What worked for them won't work for everyone. Try snacking on 2,000 calories worth of nuts a day (which isn't that hard) and see how much weight you lose! What this person likely did was, eliminate the foods that caused them to over-eat, and they lost weight, which happened to be sugar.
I have eaten nuts for days and I can tell you it will get old quickly. It’s no coincidence that sugar leads to over-eating. The body sends a very strong signal to eat when the sugar is digested. The same signal does not happen when nuts are digested.
its not just sugar. its the mixture of sugar and fat and other things that make food items more likely to cause over-eating. its called palatability. Theres a huge difference between chocolate, or ice cream, and chowing down on spoonfuls of pure sugar.
I have a sweet tooth, but I'm also diabetic. I still snack on sweets but I replaced sugar with pure monk fruit extract. I've lost 40 pounds in the last year. I make all kinds of monk fruit sweetened deserts and buy all kinds of low/no-sugar snacks and eat plenty of them every day to the point where my sweet tooth is very well satiated. You can say it's coincidental or whatever you want, but I have no doubt my weight loss and improved health is from cutting out sugar from my diet.
Congrats that's amazing! I know someone who has replaced regular sugar with date sugar, it tastes amazing, especially in deserts with none of the weird aftertaste.
That was the second time I reduced my sugar. The first time, about 20 years ago I was on the "candida diet", which eliminates all sugar intake, and it's extremely strict. It's done to reduce/remove candida from the gut. I lost 60 pounds.
Reducing sugar isn't just about reducing calories. More sugar means more gut imbalance, and that can cause some serious problems. It's not always easy to connect the dots, and not many people really get to know or understand the messages their own bodies are sending them. And doctors DNGAF about nutrition or diet, not really at least - they just treat symptoms with pharmaceuticals but a real cure for some ailments means a serious change in eating habits, and one of the best changes to promote health is reducing sugar intake.
It's almost as if calories aren't relevant, but that the effect that different foods have on the body is.
Also, I'm not sure what you're communicating with the point about nuts. Are you saying that a person will gain weight? Lose weight? Lose nothing? Depending on what you were implying, you might actually be proving the author's point.
By the way, I actually have done many experiments eating various monodiets, including nuts. The worst was walnuts. I love walnuts, but the end result was horrendous. I almost certainly would have lost weight because so much of the fats were not being absorbed (ALA is poorly metabolized) and passing through. On the other hand, fresh raw peanut butter (with a little salt) was not only satiating but well tolerated.
My experience reflects exactly why people object to CICO. Nobody is saying that two different substances can emit the same amount of heat measured in calories when burned in a bomb calorimeter. The root objection is that the body will treat different substances the same way. It's wildly untrue that you can just eat anything and predict a health outcome with 3rd grade arithmetic. CICO doesn't explain why I could sustain a diet solely of peanut butter (no sugar added) but couldn't eat a diet only of walnuts, to the point where the "calories" were coming out in my shit having not been oxidized.
youve found an extremely bizarre edge case where CICO doesnt perfectly hold and you think thats some sort of death knell to the general principle that if you eat more calories than you burn you will store it as fat?
It may be an extreme case, but it's no more an edge case than the millions who drop weight eating a vegan diet or a high fat diet. By definition, there is no edge case for the human body because nobody designed it. It developed with pressures to encourage it to handle foreign substances in different ways. There's no programmer who made the human but left out the part of efficiently metabolizing walnuts as a form of oversight.
> you think thats some sort of death knell to the general principle
Yes, it completely defeats the general principle, and if it didn't then those insisting on CICO would reply with more than "how can you actually believe what I don't believe?"
> if you eat more calories than you burn you will store it as fat?
If it was simple as that, then we wouldn't have glycogen stores because... why bother when anything not immediately oxidized turns to fat! If it's as simple as that, protein wouldn't ever be used to maintain lean mass but would be all converted to glucose and then into fat by the liver (not at all efficient). If it's as simple as that, then we would never shit. Don't believe me? I challenge you to collect your stool, dry it out, and light it on fire. Look – calories!
youre being pedantic about a 5-10% calorie spread here or there when 90% of people are overeating at a magnitude of 50-200%. everything you're talking about is insignificant for the average person.
You're being really sloppy with your numbers too. If someone ate 200% more than what they need on average, they'd be putting on 300 or 400 pounds per year. That's like a pound a day, and it's not what happens to most people. Even at 50% over eating, that's about 50 pounds per year, and people don't sustain that either.
Instead, many people past a certain age seem to maintain a weight that's way too high (obese), but not still going up quickly. I think you should adjust your numbers to fit the facts and then reconsider which details are actually important.
Heh, you're really unpleasant. Pick your BMR calculator of choice, but 6000 calories a day corresponds to about 850-1100 pounds. There are very few people that heavy.
You should use your brain to learn some math, quit being a jack ass, admit when you're wrong, and learn from your mistakes instead of hiding them with insults.
Uh... what are you talking about? Yeah, of course the inaccuracy of calories isn't important to the 90% whom... aren't counting calories or aren't dieting. Why you thought this was a valid point to make escapes me.
10 percent is not trivial if someone is trying to lose weight by counting calories while eating foods that are obesogenic. And yes, many people do this specifically because body fat comes down to a simple equation. Practically everyone I know whom has taken the calorie-counting approach has done so with the idea that they can still eat pasta and other crap. It's extremely common. Also, given that the calorie counts on packaged food can be off by as much as 20%, and that people at home are getting their TDEE from either calculators or fitness watches that estimate their TDEE, people doing CICO are at high risk for overeating and not losing body fat at a satisfactory rate. Moreover, if they're eating crap, they may be losing more weight in muscle than desired because the human body does not care about thermodynamics.
Yes, if a meal contains 150-300 "calories" than is suggested then that's a setback, especially for those using CICO as a way to give themselves permission to keep eating obesogenic crap. Someone can drive a car while stepping on both the gas and the brakes at the same time... buy why? Unless a person is weighing their food, calories are an imperfect measure that only measure one thing, which is heat. Calories tell you nothing about how metabolized substrates are being delegated. Is it being used immediately, or stored in glycogen, or stored in fat, or pooped out? Who knows! Calories will never tell you that.
For the sake of argument, let's pretend that we're trying to lose weight by eating no more than our BMR of 1650 calories per day and doing some exercise to put us into what some would call a "calorie deficit."
