Overcompliating the Obvious
Published 12.8.2016
The desires to overcomplicate the process of gaining and losing weight is a fascination for me (hence all the writing here on the topic). Sure, human physiology is complicated, but how people get fat is not. It just isn't. People get fat because they eat more than they expend. The inspiration for these thoughts is this recent paper with Ray Cronise as its lead author.
Cronise is the guy who thinks freezing yourself helps with weight loss, though he dolls it up with the phrase "Metabolic Winter Hypothesis. I never followed that work much, as I am truly not interested in soaking in an ice bath or taking cold showers. I have made an effort to not overdress in cold weather, something I initially did after moving back North from the South. But that’s very different from what Cronise advocates.
At least this article recognizes the reality of the energy balance. Calories ingested matter, period. The energy balance matters, period. People do not get fat unless they eat more than they expend, period.
Cronise's model hinges on the RQ values he quotes being accurate.
Cordain seems to be speaking to vegans when he shows pictures of the !Kung who gather the bulk of their food. They pick up lots of roots, and they also gather tortoises, not just vegetation. Cordain points out that chimps eat a lot of meat (insects and small animals), depending on the season. When they kill a small animal (mostly in the dry season) they eat everything.
Then he presented stable isotope data for a homo (proto-human) fossil tooth. The change in 13 carbon isotope in teeth indicatess what the creature has been eating. If there's more C3, then the animal is a browser (meaning it eats plants); if there's more C4 then the animal ate more grass rather than herbs (leaves) and is a grazer. The signature for the hominid (our ancestor) falls between grazer and browsers, but Cordain claims it's similar to obligate carnivores like hyenas. The implication is that any plant signature hyena teeth results from the diets of their prey. However, the humanoid result is nowhere near the hyena result on his graph.
My first question as I watched: Wouldn't getting an in-between reading means that a species might both grazers and browsers? Why can't it mean you ate the plants yourself, or ate both herbs and grass? Why look, it absolutely can mean that: Procavias are located in the middle section too, and they eat both grasses and broad leaf plants. Note: I'm not saying hominids didn't eat meat. I think they did, as much as they could find or hunt. But I also think they ate butt loads of plants when they could. Just like hunter gatherers today.
An obligate carnivore is an animal that has to eat other animals. They can eat plants, but they must eat meat. Cats are obligate carnivores, for instance. Obligate carnivores lack the physiology needed to digest plants. So we know that we ate both plants and animals, what's uncertain is how much plants or animal were being consumed. Cordain claims that about the time that we evolved, we started eating more meat. The alternate explanation (and the one I favor) is that when we began to cook our food, we began to evolve and our brain size increased.
The evidence for this is the stone tools they found. He says that, "Stones don't leave us," which suggests that the tools used for plants would have left. So, at best, the record is going to be incomplete. My "spidey sense" was already tingling for a version of confirmation bias, sirens were going off at this point. Stone tools can be used to cut meat. They could also be used to cut plants—or grind grains or legumes.
Fossils have been found that show evidence of being hacked apart by tools. Rather than saying hacked off the bone, he says disarticulate. I'm not questioning that paleolithic humans ate meat, it's just an issue of how much. There isn't anyway to tell how much plant material relative to meat paleo humans ate, it's only possible to say that they ate both. Ah, but that didn't fit in Cordain's narrative.
Cronise is reasoning similarly, only with RQ values.
Within the body, fuel is partitioned (burned) this order: alcohol (because the body can't use it or store it, plus it's toxic), protein (little can be stored and the body has to eliminate amino acids in the blood), carbohydrates (carbs), then fat. Fat requires no processing to be stored, so in a case of excess, it. gets. stored. first. Fat is first stored and last burned.
Carbs go first into glycogen stores, then into the blood as glucose. The body tries to keep blood glucose within a range. The issue with type two diabetes (T2D) is that cells can't store unlimited amounts of glucose and begin to ignore the insulin signaling to take the glucose in, which is insulin resistance. However, the body can store unlimited amounts of fat.
Cronise claims excess protein is turned into excess heat. So there’s a short term stoking of the metabolism— is that the “metabolic advantage” of low carb diet fame? The problem is that heat isn’t due to fat burning. Eating mixed meals (like most normal people do) thus affects partitioning. Fat storage only occurs in caloric excess. In other words, people eat more than they expend.
I also call nonsense on the fasting for days crap. Victorians did not fast for days, and they weren’t fat. Or at least weren’t on the scale that we are. Yeah, maybe in the paleo times people went days without food, but the point of agriculture was to try and avoid that. We are not fat because we don’t fast. We are fat because we eat the same amount or more that we did when we were much more active. WE. EAT. TOO. MUCH.
Rather than RQ foolery I choose to eat a bit less and find ways to move more during my days. Which only included organized “exercise” since this past June. when I joined a gym with a friend. Standing while working, walking whenever possible, taking the stairs, these are all things that I did at first and that most everyone can do. If your weight or health precludes you from doing this, then fast away. But fasting for days is not required. Even Valter Longo (the researcher that helped Michael Mosley develop his 5:2 diet) doesn’t think water fasting (because no one likes it) is necessary. I want to enjoy life, not just live. I can and do sometimes skip meals. Speaking of the 5:2 diet, we do still do the austerity day thing twice a week (at least most weeks). But eating a fraction of a normal day is still eating.
