I just read your post, and it seems like you’re arguing against something SMTM don’t support. They admit that they describe it badly in their initial post, but right after the CICO section there’s a link to this additional post about CICO.
My understanding is that they’re arguing two things: against the “linear relationship between calorie intake and weight change” meaning of CICO, and that it’s mysterious that people are eating more over time:
The overfeeding studies provide extremely strong evidence against this version of CICO [the linear relationship], since people gain very different amounts when overfed by the same amount, the difference appears to be mostly genetic, and some people actually lose weight, even when overfed by moderate (1000 kcal/day) amounts. Many people still believe something like “for every extra 3500 calories you eat you always gain one pound”, but all available evidence comes down very strongly against that.
At low levels of overfeeding, people at normal weight often don’t gain any weight at all.
[...]
[...] A common interpretation tied up in CICO is that differences in willpower explain the difference between obese and lean people. The idea is that weight gain is easy and weight loss is hard for everyone. This interpretation says something like, everyone would be 300lbs if they didn’t use their willpower to eat healthy foods rather than cake — you have to control yourself. From this perspective, people who are obese lack willpower and people who are thin/fit are virtuous resisters of temptation.
The overfeeding studies also provide strong evidence against this hypothesis, since they find that it is hard for most people to gain weight and easy for them to go back exactly to the weight they were before the overfeeding. We think this leaves “willpower” explanations dead in the water. Most skinny people have no trouble staying that way.
[...]
Another interpretation is something like “calories matter for weight gain”. Other things being equal, you generally gain weight when you eat more calories and you generally lose weight when you eat fewer calories.
We are not trying to argue against this at all! If you eat 400 kcal/day, you will lose weight (there are studies on this). If you eat 10,000 kcal/day, you will gain weight (there are studies on this one too). But the amount of calories you eat matters much less than most people think, and there isn’t a strong linear relationship between calories consumed and weight gained (see above).
You can lose weight by consistently eating at a calorie deficit, but people who do this either struggle to maintain their lower weight or gain it back. For two people who are the same height, one might weigh 150 lbs and the other weigh 200 lbs. If the 200 lb person loses 50 lbs, it will be hard for them to maintain a weight of 150 lbs, but easy for the person who weighed 150 lbs to begin with. Why is that? And why has the number of people struggling with their weight grown so dramatically since 1980?
The final line is really the mystery here. It’s obvious that people eating significantly more will gain weight, but why are people suddenly eating significantly more? It’s possible that food limitations explain some of this, but it would be surprising if so many Americans were starving in 1980 for the obesity rate to go up by 20% since then (but I’d love to see an argument that this is the case!).
Since SMTM’s mystery is (among other things) “why are people eating more”, your argument that SMTM are stupid lying liars because obviously people are eating more and historical people ate high fat/high sugar diets but ate less overall misses the point.
Well, I never called them stupid. In fact, quite the opposite. I promised a series on SMTM on my new blog, but life has got in the way somewhat the last few weeks. I should perhaps get around to that now. Just a few notes on this:
Their interpretation of overfeeding studies is extremely odd. That’s an aside, but it’s one that I’ll make good on in a few days. I’ve already discussed it at length on the ACX discord server, but not in a format conducive to just reposting here. So, a little note on my distaste for their appeals to “common interpretations”, since those literally do not matter- something that is a mystery to Bob on the street and not a mystery to diet scientists, is not a mystery that requires extra research. It requires education and publicity, maybe.
The “linear relationship” is one such appeal- it’s not something I think anyone actually believes. Or rather, there is a sensible and a less sensible interpretation. The sensible interpretation is that your metabolism changes as you get fatter, because fat is metabolically active tissue. A person with 300lbs of “extra” fat on them will “be” a metabolism which is burning through more calories daily/weekly regardless. Add 3500 calories onto what they eat weekly for maintenance of that weight and you’d expect about a lb of gain, holding things like activity level equal (and probably for someone very fat you can). But you can’t stop at time t1, determine the caloric surplus for such a person would be, say 4500 calories a day for a surplus of 1lb a week, and just run that forever. That’s not how any of this works.
