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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

#381

Post by skohan »

csee wrote: post #320
ewindal wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well that's what the article says. The Hazda who walk 8-12 km a day burn the less calories as an average American (or the same after adjusting for body weight). Also that Phelps thing is highly questionable. He says he "probably" burns 8-10k, not 12k. Not the type of statement you want to rely on to dismiss all this work.

I just have a hard time believing it to be true that no amount of exercise will increase the overall caloric expenditure. For example, I've done a few multi-week bike tours, and we ate an enormous amount of mostly pasta every day, and managed to peel off a few pounds each by the end of it.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#382

Post by 1_player »

michalu wrote: post #352
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…

Whenever there's insignificant science making "controversial" claims like "you can't lose weight with sport" journalist will provide storytelling instead of science. The whole premise of that "You can’t exercise your way out of obesity" is that you burn more calories when you start running than later on as you continue. What's so controversial about it? It's normal that body optimizes for energy expenditure that's wh…

> What's so controversial about it?

Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about.

Exercise certainly increases your calorific expenditure, but it's much easier to ingest less fuel than to run 5 more miles because you had a portion of fries.

There are benefits in exercise, apart from the obvious ones the raising of the baseline metabolic expenditure, because muscles are expensive to maintain, but again, if you want to lose weight eating one less portion of fries is easier and takes less time than going for a 5 mile run.

> body optimizes for energy expenditure

No that's wrong, it optimises for energy maintenance. Genetically it's better to maintain fat and survive the next famine, than burning all the energy today. Which is why the body is so efficient at _not_ losing weight unless it has no other choice to maintain homeostasis. And thus to lose fat, we need to preferably eat less, not run more. Do both, and you'll do great.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#383

Post by KronisLV »

aixi wrote: post #375
Elte wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused by this point in the article, because it also states: > There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy. He calculates that the ceiling for an 85-kilogram man would be about 4650 calories per day. Given that "regular" people clearly do not burn 4650 calories per day, and it is possible to burn 4650 calories…

out of context, that quote is really funny; what happens once you reach 4650 calories? you start violating the rules of thermodynamics? (i know your body starts compensating for it and burning less calories, but still)

> what happens once you reach 4650 calories?

Well, we probably need to look at the direct quote again.

> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy.

Maybe i'm reading this wrong, but if one's body were to burn calories at 100% of this supposed possible rate, then by the time you'd reach 4650, a new day would start.

If digestion would top out at 4650 calories at day, with 24 hours per day, it would come down to 193.75 calories per hour. Or, in other words, it'd be about 3.23 calories per minute.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#384

Post by oblio »

michalu wrote: post #352
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…

Whenever there's insignificant science making "controversial" claims like "you can't lose weight with sport" journalist will provide storytelling instead of science. The whole premise of that "You can’t exercise your way out of obesity" is that you burn more calories when you start running than later on as you continue. What's so controversial about it? It's normal that body optimizes for energy expenditure that's wh…

> If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight.

This example is kind of bad :-)

You don't lose weight by lifting weights, in general.

And amusingly, if you did want to lose weight by lifting weights, your example is precisely how you > lose weight. You lift 10kgs over and over and over again, or even better, incorporate the extra weight into some sort of cardio routine.

Instead of increasing the weight, you'd increase the reps or the motion you use for lifting weights.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#385

Post by jbotz »

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…

Am I alone on HN in being perfectly happy to get a bit of insight in the human nature of scientists doing impressive work?

Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What can I do to be more like the former rather than the later? One popular magazine article may not give me that insight, but after a bunch of them patterns emerge.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#386

Post by oblio »

aembleton wrote: post #362
Dinux wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's funny. SEO optimization for keywords "woods" and "Appalachians"? :-)

No, it's written that way to turn the person into a) a character, b) a relatable character.

Regular people like stories, not dry facts piled up.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#387

Post by caffeine »

This article really needs a TLDR. Reading it in between the cookies notice, the subscribe modal, and trying to slog through a detailed history of everything this guy has done since he was 10…

Has anyone managed to get through this who could post here: what is the conclusion about humans burning calories?

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#388

Post by petercooper »

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…

Exercise is portrayed as virtuous in our society, whereas counting calories and portions isn't.

I have problems with doing deliberate intentional exercise (though I am very 'active' just in my usual day to day activities) so do absolutely zero gym, zero running, etc. Yet when I started simply counting my calories and limiting myself to 1800-1900 a day, the weight dropped off. I'm down 8% body weight so far and set to have a BMI under 25 in the next couple of months, and it hasn't been a struggle at all despite a total lack of deliberate exercise.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#389

Post by hnbad »

verytrivial wrote: post #369
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The practice of indicating kcals as "Calories" always seemed to be an American thing to me. I don't know how widespread this is outside the US but there are plenty of countries that use "kcal" in nutritional tables and such. People will still colloquially confuse calories and kilocalories a lot but that's largely due to bad translations (similar to mistranslating short billions).

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#390

Post by oblio »

jbotz wrote: post #385
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…

Am I alone on HN in being perfectly happy to get a bit of insight in the human nature of scientists doing impressive work? Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What can I do to be more like the former rather than the l…

HN is both tech oriented, full of nerds and people with probably lower than average EQ and also an echo chamber in the sense that nerds at some point start geeking out about this and turn it into virtue signaling.

"Look how bad I am at reading people."

"I'm worse than you at..."

"I'm so bad that..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE

> Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us

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