I'd like to make something clear (for what seems like the hundredth time). Obvious doesn't mean easy. Changing habits, particularly enjoyable habits, is not an easy thing for most people to do. And over indulging, be it eating or drinking, is enjoyable for many people. It certainly was for me. I like good food, and enjoy a fine adult beverage, and as a result I habitually ingested (eat and drank) more energy (calories) than I expended for years. Thus I became obese (granted, my obesity was of the mildest sort, which of late has been discounted in some forums). I became not-obese by changing my habits for good. If I go back to eating, drinking, and being sedentary as I was, I will become obese again. There is no need to overcomplicate things or spend mornings in ice baths.
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The desires to overcomplicate the process of gaining and losing weight is a fascination for me (hence all the writing here on the topic). Sure, human physiology is complicated, but how people get fat is not. It just isn't. People get fat because they eat more than they expend. The inspiration for these thoughts is this recent paper with Ray Cronise as its lead author.
Cronise is the guy who thinks freezing yourself helps with weight loss, though he dolls it up with the phrase "Metabolic Winter Hypothesis. I never followed that work much, as I am truly not interested in soaking in an ice bath or taking cold showers. I have made an effort to not overdress in cold weather, something I initially did after moving back North from the South. But that’s very different from what Cronise advocates.
At least this article recognizes the reality of the energy balance. Calories ingested matter, period. The energy balance matters, period. People do not get fat unless they eat more than they expend, period.
However, Cronise thnks exercise is unimportant during weight loss. I could not disagree more.While it may be true that isocaloric foods are not always isometabolic, food caloric intake minus heat dissipated, respiration, and those calories eliminated as fecal and urine waste must equal zero.
Cronise's model hinges on the RQ values he quotes being accurate.
So his thinking is that anything that raises RQ (aka exercise) lowers fat burn. So eat less, but don’t move. Not really buying it. All he can measure is total RQ, from there he's guessing as to what contributes to the total.Generally, lipids have an RQ of ∼0.7 and carbohydrates have an RQ of ∼1.0. The RQ of alcohol is slightly lower than lipid at ∼0.67, and while the RQ of amino acids range from 0.6 to 1.17, the average is ∼0.84.
Confirmation Bias
This reminds me of the faulty reasoning Loren Corain used in this talk to assert that humans were primarily meat eaters. The talk is from 2005. I don't remember when I watched it, but I did take notes. In the talk, Cordain notes that Paleolithic human was omnivorous, and there was no one diet. Diet depended on geography and climate.Cordain seems to be speaking to vegans when he shows pictures of the !Kung who gather the bulk of their food. They pick up lots of roots, and they also gather tortoises, not just vegetation. Cordain points out that chimps eat a lot of meat (insects and small animals), depending on the season. When they kill a small animal (mostly in the dry season) they eat everything.
Then he presented stable isotope data for a homo (proto-human) fossil tooth. The change in 13 carbon isotope in teeth indicatess what the creature has been eating. If there's more C3, then the animal is a browser (meaning it eats plants); if there's more C4 then the animal ate more grass rather than herbs (leaves) and is a grazer. The signature for the hominid (our ancestor) falls between grazer and browsers, but Cordain claims it's similar to obligate carnivores like hyenas. The implication is that any plant signature hyena teeth results from the diets of their prey. However, the humanoid result is nowhere near the hyena result on his graph.
My first question as I watched: Wouldn't getting an in-between reading means that a species might both grazers and browsers? Why can't it mean you ate the plants yourself, or ate both herbs and grass? Why look, it absolutely can mean that: Procavias are located in the middle section too, and they eat both grasses and broad leaf plants. Note: I'm not saying hominids didn't eat meat. I think they did, as much as they could find or hunt. But I also think they ate butt loads of plants when they could. Just like hunter gatherers today.
An obligate carnivore is an animal that has to eat other animals. They can eat plants, but they must eat meat. Cats are obligate carnivores, for instance. Obligate carnivores lack the physiology needed to digest plants. So we know that we ate both plants and animals, what's uncertain is how much plants or animal were being consumed. Cordain claims that about the time that we evolved, we started eating more meat. The alternate explanation (and the one I favor) is that when we began to cook our food, we began to evolve and our brain size increased.
The evidence for this is the stone tools they found. He says that, "Stones don't leave us," which suggests that the tools used for plants would have left. So, at best, the record is going to be incomplete. My "spidey sense" was already tingling for a version of confirmation bias, sirens were going off at this point. Stone tools can be used to cut meat. They could also be used to cut plants—or grind grains or legumes.
Fossils have been found that show evidence of being hacked apart by tools. Rather than saying hacked off the bone, he says disarticulate. I'm not questioning that paleolithic humans ate meat, it's just an issue of how much. There isn't anyway to tell how much plant material relative to meat paleo humans ate, it's only possible to say that they ate both. Ah, but that didn't fit in Cordain's narrative.
