Sorry, I suppose that I do have some things mixed up and have listened to too many conspiracy theories. In re-researching now I may have earlier confused a journal with an author and a few other things when researching where some specific exercise calorie numbers come from. I'll retract most of my statements about the "Standard Calorie Model" as bad syncretism and review again further later.
> how calories in food and calories burned
Right or wrong on the specifics of the history of such things, this phrasing continues to bother me that every discussion about calories is still entirely in the vocabulary of Phlogistion. Calories are treated as particles somehow "in" food, and all we care about is how well calories "burn". The metabolism doesn't work as a fire. This just seems to me like a fundamentally bad assumption for how energy works in the metabolism. How is heat energy in food or heat energy during exercise good measurements or metrics for food or for human activity?
It's too over-simplifying as a model. It favors a heat-centric view of energy that both chemistry and physics have since rejected as critically flawed (including all the many times they rejected Phlogiston Theory). Physics has an easy and direct formula for the energy density of mass (E=mc^2) but we'd all have a good laugh if someone proposed we model human food consumption as an ideal fusion or fission reaction. Why is it not equally laughable when we talk about the energy in food based solely on how much heat it creates when food is set on fire or the energy costs of exercise based mostly on how much people exercising raise the temperatures of the rooms around them?
I think that's a bit more strange than just "incorrect numbers". I know that's a rare opinion in general, and I offer my opinions not to "disprove CICO" but to encourage people to explore the controversies themselves more deeply whether they end up agreeing with me after the exploration or not.
I think CICO is somewhat fine first-order approximation. Over-simplifying models are useful sometimes, and a broken clock can be right at least twice a day, especially if your error sensitivity is only plus or minus 10 hours. There are too many anomalies in the current obesity crises that CICO doesn't explain well. I think far too many people assume the over-simplified CICO map is the entirety of the complex territory of human dieting, and have a near religious fervor that too many people in the world simply love eating Phlogiston particles too much and don't have the "willpower" to cut the Phlogiston in their diet nor to exercise their Phlogiston away.
Plus there's a lot of interesting Goodhart's Law controversy in modern food that when a metric becomes the target it ceases being a good metric: have you explored the "zero-calorie" sections of your local grocery store lately? What do you think is the macronutrient benefit of some of those beverages and snacks? Do they actually seem healthier to you than things with plenty of food calories? Those foods certainly seem free enough of Phlogiston, so far as I can tell. But they certainly don't seem free from interactions with the human digestive system to me.
Maybe these aren't controversies that are worth talking about? I'm feeling sorry I brought it up. I'm definitely sorry I mixed up some facts that distracted from the actual points I was making. The obsession with heat energy/fire output as the one metric to rule them all and that can explain "all of food and exercise" is fascinating to me. It seems bad organic chemistry and it seems bad physics to me. CICO is right just often enough (as a high error rate, first order approximation) that it probably isn't worth the effort disproving, but that doesn't mean it is free from controversy.