Curious. I’m fully aware that calorie counting is BS (https://thefastingmethod.com/smash-the-fat-calories-part-xi/ and everything). I also assume that we wouldn’t lose weight on keto if we ate a lot, say in 4h intervals, because we would use dietary fat exclusively.
So here is the question. Assuming I repeat that experiment and eat a lot more calories than I need (say those 5800 calories on 2 meals a day), what exactly happens if I don’t gain weight (except for muslce buildup)? Where does the energy go? Or more formally, obviously we don’t reduce the fat to CO2 but to something else that has a higher thermic energy. Do we simply produce excess acetate that we exhale?
I know that we burn a bit more energy to metabolize fat and protein, and I think Richard Feinman points out that we get a little bit less Acetyl-CoA from a fat calorie (compared to a carb calorie), but neither raises the energy consumption by a factor of 2 or more (5800 calories in to 2400 or whatever out). The first law of thermodynamics is trivial, the second is the one to watch: We waste some energy whenever we do a conversion. If we can eat more calories than we burn without storing them, there has to be waste. Is it acetate?
Thanks, but pointing towards a 80-minute podcast is a bit like “it’s in that book”. The question is simple enough and shouldn’t require an 80-minute answer, of which at least 75 minutes will be most likely stuff that I already know. So what is the answer?
The answer to that question is so complex, no one knows the entire answer. Here is Gabor Erdosi giving a talk about how processing food changes the body’s response. One example involves eating an apple, apple sauce, or apple juice, calorie and time matched. Note the different responses.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#5
As @ctviggen points out it’s a complicated issue with no simple answer. And the complexity is compounded by individual variations. It’s not simply that calories don’t matter, just not in an obvious way.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#6
Good way to convince people not to respond is to criticize them for doing so. Posting a link to relevant info is appropriate. Just because you think something is simple doesn’t make it so. @Rclause
This is a great talk, thanks! I knew some of the studies, but others were new. Food for thought, I’ll have to look into a few of them in detail.
Still, I’m afraid it doesn’t answer the question And I wonder why it hasn’t been posed more often. Let me rephrase. If people cite the first law of thermodynamics as proof of the calorie-in = calorie-out theory, I always think of Feinmans quote that the first law of thermodynamics is used quite often in nutrition, usually by people who know zip about thermodynamics. But naturally we can apply thermodynamics to nutrition, and we should, if only to be smartasses
In regard to fat accumulation, there are 3 main effects that determine if we gain or lose fat:
The energy balance. Calories in - calories wasted = calories used + calories stored.
The rate of storage, with the gazillion complicated processes here. High insulin means you’ll store a lot of carbs as fat which is not immediately available as energy, therefore you must eat more. But this is the bottom line: Food stored as fat in high-carb environment is essentially gone (for insulin resistant people), and the more we store, the more we must eat. Completely different in low carb of course.
The amount of excess food that one eats due to leptin/ghrelin inbalances (satiety signal not working, or simply addiction to processed carbs).
Almost all low-carb research in this area has focused on the latter two. We know very well that low carb regulates hunger and satiety a lot better, we store less fat, and we don’t get addicted to our food (although I’m not 100% sure about the mousse au chocolate in my fridge ). As for the energy balance, we know that the base metabolic rate goes down if we eat high carb, calorie restricted, but not on keto. All this explains why we typically need less calories to be happy, but it doesn’t really explain why we can eat huge amounts and not get fat. (Can we, for a long time, more than 3 weeks? Where is “the biggest gainer” show when you need it? )
But the question of energy balance is rarely considered at all, if we separate it from the base metabolism. Obviously the laws of thermodynamics apply. If we put food into a machine, we will end up with either energy (heat) or compounds that have a thermic energy. The calorie measure of the food tells you how much heat the food produces if we burn it (reduce it completely to CO2). So I can see 3 ways we can get rid of that energy (besides storing it as fat):
Burn it completely to CO2. This appears to be the default with carbs.
Burn it partiallty to chemicals that still have thermic energy (can be burned), and get rid of them via poop, urine or breath.
Use it to fuel endergonic chemical reactions. For example we synthesise protein from amino acids, which is endergonic and in this sense “wastes” heat. Some of these reactions may happen in our gut. Unfortunately I know very, very little about biochemistry and the kind of reactions in our body, but I think the body does very little to simply get rid of energy. So if we consume 3000 excess calories a day, I don’t think our body would use additional endergonic chemical reactions just to get rid of the calories, but you never know.
Of course there may be a big difference in energy consumption depending on the food. For example, we need more energy to metabolize protein than carbs, but this will simply result in more heat (in the energy balance). I don’t know the exact number, but say 2000 calories from carbs give 1800 calories worth of energy for our muscles, while 2000 calories from protein will give only 1600 calories for the muscles. But still, if we double the amount of food then we double the amount of usable energy. If we eat more than to satiety (or more than the amount we need for our muscles), I can see only 3 options:
We gain weight.