Cronise is reasoning similarly, only with RQ values.
Fasting
The ultimate way to eat less is to eat nothing. There are drawbacks to fasting, however. Cronise admits that in a fast glucose does get made from “protein stores” aka lean muscle mass and organs. Humans are not "fat burning beasts." Glucose is the preferred fuel, and in some cases the obligatory fuel. If you're not ingesting glucose, the body can make it, but it's not going to make from your fat stores.Within the body, fuel is partitioned (burned) this order: alcohol (because the body can't use it or store it, plus it's toxic), protein (little can be stored and the body has to eliminate amino acids in the blood), carbohydrates (carbs), then fat. Fat requires no processing to be stored, so in a case of excess, it. gets. stored. first. Fat is first stored and last burned.
Carbs go first into glycogen stores, then into the blood as glucose. The body tries to keep blood glucose within a range. The issue with type two diabetes (T2D) is that cells can't store unlimited amounts of glucose and begin to ignore the insulin signaling to take the glucose in, which is insulin resistance. However, the body can store unlimited amounts of fat.
Cronise claims excess protein is turned into excess heat. So there’s a short term stoking of the metabolism— is that the “metabolic advantage” of low carb diet fame? The problem is that heat isn’t due to fat burning. Eating mixed meals (like most normal people do) thus affects partitioning. Fat storage only occurs in caloric excess. In other words, people eat more than they expend.
Winter is coming
After extensive verbiage to reach the obvious conclusion regarding intake, Cronis re-iterates his metabolic wonter hypothesis.I missed the publication of his Food Triangle hypothesis.our “Metabolic Winter Hypothesis,”1 we postulate that the molecular responses to these two stressors (i.e., caloric restriction and cold temperatures) may have evolved in tandem—both conserving energy in the fasted state and partitioning calories to fat for warmth during times of cold.
Sounds a bit like Fuhrman's nutrient per calorie idea to me. Unsurprisingly, the Western diet fares badly, being the most energy dense and nutrient sparse. Then Cronise sings the praises of intermittent fasting. In the end however, everything he relates is contingent on people being, “in the chronically fed state.” In other words, WE. EAT. TOO. MUCH.The Food Triangle organizes whole food using an energy density paradigm. It recognizes that essential amino acids (i.e., proteins) are not limiting nutrients in any whole-food diet that meets daily energy needs. Rather, vegetable— or animal-sourced amino acids, in excess of daily requirements, along with carbohydrates and fat, all become fuel with oxidative priority given to that which is not readily stored. This organization of energy density permits individuals to address their micronutrient requirements (the apex of the triangle) without driving chronic overnutrition (the bottom vertices of the triangle). These foods become the nutritional foundation of daily meals, rather than the more energy-dense alternatives. They also provide a rich source of phytonutrients and can be eaten in nearly unlimited quantities. It further places emphasis on foods that are increasingly important for healthy gut microbiota.
Exercise
Cronise admits that exercise is important for health, but says while losing it might be better not to do so. I disagree. Begin as you mean to go on is my motto— unless you are physically unable to do so (you are so fat your joints ache when you move, for instance). Exercising while losing is better for your heart. He concludes with "you can't outrun your fork." However, I strongly think that moving more in addition is the healthier way to go.I also call nonsense on the fasting for days crap. Victorians did not fast for days, and they weren’t fat. Or at least weren’t on the scale that we are. Yeah, maybe in the paleo times people went days without food, but the point of agriculture was to try and avoid that. We are not fat because we don’t fast. We are fat because we eat the same amount or more that we did when we were much more active. WE. EAT. TOO. MUCH.
Rather than RQ foolery I choose to eat a bit less and find ways to move more during my days. Which only included organized “exercise” since this past June. when I joined a gym with a friend. Standing while working, walking whenever possible, taking the stairs, these are all things that I did at first and that most everyone can do. If your weight or health precludes you from doing this, then fast away. But fasting for days is not required. Even Valter Longo (the researcher that helped Michael Mosley develop his 5:2 diet) doesn’t think water fasting (because no one likes it) is necessary. I want to enjoy life, not just live. I can and do sometimes skip meals. Speaking of the 5:2 diet, we do still do the austerity day thing twice a week (at least most weeks). But eating a fraction of a normal day is still eating.
I'd like to make something clear (for what seems like the hundredth time). Obvious doesn't mean easy. Changing habits, particularly enjoyable habits, is not an easy thing for most people to do. And over indulging, be it eating or drinking, is enjoyable for many people. It certainly was for me. I like good food, and enjoy a fine adult beverage, and as a result I habitually ingested (eat and drank) more energy (calories) than I expended for years. Thus I became obese (granted, my obesity was of the mildest sort, which of late has been discounted in some forums). I became not-obese by changing my habits for good. If I go back to eating, drinking, and being sedentary as I was, I will become obese again. There is no need to overcomplicate things or spend mornings in ice baths.
Disclaimer
Related writings:
Search this site: