Maintenance Phase - The Trouble With Calories

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Weight loss is as simple as “calories in, calories out,” right? Or — gasp — could the reply guys be wrong!? This week, we dig in on the surprisingly complex science behind a seemingly simple calculation.Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!History of the Calorie in NutritionCaloric Equivalents of Gained or Lost WeightThe Foreign Policy of the CalorieWhy the most popular rule of weight loss is completely wrongTime to Correctly Predict the Amount of Weight Loss With DietingMysteries of Weight LossThe energy balance model of obesity: beyond calories in, calories out“Calories in, calories out” and macronutrient intakeOlympians owe gold standard to a 19th-century chemistCalories on food packets are wrong—it’s time to change thatWhy Does the FDA Recommend 2,000 Calories Per Day?Who Actually Needs a 2,000 Calorie a Day Diet?The Nutrition Facts Label: Its History and UpdatesThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

I'm gonna say something else. Wait, what is it a spoiler of? Okay, I was gonna say, welcome to to maintenance phase the podcast that raises a cubic Centimeter of water by one degree. Oh buddy. That's like the first five minutes Welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that recommends 2,000 of it per day Wait it per day. No, that's so fast. That was the worst. Wait, no, I love it. Leave it. That's my worst one. We have not done a me episode in a while and it's finally showing up how

rusty you are. I've never co-hosted this show before. I'm Aubrey Gordon. I am like a Hobbs. Yeah. And today, as you may have gathered, I don't know how you would have gathered this. We're talking about calories. We're doing calories. Before we get to that, if you would like to support the show,

you can do that on Patreon, or you can buy T-shirts, Mugs, tote bags, all manner of things at T-Public. Both of those are linked for you in the show notes. And today, Michael Hobbs, it is the first of a two-parter. A calorie dip tick. So we have gotten a bunch of emails from listeners, particularly listeners in the UK,

wanting us to talk about this new mandate in the UK to add calorie labeling to restaurant menus. And as I got into that research, I found that there was like a ton of stuff that I did not know about calories and just like straight up how they work. So today, we're gonna talk about, we're gonna do part one of our two-parter.

I am calling this one the trouble with calories. Oh, okay. And next time, we're gonna do a deep dive into the history of this kind of like food and menu labeling. We'll get a little teaser taster of it today. Okay. It really blew my mind. I think I and many others have thought of calories

as being like a very straightforward measure with very clear science behind it. And as per usual, everything is mudnier than we think it is. Did you think that it was simple because men on the internet are always shouting calories and calories out at you? Oh, you busted me again. I know, doesn't you know? It is. I mean, so like, you already did it, but Mike, can you tell me what a calorie is?

Okay, I'm gonna fuck up the specifics, but isn't it the amount of energy that it takes to raise a cubic something of water by one degree? It's like you burn, I don't know, a piece of paper underneath a little cube of water and the water gets slightly warmer and you're like, that's a calorie. Is that right? You suspend water in a cubic shape in the air over an open flame. Over a zippo lighter. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, so that's it. And cubic something is exactly right,

right? You're sort of like leaving a blank for that space because we talk about calories, there are sort of two versions that people talk about. Oh, the dumb, kilo calorie thing, or kilo fuels, or whatever. We're gonna get emails if I don't say it. So I'm gonna say it. Sometimes you look on labels,

especially if you're in a foreign country, you look on the label and it's 16,000 calories. And you're like, I don't understand, but then you're like, oh, they're using the weird calories. Yeah, the little calories. Yeah. So in physics, historically, the small calorie is defined as the amount of energy

that is needed to increase the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. Okay. Most of us when we talk about a calorie or talking about a kilocalorie, the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. Most of us when we talk about a calorie or talking about a kilocalorie, that's the amount of energy that it takes to raise the temperature of one liter of water by one degree Celsius, right? And that's at sea level. Oh, right, of course.

Because boiling points are different at different elevations, bubble up. I learned that from the back of the macaroni and cheese box. But then it's one of those things where it's like, I know what a calorie is in the sort of the scientific description. Like I can put all of the words into that order, but that doesn't actually answer the question because the way that we interact with calories is like a snickers has, I don't know, 250 calories. And so it's like, okay, well,

are they putting a snicker under the water cube and lighting the snickers on fire and like seeing how hot the water gets? To me, that scientific definition doesn't actually get at what a calorie is, really. I really appreciate that you're just here to pave the way for what comes next that you're like, I have a question about this

and I may like literally the next bullet point. My show notes. I'm like, the next bullet point. My show notes. I'm like, but Aubrey, what does that mean? But how do you determine it? I know. So there are many different ways to measure calories, many different kinds of what are called calorimeters. The most widely known and widely used one

is called a bomb calorimeter. It is a sealed container that is filled with pure oxygen. Okay. And it is suspended in a container of water. So like inside that sealed container filled with pure oxygen, you put your Snickers bar, say, to determine how many calories you're in it. You ignite it using electrical fuses in this case in that pure

oxygen chamber, and it gives off heat into this sort of bath of water that it's suspended in, and you've got a thermometer in that bath of water. So I was right about them letting stick or stuff like that. Yes, I was joking. You know, that's what they do. Okay. It is worth knowing that the history of like how calories first appeared in written text and in scientific literature is actually like pretty disputed. I looked into a bunch of different historical sources on this, and basically the closest that folks get to agreement is that calorie was coined as a term to measure heat in scientific literature. Sometime between 1787 and 1824.

