Open Thread, Aug. 8 - Aug 14. 2016

The number one tip on the top of every single "writer's advice" list is to write every day. rain, hail, death in the family. Write.Every.Day.

An auxiliary problem is that once you find that you've managed to write something like 50,000 words, you realize the difficulty of going back and editing it into something good. It takes a couple of hours at a careful pace just to read that much text.

I thought that to most LW'ers the weak version of "Calories in, Calories out" was uncontroversial. One can accept that Calories in (the mouth) is not the whole story, and at the same time feel it's pretty much most of the story.

Just one point of data: I kept a spreadsheet when I lost 59 pounds in 96 days. I had values for my personal base burn as a function of current weight and per task (usually a rower and hiking), and a daily deficit of 2000 calories correlated fairly well with a daily loss of .55 pounds (in round numbers; I don't want to sound like the proverbial economist with a sense of humor. I also went over some and under some, used nutritional labels and activity estimates that rounded to the nearest 10, &c.)

I was not scientifically rigorous so grain of salt, but over three months or so, I anecdotally found that 3500 calories of deficit correlated very well with a pound of loss. After that I stayed pretty constant while I was paying attention, 1-2 years. Bit North of there now, but I don't do much counting anymore.

LMGTFY: "base metabolic rate calculator"

gives you a few calculators that estimate your resting energy burn rate. Each human will be slightly different being noisy systems. Add in an entire lifestyle of different potential variations and you get a good feel that this is a very fuzzy estimate.

The first one on google gave me 1818kCal a day. You can look at the equation that got to that.

CICO is a close enough approximation to use for dieting. Dieting systems usually do what they do based on the assumption of CICO. given CICO if you also only eat blueberries you wont be very hungry or similar.

I believe the Shangri-la diet works in an interesting way around disconnecting calories with pleasure reward.

Most diets work if you can stick to them. Different diets might sound like they are selling the "what you eat" part, but in reality they are usually selling the "you can stick to it" part disguised as the "what you eat" part.

If you also look into the energy burnt during say; an hour of running, an hour of walking, and an hour of sleeping. You can get a sense of the scale of how much exercise impacts weight loss (hint: not much).

This can also be reasoned from first CICO principles that you can eat more calories in 5 minutes than you can burn in 5 hours running a marathon. (You can out eat your exercise routine and more effective interventions will involve diet than just exercise, but of course both together is best.)

As a final note: There will always be another birthday cake.

a) all calories in the food you put in your mouth are digested;

This is certainly not true. Usually calories in food are measured burning the stuff and measuring the calories emitted, but of course our digestive tract doesn't work like that. This means that we always absorb less calories that are in the food, indeed cooking was a great revolution in human history because it allowed more calories to be extracted from the same amount of food.

b) the digested calories are either stored as fat or spent as work; there is nothing else that could happen with them;

This, on the other hand and with the caveat of a), seems pretty uncontroversial. There are different deposits of long-term energy, such as glycogen in the liver, glycogen in the muscles and adipose tissue. But other than accumulating or being used to produce ATP, I have never seen any reason to believe that calories are used for something else.

c) the calories are the whole story about nutrition and metabolism, and all calories are fungible.

Well, this is obviously untrue, but usually "calories in, calories out" is used in the context of weight loss.

Could it be that some people are forced to eat large amounts of food just to extract the right amount of vitamins and minerals, and any attempt to eat less will lead to symptoms of malnutrition?

It can be, but the body is usually extremely efficient when extracting vitamins out of food. An inability to do that would be a serious business, most probably caused by a genetic disease, and surely cured by supplementation rather than eating large quantity of food.

maybe you cannot always get thin by eating less calories than you spend working; but if you eat more calories than you spend working, you will inevitably get fat.

I don't see how the first sentence would work. As far as I know, there are no hidden reserve of energy besides glicogen, muscle proteins and fat.

But it is possible that some of the "calories in (the mouth)" may pass through the digestive system undigested and later excreted? Could people differ in this aspect, perhaps because of their gut flora?

This is a certainty. Think for example to all the calories contained in indigestible fibers.

Also, what if some people burn the stored fat in ways we would not intuitively recognize as work? For example, what if some people simply dress less warmly, and spend more calories heating up their bodies? Are there other such non-work ways of spending calories?

That is called non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) and is the way that most of our calories are expended: keeping body temperature constant, providing energy to all the chemical reaction in the body, etc.

While reality seems to suggest that most people, both thin and fat, keep their weight stable around some specific value.

Yes, there is a set-point which is regulated by a complex interaction between various hormones, such as ghrelin, leptin, insulin, etc.

You're missing the fact that tightly controlled feedback mechanisms govern appetite. That's what allows maintaining weight in the real world. Magically add 20lbs (or an apple a day) to a healthy person and they'll feel correspondingly less hungry.

impact on how much calories people spend simply moving their own bodies

Actually, it's mostly going to be the metabolism of the tissue (extra fat tissue needs flood flow, temperature regulation, energy for cellular processes etc too), and that can be significant, although not as much as hunger regulation.

Can we get in some agreed upon middle ground?

A simple daily-iterated formula to start: WEIGHT = WEIGHT - WEIGHTBURN + FOOD

My assumptions are that WEIGHT is the person's current weight. WEIGHTBURN is the amount the person burn per every day from energy consumption + bodily maintenance. FOOD varies from person to person.

My questions for you:

But it is possible that some of the "calories in (the mouth)" may pass through the digestive system undigested and later excreted? Could people differ in this aspect, perhaps because of their gut flora?

Not unreasonable. I remember reading that while brocoli has more calcium than milk, the composition of milk allows the calcium to be absorbed better. In fact, the components of brocoli seem to contain something that actually inhibits calcium absorption!