If we divide 1650 calories into 3 meals, each meal would be around 550 calories. However, in the worst case that the calorie estimate for these meals is off by 20%, then each meal contains 110 extra calories, putting our calorie intake 330 calories over our target.
Ok, that's fine. We'll just run those calories off at the gym, right? If we use a MET calculator, this would reveal that we'd have to run for around 35 minutes to actually oxidize enough food to produce 330 calories of heat. But what has actually happened here? Since glucose metabolism is prioritized, a significant amount of those calories won't have been produced by fat oxidation. If the food we're eating put our RQ at 1.0 or greater, such as if we're eating pasta and toquitoes, that puts us at greater risk of burning carbs but not fat. This isn't a bad thing per se, since some of those carbs might have been otherwise stored as fat. But after 35 minutes of intense running, how much have we really achieved if we are trying to lose body fat? Not much unless we run much longer than 35 minutes every day. Most people simply don't keep up this kind of routine for very long.
On the other hand, perhaps we end up undereating, or we decide to eat even less than we were before. This can work because something's gotta give and fat mass will continually be accessed and used. However, we would likely be at risk for muscle loss. Without enough protein, muscle is difficult to hold on to. If we reach a point where our glycogen stores are chronically exhausted, then glucose has to come from somewhere, and if it's satisfied by exogenous carbohydrates then it's gotta come from breaking down muscle through gluconeogenesis. We'll lose weight in the long run, but at what cost? Even if protein is factored in to meals, it still may not be enough if we're not eating as many calories as we thought we were.
If you think what I'm saying is trivial, then tell that to all the researchers you seem to think are w...
your continued obsession with the accuracy of the numbers im just pulling off the top of my head is just reinforcing my point that hacknernews commenters are by far the most pedantic and insufferable people on the entire internet.
worrying about protein absorption and glycogen stores is so far off the mark on what is important to someone trying to lose weight that you are actively harming them by making them think this is some sort of complicated problem, when it is not.
> you are actively harming them by making them think this is some sort of complicated problem
Take a hike, dude.
You can disagree all you want, but there's no good reason for you to to be this rude. So far, you haven't shown the slightest indication that you know enough about the subject to assert that I'm "actively" harming anyone. You really have a nerve to say that when your responses are so devoid of substance. If you can't handle civil conversations that aren't to your liking, you are free to not participate.
Exactly this. I threw bread out of my diet and counted calories for a year. I ate plenty of chocolate and sweets but still lost a substantial amount of fat. 0.5-2kg a month, depending on a month. All together I lost 16kg in a year.
> “Calorie is a calorie” is thermodynamically correct, but not true when it comes to diet. It’s like saying “it doesn’t matter if you drink booze or beer as long as you get the same amount of alcohol”. Alcohol intake is much easier to regulate with mild beverages. The same applies to energy intake with low-glycemic-index products.
While I have serious concerns about most nutritional/exercise studies the underwhelming number that point to low carb/low fat/etc. as the end-all-be-all even controlled for calories is still mind-blowing. It's all calories at the end of the day, you should do whatever satisfies your micro and macro needs while helping you to stick to the diet.
I think we would both agree that a theoretically imperfect diet that improves health is preferable to a perfect diet that doesn't maintain health in practice.
However, it's not "all calories" at the end of the day. If all we cared about was losing or maintaining weight, then calories might approach being a tool for it. Yet it's not actually the weight we care about when we say we want to lose weight; it's the body fat we care about, and probably muscle maintenance, which is why CICO falls apart. Diets composed of different macro ratios can have drastically different outcomes, and what's funny about that is most camps ranging from vegans to carnivores implicitly agree on this, yet many still choose to elevate theoretical physics above physiology.
A lump of coal has measurable "calories" when burned in a bomb calorimeter. That doesn't mean that a human will oxidize a lump of coal and produce calories. A human can eat carbs or fat, but they result in different outcomes because those things are fundamentally metabolized and utilized differently. Even different types of carbs and different types of fat have different effects from each other, regardless of caloric value. In terms of a person's health status, calories are hardly relevant.
Also, most people don't even come close to measuring their "calories." When they lose weight counting calories, they are getting lucky by figuring out how much it takes to under eat, which can also mean unnecessary muscle loss when they don't take into account the composition of what they are eating. Many people who count calories either struggle to lose that weight or lose a ton of muscle because they believe that a calorie is a calorie and that therefore they can eat crap and "run it off." In either case, they're not really measuring what they think they're measuring because calorie counts on food are allowed to be as far off as 20%, and virtually nobody weighs their feces to estimate how many consumed "calories" didn't actually get used.
When you're at a caloric deficit your body will begin to burn fat. It doesn't make a difference what kind of calories you're intaking - your body literally does not know.
What you're speaking to wrt fat loss vs weight loss is a much more complicated subject than just eating the right foods and having a calorie deficit.
There's no "caloric deficit." Your body stores and oxidizes fat because it needs to get the appropriate mass from somewhere. If the body has fat to oxidize, then there's no deficit of anything.
> It doesn't make a difference what kind of calories you're intaking - your body literally does not know.
You're conflating a few things here.
Fundamentally, you're saying that the body doesn't contain an internal calorie counter. In that sense, you are absolutely correct. The human body, and pretty much all organisms performing respiration, does not keep track of calories in any capacity or measure mass. The only thing the body can do is delegate different kinds of mass to the places in different cells where their presence would be of benefit to the survival of the system. That's really it, though it's a bit of an oversimplification.
However, if we correct "kind of calories" to "kind of mass", and drop the whole idea of the body "knowing" something, then what you are saying is fundamentally untrue. It is not controversial in any way that the cells in the human body, and all creatures for that matter, treat macronutrients differently and prioritize them in ways that are not equivalent.
Yes, it's more complicated, but food composition is way up there in terms of importance.
>When you're at a caloric deficit your body will begin to burn fat. It doesn't make a difference what kind of calories you're intaking
Of course it matters. Here's an experiment. Drink only 12 cans of soda (~140 cals each) spread over the day (so 1680 cals total). Assuming a BMR of 2000 cals (standard male), you're at a deficit.
Assuming you start drinking as soon as you get up and last one just before you got to sleep, will you lose weight?
No.. because your insulin is constantly spiked throughout the day which inhibits fat burn.
