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Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

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Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#361

Post by impjohn »

lhuser123 wrote: post #88
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) Your hunger will increase to compensate for the calories burned and you'll subconsciously eat more if not carefully tracking. This is also a oft-made claim that doesn't have much backing. Part of the point of the research described in TFA is that humans who face specific periods of energy expenditure during the day may often simply reduce energy expenditure during the rest of the day so that TEE remains roughly…

I have a bias towards the idea that we are very different, and it really depends on many unknown factors that apply only to one specific individual.

I also have that gut feeling, mind the pun. It stands to reason to me that since metabolism is incredibly complex, any slight variation in any of the parameters can lead to significant differences observed at an overall operational level. It's also very obvious people are reporting a wide range of experiences for the same activity

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#362

Post by aembleton »

Dinux wrote: post #346
rdiddly wrote: post #312

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the d…

I was thinking the exact same thing. I stopped reading after three sentences and couldn't find the scientific paragraph right away so I just when to the HN comment section to see if some could give me the gist of the story. Many of these articles are written to increase volume, but its my take that no one really cares about who ate what this morning. Scientific papers often do the same thing

I think they're written this way for seo optimisation.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#363

Post by mtmickush »

geoduck14 wrote: post #70
dahart wrote: post #4

> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.” While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to ex…

>A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths It is still worth mentioning - because it is so easy to overlook. Some simple math: if I go all out on a row machine for 30 minutes, I'll burn 300 calories. If I eat 2 extra slices of pizza, it is easiely 300 calories If I swap a turkey sandwich with healthy options, I can reduce my linch calories by 300 - and I can save even more during dinner…

It is a very valid point that dieting / food intake converts to calories way more drastically than exercise.

The article is taking this one step further though and saying those 300 calories burned by exercise are simply conserved elsewhere throughout the day automatically by your body.

The claim then is that if you exercise and burn 300 calories, but eat an extra 300 to offset it you won't end up at a neutral state and instead will gain weight as if you hadn't exercised at all.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#364

Post by bodge5000 »

Lio wrote: post #342
rdiddly wrote: post #312

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the d…

You’re not alone. This reads like one of Grandpa Simpson’s stories about onions. I also like the way they’ve broken my browser’s reader mode too. I was once advised to read the opening and the last 2 paragraphs of articles like this. If there’s no actual content there then move on without reading.

Thats generally what I do, I skip to the last paragraph, read it, and if I've missed any important context (that I care about of course), I go up one, rinse and repeat until I get the point they're making, or until I get bored and decide I can quite happily live my life without knowing the busted myths

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#365

Post by jeffreygoesto »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #359
rdiddly wrote: post #312

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the d…

Could machine learning could help with this? Could some algorithm be created to strip the padding from such articles just leaving the useful stuff?

No.

If you want this to change, change the source, don't patch cargo cult on top.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#366

Post by pawelmurias »

dahart wrote: post #4

> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.” While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to ex…

You can totally loose weight by exercising, it's just regular people don't exercise hard enough. If you do pro athlete levels of exercise it will start affecting your weight a lot.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#367

Post by kwhitefoot »

rdiddly wrote: post #312

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the d…

Paste bin copy with most of the fluff paragraphs removed: https://pastebin.com/LXtLkdgN

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#368

Post by tsimionescu »

ewindal wrote: post #281
y4mi wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the article you're commenting on says that you don't burn more calories by exercising... If it is true, it definitely changes the narrative.

You’re reading that wrong. Of course you burn more calories through exercise. Michael Phelps couldn’t have eaten 12k cals a day if exercise didn’t burn calories.

The article says pretty explicitly that, while you do burn more calories while exercising, your body finds other ways to compensate and generally keeps about the same total energy expenditure in a day.

I'm pretty sure this doesn't apply to extreme cases like modern athletes, who explicitly push their bodies in many ways that normal fit people don't, and who have teams of doctors and coaches that can force them to keep up with exercise and diet even when their bodies are telling them to stop.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#369

Post by verytrivial »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #360
ajuc wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes counting calories is essential, I had very similar experience (walk 10 km on the weekend ~= burn 600 kcal, then buy a 1000 kcal snack on the way back and wonder why I'm not losing weight), but still the exercise makes a big difference. Last year in march I started counting calories, recording my weight and all exercises I did and walking/biking every day. I lost 30 kg, walked 2100 km, biked 1000 km, and the sum o…

> the sum of calories burned by all exercise was about 160 000 I believe you meant kilocalories

In the context of nutrition the word calories always means dietary calories, so the kilo- prefix is redundant unless discussing physics, or commenting on HN...Ooooh, ok.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#370

Post by bodge5000 »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #359
rdiddly wrote: post #312

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the d…

Could machine learning could help with this? Could some algorithm be created to strip the padding from such articles just leaving the useful stuff?

Seems like a lot of work (and a lot of time to get working reliably) for a relatively minor issue that can be mostly fixed by skim reading
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