We excrete the excess energy as combustible biomatter.
We use the energy and produce more heat (or fuel endergonic chemical reactions).
And I would guess that (2) may be the true answer to the question why we get fat on 5800 daily calories from carbs but not from 5800 daily calories from fat.
Sorry, I didn’t want to be rude. True, posting a l link is appropriate. Unfortunately, content type matters a lot. I can scan a text and quickly decide if it’s worth reading in detail. With a scientific talk on youtube I can at least get quick information which topics are covered but jumping back and forth looking at the slides. With a podcast, the only way to get the information is to listen to the whole thing. And I don’t mind if it’s 10 minutes, but 80 minutes is a lot of time. And we all know that the amount if new information is limited if you are familiar with a certain topic. So frankly, wouldn’t it be even more helpful to write a little hint why exactly that podcast is interesting and which topics are discussed?
Maybe I’m just old or old fashioned, but I do prefer the written word over any other content type.
When you look at the total amount of calories we ingest on an annual basis you have to step back and say “what is the human body doing to regulate.” There was another podcast that I won’t bother to link to but it had a quote that I found interesting. It went something like “you don’t see a pride of lions with a calorie counting app to see if it is time to eat”. For the Thermo is law folks it really comes down to
1 you store excess as fat
2 you burn as needed fuel
3 you waste calories
A complex mix of hormones, genetics and eating styles govern the inputs and outputs. If we were to place a bubble around each person it would add up mathematically. We don’t and therefore the equation is incomplete. Just think of the way our body can use nothing more than temperature to adjust metabolism.
Sorry to hit you with a podcast link and yes it is a lot but for me I put it on during my morning run so it is not a drain on time but a additive. It is still a very interesting self experiment on CICO.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#9
How exactly do we maintain 98.6°F body temp? I think we expend a lot of calories to do it. Every metabolic process produces heat in addition to whatever chemical and/or mechanical work is accomplished. I suppose one could calculate just how much daily caloric intake becomes heat to maintain 98.6°F. Bikman talks about energy wasting where he says that a lot of ketones are wasted in both excretion and exhalation. But are they really ‘wasted’ or are they ‘spent’ maintaining body temp?
I had an experience back in May of this year, when I was monitoring my BrAce multiple times per day for a couple of months. I had a big spike in BrAce that corresponded to an increase in body heat, a sort of ‘hot flash’ but not so flashy. My interpretation was that a lot of acetoacetate decided to go poof all at once. Being the ketone energy packet, when acetoacetate goes poof, the energy has to go somewhere and in this transient experience it increased my body temp quite noticeably.
My guess is that most caloric intake is spent maintaining body heat.
From what I understand we breath out most of the fat or burn carbohydrates before they are stored once it is oxidized into carbon by a biochemical substance released by skeletal muscle tissue called aminoisobutyric acid that ignite (“higher thermal energy” or electrical energy rather than chemical?) the mitochondria in the adipose cells to burn glucose rather than store glucose as a lipid droplet inside of it. “…each human breath contains 33 mg. CO2 with 8.9 mg comprised of carbon output. …”
I’d say that a calorie obviously is a calorie - we’re talking about physical matter, here, right down to individual molecules and atoms.
That’s not to say that the different macronutrients will necessarily affect us the same way - due to the differing insulin responses the body can have. If we’re at a relatively high insulin level, our access to our stored fat may be almost entirely blocked, a much different situation than with low enough insulin - this is broadly the context in which a ketogenic diet works for so many people who want to lose weight/fat, versus a diet much higher in carbohydrates.
If there’s no fat storage going on, then the excess beyond what’s used for muscle building, muscular work, and the other bodily processes like digestion, heat production, etc., will be excreted. This would be pretty darn unusual, i.e. normally not much human-diet energy goes through undigested.
I think in practice 5800 calories per day would result in fat gain for the overwhelming majority of people.
I heard a podcast with someone who fed volunteers 3,000 extra calories per day. These were metabolically healthy volunteers (he did not say what the extra calories were, though). I can’t remember the length of time, but it was for a while. The maximum weight gain was 2kg, so a little over 4 pounds (edit: miscalculated, said 2 pounds instead of 4). He said they all felt great and had tons of energy. I assume their basal metabolic rate went up.
Jason Fung in one of his videos relates a story where they tried to do a similar over feeding experiment, but they used pork chops. The subjects could not overeat. They ate a certain amount and could not eat more. (It’s the whole theory that protein causes satiety much better than carbs and better than fat.) They had to change the food to higher carb fare.
And if you liked that video, here’s another one for you. In this one, the theory is that saturated fat causes your fat cells to be insulin resistant, meaning you eat less. Meanwhile, polyunsaturated fatty acids cause your fat cells to be insulin sensitive, meaning you eat more.
And here’s a guy who tested this theory. As further background, some people (here’s looking at you, Stephan Guyenet) believe we get fat because food simply tastes too good. (If you don’t know,Guyenet is convinced we get fat because food tastes too good; in fact, he says not to add butter to vegetables, not because of the fat, but because this makes the vegetables taste too good, so we’ll eat more. Seriously. I’m not kidding.) So, this guy made sure the food he used to test this theory all tasted really good.