Came here to say this. There was a pretty funny study some researcher did a long time ago where he ate nothing but twinkies and water for a month and lost a ton of weight by restricting calories. Was he probably miserable and hungry? Sure. But, your body doesn't really differentiate too much when it comes to calories in vs calories out.
Proteins/Fiber/etc. are only good diet options because they are very filling for the amount of calories they have. Additionally, certain macros like protein help to build muscle, which can raise your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure).
But you're right, a calorie definitely is a calorie - even in a diet.
I found articles about this experiment, but it doesn't appear that an actual study was performed or formal paper published about it. Although that person was (perhaps still is) a professor in nutrition, this Twinkie story remains an anecdote. Anecdotes are worth something, but what that means is we're missing a bunch of variables, especially what he was eating prior to the experiment and whether eating nothing but Twinkies and other snack foods also lead to muscle loss. It's also totally unclear, from what I'm reading, how much exercise he was performing and what is TDEE was prior to and after the weight loss. A month is not a lot of time to understand the long term sustainability of a diet like that.
If a person finds that a Twinkie diet works to help them cut fat in a short period of time, there's really not much to object to. Asserting that it's OK to just eat food that is classically categorized as "junk" as long as you don't eat too many calories is fallacious and ignores the poisonous nature of the things we eat.
> But you're right, a calorie definitely is a calorie - even in a diet.
It's not that calories aren't what they are, or that they don't have some use. The core objection is that they aren't an appropriate measure for human health. At best, they are a very imperfect proxy for mass measurement. If you want to lose weight, don't eat more anhydrous mass than you eliminate. When you measure calories to the exclusion of nutrient composition, not only is one ignoring a mode of optimization (that could lead to longer term successful outcomes), but they are relying on very inaccurate tools. Calorie counts on packaging are allowed to be as inaccurate as 20%, and the tools people use to count their "calories" really aren't accurate enough for that purpose (researchers still use respiratory gas analysis for that reason).
Obviously, someone can maintain or lose weight by counting "calories." That does not mean what they are doing is optimal or sustainable in the long term, or that anyone is a fool for taking the exact opposite approach. The many people out there who do not count calories, eat as much as they want of a specific diet, incidentally eat more in "calories", and still lose weight throw a wrench into the whole "it's just calories in, calories out" hypothesis.
Well said. Additionally, even if we reduce all foods down to calorie counts, some "calories" (foods) are more pro-inflammatory, while other "calories" are anti-inflammatory. I'll let the reader guess which group highly processed foods vs whole foods tend to land in. On the balance, no mater how many calories you are taking in, if your body is experiencing inflammation from the foods you eat (while also lacking all kinds of anti-inflammatory compounds, both directly from the whole foods and as a result of bacterial metabolism of these foods)... you are not going to have as much energy to move your body around. Not to mention many other detrimental effects to your wellbeing and experience of energy levels.
And this ignores all manner of more complex interactions between the foods we eat and host and microbial metabolism. See my nearby comment for one such example.
Furthermore, "a calorie is a calorie" ignores the incredibly complex relationships in our microbiome between bacteria, fungi, and yes even viruses (which apparently can and do absorb nutrients when they are in a host cell), that constitute a significant portion of the metabolism going on in our bodies. Dietary changes can alter the microbiome dramatically in relatively short periods of time, with some studies showing measurable microbiome composition shifts in as little as 3 weeks! [0] (note that while most of the examples in this review are on mice, there are human studies included further down that also demonstrate this rapid shift)
Processed carbs, and especially refined sugar, is rapidly absorbed in the upper GI, bypassing most of the beneficial microbes that 'preprocess' much of our raw food intake (especially complex carbs, like the prebiotic fibers and such) into more beneficial metabolites. Including bacterial metabolites that are essential to health and cellular energy.
Consider processed fructose vs fructose from a fruit, eaten whole. The former starts entering the bloodstream directly upon consumption, where it then must be processed by our own liver at some metabolic expense. Some people refer to fructose as "toxic" for reasons such as this:
>fructose induces a number of proinflammatory, fibrogenic, and oncogenic signaling pathways that explain its deleterious effects in the body, especially in the liver. [1]
Furthermore, when there is excess free fructose in the upper intestines, more than the body can rapidly absorb, it is also metabolically expensive simply to clear it from the gut to get it into the liver. This process can lead to ATP depletion in the GI tract. [1] Thus it robs us of that magical substance that powers all of our cellular activity, from muscle firing to nerve impulse activation (both of which are critical to optimum digestive function) and beyond.
On the other hand, when fructose is bound up in in complex carbs (fruit), it gets farther down into the intestines where fructose loving bacteria such as F. prausnitzi can ferment it for us. [2] In addition to sparing our ATP reserves in the gut and sparing our liver the trouble of processing fructose, F. prausnitzi produces an incredibly beneficial nutrient, butyrate, in the process. Butyrate has protective effects on the gut and intestinal barrier, and it is also a key building block of that lovely neurotransmitter GABA, that helps keep all of our other neurotransmitters in check (which is why it is called the "calming neurotransmitter").
Finally, on a hunch, I went ahead and googled "butyrate and satiety" which immediately returned this:
> Fermentation of fiber in the gut generates short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), such as butyrate, which decrease food intake and promote weight loss in rodent models. SCFA have been shown to enhance secretion of the gut satiety hormone peptide YY (PYY). [3]
Further investigation shows that this peptide is also active in humans, reducing hunger signals in the brain. [4]
All of this is to say, while the popular phrase "a calorie is a calorie" can help people to understand diet and weight loss in terms of an energy budget, the reality is far, far more complex than that. And we have truly only scratched the surface of all the complexity going on in the microbiome as it relates to diet and cellular functions throughout the body. Especially our immune system, which appears to borrow many critical metabolites from bacterial activity on the foods we choose to eat. It will be exciting to see how far down this rabbit hole we get in the coming years. For now, whenever we hear "a calorie is a calorie," it is useful to remember that things are not nearly so simple, and this sometimes helpful simplification can lead us astray quickly if we are not judicious in how we apply it.
> If you’re struggling to lose weight, just remove sugar from your diet. I promise you: you’ll be thinner.
...
> I’ve never been exactly fat, but I used to be nearly 10 kg heavier when I did energy drinks, sugary snacks and desserts.
