A Calorie Is Still A Calorie - Why Keto Does Not Work 😖

[amwassil]

@LeroyJenkins Leroy, I never heard about the Tudor Bompa Institute before and know absolutely nothing about it. But I’d like to see an argument contra the OP article based on something other than ad hominem fallacy. The article actually presents the common arguments contra the insulin/hormone hypothesis which is the basis of keto. It doesn’t matter if the article is research or an opinion piece on research cited, 36 citations. It doesn’t matter if the authors are experts or not or even shills for Tudor Bompa. If the article is hogwash then it sould not be difficult to demolish it on substance. I posted it in the hopes that someone could demolish it on substance.

[anon81060937]

Does the hormone hypothesis take into account that calories are recycled and that they’re more efficiently recycled during OMAD?

[amwassil]

Does the hormone hypothesis take into account that calories are recycled and that they’re more efficiently recycled during OMAD?

You may find this of interest:

[LeroyJenkins]

I posted it in the hopes that someone could demolish it on substance.

It’s cherry-picking, erroneously selective, pay to publish stuff. It’s deliberately slanted and nobody here is defending it. It doesn’t need demolition, it needs a comments section.

Leroy, I never heard about the Tudor Bompa Institute before and know absolutely nothing about it.

I meant no disrespect on this thing - it’s just funny to see that ‘Institute’ come up multiple times. “Tudor Bompa” sounds funny in English, to me anyway, and I have visions of a couple wild-looking blokes coming and knocking on my door.

“Hello, we’re collecting money for the Tudor Bompa Institute, to support opening a portal to another dimension…”

[amwassil]

@LeroyJenkins There’s a big difference between stating one’s opinions and citing relevant evidence in support of those opinions. As I stated previously, I’d like to see some contra evidence to discredit the OP article. I also mean no disrespect. You are entitled to your opinions, but your opinions mean nothing. Without supporting evidence/citations your opinion that the article expresses cherry picked and agenda slanted data does nothing to descredit the OP.

[LeroyJenkins]

There’s a big difference between stating one’s opinions and citing relevant evidence in support of those opinions.

Hey, it’s just funny, that’s all.

As I stated previously, I’d like to see some contra evidence to discredit the OP article.

You shouldn’t need it. It’s immediately evident what’s going on, i.e.

This is one of those pay-to-publish articles. It’s not a study, it’s an opinion piece (probably being kind, there) from two flunkies at the ‘Tudor Bompa Institute.’ Tudor Bompa - smart guy, great athletic coach, but he’s in his late 80s now and the "Institute’ is just trying to sell stuff.

And:

If you want to find “stupid stuff,” you will find it at such websites.

And:

Yes, sometimes it does work like that. So, what’s the complete picture and the dietary/metabolic context there? Sometimes calories in and out is a determinant of weight. You don’t think all that’s referenced was outright faked, do you?

The Tudor Bompa stuff is clearly biased and focused on cherry-picked information. They are trying to imply that it’s always that way.

I also mean no disrespect. You are entitled to your opinions, but your opinions mean nothing.

You should know better, that’s all. We mostly all do know better. That’s why you’re not getting the “response” here that you seem to want. Can you find something, somewhere, that’s deliberately slanted, uses cherry-picked information, is not peer-reviewed, is pretty much just ‘dumb’ and which misses the bigger, more complete picture, as on the other thread?

Well of course you can, but so what? If all the members of this forum did was post half-arsed stuff all the time, then not much at all would be achieved. We need to have better scientific understanding, to get that ‘bigger, more complete picture,’ and be able to quickly see BS for what it is. Paying attention to a smaller thing, versus the larger reality, isn’t really what we should do.

A Calorie is Not A Calorie - A Discussion of Thermodynamics

Are we able to think critically? Can we be independent and contemplative? Can we get the ‘bigger picture,’ rather than what somebody might want us to think?

Critical thinkers rigorously question ideas and assumptions rather than accepting them at face value. They will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments and findings represent the entire picture and are open to finding that they do not.

Critical thinking means being aware of what stuff like that Tudor Bompa article is. Might as well just have a laugh about it.

[amwassil]

Critical thinking means being aware of what stuff like that Tudor Bompa article is. Might as well just have a laugh about it.

No, critical thinking means doing your homework to cite evidence. DodgeBoys are not evidence of anything other than DodgeBoys’ opinions.

