Don't Say CALORIE!
Don't Say CALORIE!
A tale of failed science and new paths
It is better to know nothing than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek, neglecting meanwhile everything that fails to agree with them.
— Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
It all started in 1819 with Nicolas Clémont. As someone who studied temperature, he wanted a reliable way to measure it and so he took the Latin word calor — meaning heat — and defined a term to equal the amount of energy required to heat 1 kg of water by 1 ℃. He called this his creation: calorie.
Then, in 1852, Pierre Antoine Favre et al decided to redefine the calorie to match a smaller quantity. They redefined it to be the amount of energy required to heat 1 g of water by 1 ℃.
Chaos ensued. I mean, what did they expect after redefining a term which had been around for over 30 years?
The smaller calorie won out and the old, large calorie was now referred to as a “kilocalorie”. Though it actually took a bit of time for that to catch on.
Fast forward to the 1870s and Pierre Eugene Berthelot invents a clever little device: the bomb calorimeter!
It sounds a bit silly but it’s a very seriously useful device. By burning anything you want in a small, sealed container surrounded by water, you can measure the temperature increase of the water and know exactly how much energy there was in the thing you put inside. The science of calorimetry took a leap forward. It was a great time to be a scientist.
Berthelot did something else clever. In 1887, he decided to capitalize the C on the “big calorie”. He said: a gram-calorie is a calorie but a kilogram-calorie is a Calorie.
But then someone had an idea. An idea about diet. An idea about weight loss…
His name was Wilbur Olin Atwater. And in 1887, he made a great mistake.
Atwater took some food and placed it into a bomb calorimeter. He also put some pure fat, pure carbohydrate, pure protein, and pure ethanol into it. Then he fed the same stuff (just less exploded) to some people, took their excrement and urine, and put those excreta into the bomb calorimeter as well. Finally, he took the resulting Calories1 from the food and subtracted from it the Calories of the excreta. He called the final results “usable Calories”. His logic was that this energy is what gets absorbed into the body. These are the Calories that you’re familiar with.
Atwater said that since the Law of Conservation of Energy said the Calories you consumed couldn’t disappear without you spending (“burning”) that energy, the accumulation of Calories was what caused weight gain. He called this the Energy Balance Theory (EBT).
It seems to make sense.
But… it doesn’t.
And only recently, in 2020, did a paper come out that refutes EBT.
Serious analytical inconsistencies challenge the validity of the energy balance theory is the name of the paper. And I’m going to talk a little bit about it.
Before I continue, if you would rather watch a video, I have a short one and a long one that cover the same material, plus a little extra.
Okay, if you’re still reading, here’s how this goes…
They’re Lying To Us!
So say the scientists who run studies that take EBT as fact.
In a first report Brehm et al. published that obese women in [Low Carb Diet]s lost more than twice as much weight than those that follow [Low Fat Diet]s during a 6 months treatment period. This difference was not caused by distinct levels of energy consumption since women in both interventions reported statistically similar EIs. Guided by the EBT, they tested the hypothesis that the greater weight loss in LCDs vs. LFDs resulted from differences in the total [Energy Expenditure] evoked by each diet. After a second study they found that weight loss variation could not be explained by differences in resting EE, thermic effect of food or [Physical Activity Level]. These data led them to conclude that the most likely explanation for their findings was [Energy Intake] underreporting by the LFD group2
This infuriates me. These scientists conclude that the most likely explanation for their data not meeting their expectations is that the study participants are lying to them.
Luckily for us, the Mass Balance Theory being proposed by this paper has no issue explaining the results. On the same page, they provide some charts and say
the superior weight loss observed in LCDs vs. LFDs is mainly the result of differences in daily mass intake.
But why is the Low Carb Diet also lower mass? Well, according to the paper
Implicit between any two isocaloric diets, is the fact that the diet with largest energy proportion from fat will always contain the least macronutrient mass.
In this model, the underlying mechanism that explains the advantage of LCDs over LFDs is independent of the difference in the physiology of each diet; the difference simply emerges from dissimilar mass intakes3
and this makes sense. They are testing isocaloric diets in their studies; after all, according to EBT that should make them “the same”. And, of course, since fat is more energy dense — has more calories — that means the more fat you eat while constraining calories, the less mass you will consume.
It’s worth noting additionally that, unlike the proponents of Low Carbohydrate Diets who came before (eg. Gary Taubes, Nina Teicholtz), this model does not take diet construction into consideration at all. Of course, the paper does recognize that nutrients affect your hormones, which control when and how you exude mass and how easy it is (or isn’t) to eat less.
the effect of any diet on an initial state of body composition appears to be only dependent on the amount of weight lost and not in the diet's macronutrient contents. The diet composition, however, may have a positive or negative effect on the subject's diet adherence which is clearly an important determinant of the final weight loss amount.