So in other words, not only is this opinion not supported by the scientific evidence, it's not even really supported by mmalmi's personal experience. Phenomenal.
>it's not even really supported by mmalmi's personal experience. Phenomenal.
Notwithstanding this correct observation, it's still probably still a good idea for the majority of the population who aren't as analytical as folks on HN to follow.
Too much so called 'food' is laced with added sugar, salt, bad oils that is not healthy which should generally be avoided.
I really dislike this kind of "we HackerNews users are smarter than everyone else" attitude. It's not justified to lie to people because you think they are stupid.
I can tell you from experience that most overweight people know a lot about nutrition and proper ways to eat. Lack of knowledge and education is not the primary issue. Many people who struggle with food issues do so because they are self-medicating for various levels of depression/anxiety/other psychological issues. It is quite difficult to break these bad eating habits without having a replacement for the temporary positive effects they create.
Articles like this are extremely annoying. Nearly every educated person knows everything this article says. It just comes across as condescending in a "I can do this, so anyone can" sort of way.
I would not underestimate the how shortsighted people are -- most of my peers are PhD students and most of them skip meals. Anecdotally, none of my flatmates eat breakfast, and my office mates often skip lunch and/or dinner because they have a meeting. The food offered at the university is a steal for the price and how convenient it is. These people are not out of money, they are (work) sprinting.
Is skipping meals bad? Like let’s assume the worst case: someone ate like shit all 3 meals a day. Instant ramen, spam, potato chips, ice cream, whatever. And then they skip a meal and on their next one they are 1.5 meals worth of food. Is that worse?
Yes. Skipping meals can condition your body to store away more of it because it isn't sure when the next meal will come, eventually making you fatter even if you eat very little.
cheap unprocessed brown rice, dried beans, frozen branded grocery store veg is not that expensive. (some spices help as well). Lots of poor students live on that.
Of course, it can't compete with super tasty fast-food places (laced with sugar/salt).
Bullshit sugar is self-medication for depression/anxiety/psychological issues. Besides the fact it makes all those things worse, you can get the same effect from eating sweet foods richer in fibre and nutrients, and the “dose” people are using is like treating a toothache by taking 5 Tylenol. People aren’t carefully dosing out sugar in response to adverse events, they’re indulging in mega doses all day every day.
I know people who got type 2 diabetes from sugar usage and the vast majority of them magically find the willpower to cut sugar once it’s about to kill them. Not to say their diets were wonderful afterwards but few people are so addicted to sugar they couldn’t stop if they REALLY needed to. There’s a ton of learned helplessness and people just make things that aren’t their health their priority in life unless they’re forced to because it takes so much time and energy to eat a low sugar diet that they just decide they don’t care enough.
Man I guess the majority of Americans must be anxious and depressed given they’re all eating huge quantities of sugar. I guess if we label things an illness that means we need to both accept this and pat people on the back for taking charge of their health and self-medicating.
One of the core components of exercise in losing fat isn't even increasing caloric burn.
Exercise is the best anti-depressive "drug", it's better than any anti-depressant SSRI drug.
And there's about a dozen other bonuses to getting fit. Getting people out of the house, crapping better, sleeping better, mental acuity, life extension, better quality of life for your lifespan, reduction in cancer, reduction in injury from day to day mishaps, etc.
Exactly, the caloric burn that allows you to consume more calories without trouble is just the cherry on top; it allows you to get treats without needing to restrict other important areas of nutrition.
Taking the radical approach to banning all sugar is just too restrictive and counterproductive, because the most important part is getting satisfied by what you eat.
In my opinion (and experience) people who struggle with weight tend to be bad at cooking and/or selecting the food they actually want to eat; then they feel bad and end up doing both: overeating stuff that isn't so good for health (especially if exercise isn't matched) after eating not so good food they felt they needed to eat.
Pro cyclist actually consumes pure sugar for the load of exercise they do and they are some of the lowest body fat people on earth, it would actually be problematic for them to eat too many fibrous foods since they could never digest it fast enough to meet their energy expenditure.
Completely right about knowing v doing but even the knowing gets skewed. The real problem that too much sucrose and fructose (whether added to not) is insulin overproduction.
I get annoyed when some people talk about an apple is better than a cookie because an apple has "natural" sugar as if sugar cane is synthetic. I will return to this example.
Humans only metabolize carbohydrates, protein, fat, and alcohol. In general all carbs breakdown to glucose. Complex carbs take longer to do this, so the metabolizing of it actually burns more calories, but there's also other biochemical and endocrine factors that vary by age, health, activity level, etc.
It's still true that complex carbs, usually having more micro nutrients and being slower to metabolize are better for us. Nonetheless, they all become glucose at some point (except nonsoluble fiber).
To return to the apple cookie example, though. If the cookie is made with oats, butter, and nuts, it may actually be much slower than the apple in provoking an insulin response. And if one eats the equivalent calories, the cookie provides oil and protein.
The author seems to think the gylcemic index is something inherent in a food rather than a measure of a metabolic process.
Toast with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon produces is better than just toast.
Even people who "know" don't seem to know it's not the sugar. It's the insulin.
> It's still true that complex carbs, usually having more micro nutrients and being slower to metabolize are better for us.
So your friends are correct, even if their reasoning is wrong.
> If the cookie is made with oats, butter, and nuts, it may actually be much slower than the apple in provoking an insulin response.
This claim requires evidence. My understanding is that the slower digestion preventing the insulin spike is due to the apple's sugar being embedded in the fiber.
Also, even if this claim is correct, then your friends are "only" right about practically all cookies.
> Toast with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon produces is better than just toast.
I have a childhood condition that left me marginally disabled with a bad hip (I probably should get a replacement and I'm not 40 yet) that causes me immense pain some days. I also have life-long mental health issues. I've been 300 pounds and I've lost it via the old-fashioned way - diet and exercise. If I can find ways to make it work, then yes, I do think most anyone can. You do have to try different foods and exercises to see what works for you; every one is different, and in that regard no one can educate you; you have to figure it out for yourself.
Sex is the thing that humans evolved to do for exogenous dopamine (look up why the penis is shaped the way it is). Religions of old told people to deny their natural desires and instead seek dopamine from the church (we are all God’s narcissist supply). Capitalism, our modern religion, tells people to seek it out from consumption (Capitalism would fail without exogenous dopamine addictions). Humanity should just have more sex.
