Why the calorie is broken.

LeinsterDub

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160201-why-the-calorie-is-broken

Interesting read. I found the effect of cooking for example something I'd not considered before

Macy0161

It is interesting, particularly on the processing of foods - I wonder does that impact on smoothies/ shakes made which nutri ninja's and similar? I had assumed that oats in a smoother blitzed would be absorbed quicker (sometimes it would be my reason to do it), hadn't thought it would effect the amount of calories I actually get from it.

I would still say that the biggest problem, in general, for people following calorie controlled diets is people lying/ guessing portions though.

I was only quickly reading in work, but it is also focused on the measuring of the calories in - I would've thought a big problem is the measuring (and the eating up to) the calories burned in fitness trackers and apps? I get 100 calorie differences between the same 3km/ half hour walk between strava and mapmywalk with the same profile information. Santa brought me a Garmin swim which gives way lower calories than Garmin Connect would give me when I was manually entering details before Christmas. Strava always gives more calories burned compared to my Garmin with HRM for running and cycling. Over estimation by trackers/ apps, and then people eating totally up to what they are showing must be a big impact these days too?

Irishcrx

Agree with Macy,

Although the article is interesting it is in itself what the problem is with a lot of people who try diet. They are overthinking it , reading through everything to find reasons that it may not work and it's better to just give up.

Look , the proof is in the pudding as they say. Of course it's never going to be 100% accurate , but if your 90% accurate and track your food correctly, you will lose weight the same way millions before you have.

Calories and types of calories are differant yes , but the goal is the same.

Again , I think people guessing portion size is one of the biggest killers and they'd be shocked at the actual content if they measurement , weighted it and checked it. Also , most of the apps definately do overestimate calories lost during exercises...If I play a full 90 minute match the app would tell me I've lost 600 - 650 calories or so, I'd count that myself at around 150 - 200 and again everybody burns them differantly.

Irishcrx

Agree with Macy,

Although the article is interesting it is in itself what the problem is with a lot of people who try diet. They are overthinking it , reading through everything to find reasons that it may not work and it's better to just give up.

Look , the proof is in the pudding as they say. Of course it's never going to be 100% accurate , but if your 90% accurate and track your food correctly, you will lose weight the same way millions before you have.

Calories and types of calories are differant yes , but the goal is the same.

Again , I think people guessing portion size is one of the biggest killers and they'd be shocked at the actual content if they measurement , weighted it and checked it. Also , most of the apps definately do overestimate calories lost during exercises...If I play a full 90 minute match the app would tell me I've lost 600 - 650 calories or so, I'd count that myself at around 150 - 200 and again everybody burns them differantly.

Alf Veedersane

The calorie isn't broken. What they've said, from what I gathered skimming through, is that it's difficult to track exactly. And it is. But suggesting the baby be thrown out with the bathwater isn't a solution.

This is pretty relevant.

Making Sense of Strength

Your body is insanely complex.

Humans, with all of our scientific knowhow and the aid of vast computational power from supercomputers, have just reached the point of being able to model a single cell of the world’s simplest organism. We’re still a long way from having a comprehensive model for a single human cell, let alone modeling, from the bottom up, how individual cells interact, or how entire organs signal back and forth with each other, or how the human brain works in its entirety, or how it interacts with, influences, and is influenced by the other tissues of the body, and how we interact with other complex organisms (each other) and our environment.
We, as a species, know a lot, and we’re quickly learning more every day. But we still have a long way to go to understand all of the workings of a single one of our cells.
Just let that sink in for a moment.
A nihilist, when faced with this realization, would throw his hands in the air and lament, “compared to how much there is to know, we know effectively nothing. There’s no way to understand all of this stuff, so why even try?”
Luckily, I’m not a nihilist, and I think that response is nonsense. Not knowing EVERYTHING doesn’t mean we don’t know anything. Far from it. We know enough to treat many diseases, put a man on the moon, and split the atom. Heck, hundreds of years ago Isaac Newton could describe, with stunning accuracy, how the planets move the way they do with nothing but a telescope and some calculus. We, as humans, are really good at doing a lot with astoundingly little (relatively) information.
But, because we don’t know everything, we have to construct models.
Models are our way of wrapping our minds around complex systems that we don’t know everything about, distilling them down to their most important features, and being able to have a basic idea of how they work and being able to predict how they’ll respond to various challenges (stimuli or stressors).
A good model has three main features:
1) It captures enough of the system’s complexity to be useful in describing how it works and how it will respond.
2) It accounts for few enough factors to actually be user-friendly
3) It actually works