[…]
The level of daily of food mass intake is, however, influenced by the ever present interplay between the environment and genes and by how food's intrinsic biochemistry relates to satiety4
More Like “First Flaw”
This point of view fails to acknowledge, however, that according to [The Law of Conservation of Energy], in close or open systems, a non-zero energy balance can coincide with a null mass change. In line with such fact this work demonstrates that the EBT's proposed correspondence between energy balance and weight stability is unattainable, i.e., weight stability coexists with a persistent energy imbalance. 5
The calorie is a measurement of energy. It is meant to measure the movement of heat from and between materials. It was never intended to be applied to biomechanics.
Of course, energy has mass. As the well known equation goes, E=mc²… but, wait.
In nutrition science, EI represents the heat release upon food oxidation and as such it has no contribution to body mass. Einstein's energy-mass equation shows, for instance, that 2,500 kcal = 10.465 MJ of heat energy are equivalent to
\(m=\frac{E}{c^2}=\frac{10.465\times10^6J}{(3\times10^8m/s)}\approx1.16\times10^{-10}kg\)Daily accumulation of this amount for 100 years would increase body weight by 0.0000042kg. 6
My goodness! That is a small amount.
So. If it’s not energy adding to your mass (what a surprise) then what is it?
Mass.
Okay, okay, fine. So then how are we losing mass throughout the day?
Mass In, Mass Out
Macronutrients oxidation byproducts are CO₂, water, urea, SO₃ and heat7
and additionally,
[P]rotein loss occurs in feces (e.g., excretion of mucin, an indigestible protein secreted by the intestinal mucosa), in sweat (e.g., amino acids may be excreted during physical exertion), in urine (e.g., urinary excretion of glycine in creatinine and C-peptide, a 31 amino acid polypeptide generated from insulin secretion) and during renewal of skin, hair and nails (e.g., shedding of dead cells filled with keratin) 8
Humans are pretty sloppy creatures. We lose huge amounts of water through sweat
Humans’ high number of eccrine glands enables sweat production in excess of 2 L/h during heat stress, 4–10 times the rate of chimpanzees9
and electrolytes, proteins, and other miniscule particles are lost along with it.
The paper provides this handy axiom:
Axiom of daily weight loss: Each day we experience a weight loss given by the weight of the [Energy Expenditure]-dependent mass loss (EEDML) plus the weight of the EE-independent mass loss (EEIML).
EEDML is given by the daily excretion of [Energy Providing Mass] oxidation byproducts (e.g., CO₂, water, urea and SO₃); whereas EEIML represents the daily weight loss that results from: the daily elimination of non-metabolically produced water (in respiration, in sweat, in urine and in feces); minerals loss in sweat and urine; fecal matter elimination; and mass loss from renewal of skin, hair and nails.
So, we lose mass through a few specific pathways. Proportionally, you would be surprised how much mass some of these are worth. Did you know that on average, people exhume about 7.5 liters per minute?10 According to airly.com, exhalate is about 78% nitrogen (that’s about 8 grams), 17% oxygen (that’s about 2 grams), 4% CO₂ (that’s about 1.5 grams), and 1% other stuff and inhaled air is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.04% CO₂, and 1% other stuff. Let’s get the differences. The nitrogen and “other stuff” cancel out, so
That means we exhale
Which is about 144 g of mass lost just from normal breathing every day. That’s just over 4 kg (about 9 lbs) per month. That can’t be discounted.
At Long Last
We finally have a solid, scientific, straightforward method for measuring food.
It’s not like we weren’t measuring food in grams before. Anyone who counts macronutrients looks at the number of grams of carbs, fat, or protein in a food.
But until now, everyone has used Calories as the basic measurement of food quantity. Especially as it relates to weight gain and loss. Actually, everyone still does. That’s why I’m writing this: I’ve seen nobody talk about this paper and I want it to get stuck in everyone’s head.
Until now, even the most fringe diet advocates have been unable to refute EBT. They either tossed it aside and scoffed at it without having a good reason or they made room for it in their own pet theories. They made sure that what they advocated didn’t “break the First Law of Thermodynamics”. But… well, I’ll leave you with the final words of the paper. See you next time.
In conclusion, the food property that increases body weight is its mass and not its Calories. The physiological activity that decreases body weight is the excretion of food oxidation byproducts and not heat dissipation. Daily weight fluctuations are thus dependent on the difference between daily mass intake and daily mass excretion indicating that the conservation law that describes body weight dynamics is the Law of Conservation of Mass and not the First Law of Thermodynamics. According to the latter Law, in a closed or open systems, a positive or negative energy balance is not always followed by a similar sign mass change as required by the EBT. This theory is therefore not a corollary of First Law of Thermodynamics; assuming otherwise may have unintended consequences.
Remember, when it has a capital C it means 1,000 lower-case calories!
Study PDF Page 6, emphasis added
Study PDF Page 5
Study PDF Page 11
Study PDF Page 1, emphasis added
Study PDF Page 11
Study PDF Page 11
Study PDF Page 10
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222100289X
https://thorax.bmj.com/content/37/11/840
It’s a bit less when you’re asleep than when you’re awake