"He lists several ways that the first law of thermodynamics is not applicable to the human metabolism"

No. He never says that at least in the link provided. No serious person would say that the first law doesn't apply to humans just like no engineer would say that the first law doesn't apply to cars with their clutches coupled then uncoupled, to use his analogy.

Sorry folks but CICO is a fact and if it isn't then we need to rewrite the laws of the universe.

CICO, as interpreted by the mainstream is NOT a fact. it fails to take into consideration the energy costs of breaking and making chemical bonds and/or carrying nutrients to their various destinations.

The issue with CICO is not that, by denying it as written, we're denying the laws of nature, but that IT, as written, denies them.

I'm pretty sure Rob will be by pretty soon to say that he misspoke. Unless he's too busy working on his perpetual motion machine.

Calories in Calories out is true, as you say, it's in the implications of that that the disagreement is over.

You are a sly one, Mr. Teaser! (Capitalization for emphasis.)

okay okay okay. I think I get it. Let's see.

CICO is true. A calorie ingested (energy in) winds up somewhere else (energy out) to the last atom. "Out" could be:

--heat
--work
--material created (as muscles, bones, neurons, blood cells. etc.)
--material stored and circulated for fuel (as fat, fatty acids, etc.)
--material dumped (as sh*t)

Now to my way of thinking, that's a lot of possibilities for a calorie besides making and storing fat. Must be some kind of biological traffic cop making the decisions about each and every one of those calories. Could it be there's not one single "law" (or even one single cop) enforcing this decision in the same way for all bodies everywhere?

The more you eat, the fatter you get? Not necessarily.
The more you move, the thinner you'll be? Not necessarily.
The more you eat, the taller you grow? Not necessarily.
The less you eat, the smaller you shrink? Not necessarily.

We'd all like this to be simpler.

Correct, and I am wrong with that statement as written. What I should have written was the following, "He lists several ways that the idea of CICO is not ideally applicable to the human metabolism." And while I attempt to restart my perpetual motion machine, please have at it.

I mentioned that in his book, "The World Turned Upside Down," Feinman goes into a lot of detail about the applicability of thermodynamics to the human metabolism. It's worth a read for the metabolism geeks, and the book in general is one of those with a permanent place in my library. Here are a couple related quotes out of the book that address the CICO idea:

The way you describe this is accurate; however, many in the medical and fitness communities use CICO inaccurately, and maybe this is where the disconnect originates. The Jillian Michaels crowd makes this very simple, burn in physical activity more than you eat in calories, and you'll lose weight. Right, until metabolism slows down or you cave to food cravings or you develop an injury due to chronic cardio or overdoing it in general. Then there's the issue of sustainability, and the reports on the experiences of the Biggest Loser contestants appear to be the major indicator in this case.

Therefore, I'm not sure you can call CICO for humans true without your qualifiers. A calorie is not a calorie due to the different ways humans react to the same food types and quantities.

I don't know how the mainstream takes CICO. The first law of thermo definitely takes into consideration energy costs of breaking and making chemical bonds and/or carrying nutrients to their various destinations. (I think I take this stuff too seriously but then again I still keep a hard copy of the JANAF tables on my shelf.)

Right and the real question is around resting metabolism and then to hear from you earlier that there are little to no evidence for degrees of "starvation mode" makes the whole argument kind of rhetorical.

Ahh, yes, it's in the implications of CICO as the source of the disagreement. I would agree, and I firmly believe that it's how one interprets what CICO means that contributes a lot of semantic noise in this case. For me, the jury is out on NuSi Hall in regards to a calorie being a calorie. I'm looking forward to reading the study's publication.

http://caloriesproper.com/the-insul...tack/#more-6362



This isn't his full post, I left out a bit in the middle and a graph from the Minnesota starvation experiment showing how weight loss slows with time, without a change in calories.

Didn't the keto advocates have access to the study method before it was started? If do, did they object to it or not?

They did. At least, the people at Nusi did. I don't think you can really blame Kevin Hall for the study's design, people had the chance to question it. And you can't always forsee things like the large increase in metabolic rate when going from the metabolic chamber to the metabolic ward. For all we know, if they had been able to correctly calculate the maintenance calories going in, the study might have said something more definitive about the effect (or lack of effect) of switching to a ketogenic diet--because that confounder of having already been on what turned out to be a weight loss diet for a month before they ever touched keto wouldn't have been there.

I'd like to point out the obvious. Hall pointed out that there was a difference. He was pointing at a chart which shows pre- and post- to be different in their relationship between overall weight and fat oxidation. In pre-, both follow closely, while in post-, we see a disconnect between the two. In spite of his pointing out the difference, he somehow completely and utterly ignores the question that begs - why is there a difference?

There's another thing that bugs me, it's all that stuff about the meaning of CICO. If I may, I'm going to try to illustrate where exactly the contention lies.

For CICO proponents, the phenomenon occurs for the whole body. For hormone/receptor proponents, the phenomenon occurs at the fat tissue specifically for obesity, but also at other tissues where applicable. Since we specify it occurs at the fat tissue, we cannot then argue against CICO for fat tissue, since that's exactly what those hormones/receptors produce - a difference in Ein and Eout at the fat tissue.

Secondly, for CICO proponents, the phenomenon has CICO as the cause, and weight fluctuation as an effect. While for us any change in CICO is an effect of those hormones/receptors.

I hope I brought a little clarity in the disagreement so we stop disagreeing on petty semantics. Anyways, carry on.

An idea just occurred to me. Insulin also regulates other functions that can and will make other tissues grow bigger (or smaller as the case may be) - protein synthesis.

Taubes talked about fuel partitioning between fat tissue and all other tissues. I'm now adding a second type of fuel partitioning - between growth and all other functions. The idea here is that as insulin rises, fat tissue grows bigger, and all other tissues grow bigger as well, thereby reducing available fuel for all other functions. Whether this reduction is an effect or occurs in parallel is not immediately pertinent, but the point is that there is certainly fuel partitioning happening in this fashion as well.

When we go low-carb, this second type of fuel partitioning obviously comes into play, as we now feel we have more energy to do stuff. This happens in spite of the spontaneous drop in total food intake.

Hall also mentioned something about nitrogen loss, supporting this idea of a second type of fuel partitioning. Thank you, Hall, for the seed for the idea that just occurred to me.