Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is a gem, one of the most important books of the past century.

It’s possible, however, that white people are more adapted to these things than hunter-gatherer groups. That isn’t to say that whites are immune (just visit any Walmart and look around) but that the effects of a moderate (by our standards) amount of sugar or corn or wheat causes them to blow up. Recall Benjamin Franklin’s musings on the Indians and their “firewater”.

I think that it’s probably related to seed oils, sugar, wheat, etc., but that doesn’t explain (and I don’t know how to explain) why the effects appear to be exponential: there was a small population-wide decline in health between 1900-1970, a modest decline between 1970-1985, an acceleration from 1985 to 2000, and an absolute fucking collapse since.

We need federal or state capital-I Intervention, frankly. The only problem is that the feds and the staties are functionally retarded when it comes to health, and eat the same slop and are just as fat as everyone else.

I salute, and envy, your pith.

This is critical, since muscle growth is the largest, most important, and in many respects only, means of increasing your bodies basal metabolic rate, which is in turn the basic key of not just yo-yoing, but actually maintaining a healthy body composition, reducing visceral fat levels, and keeping it off indefinitely.

I thought that people had proposed such a system, but that it had never been implemented, and that labels still use the old Atwater method.

There is, apparently, some background here:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033392-800-calories-on-food-packets-are-wrong-its-time-to-change-that/

I could be wrong, of course.

The “pooping out undigested calories” thing is supposed to be taken into consideration when the calorie calculation is written on the bag.

They put “net calories” on the bag, meaning that the 200 calorie bag of almonds probably has more than 200 calories in it, but that on average, you’ll get 200 calories from it and poop out the rest. So that’s accounted for.

As for the variation of efficiency of digestion between individuals, and the variation of burn rates, etc, that’s been shown to be real, but a small enough difference, person to person, to not really account for much. You’re talking about a point or two in BMI, not the difference between being healthy weight.

…I actually don’t think that’s actually physically possible. Like, I don’t even want to visualize how much mass would be in 500 calories of brocolli, and I’d hazard a guess that most people actually wouldn’t physically be able to eat that much in a single sitting.

So yes, there are definitely confounding factors to making CICO easier or harder, but there was a guy that lost 50 pounds eating nothing but Twinkies to prove a point, and that point was that while eating good foods makes CICO way easier to accomplish (because you won’t be hungry all the damn time), it isn’t necessary. It just sucks.

CICO is king. It’s a incontrovertible law of physics. However, trying to obtain a caloric deficit eating french fries and twinkies is hard as hell.

So I really think we’re agreeing, I’m just stating that bad calories making CICO harder doesn’t make it not true. It’s true, no matter how hard it becomes, and you absolutely can lose weight eating nothing but french fries, it’s just going to suck to the point to where it’s insurmountably difficult.

Jim; “It’s possible that the human body responds to different calories differently.”

I think that you’re both right.

The complicating factor is that you simply don’t absorb every calorie you consume. Excrement has surprisingly high caloric value. (About 5cal/gm dry.) Certain foods — such as nuts, unprocessed animal meats, and fibrous vegetables — aren’t absorbed easily or well, whereas certain others — like donuts and sugary drinks — are very easy for the body to process. Calorie labels can be deceptive.

See, e.g.: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/96/2/296/4576806

So if the label on a can of Pringles says “200 calories” and the label on a bag of almonds says “200 calories,” you might actually absorb 200 calories from the former, but you’d only absorb about 136 calories from the latter.