These truthy articles seem to be only correct by accident.
The reality is if you cut out sugar, you tautologically get more calories from fat and protein. You need protein to maintain muscles, and most folks get fat too little protein in their diet. Purely by making that shift, you likely will have some muscle building, which naturally burns more calories…
It has nothing to do with the sugar itself, you could eat only sugar and lose weight… you’d just be miserable and feel like you’re starving constantly, most likely.
In some places they may in fact be high school dropouts. Just like naturopaths, it's important to be aware of the laws and certifying bodies in your state / country when seeking health and medical advice.
My state at least requires a 4 year education in an area approved by the state board of dieticians to call oneself a nutritionist... but that's a far cry from the 8 year education requirements plus board certification and testing required to become a registered dietician here. IIRC they are even developing something akin to residency requirements going forward.
But in some states there are literally no legal protections on the title of nutritionist. I wonder if any aspiring dietary health bloggers (who perhaps became experts in nutrition via facebook posts) have moved residence to capitalize on this situation...
I think there's a positive knock-on effect in a lot of "I stopped eating X and everything got better" stories that usually go unsaid - once you decide to cut something out, it forces you to actually start _paying attention_ to what goes in.
For a lot of us - myself and friends anecdotally included - that's possibly for the first time in a long time, or ever.
And once you start paying attention, opportunities for other positive adjustments open up. Maybe you only intended to cut sugar, but now you realize through your tracking app you've been ridiculously deficient in potassium or way over target on saturated fats.
> it forces you to actually start _paying attention_ to what goes in.
Anecdotally, merely recording calories had a big impact. I found myself treating calories as if I were frugally spending money: "Wait, X has a a terrible pleasure/satiety per calorie compared to Y, that's a bad deal, I'd be wasting calories."
Actual research [1] says that just taking a photo of everything you eat helps awareness of food choices and portion sizes, which should contribute to healthier diets. Anecdotally, for me, just writing down everything I eat (without even counting calories) helps me avoid unnecessary eating.
> “Calorie is a calorie” is thermodynamically correct, but not true when it comes to diet. [insert alcohol analogy here]
In case this doesn't quite compute for some, I have a very simple thought experiment to apply to the CICO fallacy.
If you fill your gasoline car with diesel, will the engine perform correctly?
Of course we would not expect the engine to perform as well (or at all) on diesel. It doesn't matter if diesel contains more than enough energy per volume for the engine to run. It doesn't matter if the engine runs with some diesel mixed in with gasoline because it will not run as well and suffer other problems that can damage the engine. The car simply is not optimized to run on a fuel it wasn't designed for.
If you run a human body solely on sugar, it will eventually crash and burn, figuratively speaking. The body can run on some exogenous sugar, but it's likely not optimal; in fact, it's not even indicated for when protein and fat are available. Likewise, the human body will fail solely on protein or solely fat, and it may suffer problems when eating fat and sugar simultaneously. However, it operates quite well on some mixture of protein and fat, and can tolerate a relatively small amount of carbs without much consequence. This is because the human body was designed by ~4 million years of evolution to move away from fruit-eating to hunting (and the occasional eating of tubers when game is scarce). It is hardly more "omnivorous" than a cow is, given that cows will eat meat (and may other things) when you put it in front of them. Most large mammals can tolerate eating a wide variety of things, but that doesn't mean their species didn't develop to specialize in a specific diet.
CICO also encounters an issue when it comes to using exercise as a means of maintaining or losing body fat. When you engage in exercise, your glycogen stores are prioritized over fat because it can be oxidized more rapidly. Although you are always relying on some amount of fat and carbs, neither being absolutely exclusive, exercise prioritizes carb metabolism. What happens when someone relies heavily on exercise for weight loss is that they may lose some weight because they've expended a lot of glycogen from their muscles and liver, but that doesn't really equate to losing an appreciable amount of body fat, which is what most people are interested in when they want to lose weight. It's not that exercise doesn't work, but it's not as efficient as people realize – that is unless you exercise hard and long enough that your body is forced to start relying much more heavily on fat oxidation.
only pea brained morons (the general public when it comes to diet and exercise) actually think "exercise burns fat." everyone knows that actually exercise will increase your TDEE which when combined with calorie restriction will force your body to use fat reserves to maintain itself.
However, most gym machines (e.g. treadmills) have a setting that says 'fat burn', so I can see why the average population could incorrectly think that.
"Stop Eating [Added] Sugar" is good advice, but insufficient. The ease of overconsumption in the American food environment is to great to be overcome by a single pithy phrase. Couple it with a few other phrases: "don't drink your calories", "eat more fiber" and you're starting to get somewhere.
Maybe learn to cook simple meals is another tip. Rice/beans/vegetables and protein is cheap and a lot of the world (outside of the US) live on that for decades.
67 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadReducing sugar isn't just about reducing calories. More sugar means more gut imbalance, and that can cause some serious problems. It's not always easy to connect the dots, and not many people really get to know or understand the messages their own bodies are sending them. And doctors DNGAF about nutrition or diet, not really at least - they just treat symptoms with pharmaceuticals but a real cure for some ailments means a serious change in eating habits, and one of the best changes to promote health is reducing sugar intake.
Nuts are calorie dense, since they're mostly made of fat and eating them makes it easy to gain weight.
Density would not matter if its a hard limit
Also, I'm not sure what you're communicating with the point about nuts. Are you saying that a person will gain weight? Lose weight? Lose nothing? Depending on what you were implying, you might actually be proving the author's point.
By the way, I actually have done many experiments eating various monodiets, including nuts. The worst was walnuts. I love walnuts, but the end result was horrendous. I almost certainly would have lost weight because so much of the fats were not being absorbed (ALA is poorly metabolized) and passing through. On the other hand, fresh raw peanut butter (with a little salt) was not only satiating but well tolerated.
My experience reflects exactly why people object to CICO. Nobody is saying that two different substances can emit the same amount of heat measured in calories when burned in a bomb calorimeter. The root objection is that the body will treat different substances the same way. It's wildly untrue that you can just eat anything and predict a health outcome with 3rd grade arithmetic. CICO doesn't explain why I could sustain a diet solely of peanut butter (no sugar added) but couldn't eat a diet only of walnuts, to the point where the "calories" were coming out in my shit having not been oxidized.