More generally, I assume your reasoning here to be that actual food digestion is not a 1:1 to, say, food labels. Correct? (I assume that food labels use some sort of average, say, 10,000/100 = x per 100g. Correct me if this is wrong please!)

Also, what if some people burn the stored fat in ways we would not intuitively recognize as work? For example, what if some people simply dress less warmly, and spend more calories heating up their bodies? Are there other such non-work ways of spending calories?

Define your 'work'. Is it physical activity without any body maintenance? Keeping your body temperature, for example. Digesting food also takes 'work'. I don't think you can burn so much calories from exercise alone, in fact. Calorie counting is a better choice for fat loss than walking/running distance.

Basically every person (including those who will tell you that calories in = calories out) has seen babies, so if your model of the people who disagree with you would be baffled by the fact that fat dad and football sized son don't gain the same weight from eating the same food then your model of their beliefs may be lacking an important nuance.

As of today, the thread is still gathering questions. The team will start answering them August 11; a LW post may be of interest then.

I think cooperation is more complex than that, as far as who benefits. Superficially, yes it benefits lower status participants the most and therefore suggests they're the ones most likely to ask. In very simple systems, I think you see this often. But as the system or cultural superstructure gets more complex, the benefit rises toward higher status participants. Most societies put a lot of stock in being able to organize - a task which includes cooperation in its scope. That's a small part of the reason you get political email spam asking for donations, even if you live in an area where your political party is clearly dominant. Societies also tend to put an emphasis on active overall participation (the 'irons in the fire' mentality), where peer-cooperation is rewarded, and it's often unclear who has higher status in those situations without being able to tell who has the most 'irons in the fire' so to speak. I feel like this is where coauthoring falls. Although it probably depends on what subculture has developed around the subject being authored.

And then there's the people who create organizations entirely centered around cooperation. The idea being that there's power in being able to set the rules of how the lower status participants are allowed to cooperate, and how they are rewarded for their cooperation. For example, Youtube and Kickstarter. In these and similar systems, cooperation effectively starts at the highest possible status and rolls downhill.

In your example I would say mostly yes it does signal lower status, but you should do it anyway.

Willingness to collaborate is not as pure of a signal as say something like owning a winter home does to signal status because if I knew nothing about your willingness to collaborate I could still tell your status by examining your catalog of publications. Willingness to collaborate is an attempt to increase the lower status that you already have to a level that you would like to have. It's like attempting to win is signalling that you haven't won yet, but how do you win? You have to attempt to win.

I have recently been thinking about how incredibly useful networking is. I know successful people that have large and small social/professional networks, but if I examine only the people who I know that have large social/professional networks they are almost always employed and win more.

I've noticed that old money types will tend to cooperate in this sort of publication-based dilemma more frequently for cultural reasons: to them, not cooperating would be a failure to show off their generosity.

To give a real life example, I've often seen my parent's friends "fighting over the check" when they all eat together, while I've never seen new-money-types of similar net worth do this outside of romantic contexts.

Mnemonic peg systems are almost perfectly arbitrary so they provide a decent case study for how you form memories in the absence of any governing structure or natural chunking. It's an "IQ-proof" task.

I don't think it's useful to try to adopt mnemonic pegs without any chunking. I personally started having pegs from 0 to 9 and 00 to 99. I filled them with images of woman that I put into 11 categories with 10 people and sorted every pile by the alphabet.

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast interviewed Grant Richey about this. He notes that some of the headlines were misleading, because the study did find that when flossing is performed by a dental hygienist on children, it has positive effect. So, a better encapsulation of the recent review is that improper flossing doesn't have any positive effect. On the other hand, its very unlikely to hurt you, unless you damage your gums in the process.

in case anyone wants a detailed review of the literature from before this study, Grant Richey did a blog post on it a few months ago: https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/may-the-floss-be-with-you/

This study was trying to figure out what would happen if everyone in the US followed the same diet. That's probably not that useful for individual decision making. Even if lots and lots of people became vegan we wouldn't stop using grazing land, we would just raise less grain-fed animals.

Also, this analysis doesn't seem to consider animal suffering, which I personally find important.

Says CRSPR will never be able to fix damaged people that exist, just the next generation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4xb9tw/could_crispr_eventually_allow_us_to_borrow_genes/

and here is a story on the regeneration they discuss in the thread

http://www.sciencenews.org/article/anemone-proteins-offer-clue-restoring-hearing-loss

You should also research some of the existing methanotroph bacteria studies, there are some strains available without GM.

One of the most interesting is the Antarctic researcher who was studying the ice cores. He used some weird culture when his regular supply ran out, and found that every single core he tested was inbued with methanotrophs. They were dormant in the cores, but they were still metabolizing very slowly, and they where in all of them. This points to the major possibility that the "historical" high levels of CO2 everyone points to in the record, were actually methane gun events, that upped the methano's, then as the level dropped due to predation and conversion, we are left with the gas bubbles people are studying now, which show very high levels of CO2 before industrialization.

and as i posted before , the Ridiculously Resilent Ridge atmo high is still in place, we are getting a winter storm front right now in AZ. Gonna be 4 years soon, and we know about emplaced highs, we get one most every summer for 4-6 weeks.

That fear has been at least partially alleviated by new research showing that more educated people are having more kids

Could you please post a link if available?

Not everybody who makes it to adulthood has kids. Various disabled people don't find a partner with whom to have kids.

I'm relatively confident that medical progress will be stronger than the effects you talk about in the next century. Sooner or later I expect genetic engineering to replace natural selection as the driving factor for human DNA, so the effects of the selection become less important.

Presumably this is the kind of thing that is fixable by widespread genetic technologies. Once you can identify and/or fix problematic zygotes, the problem disappears.