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. You have different cultures, access to different foods, tolerance of different foods, different leptin signalling, different hormonal responses, different fat distribution, so on- oh and just differing lifestyle factors between individuals. Much of this explains how some get fat in the first place and how some fail to do so. It also explains how those differences could become more stark in environments where suddenly lots of hyper-palatable and not-very-satiating food becomes the norm.
But anyway, these are just a few notes, and I’ll cover more when I write up the post responding there. I’ll just add that I think there is clear intent to mislead in various places (to the “why would I call them lying liars and aren’t I really missing the point” issue). I refer you to (1) especially here- if you don’t think, having read the underlying article, and their commentary, that they are being even remotely misleading, well, that’s an interesting data point at least. Because I’m not seeing a retraction or an edit there, which would be reasonable if one thought there was danger of misunderstanding. And it seems to me the reason why is because it’s a nice hook- “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”.
Since SMTM's mystery is (among other things) "why are people eating more"
If I thought their only point was “environmental contaminants might be making people hungrier” then, well, I’d still have lots of issues- not least that we already have plenty of research on diets which talk about this very issue. But, y’know, fine. There are plenty of interesting things which do affect hunger-signalling, But the “among other things” troubles me, and the main one- which SMTM very evidently devote quite some time too, is the “ability of the body to just dump fat stores”. It’s noted in various places, sometimes explicitly, sometimes through the writing equivalent of raised eyebrows and nodding in a certain direction. But it’s there. And (1) to reference back, goes precisely to that issue. The claim isn’t that people just feel like they must eat more now, it’s that they ate “badly” in the past and yet didn’t seem to gain weight in spite of it. No mention of calories specifically there, but of course that does come up later with overfeeding studies and this utterly ludicrous “we don’t deny that if you eat only 400 calories a day you’ll lose weight, and10,000 a day you’ll gain weight”, as if this is a concession to common sense. 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). That is where I have serious issues. If you think that is not something in the SMTM canon, then let me know why I’m misreading them, please.
I think the most straightforward way to prevent people from giving SMTM money is to stop questioning their motives and just answer the question (if it really is so easy): Why does the obesity rate curve look the way that it does?
And note that “because people are inexplicably eating more” doesn’t really answer the question, and an explanation like “Americans had substantially easier access to delicious food in 2018 (obesity rate 42%) than they did in 2008 (obesity rate 34%)” would be surprising and need evidence backing it up.
To be completely clear, I honestly want the answer to this question (and I like SMTM since they seem to understand why it’s an interesting question)..
There is nothing at all inexplicable about that. Access to very palatable and not-very-satiating (cal for cal) food will change behaviours over time, these behaviours are also inherited in familial environments, and compound since once someone is obese, it becomes increasingly hard to get not-obese. With micro-cultural behaviour change which favours obesity, we’re also seeing actual cultural changes toward acceptance and promotion of obesity-promoting behaviours, excessive eating among family and friends, increasingly sedentary lifestyles (lord knows the last two years will have accelerated that), forgetting how to cook, or deciding to not bother cooking the sorts of foods which are satiating and lower cal.
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.
I just read your post, and it seems like you’re arguing against something SMTM don’t support. They admit that they describe it badly in their initial post, but right after the CICO section there’s a link to this additional post about CICO.
My understanding is that they’re arguing two things: against the “linear relationship between calorie intake and weight change” meaning of CICO, and that it’s mysterious that people are eating more over time:
The final line is really the mystery here. It’s obvious that people eating significantly more will gain weight, but why are people suddenly eating significantly more? It’s possible that food limitations explain some of this, but it would be surprising if so many Americans were starving in 1980 for the obesity rate to go up by 20% since then (but I’d love to see an argument that this is the case!).
Since SMTM’s mystery is (among other things) “why are people eating more”, your argument that SMTM are stupid lying liars because obviously people are eating more and historical people ate high fat/high sugar diets but ate less overall misses the point.
Well, I never called them stupid. In fact, quite the opposite. I promised a series on SMTM on my new blog, but life has got in the way somewhat the last few weeks. I should perhaps get around to that now. Just a few notes on this:
Their interpretation of overfeeding studies is extremely odd. That’s an aside, but it’s one that I’ll make good on in a few days. I’ve already discussed it at length on the ACX discord server, but not in a format conducive to just reposting here. So, a little note on my distaste for their appeals to “common interpretations”, since those literally do not matter- something that is a mystery to Bob on the street and not a mystery to diet scientists, is not a mystery that requires extra research. It requires education and publicity, maybe.