You can go down this rabbit hole a lot.
But you also have to realize that we are not closed systems. If you ever looked at your poop and seen part of blueberries or red color due to beets or whatever, we’re not completely absorbing these. Furthermore, if you are breathing out ketones enough to measure them, guess what these are? Potential calories that are being excreted. In fact, for people who believe low carb confers a calorie benefit, in that we use more calories than do high carb people, those excess calories are primarily breathed out of our bodies.
I think it’s like this:
The more you know, the more you realize that we don’t know anything.
I have never checked to see if my temperature was actually lower but when fasting I feel very cold. During Ancel Keys starvation experiments the subjects felt cold even in the summer. Assuming this change in the body is an attempt to save or conserve energy than the opposite which would be wasting energy makes sense to me.
We do seem to like similar resources I watched Mike Eades talk a while ago and have been monitoring hyperlipid ever since. Great stuff. I also may or may not try the croissant diet (which I think was linked on hyperlipid a few weeks ago) for a while, because I do believe that metabolic flexibility is important. But I do want to wait until my insulin resistance has gone down a bit more before I reintroduce some carbs into my diet.
It may not be easy to overeat, but it’s certainly possible to eat a lot more than energy requirement. I think Gary Taubes mentiones some old observations from 80-100 years ago where people consumed 3000+ calories a day while losing weight on a meat heavy diet. So even though satiety management is a big factor, it certainly seems that we use excess carbs in a much more efficient way than excess fat.
People on the Feldman protocol consume a lot calories (ideally about twice the daily requirement in animal fat) and they report that it’s not easy, but it can be done if you eat when not hungry. Obviously not recommended, but an intereresting experiment neverhteless
The metabolic rate does go down a lot when fasting after 3-4 days, that’s why people like Fung usually advise intermittent fasting or alternate day fasting where this doesn’t happen.
But I have my doubts that we can burn a ton of excess energy this way. Some calories, absolutely. So maybe the answer to my question is “a bit of each”: Higher consumption (body heat), higher waste (breathing and pooping out combustable chemicals) and if we consume even more calories then we do get fatter even on a keto diet.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#16
Here’s a good layman’s intro to how calories are spent, refs at the bottom:
I did the Feldman protocol and found it very hard. I fasted 4.5 days, then immediately starting eating as much as I could of high fat fare for three days. That’s not normally what I do after fasting this long, as I’m not really that hungry. It did what it should, but I would not recommend doing it that often. (And I have “low” LDL normally, anyway, so it’s not necessary for me to do this.)
Phase 3 was the overeating phase, and this is how they describe it:
I’d call the carbohydrate ( C ) as high carb, low protein, and the fat (F) as still higher carb, low protein. They don’t really say what the fat is.
Here’s the abstract. They ate about 1,200 extra calories a day, so should have gained about 7.1 pounds or 3.25 kg.
You can see how the whole “3.500 extra calories/day = one pound of fat” is totally wrong.
Also, I’ve been trying to eat more stearic acid based on the croissant diet I posted above. I’ve found a HUGE decrease in hunger by eating cocoa butter. Unbelievably huge, to the extent where I skipped dinner (only eat two meals per day) one day and want to skip it every day. In 6 years of low carb/keto, that has NEVER happened to me. If I want to eat OMAD, I have to force myself to do that. With cocoa butter, it came naturally. I physically was not hungry. In fact, I’ve had to cease eating cocoa butter, otherwise I get too full to eat over the holidays.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#19
@ctviggen Bob, how much cocoa butter are you eating each day? I’ve been eating abut 50-100 grams per day for about a week. I haven’t noticed any change in my appetite. In fact, if anything I’ve noticed a slight increase in morning hunger, which might have nothing to do with the cocoa butter. I’ve also decreased total daily calories by 2-300 during the same time, so that is possible/likely to be the source of my increased morning hunger.
Are you eating cocoa butter or cacao butter? I’ve been eating cacao butter. My understanding is that the only difference between the two is that cacao butter is extracted at a lower temp (max 115°F) than cocoa butter. Nutritionally, they are identical. Although most cocoa butter ends up in the cosmetic industry.
Again, this really isn’t true. Fung mentions that after fasting 4 days, the average metabolism is 13% higher. There is definitely individual variation, i.e. some people really feel “cold,” others do not. But it’s really not correct to say that after fasting only 3 or 4 days, one’s metabolic rate “goes down a lot.”
And I wonder why it hasn’t been posed more often. Let me rephrase. If people cite the first law of thermodynamics as proof of the calorie-in = calorie-out theory, I always think of Feinmans quote that the first law of thermodynamics is used quite often in nutrition, usually by people who know zip about thermodynamics. But naturally we can apply thermodynamics to nutrition, and we should, if only to be smartasses 