Your opinions, DodgeBoys’ opinions and my opinions count for naught. Here’s evidence:

The Biggest Loser FAIL and that ketogenic study success - Diet Doctor

The calorie theory of obesity falsified - Diet Doctor

[atomicspacebunny]

Your opinions, DodgeBoys’ opinions and my opinions count for naught. Here’s evidence:

This is a nice over-view:

Where it says “1. …cutting calories puts you into starvation mode…” is the key to the entire mystery?

So what do you do?

The top of the size of the thumb (or your personal thumb) is how much fat I eat that’s how I keep from going into starvation mode. If I eat more than that I’m over eating fat!

[LeroyJenkins]

No, critical thinking means doing your homework to cite evidence. DodgeBoys are not evidence of anything other than DodgeBoys’ opinions.

Nah, man, that ain’t it. Critical thinking means one should be able to see BS right away.

Your opinions, DodgeBoys’ opinions and my opinions count for naught. Here’s evidence:

You’ve already missed the boat, though. You’re assuming that everybody sees things as you do, and that’s wrong. There is a ‘larger picture’ and that you’re unaware of it doesn’t mean that everybody else is. The Tudor Bompa thing is BS, and DodgeBoys saw it right away. On this forum, most people probably would.

The larger picture is that it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s one report or 36 reports, it’s still BS if it’s deliberately slanted, uses cherry-picked information, is not peer-reviewed, is pretty much just ‘dumb,’ etc.

[PaulL]

I believe it was Peter Hyperlipid who made a comment once that he could predict, with a high degree of reliability, what a study’s conclusion would be, simply from the names of the authors. And that certain authors were known for reaching conclusions unrelated to their actual data. He had some snarky remark about how many studies he needed to chuck into the wastepaper bin each day.

[LeroyJenkins]

Amen!

I believe it was Peter Hyperlipid

I had to pause, there, and feel the universe wobbling. "Wait a minute - this dude’s name is actually ‘Hyperlipid’?" Okay, so Peter Dobromylskyj – Hyperlipid - this came up right away when I searched, and looks like a righteous bloke, but I did have to laugh.

[PaulL]

He is (or was) a veterinary anaesthetist by profession, but he’s one sharp cookie. He knows how to read a study and has an excellent grasp of statistics. I don’t always understand his posts, but I trust his objectivity and commitment to following the data wherever they lead.

[DodgeBoys]

No, critical thinking means doing your homework to cite evidence. DodgeBoys are not evidence of anything other than DodgeBoys’ opinions.

We still need to be able to separate the wheat* from the chaff. (So to speak. )

Critical thinking reveals a good bit of what I said, immediately. ‘Pay-to-publish,’ etc. It can also be seen - literally in seconds, by scrolling down through the article - that there’s no peer-review, no qualifications given for the authors, they don’t even bother making claims about their education…

Respectable, serious science isn’t usually going to be that way, so the BS detectors and warnings about “stupid stuff” should be going off in our heads - that’s really all I’m saying. There is a LOT of lame stuff out there.

*Sorry for the mention of wheat, if anybody was offended.

No ketonians (and only 3 carbfiends) were harmed in the making of this post.

[Fabien_Paillusson]

Hello everyone,

My naive understanding is that each person promoting and/or following a ketogenic lifestyle has a slightly different reason to do so and possibly a different appreciation of the mechanisms by which a miracle weight loss could occur. That might be the case for researchers too.

I have read the article and, just reading it, I could not see any distinction between having achieved ketosis or not in the studies allegedly debunking the carb-insulin hypothesis (I have not read the cited studies themselves in detail though). Still, the fact that being in ketosis or not does not seem to matter to the authors of the article doesn’t seem a good sign (the word ketosis doesn’t even appear once).
Even so, some questions are still worth asking: Hall et al paper (Ref. [12]) reports some interesting results with a larger weight loss for participants with higher fat intakes but a reported lower fat loss for the same cohort with high fat diet. Now, I am playing naive but I would a priori be cautious on how fat mass is being measured. I am happy to trust a weighing scale but not so much an estimate of the fat loss over the course of 6 days. Hall et al. use the DXA method which is not devoid of error (https://weightology.net/the-pitfalls-of-body-fat-measurement-part-6-dexa/) in particular from the hydration levels of the fat-free mass. Given a drastic change in diet over 6 days, it is possible that hydration levels of the cohort populations have been out of whack.

