Not at all, and I did not say anything of the sort.
What I said was: circulating glucose either gets used or get stored as fat. Which means that counting glucose calories for thermodynamic calculations would actually make some sense (but see below).
Circulating fat get stored as fat, or converted to ketones for use. The difference is, unused ketones get peed whereas unused glucose gets stored.
Ketosis means fat gets converted to ketones for use - but only as much as the body means necessary for activity as that point. If your fat intake exceeds your use, you will likely gain fat.
Thermodynamics is of course never violated. But the “calories in - calories out” statement is not that useful with regard to body weight.
If you drink petrol, you will not gain wait (not be able to use it for energy - you’ll just excrete it) despite being more energy dense than fat (fat is 9kcal/gr, petrol is 12kcal/g). Similarly, plain paper (and indeed the wood it is made of) is a carbohydrate at 4kcal/gr, and yet you won’t derive any energy from it and again excrete it. Does that violate any law of thermodynamics?
No. What it does show is that the assumption that our metabolism is a perfect combustion machine (Which is at the base of the CICO weight theory) is wrong.
The conversion efficiency of different food is measured (and documented) as “Atwater factors”, the value of which was first measured over 100 years ago and assumed constant, but turned out in recent studies to vary among people and and even for same person in different times by 50% or so.
Similarly, for the same physical activity, same person may have a difference of 50%in energy expenditure (e.g. depending on how high feet are lifted while running)
Thermodynamics is not violated, but if you try to reason using it with the appropriate error bars, it turns out that you can’t say much. Statistically, the average is close enough to work for most people, most of the time, but that “most” is 70% or so.
With respect to ketosis - ketones are “use it or lose it” like heat. Once the body converts fat to ketones (a process which is NOT immediate), they are either used or peed out.
If your activity level is close to constant (as most sedantry people are), the body is very good at having very tight control on levels produced, little are wasted and you are close to what you consider “thermodynamic equilibrium” even though it’s not. If you are used to large varying activities, the body will produce more ketones just in case and pee them out if unused - thus you will only consider it “thermodynamic equilibrium” if you consider pee energy content as well.
I’m an electrical engineer, not a biochemist. But I did try to understand nutrition “science” and realized it is at most cargo cult pseudo science.
I don’t have a list of handy references, but at the very least google Richard Feinman’s famous “a calorie is not a calorie” (it’s not the physicist - and note the spelling of the name is different)
However, back in the real world, where caloric and macronutrient labeling is off by up to 20% and NEAT is highly variable, you're pretty much going to have to either eat less or move more if you want to lose weight - some strategies of doing so may be more efficient than others.
For sure. But I lost weight, a lot of it, by moving more or less the same and eating a lot more "caloric content" (switching from mostly carbs to mostly fat), which many people consider "violating thermodynamics", which is nonsense.
If you don't change the ratios of your macros, and you don't make your expenditure vary much throughout the day, then -- yes, eat less, or move more.
What I said was: circulating glucose either gets used or get stored as fat. Which means that counting glucose calories for thermodynamic calculations would actually make some sense (but see below).
Circulating fat get stored as fat, or converted to ketones for use. The difference is, unused ketones get peed whereas unused glucose gets stored.
Ketosis means fat gets converted to ketones for use - but only as much as the body means necessary for activity as that point. If your fat intake exceeds your use, you will likely gain fat.
Thermodynamics is of course never violated. But the “calories in - calories out” statement is not that useful with regard to body weight.
If you drink petrol, you will not gain wait (not be able to use it for energy - you’ll just excrete it) despite being more energy dense than fat (fat is 9kcal/gr, petrol is 12kcal/g). Similarly, plain paper (and indeed the wood it is made of) is a carbohydrate at 4kcal/gr, and yet you won’t derive any energy from it and again excrete it. Does that violate any law of thermodynamics?
No. What it does show is that the assumption that our metabolism is a perfect combustion machine (Which is at the base of the CICO weight theory) is wrong.
The conversion efficiency of different food is measured (and documented) as “Atwater factors”, the value of which was first measured over 100 years ago and assumed constant, but turned out in recent studies to vary among people and and even for same person in different times by 50% or so.
Similarly, for the same physical activity, same person may have a difference of 50%in energy expenditure (e.g. depending on how high feet are lifted while running)
Thermodynamics is not violated, but if you try to reason using it with the appropriate error bars, it turns out that you can’t say much. Statistically, the average is close enough to work for most people, most of the time, but that “most” is 70% or so.
With respect to ketosis - ketones are “use it or lose it” like heat. Once the body converts fat to ketones (a process which is NOT immediate), they are either used or peed out.
If your activity level is close to constant (as most sedantry people are), the body is very good at having very tight control on levels produced, little are wasted and you are close to what you consider “thermodynamic equilibrium” even though it’s not. If you are used to large varying activities, the body will produce more ketones just in case and pee them out if unused - thus you will only consider it “thermodynamic equilibrium” if you consider pee energy content as well.
I’m an electrical engineer, not a biochemist. But I did try to understand nutrition “science” and realized it is at most cargo cult pseudo science.
I don’t have a list of handy references, but at the very least google Richard Feinman’s famous “a calorie is not a calorie” (it’s not the physicist - and note the spelling of the name is different)