Refuting CICO platitudes

(KM) #101

I think where CICO fails us is obviously not in the physics equation, it’s the mechanics. You drive a Civic. You change the oil every three months, you drive like there’s an egg between your foot and the gas pedal, you religiously inflate and rotate the tires, you drive on asphalt. I drive a Civic. I haven’t changed the oil since I bought mine, I drive on sand and I like to pretend I’m Richard Petty. You get 42 mpg and I get 29. Same CI, same number of miles driven, you’ve still got a quarter tank of gas and I’m thumbin’ a ride to the gas station. (I did however have a lot more fun than you did😁).

If you break that down it may all come down to explicable little physics equations - friction, inefficient burn etc. - but the real world difference in performance makes your “mpg” almost meaningless to me and vice versa. The energy in a gallon of gas is merely one factor in how far I can go.

ETA:. Taking this back to human bodies, there are thousands of variables, including some we don’t really know well. To begin with we’re not all driving the same car, but even if we were, maybe you have an optimal hormone profile. Maybe I have extraordinary gut microbiome. You can’t sleep, I have excema. You got a new puppy, I lost an old companion. The shape of your femur requires more energy to move than mine, I chew my food more times. You fidget, I meditate. I’m “fat adapted”, you’re aerobically fit. How any of that affects our real world CO is an unfolding and pretty individual story. Maybe keto or some other tweak is like engaging a hybrid system we didn’t even know we had on board.

#102

Mpg has so many factors… It’s usually 60-70 for our tiny car but it depends on so many things (length of trips and weather being very big ones), I could talk about it for ages, I don’t drive a vehicle anymore but my hypermiler heart is still beating :wink:
A good hypermiler can do over 60 mpg with a Civic under the right conditions :slight_smile:

And indeed, the human body is even much more complicated. CICO still stands, we just can’t figure out our CO. I totally used calorie counting to lose at a time and it worked for me great, I even had an educated guess about my CO - but I never knew my BMR and people always talked about that and why we need to eat significantly above that. (It made me no sense as it would mean that one barely moving can’t lose fat as a deficit is impossible. It’s good as I have no idea about mine :slight_smile: At the moment, I don’t know my TDEE in average either as I don’t lose fat so can’t even calculate it inaccurately. And as I eat things where tracking is impossibly, I don’t know my CI either. It doesn’t keep me from using the for me very right “eat less” - it is “as little as comfortably possible”, actually. and it involves stuffing myself because that minimizes my food intake, things are interesting - method to lose fat but I can’t depend so much on numbers as they are MYSTERY. I still use them, I am merely aware that I can’t trust them much. Still, a tiny information. Inaccurate, sometimes very much so but still helpful to know if I ate 1300 or 4100 kcal according to guesstimation. And I like numbers. I could just ignore tracking and sometimes do but I am too curious about even the inaccurate numbers…)

(Doug) #103

In the modern world, I think it’s the basic efficiency of the human body and our circumstances that is the problem, as least as far as being too fat and wanting to be thinner. If we were engaged in increased physical activity - as was more normal 300+ years ago - just to live, vast numbers of us wouldn’t become obese or develop fatty liver, insulin resistance, etc., and start down the road to obesity and other generally disliked consequences.

In the here and now, if we could push a button or move a switch so that we are in “waste energy” mode, then fat loss would be so much easier.

Modern hunter-gatherers aren’t fat, per se. One big change for humanity as a whole was the development of agriculture ~12,000 years ago. Another big step - in the wrong direction for body composition - was the Industrial Revolution, which began around 1750. ‘Progress’ (undeniably) but with a cost.

Well said. :clap: We indeed are individuals with a wide possible variance in many areas.

Well, I feel compelled to say that it’s not that CICO is “failing,” but rather that we are failing CICO, if anything. :smile:

As relatively sound-minded adults, it’s up to us to figure things out. What’s the desire - to lose fat? Well, okay, then configure CICO so that happens. It’s not a mystery how it happens. If it’s really only ketogenic eating that on a sustainable basis makes it so we are making net withdrawals from our fat stores, so be it. That’s the case for me, and even though I probably suck at it more than most - because I don’t stay with the program enough - I don’t kid myself about it.

(Doug) #104

But if you are a fat Civic, then you want to do 10 MPG. :smirk:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #105

This may be an erroneous conclusion. The last time I saw statistics (from 2014, if memory serves), there were actually a few more million thin people in the U.S. with metabolic dysfunction (TOFI) than there were obese people with metabolic dysfunction. And there is a fair percentage of obese people who are metabolically healthy (MHO). So obesity or the absence of it is not the determining factor of metabolic health. It is not always the result of metabolic dysfunction, and metabolic dysfunction does not always result in obesity.

Another possible conclusion might be that if we were to return to the diet of 300 years ago, we might be healthier, whether of not we were as physically active as people were back then.

It’s worth remembering that the diet in the Colonies back then included far more meat and far fewer plant foods than today.

(Doug) #106

Paul, how can this be? Take out the obese that are okay on metabolism, and you’re saying the TOFIs outnumber all the rest of the obese? Let’s see the numbers.

Even if so, it wouldn’t necessarily negate what I said, i.e. that vast numbers of us wouldn’t become obese or develop fatty liver, etc.

Well, I didn’t say it was. :slightly_smiling_face: You’re talking about a blanket, unqualified statement.