In general, my naive understanding of the “keto” hypothesis was not to follow calories but to follow instead fat. This could be summarised in an equation of the form:

dF = f(FI - FC) + g(CI - CC) where

FI = Fat in
FC = Fat converted
dF = fat mass variation
f = fraction of fat surplus/deficit which can be stored/burnt
g = fraction of carbs surplus/deficit which can stored/burnt
CI = Carb intake
CC = carb converted

In a ketogenic diet gCI ends up being ridiculously small compared to all the other terms so I will discount it for now.

FC accounts for fats being burnt and being converted for other uses in the body. The fat burning part is dictated by the energy expenditure which can be increased by physical exercise and various forms of intermittent fasting.
The factor f is mostly set by insulin levels.

With the simplistic equation above fat loss occurs if FI is less than FC i.e. if the mass of fat intake is less than the mass of fat needed to run the body.

A typical ketogenic diet has about 80% of caloric intake coming from fat. Assuming a similar energy conversion factor for dietary fat and stored fat we get that fat loss occurs if

Cal In < (BMR)/0.8

For an assumed BMR at 1700 Cals this gives that weight loss can occur if Cal In is less than 2125 Cals.

Of course the model above is simplistic and doesn’t even look at protein intake but it should not be too bad to give a heuristic rationale for why people in ketosis can lose weight even if they consume above their BMR.

Given that many people here are much more knowledgeable than I am on the matter, any improvement to the above stupid model are welcome.

[anon81060937]

Emerging Roles for Serotonin in Regulating Metabolism: New Implications for...

[Fabien_Paillusson]

Note that when I derived that Cal In < (BMR)/0.8, I assumed that all the energy required to run the body would be obtained from fat which is not true even for an optimum state of ketosis.

It is also noteworthy that when looking at mass fat balance, it can usually be converted into an equation with calories in and calories out under simplifying assumptions, except that there are some prefactors coming in.
A less radical take on CICO that would simply posit the necessity of an inequality of the form

Cal In < function(Cal Out)

as a requirement for fat loss (and where the function depends on the current metabolic state of the individual and, possibly, their diet) would not be incompatible with most of the narratives put forward to promote a ketogenic life style.

[amwassil]

@Fabien_Paillusson Finally! Someone got past being silly over Bompa Institute. Thank you, Fabien.

Hall’s study is, indeed, a serious attempted rebuttal of the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis. I link it below. Michael Eades has an excellent commentary on Kevin Hall’s claimed debunking of the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis of obesity. Not a long article and well worth the read:

Hall’s study cited in the OP as discussed by Eades:

Energy expenditure and body composition changes after an isocaloric ketogenic...

[amwassil]

@anon81060937 Thank you for this article link! Please post the link here:

A Calorie is Not A Calorie - A Discussion of Thermodynamics

[OldDoug]

I have read the article and, just reading it, I could not see any distinction between having achieved ketosis or not in the studies allegedly debunking the carb-insulin hypothesis (I have not read the cited studies themselves in detail though).

Hi Fabien. Very good post. Yes, there are several things like that. There is a big problem with a lot of studies that talk about “low carbohydrate” because they don’t go low enough for ketosis, or even as low as most people who want to “eat keto” aim for. So much of the “low-carb advantage” deals with insulin resistance - so to give it a fair test the people need to eat VERY low carb, so as to make a noticeable difference in their insulin levels. Then the results will be more on the side of the carb-insulin hypothesis. The degree to which the test subjects are insulin-resistant obviously would also significantly affect things.

DEXA scans may be fooled by different hydration levels in tissue. Water is a little “heavier” than our bodies, and if a DEXA scan “sees” more water in fat or nonfat tissue, it doesn’t know what it’s looking at, which can make a substantial difference. Hydration levels need to be controlled for.

You mentioned "Hall et al paper (Ref. [12])." Kevin Hall seems to want to deny the carbohydrate-insulin-hypothesis, from the beginning. Dr. Jason Fung gave a good critique and rebuttal about that study. Hall really did not give “low-carb” a fair trial.

This is a good subject, and I hope lots of people comment. More to come (I just don’t have time now).

[amwassil]

@OldDoug Following is the food content of Hall’s study, KD is the ketogenic version. I don’t think you can criticize this as not low enough for ketosis. It likely was for most if not all subjects. Read Eades’ comment on the study. According to Eades the real problem (for Hall) is that the study confirms keto rather than not.