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Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#51

Post by alextgordon »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #49
randlet wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's tough to hear but no matter what your genetics or internal flora are, being overweight is still your fault . It may not be "fair" that someone puts on less weight than someone else eating the same diet, but ultimately you're the one responsible for maintaining your own weight (by controlling what you put in your mouth) no matter what the state of your gut microbes. edit: not picking on you Onion2k...I end up com…

http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.ht... - Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades. - Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented. - Endocrine disruptors, pathogens or temperature changes might play a role and could also factor into human obesity http://www.bbc.com/n…

The laws of thermodynamics still apply. If someone does not lose weight on 1300 calories a day then either their body is a marvel of science and should be studied for its amazing efficiency... or they are completely sedentary.

Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#52

Post by nsxwolf »

randlet wrote: post #40
onion2k wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to admit it's their fault they got fat, but it always is. If that were the case then studies to find out why two people can eat the same thing and do the same amount of exercise yet one of them can end up fatter than the other wouldn't be necessary. It seems to be the case that, all external factors being equal, how fat you are can be determined by something outside of your control (genetics, gut microbe…

It's tough to hear but no matter what your genetics or internal flora are, being overweight is still your fault . It may not be "fair" that someone puts on less weight than someone else eating the same diet, but ultimately you're the one responsible for maintaining your own weight (by controlling what you put in your mouth) no matter what the state of your gut microbes. edit: not picking on you Onion2k...I end up com…

It's not really worth it, though. If I eat much less than I do now I just suffer, and the weight loss quickly plateaus at a point that doesn't have any aesthetic value and isn't likely to improve my health.

So I can weigh a little less by becoming obsessed with what I eat and always being in a bad mood. And I get no credit from the smug thin people who still see me as a lazy obese person.

Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#53

Post by pfalke »

Could a similar approach work to find the impact of foods on other health factors (sleep quality, digestion, ...) in a personal experiment?

I picture logging my coffee consumption (or even all foods + sports etc) and sleep over a few weeks, then using machine learning to find a possible relationship.

I'd appreciate any links to OSS projects/commercial apps that work on this.

Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#54

Post by wdewind »

jankor wrote: post #5

The full study is much more interesting: "We devised a machine-learning algorithm that integrates blood parameters, dietary habits, anthropometrics, physical activity, and gut microbiota measured in this cohort and showed that it accurately predicts personalized postprandial glycemic response to real-life meals." http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(15)01481-6.pdf

This is a great study, for nutritional science I am very impressed with the methodology. It's very large and very thorough. It should be heavily noted that the goal of the study is not to create algorithms for healthy people, but for diabetic and pre-diabetic populations.

The only well supported long term consequences of post-prandial high glycemic response in otherwise healthy people is an increased psychological urge to eat. Outside of that, the importance of insulin levels in healthy people is extremely overhyped. These machine learning algorithms are cool, and may be useful for diabetic people, but for the general population monitoring your insulin levels is a waste of time.

Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#55

Post by tomp »

mistermann wrote: post #26
tomp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then I was definitely eating 4000+ calories per day and not getting Fat I'm not sure about that... allegedly, research suggests that most people have the same BMR (basal metabollic rate), and that there is nothing like "fast metabolism" (i.e. people get rougly equal amounts of energy from food). What I was referring to above, and what the article referrs to (with Glicemic Index) is purely psychological - how much f…

> I'm still pretty sure that calories-in/calories-out theory is more-or-less correct. From where do you derive this certainty? There's plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating significant variance among individuals. Simply less efficient absorption of ingested calories would obviously make a huge difference, and I don't think there's any reason to think everyone absorbs calories with identical efficiency is there?

> From where do you derive this certainty?

Physics.

> There's plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating significant variance among individuals.

However, research evidence disagrees. So, the most likely culprit in the variance reported anecdotally isn't different BMR or efficiency of digestion, but different (even delusional) calorie-counting approximations.

Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#56

Post by nsxwolf »

restalis wrote: post #44
Shivetya wrote: post #9

Interesting results. While I understand the microbes do affect how we process foods does our diet affect how they work? As in, if long term she eats grapes then perhaps either the microbes in her changed or the microbes themselves adopted a new behavior. So the idea is, put a group of people on a strict diet long enough to affect which microbes they have and the exposure of the microbes to the diet. Then take three d…

I'm not that versed in the subject, but my (dilettante) guess is that our own behavior may affect the fauna of our digestive microbes by consuming spicy food, alcohol, having nicotine in blood, or through other unhealthy habits.

Spicy food is unhealthy?

Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#57

Post by jonnathanson »

logfromblammo wrote: post #47
onion2k wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to admit it's their fault they got fat, but it always is. If that were the case then studies to find out why two people can eat the same thing and do the same amount of exercise yet one of them can end up fatter than the other wouldn't be necessary. It seems to be the case that, all external factors being equal, how fat you are can be determined by something outside of your control (genetics, gut microbe…

Without it being entirely their fault. I know I am at least partially at fault for being fat. I sit on ass all day and rarely exercise. That certainly doesn't help . But I also know that several of the reasons for obesity do not originate in the frontal lobe of the brain, and are therefore not the result of conscious decision-making. And that absolves me from some fraction of the burden of culpability. But not the wh…

"But not the whole thing. I could make conscious choices to make my body healthier. But I don't, and therefore I can accept at least a little bit of the blame."

