A Calorie is Not A Calorie - A Discussion of Thermodynamics

[atomicspacebunny]

discarded

Discarded protein has to be catabolized through gluconeogenesis to be oxidized just like fat, dietary or adipose and into CO2, in the out going respiration?

When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?

This research article was featured on a recent episode of Ben Greenfield‘s podcast and thought it was of interest to ketonauts: When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go? [image] -How fat actually gets burnt…6:20 - Ben Greenfield https://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/3/5/3/3530b59961896836/Fat_Loss_Solosode.mp3?c_id=44432024&cs_id=44432024&expiration=1560109068&hwt=c11906374f553ac299af1ba2d07011f0 Law of conservation of mass: Mass, in an iso…

[OldDog]

Your reference is all about fat. Nothing about protein …

[Festus]

Really?

You’re just trolling. I wondered about you being a non-native English speaker, etc., but this is clearly not what’s responsible for your silly replies. You know @OldDog is correct and you know that liquid droplets in fat cells are not mostly protein. You just “say stuff” and copy and paste without any regard to the truth or the discussion at hand.

[OldDog]

This gets more interesting as we go:

It sure does.

Don’t stop now.

[PaulL]

totally demonstrably false…

I believe that what @atomicspacebunny was referring to is the process of gluconeogenesis, in which the liver deaminates amino acids and turns the remnants into glucose. Glucose can also be made from fatty acids, of course, but gluconeogenesis generally uses protein as the substrate.

Gluconeogenesis is stimulated by glucagon and inhibited by insulin, so it generally occurs only when carbohydrate intake is sufficiently low to make it necessary.

[atomicspacebunny]

Don’t stop now

If you insist!

What matters about matter is how much you eat of it.

Portion size <===and timing <===is the secret?

You eat too much meat you will get fat?

You too much fat you will get fat?

You eat too much sugar you will get fat?

So simple a caveman can do it?

[IdesOfMarch]

Perhaps we should focus more on the real, ‘hard’ science of it?

Heck yes. We’re all free to disagree all over the place, but pretense seems to be overwhelmingly creeping in, here.

I thought this was good, from another thread ~~>

I am saying that just because science gets complicated, that just because we can’t do the math in our heads or immediately visually detect the answers, etc., it does not mean that a proper scientific consideration is not possible. It’s not always easy to avoid logical fallacies, to not generalize from the particular, to not insert opinion as objective fact, to properly qualify our statements so they are always true, rather than sometimes true, etc.

Thanks. I was most immediately talking about the idea that we can’t measure energy accurately, and that this pretense morphs into denying the existence of a fairly complete, sensible scientific explanation. While there’s much to yet be learned, why deny what we do know already?

And does this lead to assuming we can’t make glucose from fat, and that our fat tissue or the lipid droplets in the fat cells are mostly protein, or that the lipid droplet surrounds fat cells rather than being inside, in the center of them? Sheesh!

Call me when there’s an RCT in humans.

Speaking of pretense… It’s indeed proper to look at RCTs. Yet we also see people beginning with pretenses, and when the evidence disproves or at least casts severe doubt on the pretenses, they sometimes just ignore the evidence and walk away.

Much of this discussion is about basic science and how well we can measure things, energywise.

• Check out my comment I made at KetoCon2019

Right there’s a study. You were obviously going with the pretense that we can’t measure things well enough and that the overall consideration of energy, weight and metabolism won’t work out. Yet that study had things work out surprisingly well, with more accuracy than anybody should have issues with, and it presented a picture complete enough that it should satisfy very well on a general rational basis.

The results didn’t go well with your pretense, and at that point you wanted to drop it like a hot potato and walk away, ignoring it entirely. And YOU were the one who posted the RCT… Sheesh!

[Festus]

The part surrounding the adipocyte is a lipid droplet organelle that contains protein RNA storage compartments (proteome) which regulate the storage and hydrolysis of triacylglycerols.

This looks like just jumbling up a bunch of words and putting them together. The lipid droplets surround the adipocyte?

[atomicspacebunny]

Your welcome for my effort at an explanation it is kind of a more recent description of something not well explained or explored, I’m sure you’ll find some better ”jumbling“ else where?

A thousand apologies for not meeting your expectations of perfection!

[ElmosUzi]

@PaulL Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful post.

Also, my impression is that your objection to the article by professors Feinman and Fine, which started this whole thread, appears to be a misunderstanding of where they are coming from, and of how their point fits into the scholarly conversation.

You may be right. I should read the whole thing, carefully, at least a couple times.

we’re continually dealing with the pretense that CICO means “a calorie is a calorie,” with nothing more to be considered. How, logically, do you get there from “calories in, calories out,” stated just like that? You cannot do it. We’re counting things. We’re keeping track of things. We’re not saying there is nothing beyond the count that may affect other stuff. Change “calories” to another noun, and it’s going to be the same. The evidence is logic itself.

But that is exactly what it does mean, so what is the problem?

No - CICO is two quantities, not any statement of necessary equality. Look how many times ‘CICO’ comes up on this forum. But nobody is saying that all calories are exactly the same, with nothing more to be considered. Why CICO comes up on this forum is because of the question of what the energy balance is, and if it matters.

Coca-cola, for one, uses the phrases interchangeably in its advertising, in order to claim that you can drink its sugar-water with impunity, so long as you account for the calories involved.

Their advertising does try to imply that 140 or 100 calories and the like isn’t anything to worry about. But if you really pressed the Coke executives, even the advertising ones, they’re not going to say there’s no difference at all between the macronutrients, or that a person could live forever on Coke. And that’s not the issue here.

While these discussions are always fun, they never seem to get resolved, because the people on the various sides of the argument are not always clear about how they are using terms.

Definitely, as several people have talked about in this thread, alone.

For instance, people arguing that the body’s hormonal responses to foods in the diet trump the caloric content of those foods are not saying that the First Law of Thermodynamics is being violated thereby (even though they may appear to be saying so), merely that there is more to the picture.

Everybody should know intuitively that the laws of conservation of energy and matter will be satisfied. The ‘First Law’ talk usually includes stuff about a closed or not closed system. While you can make some observations peculiar to a closed system, that really has nothing to do with human digestion and metabolism obeying physical laws - they do that anyway.

It usually comes up with ‘anti-CICO’ people pretending that the human body not being a closed system means that physical laws somehow do not apply, which is of course false.

For example, Gary Taubes makes the point that while the First Law always applies, it says nothing about the direction of causality. It may be that eating less may cause us to lose weight or—as Taubes points out—it may be that the eating less is the result, not the cause, of our being in weight-loss mode for hormonal reasons.

Interesting line of thought, and obviously it can be that way sometimes, and it makes sense (for example) that if we’re taking 1000 calories from fat storage (or the equivalent mass, if you prefer) then we probably won’t be as hungry or eat as much as if we weren’t doing that. But that doesn’t affect CICO. CICO is just the two quantities (plus what we can infer from them). Here’s 3 conditions:

CI = CO means no change in weight
CI > CO means gain in weight
CI < CO means loss in weight

Let’s say we’re talking about weight loss. We can start with Taubes’ hormonal effects/weight loss mode, and this leads to less on the “In” side (as a result). Or we can start with less on the “In” side (as the driver). Either way, as long as the condition is satisfied, i.e. CI < CO, then there’s weight loss. The direction of causality does not matter.

Taubes points out that no one claims that teenagers grow up into adults because they ate more than they expended. We are all clear that their hormones caused the weight gain and directed it to muscle and bone, while causing fat loss in certain places (particularly in boys) and the deposit of fat in certain places (particularly in girls). The fact that pubescent children are eating machines is the result of their growth, not the cause. He points out that it might make sense to apply the same logic to adult weight gain and loss, as well

No argument - I will personally testify that hormonal effects are huge, even for adults. Low-carb -> fat-adaption -> less hunger and less often eating. Here too, CICO will change along with it.