……………..
It accounts for few enough factors to actually be user-friendly
A perfect example here is calories in and calories out.
We all “know” calories in minus calories out equals caloric surplus or deficit equals weight loss.
While this may be “true” from the perspective of pure physics, things are a little fuzzier in the human body – it’s essentially impossible to pin down an exact value for either “calories in” or “calories out” under reasonable conditions.
Different macronutrients (carbs, fats, and proteins) take different amounts of energy to digest and process in your body. They can also influence various hormones like leptin and thyroid hormones that change your metabolic rate.
A caloric excess or deficit is met with regulatory responses from your body to naturally adjust how active you are or how many calories your metabolism will burn at rest. They’ll also affect hunger, which mediates how much food you’ll want to consume without forced self-restraint or gluttony.
Not everything you eat is even absorbed by your body to be utilized as fuel – you naturally excrete a small percentage of what you eat, which can change a bit with dietary composition. Furthermore, some foods will be used as fuel by your intestinal bacteria to a greater or lesser extent, meaning more or less of it is actually “left over” to be used by YOU.
Of course, then you toss in the monkey wrench that nutritional labels only have to be within 20% of the actual energetic values of the food – and that regulation isn’t always followed to a “t” by food manufacturers or restaurants. So even if you COULD know what your body was going to do with the food you ate, you still wouldn’t ever know for sure exactly how many calories you were putting in your body unless you made two identical meals, ate one, and tossed the other in a bomb calorimeter.
Also, even if you could know the exact number of calories that were going into your body or being expended by your body, other hormones like cortisol alter the relative amounts of each type of fuel your body is using –fatty acids, proteins, or carbohydrate. So being able to predict changes in weight with perfect accuracy still wouldn’t mean you could predict changes in body composition with dead-on precision.
Then, pressing further, you can’t know exactly how many calories your body is expending in day to day activities unless you live in a metabolic chamber in a lab. Different people display various degrees of efficiency in movements, so two people who are the same size who run the same mile will burn slightly different amounts of energy in doing so.
So am I proposing we throw the baby out with the bathwater and scrap CICO? Of course not! What would we replace it with, or how would you improve it?
Could the model account for more complexity? Sure.
However, let’s go back to the fact that for a model to be useful, it has to be user-friendly.
Attempting to account for ALL that complexity would make the model much less user-friendly. You could fine-tune the calories in and the calories out sides of the equation if you burned your feces in a calorimeter, accounted for fluctuations in lean and fat mass, measured the concentrations of various hormones a few times per day, took your temperature at regular intervals, and measured your daily activity by wearing an accelerometer all the time…but who’s going to do that.
There would be issues with gathering data (who wants to burn their poop and draw blood a few times per day?), and there would be issues analyzing data (the equation would be quite a bit more difficult to use than calories in – calories out).
And, as a segue into the next topic, although CICO is not a perfect model, it works well enough.
It actually works
This is what it all comes down to. Does the model work?
The first two factors – accounting for enough complexity and being user-friendly, are necessary factors, but they aren’t sufficient.
Any model, no matter how elegant or thorough it may appear, is ultimately of little value if it doesn’t actually describe the system well and lend itself to making predictions about that system that are fairly accurate (or more accurate than a competing model).
You can’t assume that a model is automatically a good model if it meets the first two criteria. Heck, you can’t even assume it’s an accurate model because it meets the first criterion, user-friendliness be damned (accounting for so much complexity that it’s no longer user-friendly).
Bringing this full circle, refer back to the initial part of this post about complexity and how little we know.
If we simply don’t know enough about a system, a model built on everything we know is still not going to be a good model. Even if we know enough to construct a good model, if we need a massive computer to account for enough factors to run the model, it’s still not going to be very useful to a coach or an athlete in-the-moment in the gym.
Imagine you have a machine that you feed a number into and, through a massively complicated algorithm you can’t understand fully, it spits another number out the other side, and the number it spits out isn’t always the same if you feed the same number into it repeatedly, though the output usually falls within a reasonably small range of values.
For example, if you input “5,” the machine may spit out 33, 37, 32, and 35, but not 2 or 13243.
You’re playing a game with a friend where you have to get the machine to spit out the biggest number possible.
Through trial and error, you find a range of inputs that tend to results it high outputs. You don’t know WHY it works, but you know that it works.
