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If anyone can find the author's slides or related article, I'd appreciate a link to them.
"Well, what do people do when there is extra food around? They eat it! This, of course, is a tremendously controversial idea. However, the model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight." This doesn't actually follow logically. I know Mr Chow is implying that there's a lot of data that this interview obviously doesn't present, but there are serious problems with this thesis on the face of…
Your point about the rich is an interesting one. A conceivable explanation for this could be that higher-end restaurants tend to have a different value-proposition than lower-end ones: instead of focusing on quantity, they focus on quality.
Finally, I think the point you bring up about the summary being misleading is a good one. Reporters are generally not known for accuracy when reporting on scientific matters.
I was unable to find original source material by the researcher (only finding the abstract for his presentation at http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2012/webprogram/Paper6155.html ) If anyone can find the author's slides or related article, I'd appreciate a link to them.
He links to the slides from that conference: http://sciencehouse.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/aaas122.pdf
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> So, with that in mind, children learn that one calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise 1 g of water by 1 degree c. I find this to be wonderfully ironic, because the nutritional calorie is 1000x larger than the physics calorie. In nutrition, one calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise 1kg of water by 1 degree C. So yes, it's entirely possible that this fellow didn't know what a "calorie" was in the r…
Wait, what? That would be one kilocalorie. And that's what's listed on most food?
If it were regular physics calories, the energy content of food would be nowhere near enough to sustain us. A typical human body at rest will consume around 8 megajoules per day, or about 2 million calories. But that's only about 2 thousand big-C food Calories.
Forgetting or ignoring this difference results in amusing things like the beer and ice cream diet: http://training.fitness.com/weight-loss/beer-ice-cream-diet-...
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Why do you say it as bullshit? One important thing in higher education for math and physics is to be able to perform detail technical computations or modeling for phenomenons. In common high school and undergraduate physics class, it only requires students to be able to come up models with intuitions. But in graduate schools, you are trained to examine each step to make sure nothing is left out or based on assumption…
> Why do you say it as bullshit? An MIT-trained physicist should know the common name for a unit of energy. Sure, he might not remember the conversion from joules to calories, but to have never heard of it? That's taking a literal reading ("I didn't know what a calorie was"), but perhaps he was referring to a more nuanced understanding ("I didn't understand how energy was used by the body"). That interpretation wasn'…
"What caused the obesity epidemic?" "And it’s something very simple, very obvious, something that few want to hear: The epidemic was caused by the overproduction of food in the United States. ...This, of course, is a tremendously controversial idea. However, the model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight." This is analogous to saying: "What caused the increase in car accidents?" "And…
> By using the phrase "overproduction of food" he is using too broad of a statement that doesn't describe the problem in an addressable way. Cut food production, food prices rise, people can't eat as much. It's an extreme solution, perhaps, and one with more political obstacles than I care to think about right now, but it seems "addressable" to me. What if we stopped some of the farm subsidies that don't make sense?…
"And it’s something very simple, very obvious, something that few want to hear: The epidemic was caused by the overproduction of food in the United States." Overproduction? Does a factory intentionally produce more cars than it can sell? Probably not. How about a baker? Does a baker produce more cookies than she can sell? Not for long. Maybe a farmer? No. Not really. That is not an economically sustainable position t…
The "calories in/calories out" argument is based on the assumption that the human body is a closed system. This is simply not the case, and touting it as a diet strategy is irresponsible. You might lose weight if you lower your caloric intake by only eating 1 McDonalds cheeseburger a day instead of 2, but in the end you are still eating crap food "product", and you won't be as healthy as you could be by focusing on t…
There's a few National Institute of Health studies that back the calories in vs calories out argument. Keep your calorie intake below your BMR (basal metabolic rate) + what you burn during the day if you want to lose weight. Very simple. You don't have to "balance saturated and unsatured fats", get ten hours of sleep per day, or whatever other ridiculous microoptimisations people come up with. Eat 500 calories below…
I disagree with the article, and don't believe mathematics has the answer to obesity. However, if someone would like to start a diet-centered startup with me, I believe I have an insight that invalidates every diet book on the planet. Every diet book on the planet makes one very false assumption. Before we get to the assumption, let's review something uncontroversial: - You put on fat by eating more calories than you…