Calories to be stated on restaurant menus from now on. Oh dear. It’s not about the calories. It’s about what those calories consist of. A calorie isn’t a calorie except when it comes to steam engines. Hard to grasp I know. But it’s pretty bloody obvious really.
In the Grauniad: Acalorie is a calorie, right? Fixed and unchanging, like a gram, or a mile? Well … no, not necessarily. You see, what a straightforward calorie count on a restaurant menu or food packet can’t tell you is how your individual body will use those calories. This comes down to multiple factors including genetics, sex, age, hormones, gut microbes, sleep patterns, the time of day we are eating, how active or sedentary we are, our body fat and muscle mass, and – crucially – what sort of food the calorie is in. Our bodies are much better at absorbing the energy from a calorie of low-fibre, processed food (like a potato chip) than they are at taking in calories from whole foods, like an apple. Calories are a measure of the heat (energy) given off when a food is completely burned away in a pressurised bomb calorimeter. “But we don’t eat calories. We eat food,” says Dr Giles Yeo, an obesity researcher at Cambridge University and author of Why Calories Don’t Count. That energy is used differently by different bodies. Read on…
This statement is correct "different effects on satiety and future food intake", I agree with that. However "A calorie is not a calorie" is an oxymoron, it is a factually wrong statement. I'm talking about physics, you are talking about a side effect of the contents of individual food types and the resulting effects on psychology and physiology of the organism consuming said types of food, I agree that the side effect is real, I agree that this side effect is why LCHF works when carbohydrates are largely eliminated from a diet, I've been agreeing all this for the last 2 years.
It’s the flip side of the argument that has said “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie” which of course is factually incorrect when it comes to nutrition. Whilst the laws of thermodynamics are true they don’t apply to nutrition in quite the same way and have given rise to one of the biggest fallacies of modern times. Progress. So having agreed that it’s all nonsense when applied to food, we can quickly move on to say that calorie statements on food packets are useless. For all the reasons Tim Spector is saying. Nice we all agree that it is useless and ignore what it says on the packet it becomes easier to focus on what really matters and that is the breakdown of nutrients on the back and the actual ingredients list on the back. Whilst you now say you agree Oss, clearly one or two members either find it difficult to grasp or feign it being difficult to grasp for reasons known to themselves. No doubt all members will eventually say that they knew it all along. Upshot is that if you think running a marathon will wipe out a diet of doughnuts then you are flogging a dead horse. Yes, the laws of thermodynamics. Great stuff. Just misapplied to nutrition and public health. We need to disassociate the link between the laws of thermodynamics and nutrition. It has forked everybody up for a generation or two.
Oss. Go back to your first post on this thread… It is an absolutely colossal task to try to address the erroneous cico model. It is being tackled. Slowly. Tim Spector’s work will help to achieve that and his address in the House of Lords the other day is a big part of it all. One day the reference to calories and food will recede when it comes to food. When exactly that will happen I don’t know. Tom Watson as PM as opposed to Boris Johnson as PM might have sorted it out sooner rather than later. However the need for the nation to consume less pills may get the right result for the wrong reasons. I meet every two months with a GP at my local surgery and from our meeting the other day he knows there is likely to be change. Just now they all get paid to prescribe statins rather than give a nutritional solution and that’s why they prescribe statins. “We don’t get paid unless we advise statins” when certain markers are triggered - is common across the length and breadth of the country”. This may well change quite soon.