Your friend, on the other hand, knows more about math and computer science than you, and he does his best to figure out the algorithm. He constructs the best model he can to describe how the machine will respond, based on what he knows, though he can’t yet account for the full complexity of the machine’s operation.
When you play the game, you consistently get the machine to produce higher values than your friend does. His model looks better on paper (accounting for as much complexity as he possibly can vs. simple trial and error), but yours is better at reliably getting the machine to produce higher numbers.
This is the reality test. The ultimate usefulness of a model is not in its construction, but in its results.
If trial and error produces better results than a model accounting for everything we know, there may have been a problem with the actual construction of the model, or it may just be that we don’t know enough to construct an adequately good model.
You see this in exercise technique and program design a lot.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to build a model for ideal exercise technique, or proper program design. But does it produce results? Does it produce better results than competing models?
If it’s been tried and it’s failed, it’s not a good model, the elegance or complexity of it be damned.
If it’s been tried and it works better than the other models out there, it’s a better model even if it seems rudimentary or simplistic on paper.
If it simply hasn’t been tried, you have to treat it as an untested hypothesis – you can’t assert that it would work better than the other things out there, because what should work isn’t always what does work (refer to the multitude of “can’t-miss” drugs that fail badly when put through human trials).
A bit about humility
So, going back to CICO, even though there are a lot of factors it doesn’t account for, is it a good model? YES! Because it simply works. It produces results that are within 5-10% of what would be predicted by the model in the vast vast majority of cases. For a model as simple as CICO, trying to describe the behavior of an enormously complex system, perfection is an unrealistic standard – 5-10% is truly exceptional.
However, we can’t forget what we’re dealing with.
We are dealing with models.
Models are not the system. Models approximate the system and its behavior.
Models help us wrap our minds around and work with a set of factors, circumstances, and interactions that can’t be (at this time, potentially ever) fully known. Building and using effective models helps inform practice and helps us make useful predictions, but they are not Fact. They are not Truth.
They are maps, of varying degrees of quality. Your body and the world it interacts with are the territory. A perfect map of the USA doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be American.
As such, don’t fall into the lazy intellectual trap of treating your model as the facts about the situation. It simply helps you deal with facts that aren’t fully known.
Your body changes day to day, and it won’t respond exactly the same way to an identical stimulus if it meets it twice. Your body is different from someone else’s, and theirs won’t respond exactly the same way yours does.
It’s usually weak people who try to argue that one exercise technique or one program is the best. Chasing optimal is a fool’s errand.
There are very few raw lifters who I’d instruct to squat as wide as I do, but I have hips that let me drop into an almost-full split with no stretching, but that go bone-on-bone with very little straight-ahead flexion.
This is what my hips do with no stretching whatsoever. This is a very comfortable position for me. If that’s not the case for you, you probably shouldn’t squat like I do.
There are very few lifters who I’d recommend to squat heavy once every other week in pursuit of a 1000 pound squat like Eric Lilliebridge.
If you construct models and treat them as Truth, you’d think I squat wrong (still the highest raw drug-free squat at 242 all-time), and you’d think Eric Lilliebridge programs wrong (totaled 2000 when he was a teenager, and highest raw total of all-time at 275).
I’ve never had a strong person (someone who understands what it takes to actually get results) tell me I should squat differently, and I doubt Eric has ever had a strong person tell him he should program differently.
Your model (exercise technique, program, diet plan, etc.) may be a useful approximation of the facts for a lot of people, but it’s not the best for everyone, and it’s not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
This is not to say that everything comes down to trial and error. It’s not the nihilist “we can’t know, so why bother,” position. Gathering more facts and trying to build progressively better models as we learn more and more is a worthwhile pursuit. If we ever get to the point that we CAN model the human body from the bottom-up, it will doubtlessly save us a lot of time and resources in just about every branch of biological science. If we COULD build a model from the bottom up (taking into account individual differences) for proper exercise technique, it would save people a lot of trial and error and frustration.
But for the time being, we’re not there. Learn, experiment, build models, test hypotheses, and troubleshoot, but be humble about your conclusions.
More than anything, never lose sight of the single most important question: Does it work?

