The “linear relationship” is one such appeal- it’s not something I think anyone actually believes.
People definitely believe this.
Also I know of literally not a soul writing in the literature today (maybe random “diet coaches” at weightwatchers and the like) that thinks weight loss is equally hard for everyone.
People definitely believe this.
“people ate all the bad food years ago and they don’t eat the bad food as much now even, but they’re getting fatter”, “never mind about the fact that we just swapped what fats we consume and have quadrupled our intake or whatever”.
There are definitely people who think that if they just eat less butter/sugar/etc. but replace it with the same amount of calories in something else that they’ll lose weight.
They seem to believe, or at least write as if it is the case that, a person at weight [x] today, could eat the same amount as someone 100 years ago, also at weight [x], calorically, and yet gain more weight, for reasons having nothing to do with exercise (obviously not diet since that’s the control here).
What makes you think SMTM believe this?
It seems like you don’t believe that layman beliefs can be as wrong as they are, and then assume from that that SMTM is bringing these things up to mislead people, but the article makes way more sense if read it literally, as-if people actually believe these things and SMTM is arguing that they don’t (fully) explain the rise in obesity.
The weird thing is that none of this matters, since this is just the “Why are we writing this series?” article. SMTM’s actual hypothesis (so far) is that there’s some sort of contaminant that makes people gain weight in an unspecified way. It doesn’t actually matter if comtaminant x makes you eat more or makes you gain more weight while eating the same amount. If this hypothesis is right and we could eat less of the contaminant, then we’d stop gaining weight (and hopefully lose some).
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.
People definitely believe this.
People definitely believe this.
There are definitely people who think that if they just eat less butter/sugar/etc. but replace it with the same amount of calories in something else that they’ll lose weight.
What makes you think SMTM believe this?
It seems like you don’t believe that layman beliefs can be as wrong as they are, and then assume from that that SMTM is bringing these things up to mislead people, but the article makes way more sense if read it literally, as-if people actually believe these things and SMTM is arguing that they don’t (fully) explain the rise in obesity.
The weird thing is that none of this matters, since this is just the “Why are we writing this series?” article. SMTM’s actual hypothesis (so far) is that there’s some sort of contaminant that makes people gain weight in an unspecified way. It doesn’t actually matter if comtaminant x makes you eat more or makes you gain more weight while eating the same amount. If this hypothesis is right and we could eat less of the contaminant, then we’d stop gaining weight (and hopefully lose some).
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.