Calories Still Count

Published 1.13.2026: Two recent articles demonstrate the difficulty in doing nutrition research, if the subjects aren’t kept in the lab (as Kevin Hall used to do when he was at NIH (National Institute of Health)). People lie about intake (wherther they mean to of not) and you can’t ever know what they actuallly ate unless you control it.

In this paper, the purported goal was to measure the effect of a high protein meal. This was a free living study, so people fed themselves and reported (allegedly) what they eat. According to the results, a high protein diet resulted in no muscle gain, and excess calories did not result in weight gain. Truly, these subjects were thermodynamic miracles!

Contrast those (unbelievable) results with this paper, which kept subjects in a controlled setting (a metabolic ward), and provided them with meals. For this paper, the only thing that mattered was the number of calories. People who ate more, gained more weight. Not sure why I saved these two articles, they really aren’t telling me anything I don’t know.

I do know that Kevin Hall noted that the first study didn’t include a metabolic ward and so there’s no way to know what the people were actually eating. He also noted that the high protein intake subjects didn’t have the muscle growth that you would expect from that protein ingestion.

And speaking of calories: recently I re-listened to a podcast that discussed of the Constrained Energy model. The podcast is available on Spotfify and is called Chasing Clarity. In this case, the host, Brandon Dacruz, was chatting with Lyle MacDonald, who is a diet researcher and trainer who’s authored a bunch of books. He’s notoriously prickly and has alienated a bunch of people in the field.

As readers know, I’m not a fan of the Connstrained Energy theory or model. That link takes you to my book review of the Pop Science book, Burn, where Pontzer wrote about his theory. The reason I mention the podcast is because they meniotned a new reason that the model doesn’t work that I had not thought of.

Basically, these two guys read Pontzer’s papers carefully, and although the total energy/lean mass was the same for both the hunter gatherers and the western group— there was a distinct difference in the makeup of this energy. The hunter gatherer tribe of the study were the Hadza of Tanzania, and they are a very small people. They are much, much smaller than Westerners… that’s why they normalized the energy to lean mass.

The resting metabolic rate (RMR) of the Hadza was much lower than the larger Westerners… more of their energy was in exercise (they move a lot more than most Westerners). The opposite was true of the Westerners. A large body requires more energy to maintain it, therefore the westerners’ RMR was greater than the hadza, but the energy expended was much less. That’s not an apples to apples comparison. Basically, they are eliminating any activity of the fat, which I do not think is correct. Fat may not be involed in exercise, but you can’t just ignore it. It requires energy.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked at it that way. And to be fair to Pontzer, the theory or model has shifted in recent years, as other research has shown that exercise CAN enable fat loss— infact, body buidlers have a saying that body recomposition is due to lifting, while fat loss is due to cardio. So body buiders plainly think that exercise causes fat loss.

Cardio is something that I have added to my workout schedule. I think it was on this podcast that I heard that visceral fat (of the fat you should be worried about) responds to cardio.

Anyway, back to Pontzer, I think that the model now puts a limit on the amount of energy that would be contrained, and most people get nowhere close to it. So yeah, evolutionarily, if energy was not constrained at all, we’d all die at some point. I agree that the additive model can’t be entirely true, I just don’t buy the argument that exercise is useless for weight loss. And I don’t remember a while of nuance in the book or in the interviews he gave for the book.

Yes, he handwaved that “exercise is good for health,” but he was fairly adamant that it was not good for fat loss. And that (which is what the Chasing Clarity podcast hit hard) is the primary message that got sold. Don’t bother exercising because it won’t help with weight loss. And that is simply wrong, demonstably so.