From here

LeinsterDub

Alf Veedersane wrote: »

The calorie isn't broken. What they've said, from what I gathered skimming through, is that it's difficult to track exactly. And it is. But suggesting the baby be thrown out with the bathwater isn't a solution.

This is pretty relevant.



From here

Nope what they said is the way the food is prepared can considerably change the number of calories available to your body. A raw steak will have fewer accessible calories than a cooked one as the body has to work harder to digest it.

The point being that while the steak may have 100 calories in it a better measure maybe the amount of the energy the body can absorbe by ingesting said food maybe a more helpful unit

Alf Veedersane

LeinsterDub wrote: »

Nope what they said is the way the food is prepared can considerably change the number of calories available to your body. A raw steak will have fewer accessible calories than a cooked one as the body has to work harder to digest it.

The point being that while the steak may have 100 calories in it a better measure maybe the amount of the energy the body can absorbe by ingesting said food maybe a more helpful unit

I get that but it's a model. Amending the value to account for what is absorbed by the body is still just a manipulation of the calories except you're expanding the model to account for more complexity.

Even if you account for raw, uncooked etc, that still won't account for the effects of hormones etc in the body have on what happens that food within.

The calorie model is a model. It's not precise but it works to a degree of accuracy.

The majority of people that say that there is something wrong with it because they count calories and aren't losing weight are usually miscounting and/or overestimating calories earned through exercise.

If they can come up with an easily used model that accounts for more complexity and can have all food labels bearing these units, then that's great.

LeinsterDub

Alf Veedersane wrote: »

The majority of people that say that there is something wrong with it because they count calories and aren't losing weight are usually miscounting and/or overestimating calories earned through exercise.

If they can come up with an easily used model that accounts for more complexity and can have all food labels bearing these units, then that's great.

True enough. It shouldn't be used as an excuse when they are in actuality over eatting by hundreds of calories

Mellor

LeinsterDub wrote: »

Nope what they said is the way the food is prepared can considerably change the number of calories available to your body. A raw steak will have fewer accessible calories than a cooked one as the body has to work harder to digest it.

The point being that while the steak may have 100 calories in it a better measure maybe the amount of the energy the body can absorbe by ingesting said food maybe a more helpful unit

The first two items they listed. People serving portions that are too large, and calories miscounted on label/menus, are example of human error. Neither in anyway proves the calories is broken.


Bio-availability of calories will effect the energy we get from out food. To put it simple, you are aren't digesting food, its not in your bloodstream. However, this can only ever result in missing calories. Where you get less than the calorie count suggests. You can't ever get more. I don't see this as a problem, eating food and not getting the calories is a pretty sweet situation.
So that's actually completely contrary to the underlying attitude of the article, that "broken calories" are contributing to weight issues. They aren't, if anything they are helping people control their weight.

It's just making excuses to people like Bo Nash from Texas, and why its not his fault that he's 245lb. I'm not buying it.

ford2600

Mellor wrote: »

It's just making excuses to people like Bo Nash from Texas, and why its not his fault that he's 245lb. I'm not buying it.

Yeah I took that from it too, "I can't lose any weight because the calorie count is wrong" excuse.

You get it wrong for a week, so you eat a little less and see how that goes and so on.

From a abstract/geeking point of view the limitations of applying Thermodynamic Laws (the First AND Second) is really interesting, but it's not reason America and the Western world is getting fatter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC20OoIgG_Y

TLDW diet went from
simple, homemade, minimally processed, little added sugar or fat(mainly animal and not all omega 6), and required affort
to hyperplatable,engineered food, highly refined, high added sugar and fat, requires little effort

100 years ago most Americans were lean and didn't know what a calorie was.

If your reading a packet for your nutritional advice/calorie count your doing it wrong, most things you eat shouldn't be in a packet

aine92

I think that the calorie probably isn't ideal, but I think it's probably moreso the change it causes in diets which is important. I keep strictly to 1200 a day since shortly before Christmas because I am sick of being unhappy with my body, and more than ANYTHING it has taught me about how bloody insane my portion sizes were, and how I really didn't require that bowl twice the size with twice as many calories to keep me full.

rubadub

ford2600 wrote: »

Yeah I took that from it too, "I can't lose any weight because the calorie count is wrong" excuse.

You get it wrong for a week, so you eat a little less and see how that goes and so on.

Exactly, if you buy a new car you do not blindly put petrol in with it overflowing out the car thinking "but but, the man told me to put a that many litres in per week, what on earth can I do about this, we worked out the estimated miles per gallon". You monitor the effect of fuel in your car for your typical daily journey and get a good idea of what is needed. If you go off driving on motorways for a week you may have to adjust the mile per gallon figures.

As you lose weight you also need to adjust, just like if you no longer have a passenger in your car you need less fuel to keep the tank at the same level of fullness.

Some things will have very different effects, e.g. studies showed heavy drinkers do not get much effect from alcohol. I always knew this anecdotally, I was losing fat while still having a very large intake of calories from alcohol.