So in your world you can eat an infinite amount of fat and protein and not gain weight, yeah? I re-read my posts often and I've re-read my first post here today before I replied to you earlier. "John I don't care what anyone says fuel consumed has to be burned, if you burn more then you consume you will lose mass, if you burn less than you consume you will gain mass." Your continued never ending argument is attempting to assert that this line from my post is wrong. That post and that line is a summation and simplification but it is also true. If you eat too much protein and/or fat on LCHF you will still get fat and while we are at it what do you think plateauing is on LCHF, plateauing is telling you that you are in energy balance, your intake equals your usage, your own suggestions for getting round a plateau have included reduce to one meal a day, what do you think that is if not a reduction in energy intake what do you think intermittent fasting is. Everyone who has gotten rid of mass on an LCHF diet has consumed less energy than their body used each day, the mass they got rid of was body fat converted to the energy required to keep them alive, their energy in was less than their energy out and no amount of arguing can change that. LCHF modifies behaviour it does not magically make energy disappear. Do you know ultimately where the power in cells comes from, it's a chemical called adenosine triphosphate or ATP, ATP converts either through adenosine diphosphate (ADP) or adenosine monophosphate AMP, in the process releasing negatively charged phosphate and positively charged ADP or AMP, AMP and ADP also get rebuilt into ATP that process is endergonic while the conversion of ATP to ADP and AMP is exergonic, ATP is an energy store and requires energy to synthesize it, it's decomposition is exergonic releasing that energy to do "work", work is a specific term in physics and ultimately all movement and activity is "work". I studied biology and microbiology for an extra year about 35 years ago now, surface level but deep enough to get into NAD, ATP, ADP, AMP and NADH, I got a distinction that year. Oh and your body cycles it's own weight in ATP every day in order to keep your body working, that is in spite of the fact that your blood contains a tiny amount of glucose at any one time, that glucose is created from food, the energy we burn in any one day has to be processed through ATP ADP and AMP, the source of the ATP is glucose or ketone bodies derived from fats but ultimately the energy required for life is coming from the ATP->ADP cycle, ultimately the net thermal performance of an organism is the sum of the energy it converts from food and the amount it excretes. No amount of this magical thinking that one person is different from another gets away from the chemistry and the physics right down at the bottom of the stack, human beings have to exist in a very very narrow thermal window we have a couple of degrees C of freedom most of us feel feverish if we are at 38C, most of our energy use is devoted to maintaining that thermal equilibrium. So if you are more active you need more food, less active you need less food, you have been suggesting that people can live on nothing, yeah that's actually possible for a while, they will get lighter, or that they can consume any amount of food as long as it is the right kind of food i.e. fats without getting bigger, neither is true, you die if you don't get enough energy that happens fairly quickly if you are a normal weight to start with and you will eventually die if you constantly consume more energy than you require but that can take a long time. And Tim Spector's Zoe project states that they do not advocate exclusion of any food group, his focus is on the microbiome and I agree with him on that, interesting subject and should be discussed more but me personally at my age I will continue with LCHF because it works at regulating my intake without the need to count that intake, although you are still counting because you are counting something i.e. counting the grams of carbohydrates you consume. Oh and who has been arguing on here in the last two years that that calorie statements on food containers are useful?
Here you go again. You can’t let the CICO stuff go. In my world, in the world of Tim Spector, Dr David Unwin etc etc etc ad infinitum - the list gets longer by the day. It doesn’t happen because one eats to satiety. There’s a safety valve. That’s how it works. Not in my world Oss but across the big wide world except here on BFF of course. Give it up. Forget the laws of thermodynamics just like the guys say. Forget calories. It’s hard to do, I agree, having been brainwashed into it. You gotta let it go. We are talking about clinicians that are healing people (not feeding them full of drugs) who are saying exactly that. The whole thing is starting to accelerate across the country. You are going to be the last man standing spouting off about energy theory and health. No one else is going to be doing that. A lot of GPs who had formerly been sceptics are getting on board with it. It’s snowballing, except in a few pockets of resistance such as on this forum. Forget calories. Forget CICO. Forget the laws of thermodynamics when it comes to health.
How much is too much healthy fat? This guy explains it all well. Of course if we don’t watch the video we won’t understand. This guy saves me from tapping it all out on a thread. Excellent video. Government guidelines currently say that calories should be stated on menus and on food packets. In the new world (and not my world), patients are being advised to ignore calories as part of a lchf programme. I can assure you of that @oss. It’s happening, whether you like it or not.
I'm sick of this, you believe in magic. You DO NOT KNOW how LCHF actually works. Head-brick-wall-banging, I am tired, I got rid of 35 kilo using LCHF, I consumed far less food than I did before, LCHF modulated my appetite, I stopped consuming alcohol as well, I'm a lot happier and I am still alive 2.5 years after SARS-CoV-2 arrived. I'm sick of arguing with someone who can't see that I agree with most of what he saying. You don't even listen to most of the people you quote. My quote, from Tim Spector (Tim Spector from "The Diet Myth") Everyone knows, all of these doctors know that there is an equilibrium, but you believe in magic.
I haven't counted calories in years, that does not mean that there is no energy equilibrium. Saying counting calories is not useful is not the same as saying that energy can vanish.
Exactly. I have never said energy can vanish. I said counting calories and using calories for nutrition purposes was needless. Sure there is an energy equilibrium but it’s application to nutrition is pointless. Counting calories is a modern thing that has got us nowhere. Unfortunately so many people have been caught out by it, and there is a lad on here who is still brainwashed by it like so many others across the globe.
I've finally started intermittent fasting and been doing all my eating within a window. Sad to say it’s been the McDonald’s drive thru window.