I’d also say that while hormones are driving those teenage changes, enough food intake is necessary, as well. A kid isn’t going to gain mass unless there’s enough mass intake. And the body’s own energy accounting is always going on too - it’s not like hormones operate in a vacuum, i.e. the physical laws remain satisfied.

Along the same lines, Phinney recounts the experience of one of his research subjects, a woman who lost half the amount of weight of the other women in the study. A DEXA scan revealed that she had lost the same amount of fat but had gained some lean tissue at the same time.

Okay, so evidently the ‘Out’ differed between the two (assuming the ‘In’ was the same).

Thus it is clear, from both research and experience, that whether we gain or lose muscle, bone, or fat depends strongly on the dietary context. For example, the body tends to hold on to its fat stores until fairly late in the process of starvation. This was most clearly demonstrated during World War II by the victims sent to the German concentration camps, who didn’t start to look truly emaciated until they were within a few months of death from starvation. There appear to be mechanisms that spread out the damage from lack of adequate food intake, so that no one area of the body alone takes the hit.

As above, okay - and CICO reflects the dietary context. If dietary changes alter the ‘In’ & ‘Out’ quantities, no problem. The only thing in that paragraph that I might disagree with is “the body tends to hold on to its fat stores until fairly late in the process of starvation” - I’d say it holds onto most lean tissue there . While there is individual variation, it’s generally true that the more fat we have, the higher the percentage of fat versus non-fat mass we’ll lose with weight loss.

[ElmosUzi]

This is part of the reason that eating a ketogenic diet to satiety allows the body to shed excess stored fat. The mechanisms that control appetite appear to take into account the source of the calories expended, so that both dietary and stored fat can be metabolised. And this all makes sense, because for the vast majority of the two million years of human evolutionary history, nobody knew about calories or macronutrients, and yet our ancestors managed somehow to avoid the metabolic diseases that plague us today.

Separate post for this since it was getting so long. I’m with you all the way through, there, but again it doesn’t work against CICO. Keto diet, less insulin, part of the ‘In’ coming from our fat stores - all good. Protein & fat meaning less hunger than from eating carbs, ‘In’ changes, sure, and the ‘Out’ as well if we include the higher energy cost of digesting protein. That we know more now about science than we used to doesn’t change anything - the same physical laws are in operation.

Back to the reason that ‘CICO’ comes up for argument so often on the forum - the energy balance. And it’s really the same if we change it to mass. How about “a gram is a gram”? We all know that’s not the real deal, just the same. (Or even if we change it to ‘gram/energy equivalent’ or otherwise adjust for macronutrient differences.)

With only CICO, we know the In and Out, and we can figure weight gain/loss, including fat storage or usage, pretty close. And that’s really it. There isn’t much else, or is it that there’s nothing else? Metabolization, storage, waste. What else is there? All the ‘In’ goes to those three, right? If anybody doubts this - and it does seem to come up with amazing frequency, then they can never answer the question about where else stuff goes, or if the numbers aren’t going to add up, then what happens to the missing or extra numbers. We are talking about actual, real, physical matter here, after all - right down to the atomic level.

On a practical basis, we know that increased ‘In’ can and often does lead to increased metabolism and weight gain. Anti-CICO debaters usually have no problem pointing out energy change on the ‘Out’ side, i.e. carbs -> higher insulin -> more fat storage -> lower metabolism. Yet there’s sometimes a logical disconnect that prevents similar observations about the ‘In’ side.

The 3500 calories/lb thing comes up a lot. Humor me for the rest of this post. Doesn’t it make sense that 3500, even if not perfect, is going to be a lot closer than is 0 or 7000, for example? How about a practical examination of the theory?