> you think thats some sort of death knell to the general principle
Yes, it completely defeats the general principle, and if it didn't then those insisting on CICO would reply with more than "how can you actually believe what I don't believe?"
> if you eat more calories than you burn you will store it as fat?
If it was simple as that, then we wouldn't have glycogen stores because... why bother when anything not immediately oxidized turns to fat! If it's as simple as that, protein wouldn't ever be used to maintain lean mass but would be all converted to glucose and then into fat by the liver (not at all efficient). If it's as simple as that, then we would never shit. Don't believe me? I challenge you to collect your stool, dry it out, and light it on fire. Look – calories!
Instead, many people past a certain age seem to maintain a weight that's way too high (obese), but not still going up quickly. I think you should adjust your numbers to fit the facts and then reconsider which details are actually important.
You should use your brain to learn some math, quit being a jack ass, admit when you're wrong, and learn from your mistakes instead of hiding them with insults.
10 percent is not trivial if someone is trying to lose weight by counting calories while eating foods that are obesogenic. And yes, many people do this specifically because body fat comes down to a simple equation. Practically everyone I know whom has taken the calorie-counting approach has done so with the idea that they can still eat pasta and other crap. It's extremely common. Also, given that the calorie counts on packaged food can be off by as much as 20%, and that people at home are getting their TDEE from either calculators or fitness watches that estimate their TDEE, people doing CICO are at high risk for overeating and not losing body fat at a satisfactory rate. Moreover, if they're eating crap, they may be losing more weight in muscle than desired because the human body does not care about thermodynamics.
Yes, if a meal contains 150-300 "calories" than is suggested then that's a setback, especially for those using CICO as a way to give themselves permission to keep eating obesogenic crap. Someone can drive a car while stepping on both the gas and the brakes at the same time... buy why? Unless a person is weighing their food, calories are an imperfect measure that only measure one thing, which is heat. Calories tell you nothing about how metabolized substrates are being delegated. Is it being used immediately, or stored in glycogen, or stored in fat, or pooped out? Who knows! Calories will never tell you that.
For the sake of argument, let's pretend that we're trying to lose weight by eating no more than our BMR of 1650 calories per day and doing some exercise to put us into what some would call a "calorie deficit."
If we divide 1650 calories into 3 meals, each meal would be around 550 calories. However, in the worst case that the calorie estimate for these meals is off by 20%, then each meal contains 110 extra calories, putting our calorie intake 330 calories over our target.
Ok, that's fine. We'll just run those calories off at the gym, right? If we use a MET calculator, this would reveal that we'd have to run for around 35 minutes to actually oxidize enough food to produce 330 calories of heat. But what has actually happened here? Since glucose metabolism is prioritized, a significant amount of those calories won't have been produced by fat oxidation. If the food we're eating put our RQ at 1.0 or greater, such as if we're eating pasta and toquitoes, that puts us at greater risk of burning carbs but not fat. This isn't a bad thing per se, since some of those carbs might have been otherwise stored as fat. But after 35 minutes of intense running, how much have we really achieved if we are trying to lose body fat? Not much unless we run much longer than 35 minutes every day. Most people simply don't keep up this kind of routine for very long.
On the other hand, perhaps we end up undereating, or we decide to eat even less than we were before. This can work because something's gotta give and fat mass will continually be accessed and used. However, we would likely be at risk for muscle loss. Without enough protein, muscle is difficult to hold on to. If we reach a point where our glycogen stores are chronically exhausted, then glucose has to come from somewhere, and if it's satisfied by exogenous carbohydrates then it's gotta come from breaking down muscle through gluconeogenesis. We'll lose weight in the long run, but at what cost? Even if protein is factored in to meals, it still may not be enough if we're not eating as many calories as we thought we were.
If you think what I'm saying is trivial, then tell that to all the researchers you seem to think are w...
worrying about protein absorption and glycogen stores is so far off the mark on what is important to someone trying to lose weight that you are actively harming them by making them think this is some sort of complicated problem, when it is not.
> you are actively harming them by making them think this is some sort of complicated problem
Take a hike, dude.
You can disagree all you want, but there's no good reason for you to to be this rude. So far, you haven't shown the slightest indication that you know enough about the subject to assert that I'm "actively" harming anyone. You really have a nerve to say that when your responses are so devoid of substance. If you can't handle civil conversations that aren't to your liking, you are free to not participate.
I suspect most people don't snack on nuts, but carb rich sugary-salty snacks, which keeps your insulin levels high.
High insulin levels means you can't burn fat.
While I have serious concerns about most nutritional/exercise studies the underwhelming number that point to low carb/low fat/etc. as the end-all-be-all even controlled for calories is still mind-blowing. It's all calories at the end of the day, you should do whatever satisfies your micro and macro needs while helping you to stick to the diet.
However, it's not "all calories" at the end of the day. If all we cared about was losing or maintaining weight, then calories might approach being a tool for it. Yet it's not actually the weight we care about when we say we want to lose weight; it's the body fat we care about, and probably muscle maintenance, which is why CICO falls apart. Diets composed of different macro ratios can have drastically different outcomes, and what's funny about that is most camps ranging from vegans to carnivores implicitly agree on this, yet many still choose to elevate theoretical physics above physiology.
A lump of coal has measurable "calories" when burned in a bomb calorimeter. That doesn't mean that a human will oxidize a lump of coal and produce calories. A human can eat carbs or fat, but they result in different outcomes because those things are fundamentally metabolized and utilized differently. Even different types of carbs and different types of fat have different effects from each other, regardless of caloric value. In terms of a person's health status, calories are hardly relevant.
Also, most people don't even come close to measuring their "calories." When they lose weight counting calories, they are getting lucky by figuring out how much it takes to under eat, which can also mean unnecessary muscle loss when they don't take into account the composition of what they are eating. Many people who count calories either struggle to lose that weight or lose a ton of muscle because they believe that a calorie is a calorie and that therefore they can eat crap and "run it off." In either case, they're not really measuring what they think they're measuring because calorie counts on food are allowed to be as far off as 20%, and virtually nobody weighs their feces to estimate how many consumed "calories" didn't actually get used.
What you're speaking to wrt fat loss vs weight loss is a much more complicated subject than just eating the right foods and having a calorie deficit.