Agreed, but there too that doesn’t argue against increased activity - as was certainly the case, on average, back then - having the beneficial effects as described.

#107

Activity changes surely played a big role though I mostly blame the new, worse, easily accessible, easily overeating triggering treats (and snacking all the time, people ate breakfast and worked until lunchtime back then, didn’t go out to the office donut room or whatever people do. I just drank coffee sometimes. with milk powder and sugar… but usually plain tea. never was the snacking type, I could quite seriously overeat in 2-3 meals just fine, thank you very much). Well, both. But these are still just 2 factors and there are many. Even the mental state of modern people are different. Some things got better, some got worse.
And it matters that while (some kind of) meat is pretty cheap now (I need to be very careful about my food costs so I depend on meat a lot. I just can’t afford plants, not like I wanted. gluten is the only thing cheaper than meat if I think about it. of course everything considered, first of all satiating effect but nutrients are quite important too), it was a luxury for masses hundreds of years ago. Some people had to live on grains or whatnot (no idea how they survived. surely they ate other things, cought a fish or two here and there but it wasn’t so serious). The rich people who ate meat every day, well they weren’t the norm, to put it lightly. Even my anchestors 100 years ago and they weren’t very poor, didn’t eat much meat. They had it, sure and other animal products too (most like other animal products amount wise I suppose) but they ate huge amounts of grains and sugar (even before sugar became a common thing, they ate natural sugar in fruits. not in nearly as huge amounts as modern people though). You didn’t butcher a chicken every day as a not poor, not rich peasant… And the sausages and hams had to last all year too and a whole family ate them… Of course, poor families had no pigs.

Possibly even being outside in the cold helped with not getting obese :wink: But I really think activity and the habit of eating normal (if HCHF) food 3 times a day and that’s it was the biggest reason. Well, surely there were lots of chubby peasant women after their youth but that’s not necessarily unhealthy yet especially with a more active lifestyle…

(KM) #108

Funny how we all have our resistance spots. Just finished reading Chatterjee’s How To Make Disease Disappear. (Not quite as flaky as it sounds, his argument is that most chronic disease is a more like symptoms, a manifestation of dysfunctional lifestyle choices.)

I read happily through three of his four pillars and all the advice pertaining to diet, sleep and stress management. Got to the section on exercise and suddenly lost the will to live. :flushed:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #109

Total population of U.S. at the time (2014, if I recall correctly): 240,000,000

Thirty percent (30%) are obese: 72,000,000 obese
Of these 30%, 80% are metabolically ill: 57,600,000 metabolically ill
Of these 30%, 20% are metabolically healthy (MHO): 14,400,000 healthy

Seventy percent are normal weight: 168,000,000
Of these 70%, 40% are metabolically ill (TOFI): 67,200,000 metabolically ill
Of these 70%, 60% are metabolically healthy: 100,800,000 healthy

Thin but metabolically ill (TOFI): 67,200,00 > obese and metabolically ill: 57,600,000 by about 10,000,000

Figures were cited in a lecture by Robert Lustig.

As I wrote earlier, obesity per se therefore does not appear to be the actual problem, since it is possible to be obese and otherwise healthy, or thin and sick.

I think researchers have been confused by how strongly obesity seems to correlate with metabolic disease and therefore decided that it caused the metabolic disease.

Instead, it would appear that obesity is part of metabolic disease (in many people, at least) but is not the whole story. Just as not everyone who is metabolically dysfunctional becomes a diabetic or develops cardiovascular disease, hypertension, or Alzheimer’s disease (to name a few).

(Doug) #110

Holy Moly! Thank you, Paul - that is astounding. 40% of normal weight people are metabolically ill…:open_mouth:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #111

Yep. Sad, isn’t it?

(And quite likely from the SAD, come to think of it. :scream: I don’t know how serious he is, but Dr. Lustig has stated that we shouldn’t call it “metabolic dysfunction,” but rather “processed food disease.”)

(Doug) #112

Makes sense. So I see that a generalized assumption that ‘normal weight’ means metabolically healthy is incorrect - at least for the U.S. and people on similar diets. So many tens of millions of people… It really is amazing, and indicative of an even greater need for keto diets and/or less processed food to start with.

(KM) #113

US population in 2014 was almost 320 million, not 240.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #114

That might have been the figure for adults?

ETA: It is indeed the figure for the adult population at the time the figures were compiled. The U.S. Census bureau counted 234.6 million adults in 2010, and 258.3 million adults in 2020. This is in line with my belief that the figures cited (which I have taken from a lecture by Robert Lustig) come from 2014.

(KM) #115

Fair enough.

(Michael) #116

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR7OlvUgKY8 interesting

#117

Gary Taubes and Walter Willett on the same paper? Will definitely be reading this one!

#118

We always have the option to do not reply. You could move to another part of the forum, until the subject changes. That’s what I do.

(Doug) #119

Michael, while the video guy’s take on things is lacking, I read the paper and it mentions "For instance, Hall and Guo assert that, “for all practical purposes, ‘a calorie is a calorie’ when it comes to body fat and energy expenditure differences between controlled isocaloric diets varying in the ratio of carbohydrate to fat.”

That’s Kevin Hall - who seems to have an anti-keto bias indeed.

(Chuck) #120

Well I am 75 I have eaten a higher number of calories since doing keto than when I was in the eat less move more camp, and I was actually gaining weight. I have lost 30 pounds so far and have averaged about 250 more calories per day.