@ctviggen’s posted study - Check out my comment I made at KetoCon2019

Going with CICO, we would predict that increased caloric intake would result in some combination of weight gain and metabolism. The study subjects were fed varying percentages of protein, and did gain different amounts of weight. The metabolisms also went up, again by different amounts. Yet in all three cases, when the increased metabolism/energy expenditure was combined with the weight gain, everything did come together remarkably well.

In the end, I’d ask what people think is happening, if CICO does not apply. Don’t Dr. Fung’s two compartments make sense - stuff going to either metabolism or storage? This certainly pretty well has things covered. We can hone it a little if we include excretion, but even without it we’ll still be so close that it almost never matters.

[amwassil]

Following is a link to 36 citations regarding the subject of this topic. Based on the several I’ve already read, I think you will find wide support for the common concept of CICO and CICO diet/weight management as understood by most of the folks on this forum, including myself. That understanding is that CICO deals almost exclusively with calories in and calories out eating to a caloric deficit and that any effects due to different macronutirents having a ‘metabolic advantage’ as defined by Feinman and Fine is minimal and useless.

“Calories in, calories out” and macronutrient intake: the hope, hype, and...

This is about as far as they’re willing to go:

But this is where they’re really at:

The carbohydrate-insulin model does not explain the impact of varying dietary...

[amwassil]

Unfortunately, the full text of this is behind a subscription/paywall. Maybe someone knows how to find it otherwise?

The Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity

Abstract

Despite intensive research, the causes of the obesity epidemic remain incompletely understood and conventional calorie-restricted diets continue to lack long-term efficacy. According to the carbohydrate-insulin model (CIM) of obesity, recent increases in the consumption of processed, high–glycemic-load carbohydrates produce hormonal changes that promote calorie deposition in adipose tissue, exacerbate hunger, and lower energy expenditure. Basic and genetic research provides mechanistic evidence in support of the CIM. In animals, dietary composition has been clearly demonstrated to affect metabolism and body composition, independently of calorie intake, consistent with CIM predictions. Meta-analyses of behavioral trials report greater weight loss with reduced-glycemic load vs low-fat diets, though these studies characteristically suffer from poor long-term compliance. Feeding studies have lacked the rigor and duration to test the CIM, but the longest such studies tend to show metabolic advantages for low-glycemic load vs low-fat diets. Beyond the type and amount of carbohydrate consumed, the CIM provides a conceptual framework for understanding how many dietary and nondietary exposures might alter hormones, metabolism, and adipocyte biology in ways that could predispose to obesity. Pending definitive studies, the principles of a low-glycemic load diet offer a practical alternative to the conventional focus on dietary fat and calorie restriction.

[anon81060937]

Right there’s a study. You were obviously going with the pretense that we can’t measure things well enough and that the overall consideration of energy, weight and metabolism won’t work out. Yet that study had things work out surprisingly well, with more accuracy than anybody should have issues with, and it presented a picture complete enough that it should satisfy very well on a general rational basis.

Even if calories required can be measured precisely in a research paper. Can we measure our own required calories daily without stressing ourselves out with precise measurements?

Seems like a lot of useless research papers and the wasted money/time to complete them. What’s missing to satisfy humans which can’t be obtained from food?

[atomicspacebunny]

Maybe not having an overall picture of how a entire system really works, like is it an open system (is mass and energy leaving the system?) or a closed system (expansion and contraction?) then density (solidity), volume (capacitance) and thermal conductance (amount of heat required until sublimation).

Formula: p=m/V, or density § is equal to mass (m) divided by volume etc. (grapes to raisins)

Containment parameters, rate of flow etc.

So how much activity can happen within a given amount of space when you place a piece of mass into it, as matter can exist in three different states solid, liquid, gas (pure substances-mixtures-elements-compounds (molecules), homogenous-hetrohomogenous etc.

How long would it take for this volume and mixture of calories to turn from a solid==>liquid then into a gas? Time?