> It doesn't make a difference what kind of calories you're intaking - your body literally does not know.
You're conflating a few things here.
Fundamentally, you're saying that the body doesn't contain an internal calorie counter. In that sense, you are absolutely correct. The human body, and pretty much all organisms performing respiration, does not keep track of calories in any capacity or measure mass. The only thing the body can do is delegate different kinds of mass to the places in different cells where their presence would be of benefit to the survival of the system. That's really it, though it's a bit of an oversimplification.
However, if we correct "kind of calories" to "kind of mass", and drop the whole idea of the body "knowing" something, then what you are saying is fundamentally untrue. It is not controversial in any way that the cells in the human body, and all creatures for that matter, treat macronutrients differently and prioritize them in ways that are not equivalent.
Yes, it's more complicated, but food composition is way up there in terms of importance.
Of course it matters. Here's an experiment. Drink only 12 cans of soda (~140 cals each) spread over the day (so 1680 cals total). Assuming a BMR of 2000 cals (standard male), you're at a deficit.
Assuming you start drinking as soon as you get up and last one just before you got to sleep, will you lose weight?
No.. because your insulin is constantly spiked throughout the day which inhibits fat burn.
Now try it with broccoli (or even just fat).
Proteins/Fiber/etc. are only good diet options because they are very filling for the amount of calories they have. Additionally, certain macros like protein help to build muscle, which can raise your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure).
But you're right, a calorie definitely is a calorie - even in a diet.
If a person finds that a Twinkie diet works to help them cut fat in a short period of time, there's really not much to object to. Asserting that it's OK to just eat food that is classically categorized as "junk" as long as you don't eat too many calories is fallacious and ignores the poisonous nature of the things we eat.
> But you're right, a calorie definitely is a calorie - even in a diet.
It's not that calories aren't what they are, or that they don't have some use. The core objection is that they aren't an appropriate measure for human health. At best, they are a very imperfect proxy for mass measurement. If you want to lose weight, don't eat more anhydrous mass than you eliminate. When you measure calories to the exclusion of nutrient composition, not only is one ignoring a mode of optimization (that could lead to longer term successful outcomes), but they are relying on very inaccurate tools. Calorie counts on packaging are allowed to be as inaccurate as 20%, and the tools people use to count their "calories" really aren't accurate enough for that purpose (researchers still use respiratory gas analysis for that reason).
Obviously, someone can maintain or lose weight by counting "calories." That does not mean what they are doing is optimal or sustainable in the long term, or that anyone is a fool for taking the exact opposite approach. The many people out there who do not count calories, eat as much as they want of a specific diet, incidentally eat more in "calories", and still lose weight throw a wrench into the whole "it's just calories in, calories out" hypothesis.
And this ignores all manner of more complex interactions between the foods we eat and host and microbial metabolism. See my nearby comment for one such example.
Processed carbs, and especially refined sugar, is rapidly absorbed in the upper GI, bypassing most of the beneficial microbes that 'preprocess' much of our raw food intake (especially complex carbs, like the prebiotic fibers and such) into more beneficial metabolites. Including bacterial metabolites that are essential to health and cellular energy.
Consider processed fructose vs fructose from a fruit, eaten whole. The former starts entering the bloodstream directly upon consumption, where it then must be processed by our own liver at some metabolic expense. Some people refer to fructose as "toxic" for reasons such as this:
>fructose induces a number of proinflammatory, fibrogenic, and oncogenic signaling pathways that explain its deleterious effects in the body, especially in the liver. [1]
Furthermore, when there is excess free fructose in the upper intestines, more than the body can rapidly absorb, it is also metabolically expensive simply to clear it from the gut to get it into the liver. This process can lead to ATP depletion in the GI tract. [1] Thus it robs us of that magical substance that powers all of our cellular activity, from muscle firing to nerve impulse activation (both of which are critical to optimum digestive function) and beyond.
On the other hand, when fructose is bound up in in complex carbs (fruit), it gets farther down into the intestines where fructose loving bacteria such as F. prausnitzi can ferment it for us. [2] In addition to sparing our ATP reserves in the gut and sparing our liver the trouble of processing fructose, F. prausnitzi produces an incredibly beneficial nutrient, butyrate, in the process. Butyrate has protective effects on the gut and intestinal barrier, and it is also a key building block of that lovely neurotransmitter GABA, that helps keep all of our other neurotransmitters in check (which is why it is called the "calming neurotransmitter").
Finally, on a hunch, I went ahead and googled "butyrate and satiety" which immediately returned this:
> Fermentation of fiber in the gut generates short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), such as butyrate, which decrease food intake and promote weight loss in rodent models. SCFA have been shown to enhance secretion of the gut satiety hormone peptide YY (PYY). [3]
Further investigation shows that this peptide is also active in humans, reducing hunger signals in the brain. [4]
All of this is to say, while the popular phrase "a calorie is a calorie" can help people to understand diet and weight loss in terms of an energy budget, the reality is far, far more complex than that. And we have truly only scratched the surface of all the complexity going on in the microbiome as it relates to diet and cellular functions throughout the body. Especially our immune system, which appears to borrow many critical metabolites from bacterial activity on the foods we choose to eat. It will be exciting to see how far down this rabbit hole we get in the coming years. For now, whenever we hear "a calorie is a calorie," it is useful to remember that things are not nearly so simple, and this sometimes helpful simplification can lead us astray quickly if we are not judicious in how we apply it.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih...
...
> I’ve never been exactly fat, but I used to be nearly 10 kg heavier when I did energy drinks, sugary snacks and desserts.
So in other words, not only is this opinion not supported by the scientific evidence, it's not even really supported by mmalmi's personal experience. Phenomenal.
Notwithstanding this correct observation, it's still probably still a good idea for the majority of the population who aren't as analytical as folks on HN to follow.
Too much so called 'food' is laced with added sugar, salt, bad oils that is not healthy which should generally be avoided.
Articles like this are extremely annoying. Nearly every educated person knows everything this article says. It just comes across as condescending in a "I can do this, so anyone can" sort of way.
>afford healthier options.
cheap unprocessed brown rice, dried beans, frozen branded grocery store veg is not that expensive. (some spices help as well). Lots of poor students live on that.
Of course, it can't compete with super tasty fast-food places (laced with sugar/salt).
