To be clear I think you’ve misunderstood me here, and that may be my fault. But, to clarify, I’m not saying anything, really, about the laymans’ beliefs. Whenever I talk about “people believing x”, I’m meaning “people who research diets and such”. I don’t care what laymen believe. As I said, laymen believe all sorts of silly stuff in all sorts of fields. But laypeople disproportionately believing astrology would not, for sake of argument, mandate that we do more research showing why astrology is bunk (no, I am not comparing the arguments of SMTM to astrology, I am only using the comparison for the specific point here about laymen and their irrelevance to research). It might be the case that we should do more to educate laypeople on matters of calories and and weight-gain and all the adjacent funky stuff too. But none of this requires more research.
Actually my second quote does make it clear “not a soul writing in the literature today”- so I think that one is on you, but the first is on me, fair enough.
“What makes you think SMTM believe this?” All of the talk about mechanisms for dumping fat, in relation to changes in weight at the population level. Also their later commentary about diets basically not being possibly workable, which would only be true if there was some mechanism meaning people retained fat way more than others, instead of “some people have disproportionately strong hunger signalling relative to others”. But mostly the prior stuff.
“If you eat more calories than you expend, you store the excess as fat and gain weight, and if you expend more than you eat, you burn fat and lose weight.
This perspective assumes that the body stores every extra calorie you eat as body fat, and that it doesn’t have any tools for using more or less energy as the need arises. But this isn’t the case. Your body has the ability to regulate things like its temperature, and it has similar tools to regulate body fatness.”
So we have this. In the same article, we also have them talking about how fat and carbohydrate consumption have gone down, yet obesity has gone up. Frankly, if they sincerely believe people are eating less (I do not believe this to be true, I think we have good reasons to think this is not true), then its’ not just hunger-signalling that they’re talking about as being a difference maker.
To be clear I think you’ve misunderstood me here, and that may be my fault. But, to clarify, I’m not saying anything, really, about the laymans’ beliefs. Whenever I talk about “people believing x”, I’m meaning “people who research diets and such”. I don’t care what laymen believe. As I said, laymen believe all sorts of silly stuff in all sorts of fields. But laypeople disproportionately believing astrology would not, for sake of argument, mandate that we do more research showing why astrology is bunk (no, I am not comparing the arguments of SMTM to astrology, I am only using the comparison for the specific point here about laymen and their irrelevance to research). It might be the case that we should do more to educate laypeople on matters of calories and and weight-gain and all the adjacent funky stuff too. But none of this requires more research.
Actually my second quote does make it clear “not a soul writing in the literature today”- so I think that one is on you, but the first is on me, fair enough.
“What makes you think SMTM believe this?”
All of the talk about mechanisms for dumping fat, in relation to changes in weight at the population level. Also their later commentary about diets basically not being possibly workable, which would only be true if there was some mechanism meaning people retained fat way more than others, instead of “some people have disproportionately strong hunger signalling relative to others”. But mostly the prior stuff.
“If you eat more calories than you expend, you store the excess as fat and gain weight, and if you expend more than you eat, you burn fat and lose weight.
This perspective assumes that the body stores every extra calorie you eat as body fat, and that it doesn’t have any tools for using more or less energy as the need arises. But this isn’t the case. Your body has the ability to regulate things like its temperature, and it has similar tools to regulate body fatness.”
So we have this. In the same article, we also have them talking about how fat and carbohydrate consumption have gone down, yet obesity has gone up. Frankly, if they sincerely believe people are eating less (I do not believe this to be true, I think we have good reasons to think this is not true), then its’ not just hunger-signalling that they’re talking about as being a difference maker.