[LeroyJenkins]

Even if calories required can be measured precisely in a research paper. Can we measure our own required calories daily without stressing ourselves out with precise measurements?

Seems like a lot of useless research papers and the wasted money/time to complete them. What’s missing to satisfy humans which can’t be obtained from food?

World peace?

That’s a pretty broad question. When this thread began, I thought

There are essentially two ways to see the world we live in, according to the critical realist philosopher Wilfrid Sellars. While I don’t agree with everything he said (and he said some pretty far-out stuff ), he does make a good point about what he called the “manifest image” versus the “scientific image.”

You’re not required to do anything - you don’t have to measure or read research papers or care. That doesn’t mean there’s not an underlying scientific reality at work. It’s that way for all of us.

We can say, “Ooh, pretty rainbow ,” or we can say, “That’s pretty how the light refracts like that.” Or we can take all the emotion out of it. “Light is being refracted and reflected.”

It depends what “satisfy” means. Doesn’t that involve desire? We may want to get rid of hunger, or we may crave a scientific explanation, or even just “the answer,” among an unlimited number of things.

There is a continuum, and along it we differing people will want different things and make different assumptions. Yet at a very primal level or “at the beginning of it,” we are physical beings; we are all the same in some respects.

[OldDoug]

We pretty much stay within a Newtonian world, however, for our eating and metabolism. We’re not really converting mass to energy, for example, as with nuclear fission, fusion, etc.

However, adipose tissue weighs more than the lipid droplet it stores which is mostly protein but to burn protein:

”…The body rarely burns protein as its sole fuel source, and when it does it is usually under conditions of starvation. Interestingly, when no carbohydrate is present in the diet, the body will use the amino acid backbones of protein to form glucose (a carbohydrate) in order to supply the brain with adequate energy . …”

We’re still not like a star or a nuclear bomb. Agreed that our fat tissue has a higher density than that of ‘fat’ - because of the water (mostly) in the cytoplasm of adipocytes. And before anybody loses their mind, that’s actual ‘density,’ not energy or caloric density - with the latter, things are reversed, i.e. there are more calories in a given volume or weight of fat than for the fat cell as a whole.

Yeah, the body almost never burns protein, alone. But it certainly will do it if there’s nothing else; better than dying. Other than real starvation, there’s a mix of fat and protein consumption that occurs, with some of the protein being recycled. For the generalized “really fat person,” they’re going to be burning almost entirely fat and just a very little protein. With some of it being recycled, the net protein loss will be extremely small, versus fat loss.

As we get leaner, the percentage of protein loss increases. This is all well-known, right?

[DodgeBoys]

Maybe not having an overall picture of how a entire system really works, like is it an open system (is mass and energy leaving the system?) or a closed system (expansion and contraction?) then density (solidity), volume (capacitance) and thermal conductance (amount of heat required until sublimation).

We’re definitely not closed systems - we’re inhaling and exhaling all the time, for just one example. It’s greatly related to metabolism and can be to transient weight/mass changes. How do you ever get away from that? If one cares about having a complete picture, that has to be taken into account.

[PaulL]

As we get leaner, the percentage of protein loss increases. This is all well-known, right?

I’m not sure about this particular point, Doug. Not saying it’s wrong, just that I haven’t heard it. Phinney says that as we get leaner, we need to compensate for no longer having extra stored fat, by increasing the amount of fat we eat, and that as long as we keep eating fat to satiety, that increase is automatic.

As far as protein is concerned, Bikman says that it is harder to prevent lean-tissue loss as we age, and harder to assimilate protein to make new lean tissue, but that is an issue of aging, not fat-loss, as I understand it.

[atomicspacebunny]

They eat meat. No one seems to be able to say how much.

Very small amounts, the ones who eat more die faster?

They are also known for being small and hunched over. Only 5.5 feet for men:

Small stature good, not ‘deformed,’’ no excessive growth hormone? And as far as being hunched over, probably not so good if your hunched over and have diabetes? …lol