The “linear relationship” is one such appeal- it’s not something I think anyone actually believes. Or rather, there is a sensible and a less sensible interpretation. The sensible interpretation is that your metabolism changes as you get fatter, because fat is metabolically active tissue. A person with 300lbs of “extra” fat on them will “be” a metabolism which is burning through more calories daily/weekly regardless. Add 3500 calories onto what they eat weekly for maintenance of that weight and you’d expect about a lb of gain, holding things like activity level equal (and probably for someone very fat you can). But you can’t stop at time t1, determine the caloric surplus for such a person would be, say 4500 calories a day for a surplus of 1lb a week, and just run that forever. That’s not how any of this works.
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. You have different cultures, access to different foods, tolerance of different foods, different leptin signalling, different hormonal responses, different fat distribution, so on- oh and just differing lifestyle factors between individuals. Much of this explains how some get fat in the first place and how some fail to do so. It also explains how those differences could become more stark in environments where suddenly lots of hyper-palatable and not-very-satiating food becomes the norm.
But anyway, these are just a few notes, and I’ll cover more when I write up the post responding there. I’ll just add that I think there is clear intent to mislead in various places (to the “why would I call them lying liars and aren’t I really missing the point” issue). I refer you to (1) especially here- if you don’t think, having read the underlying article, and their commentary, that they are being even remotely misleading, well, that’s an interesting data point at least. Because I’m not seeing a retraction or an edit there, which would be reasonable if one thought there was danger of misunderstanding. And it seems to me the reason why is because it’s a nice hook- “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”.
Since SMTM's mystery is (among other things) "why are people eating more"If I thought their only point was “environmental contaminants might be making people hungrier” then, well, I’d still have lots of issues- not least that we already have plenty of research on diets which talk about this very issue. But, y’know, fine. There are plenty of interesting things which do affect hunger-signalling, But the “among other things” troubles me, and the main one- which SMTM very evidently devote quite some time too, is the “ability of the body to just dump fat stores”. It’s noted in various places, sometimes explicitly, sometimes through the writing equivalent of raised eyebrows and nodding in a certain direction. But it’s there. And (1) to reference back, goes precisely to that issue. The claim isn’t that people just feel like they must eat more now, it’s that they ate “badly” in the past and yet didn’t seem to gain weight in spite of it. No mention of calories specifically there, but of course that does come up later with overfeeding studies and this utterly ludicrous “we don’t deny that if you eat only 400 calories a day you’ll lose weight, and10,000 a day you’ll gain weight”, as if this is a concession to common sense. 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). That is where I have serious issues. If you think that is not something in the SMTM canon, then let me know why I’m misreading them, please.
I think the most straightforward way to prevent people from giving SMTM money is to stop questioning their motives and just answer the question (if it really is so easy): Why does the obesity rate curve look the way that it does?
And note that “because people are inexplicably eating more” doesn’t really answer the question, and an explanation like “Americans had substantially easier access to delicious food in 2018 (obesity rate 42%) than they did in 2008 (obesity rate 34%)” would be surprising and need evidence backing it up.
To be completely clear, I honestly want the answer to this question (and I like SMTM since they seem to understand why it’s an interesting question)..
There is nothing at all inexplicable about that. Access to very palatable and not-very-satiating (cal for cal) food will change behaviours over time, these behaviours are also inherited in familial environments, and compound since once someone is obese, it becomes increasingly hard to get not-obese. With micro-cultural behaviour change which favours obesity, we’re also seeing actual cultural changes toward acceptance and promotion of obesity-promoting behaviours, excessive eating among family and friends, increasingly sedentary lifestyles (lord knows the last two years will have accelerated that), forgetting how to cook, or deciding to not bother cooking the sorts of foods which are satiating and lower cal.
For what it’s worth, I think https://www.livenowthrivelater.co.uk/2021/09/is-the-obesity-epidemic-a-mystery-part-1/ is a good response to SMTM arguing something similar (that the problem is hyperpalatable foods).
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.