I think this is the sad truth of the matter (at least for now). People tend to fall into one of two camps: 1) Those who believe that obesity is largely (if not entirely) the obese person's fault; 2) Those who believe that obesity is heavily influenced by factors outside of conscious control, and therefore, there's nothing to be done about it.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Some people are luckier than others, genetically or epigenetically. The unlucky ones will put on fat more easily, and they will have a much harder time losing it. So that means they need to work twice as hard (if not 100x as hard) to keep it off. It's a shitty break, but it's the truth.

I grew up fat. Losing that fat took nothing short of a Herculean (and borderline unsustainable) dietary effort. I mean, I lived like an ascetic monk, depriving myself of any and all pleasurable food, for the better part of a decade. I worked out like a crazy person. And even today, keeping off the fat requires a constant vigil over everything I eat, and the amount of exercise I do. I wasn't responsible for getting fat in the first place -- I lost a prenatal dice roll -- but I did take responsibility for battling the bulge.

"Continually reiterating the thermodynamic dietary hypothesis to me (energy eaten minus energy expended) does not help. I doubt it helps anyone except possibly those who do not already know what a kilocalorie is."

Agreed. It's also willfully reductionist, and it smacks of passive-aggressive moralizing. To me, rattling off the calories-in-calories-out line is no more helpful than calling obese people lazy, stupid, irresponsible, or sinful. (And in basically 90% of the contexts in which someone says it, that's the subtextual insinuation.) It's unproductive. It's an attempt to close the case summarily, and this case needs to stay open.

Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#58

Post by logfromblammo »

xeromal wrote: post #42
CaptainAmerica wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then I was definitely eating 4000+ calories per day and not getting Fat. Not true at all, you weren't even counting your calories you're just throwing out a number. And if you were counting you were counting wrong. That's a huge part of people who say they can't gain or lose weight. They claim to eat these vast amount (or extremely low amount) of calories when they really have no idea. People trying to lose weight…

It definitely can be the case. Absorption of calories depends on the person so the same people who eat 2k calories could get roughly 2k calories OR LESS depending on the gut bacteria and other variables. I do agree with you on people's reported caloric intake. Most people inaccurately record their eating habits. I use an app to get an idea of what my day was like.

Nutritional panel information is not an in vivo measurement.

If you put 100g of broccoli in a bomb calorimeter and burn it in pure oxygen, you heat it up by 34 kilocalories.

If you put it in a human digestive tract instead , the human can absorb anywhere from 0 to 34 kilocalories of food energy from it. We already have ample evidence that the food energy absorbed may be affected by the microbiome in the intestines, the preparation method used, the time of day, the time of year, and other foods that may have been eaten at around the same time.

But the calorimetry does establish a hard upper limit on absorbable food energy.

This is why non-ruminant herbivores with shorter digestive tracts--like the arctic hare--will engage in coprophagy. They will eat their "first-through" turds, because there is still some food energy in them. Ruminants do essentially the same thing with multiple stomachs and regurgitation.

If you aren't weighing your food and burning your poop in a calorimeter, you are inaccurately reporting your caloric intake. Even then, you can't really know for sure how much of that energy was absorbed for use by human cells, and how much was used to sustain your microbiome.

Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#59

Post by tptacek »

alextgordon wrote: post #51
nommm-nommm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.ht... - Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades. - Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented. - Endocrine disruptors, pathogens or temperature changes might play a role and could also factor into human obesity http://www.bbc.com/n…

The laws of thermodynamics still apply. If someone does not lose weight on 1300 calories a day then either their body is a marvel of science and should be studied for its amazing efficiency... or they are completely sedentary.

"Thermodynamics"? There are 120 calories in a tablespoon of olive oil. If I pay you $50 to drink a whole bottle of olive oil, do you think you'll gain several pounds of fat?

Re: Why do people put on differing amounts of weight?

#60

Post by beachstartup »

wdewind wrote: post #54
jankor wrote: post #5

The full study is much more interesting: "We devised a machine-learning algorithm that integrates blood parameters, dietary habits, anthropometrics, physical activity, and gut microbiota measured in this cohort and showed that it accurately predicts personalized postprandial glycemic response to real-life meals." http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(15)01481-6.pdf

This is a great study, for nutritional science I am very impressed with the methodology. It's very large and very thorough. It should be heavily noted that the goal of the study is not to create algorithms for healthy people, but for diabetic and pre-diabetic populations. The only well supported long term consequences of post-prandial high glycemic response in otherwise healthy people is an increased psychological ur…

> Outside of that, the importance of insulin levels in healthy people is extremely overhyped. These machine learning algorithms are cool, and may be useful for diabetic people, but for the general population monitoring your insulin levels is a waste of time.

a waste of time? really? what does that mean? does this mean the difference between 10-20 pounds over the course of 10 years? because that's the vast majority of 'weight' concerns - people who are overweight but not obese are 'otherwise healthy' but if we can put a finger on exactly what causes people to put on a few pounds it would be a significant advance in science that would affect billions of people.

like, how can you possibly say that investigating what causes a "increased psychological urge to eat" is some kind of trivial pursuit? that's the whole problem with "otherwise healthy" people.

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