancer-induced weight loss. The idea that the recent (post-1970) epidemic of obesity might have something to do with the massive amounts of refined carbohydrates we began consuming (in response to low-fat hysteria) is not a bizarre one. Sugar is a brand-new element to the human diet and now we're eating 100 pounds per year per capita. And with your last statement, you aren't seriously denying the primacy of growth hormone in childhood growth, are you? Because otherwise, your argument about mass triggers is rather tangential.