I know people who got type 2 diabetes from sugar usage and the vast majority of them magically find the willpower to cut sugar once it’s about to kill them. Not to say their diets were wonderful afterwards but few people are so addicted to sugar they couldn’t stop if they REALLY needed to. There’s a ton of learned helplessness and people just make things that aren’t their health their priority in life unless they’re forced to because it takes so much time and energy to eat a low sugar diet that they just decide they don’t care enough.
Man I guess the majority of Americans must be anxious and depressed given they’re all eating huge quantities of sugar. I guess if we label things an illness that means we need to both accept this and pat people on the back for taking charge of their health and self-medicating.
Exercise is the best anti-depressive "drug", it's better than any anti-depressant SSRI drug.
And there's about a dozen other bonuses to getting fit. Getting people out of the house, crapping better, sleeping better, mental acuity, life extension, better quality of life for your lifespan, reduction in cancer, reduction in injury from day to day mishaps, etc.
Taking the radical approach to banning all sugar is just too restrictive and counterproductive, because the most important part is getting satisfied by what you eat.
In my opinion (and experience) people who struggle with weight tend to be bad at cooking and/or selecting the food they actually want to eat; then they feel bad and end up doing both: overeating stuff that isn't so good for health (especially if exercise isn't matched) after eating not so good food they felt they needed to eat.
Pro cyclist actually consumes pure sugar for the load of exercise they do and they are some of the lowest body fat people on earth, it would actually be problematic for them to eat too many fibrous foods since they could never digest it fast enough to meet their energy expenditure.
I get annoyed when some people talk about an apple is better than a cookie because an apple has "natural" sugar as if sugar cane is synthetic. I will return to this example.
Humans only metabolize carbohydrates, protein, fat, and alcohol. In general all carbs breakdown to glucose. Complex carbs take longer to do this, so the metabolizing of it actually burns more calories, but there's also other biochemical and endocrine factors that vary by age, health, activity level, etc.
It's still true that complex carbs, usually having more micro nutrients and being slower to metabolize are better for us. Nonetheless, they all become glucose at some point (except nonsoluble fiber).
To return to the apple cookie example, though. If the cookie is made with oats, butter, and nuts, it may actually be much slower than the apple in provoking an insulin response. And if one eats the equivalent calories, the cookie provides oil and protein.
The author seems to think the gylcemic index is something inherent in a food rather than a measure of a metabolic process.
Toast with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon produces is better than just toast.
Even people who "know" don't seem to know it's not the sugar. It's the insulin.
So your friends are correct, even if their reasoning is wrong.
> If the cookie is made with oats, butter, and nuts, it may actually be much slower than the apple in provoking an insulin response.
This claim requires evidence. My understanding is that the slower digestion preventing the insulin spike is due to the apple's sugar being embedded in the fiber.
Also, even if this claim is correct, then your friends are "only" right about practically all cookies.
> Toast with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon produces is better than just toast.
Massive citation needed.
The reality is if you cut out sugar, you tautologically get more calories from fat and protein. You need protein to maintain muscles, and most folks get fat too little protein in their diet. Purely by making that shift, you likely will have some muscle building, which naturally burns more calories…
It has nothing to do with the sugar itself, you could eat only sugar and lose weight… you’d just be miserable and feel like you’re starving constantly, most likely.
My state at least requires a 4 year education in an area approved by the state board of dieticians to call oneself a nutritionist... but that's a far cry from the 8 year education requirements plus board certification and testing required to become a registered dietician here. IIRC they are even developing something akin to residency requirements going forward.
But in some states there are literally no legal protections on the title of nutritionist. I wonder if any aspiring dietary health bloggers (who perhaps became experts in nutrition via facebook posts) have moved residence to capitalize on this situation...
For a lot of us - myself and friends anecdotally included - that's possibly for the first time in a long time, or ever.
And once you start paying attention, opportunities for other positive adjustments open up. Maybe you only intended to cut sugar, but now you realize through your tracking app you've been ridiculously deficient in potassium or way over target on saturated fats.
Anecdotally, merely recording calories had a big impact. I found myself treating calories as if I were frugally spending money: "Wait, X has a a terrible pleasure/satiety per calorie compared to Y, that's a bad deal, I'd be wasting calories."
In case this doesn't quite compute for some, I have a very simple thought experiment to apply to the CICO fallacy.
If you fill your gasoline car with diesel, will the engine perform correctly?
Of course we would not expect the engine to perform as well (or at all) on diesel. It doesn't matter if diesel contains more than enough energy per volume for the engine to run. It doesn't matter if the engine runs with some diesel mixed in with gasoline because it will not run as well and suffer other problems that can damage the engine. The car simply is not optimized to run on a fuel it wasn't designed for.
If you run a human body solely on sugar, it will eventually crash and burn, figuratively speaking. The body can run on some exogenous sugar, but it's likely not optimal; in fact, it's not even indicated for when protein and fat are available. Likewise, the human body will fail solely on protein or solely fat, and it may suffer problems when eating fat and sugar simultaneously. However, it operates quite well on some mixture of protein and fat, and can tolerate a relatively small amount of carbs without much consequence. This is because the human body was designed by ~4 million years of evolution to move away from fruit-eating to hunting (and the occasional eating of tubers when game is scarce). It is hardly more "omnivorous" than a cow is, given that cows will eat meat (and may other things) when you put it in front of them. Most large mammals can tolerate eating a wide variety of things, but that doesn't mean their species didn't develop to specialize in a specific diet.
CICO also encounters an issue when it comes to using exercise as a means of maintaining or losing body fat. When you engage in exercise, your glycogen stores are prioritized over fat because it can be oxidized more rapidly. Although you are always relying on some amount of fat and carbs, neither being absolutely exclusive, exercise prioritizes carb metabolism. What happens when someone relies heavily on exercise for weight loss is that they may lose some weight because they've expended a lot of glycogen from their muscles and liver, but that doesn't really equate to losing an appreciable amount of body fat, which is what most people are interested in when they want to lose weight. It's not that exercise doesn't work, but it's not as efficient as people realize – that is unless you exercise hard and long enough that your body is forced to start relying much more heavily on fat oxidation.
However, most gym machines (e.g. treadmills) have a setting that says 'fat burn', so I can see why the average population could incorrectly think that.