Except that human bodies are not engines. Calories in != calories out + stored energies. A healthy body will store just enough and discard the rest of the eaten food.
For a much more accurate and interesting read, check out Good Calories, Bad Calories.
You are not just wrong, but obviously totally wrong. Obesity is up worldwide. Why would this happen if human bodies just discarded unnecessary calories?
science mag and a lot of others thought he was worth listening to...
the argument is that it's not something simple like calorie in, calorie out (seen this argument on hn a few times), but rather how certain calories trigger certain behavior with insulin in our bodies.
After all, if he's right - it quite changes how we approach the problem, and considering the backing this research has from other reputable sources - it's quite foolish to just ignore such a paradigm shifting idea like that. perhaps it was worth ignoring before the guy wrote a giant book looking at one study after the next....before he presented such a good case for the argument...but at this point, obviously wrong is not true.
if you've got a good reference, a link to an article perhaps, to why Gary Taubes is wrong -- I'd love to see it.
Actually, that sounds OK. I know my body reacts very differently to HFCS vs sucrose, for example. My problem with GP is that Calories In == Calories Expended + Calories Stored, always (unless you have diarrhea or something). The differences in the way your body responds only changes the ratio of energy stored to energy expended, by making you hyper or relaxed.
ΔWeight = Energy in (food) - Energy out (exercise plus metabolism)
The flaw in the understanding of this equation as written in "The Hackers Diet" and many other sources is that the components on the right side of the equal sign are not independent variables. They are dependent variables. If one eats less, the rate of metabolism falls to compensate. If one exercises more, the appetite increases, and one eats more to compensate.
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/more-braying-...
This is something that really irks me about people when they talk about diets.
It takes a species more than 100 odd years or so to get rid of that "eat whatever the frak you can and store as much of it as you can because there is a good chance that you're not going to find much other than grass for a WHILE".
Your body is NOT going to just "discard" (poop out) "un-needed" calories.
The other thing that bothers me is people talking about "starvation mode". That just sounds like a buzzword (because it is). If you stop eating, you're going to start getting tired. THIS is the mythical "starvation mode". If you tell your body to just fuck off, and go jogging or whatever anyway (omg free will!) you are going to lose weight really really quickly.
Your body is NOT going to just "discard" (poop out) "un-needed" calories.
Are you sure of that? I'll offer myself up as a datapoint. My weight is exactly (to the kg) the same as it was 12 years ago. I do not exercise, at all, and eat pretty much whatever I want, whenever I want (and that's a lot.) For comparison purposes, my sister-in-law runs a few miles every day, and consumes less than half the calories that I do-- and her weight has also remained constant for the past decade.
Her incoming calorie-count is much less than mine, and her calories expended is much higher than mine. If my body does not discard un-needed calories, how is it that she's not losing weight, and I'm not gaining weight?
(By the way: I worked for Ben & Jerry's for several years, and ate a pint of ice cream every single day. No weight gain, and only a marginal rise in my cholesterol count.)
Oh, they're calories out alright, just not "out via being burned and doing work". Out another way.
(Though I think this effect is dominated by the manipulation of the satiety set point by other mechanisms, which the naive (in the math sense) calorie-in-calorie-out rhetoric ignores.)
For a much more accurate and interesting read, check out Good Calories, Bad Calories.