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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

#441

Post by scotty79 »

jeltz wrote: post #404
1_player wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 expensiv…

While I agree with that excerice isn't a very efficient way to lose weight I think that you understate how many calories running burns. When I run consistently I need to eat what feels like a lot more food to maintain my weight. Running burns about 700-800 kcal per hour for me (I have a quite small build) which ends up quite a bit over a week (I run 5-8 hours per week).

Think about it this way. The rate at which you burn calories is directly proportional to the rate at which you breathe out CO2 because that what happens with carbon you burn.

So if every day you train for an hour so that your breathing is 3 times faster, then you have additional two hours of burning in a day. 23 usual hours plus one worth 3. So you have 26 instead of 24 hours in a day.

It's way easier to put 15% less on your plate every day than to intensly train for an hour each day while keeping portions the same.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#442

Post by ajuc »

toolslive wrote: post #418
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…

roughly 3/4 of your energy consumption is maintenance (fe keeping body temperature). So you walking/biking might even be irrelevant. If the outdoor temperature was low, this would probably be number 1.

Standing still in -10C/-20C is pretty uncomfortable, but walking is perfectly fine and you even get hot after a while. So I'm not sure this is true.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#443

Post by iainmerrick »

oblio wrote: post #390
jbotz wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

Seems a bit harsh to jump right into an accusation of the dreaded virtue signaling!

Would you agree at least that there’s a balance to be made, and articles could lean either on the too-dry side (all facts and no color) or too-fluffy (facts buried in an avalanche of color)?

I don’t want no color, but I agree with others here that many pop science articles seem to lean very heavily towards fluff these days. Online recipes are a more extreme example -- it’s increasingly hard to find the actual recipe these days.

Titles matter. A title like “A Short History of Nearly Everything” pretty clearly tells you that there’s going to be a lot of storytelling. But if you have a clickbait title like “Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories”, you ought to deliver on those promised myth-busting new facts!

I think it’s interesting to consider a) is this a real change; b) if so, is it driven more by culture or by technology? (i.e. by ads)

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#444

Post by drakonka »

I wonder if this could partly explain why some people gain muscle easily without eating more when lifting regularly. Common wisdom says you have to eat more to make up for the extra energy expenditure, or otherwise your muscle growth will be limited. But I'm just not that hungry. Yet not purposefully supplementing with more food during training regimens never seemed to hinder my muscle growth. Then again, I don't know that. Maybe I would've gained even _more_ muscle if I'd been eating more. Anecdotally, it just seemed like muscle has come on pretty easily regardless of how much I eat. Could the body simply be redirecting more of my calories to growing muscle during these periods while keeping the total expenditure the same?

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#445

Post by darkerside »

_9omd wrote: post #129
waterhouse wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> measuring calories out is extremely difficult unless you're willing to live in a sealed room that monitors your exhaled CO2 24/7 Is even that sufficient? Like, would you be able to tell the difference between "oxidation done by the body to generate energy for human cells" and "oxidation done by bacteria that feast on calories your human cells didn't get"? Maybe you could tell by the mixture of other gases, but I su…

Yeah, that's a very good point. This is kinda getting off into the weeds from the original point, but interesting weeds nonetheless :). This study[0] says that measuring CO2 is not enough, and that indirect calorimetry is the gold standard for measuring energy expenditure (EE). "Calculated EE based on CO2 measurement was not sufficiently accurate to consider the results as an alternative to measured EE by indirect ca…

What? No, I haven't gained weight, my bacteria is just getting a little heavy

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#446

Post by saiya-jin »

hnbad wrote: post #389
verytrivial wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

People everywhere mix those 2 regularly and nobody is confused. You don't say you go out for a run to burn some kilo calories and so on. Sometimes places like HN are needlessly pedantic

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#447

Post by oblio »

iainmerrick wrote: post #431
oblio wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t it mainly to provide more space for ads?

Probably a bit of both.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#448

Post by xurukefi »

tpoacher wrote: post #433

So the main argument in the article is the claim that your total energy expenditure is more or less constant, and independent of "exercise". In the sense that if you spend 500kcal on running, your body will "not do" something else it would have done otherwise (e.g. stress about stuff) that would have cost 500kcals. In other words it challenges the idea that if you run today and not tomorrow, your TEE on day 1 will be…

> So the main argument in the article is the claim that your total energy expenditure is more or less constant, and independent of "exercise". In the sense that if you spend 500kcal on running, your body will "not do" something else it would have done otherwise (e.g. stress about stuff) that would have cost 500kcals.

> In other words it challenges the idea that if you run today and not tomorrow, your TEE on day 1 will be 500kcal higher than day 2. The claim is that TEE on both days will be the same.

That's wild. Running a marathon will easily burn north of 2000kcals. That's a lot of "something else" the body will have to "not do" to compensate for.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#449

Post by zeckalpha »

jeltz wrote: post #404
1_player wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 expensiv…

While I agree with that excerice isn't a very efficient way to lose weight I think that you understate how many calories running burns. When I run consistently I need to eat what feels like a lot more food to maintain my weight. Running burns about 700-800 kcal per hour for me (I have a quite small build) which ends up quite a bit over a week (I run 5-8 hours per week).

TEE is what the article discusses measuring, not the energy burned during the exercises but the total in the day. The data in the referenced studies indicate the body compensates for the calories burned running by cutting back in energy use elsewhere.

Re: Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories

#450

Post by oblio »

episteme wrote: post #411
oblio wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I…

This is not accurate, weightlifting with a reasonably difficult weight for your strength level is one of the most effective ways to burn calories.

Isn't it anaerobic exercise, though, and from what I remember to lose weight you want aerobic exercise?
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