Oh, wow. So lots of gaps. Big gaps, right? And some people are like, came out of France and some people are like, it came out of Germany and some people are like, you know what I mean? Like, there's like, it's disputed where it first showed up, who came up with it, what they were referring to. Right, it's like Nutella or fascism.

It's like, we know it's from Europe. It's not clear where. Great. And that region. So in that sort of early era, in the 1800s-ish when calories are sort of coming into more common use in science, calories were established as part of the original metric system.

And it starts being used in commerce in the UK and the US, starting in the mid-1800s. But we don't really start talking about food calories and kilocalories more broadly, until the late 19th century. The first use that I was able to find is that it was first published in a US medical textbook in 1894.

This is a constant theme on the show of how young a lot of nutrition science is. Yeah, it's really, really young and also really, really old because some of this stuff hasn't really been revisited. Oh, nice. So what I wanted to do today is just like dig into a few of those core assumptions that we were talking about earlier, right? And I wanted to start by digging in on calories in calories out,

which is almost like a dieting meme at this point. Yeah, my God. Mike, tell me about your sort of thoughts and feelings about calories and calories out. I'm sure you've heard it until you're blue in the face. You know I have a spiel about calories and calories out. Tell me. I have like a thing that I have a thing that I say whenever I'm confronted with this because as you also know,

probably much better than I do, the minute you start talking about like fat phobia and society or anything involving this issue at all, you will hear the phrase calories and calories out within like 45 seconds. And then when you push back and you're like, uh, that seems a little bit simplistic. What you'll often hear is like, well, it's true. Are you saying it's not true? Oh, we've got a science denial over here. And my retort to this is always that like human beings do not judge statements only on their truth value. Right?

So if you say to me, Mike, my mom was diagnosed with cancer today. And I'm like, oh, interesting. Did you know the Titanic sank in 1912? Yeah. Like, that's a little insensitive, Mike. I'm like, actually, oh, you're saying it didn't sink in 1912, when did it sink, Aubrey?

We got a science denier on our hands here. To me, the phrase calories in calories out has always had the same amount of usefulness as saying, like, well, to win a basketball game, you have to score more points. Yeah. And then the coach is like, well, one of my kids broke his ankle and the bus isn't here

to take us to the arena where we have to play. And it's like, ah, ah, to win a basketball game. You just have to score more points. Yeah. It's true that that's how you win a basketball game, but that doesn't tell you how to win a basketball game. And I'm not coming to you with a question, how do I win a basketball game?

It's like I'm coming to you with a very specific concern. And you are then going back to the highest imaginable level of abstraction and telling me the most the number one first fact about a basketball game that obviously if I'm a basketball coach I already know. And so when people say calories and calories out, it's like it's not useful. Yeah. And so whether or not it's true is completely irrelevant. It's not an appropriate thing to say in like 99.9% of situations in which it is said. That's my spiel. I feel you, it's a thing that people say overwhelmingly in bad faith. Yes, right?

Good God. Overwhelmingly, it's not coming from people who are seeking to understand because if they were seeking to understand, it would be a question instead of like a weird challenge or a state matter, whatever, right? I have had my own responses to that. They've all been super ineffective, not because there's a perfect thing to say in those

movements, but because when someone tells you, like, it's just calories and calories out, they're telling you they're not gettable. And they don't want to understand. We're going to talk about the science of this stuff because I find it really interesting and it's been really illuminating and fascinating and has given me a whole lot more to work with. But this episode is not going to give you rejoinders

to people who say that. This isn't the clap back episode. This is not the clap back episode. Only for us. The persuasion episode, right? Right. My ineffective response to the calories and calories out stuff, I've run through a few of them, but one of the earliest ones was people would be like, it's calories and calories

out and often they'll say, it's the first law of thermodynamics. Oh, I love the yes, oh, I love that one, the physics, whenever they bring up physics. The law of conservation, the idea that energy can't be created or destroyed in a closed system, right? Thanks Bill Nye, really smart. Thank you for that. Cool. I appreciate your comments. Good bow tie.

The response that I came up with early on to this stuff, which I don't recommend was I would be like, oh yeah, well, the first law of thermodynamics only applies to closed system. Oh. You tried to out-build-knye them. That's good. I tried.

It's like so ineffective. The reason why that's ineffective, Aubrey, is because you're assuming that they know or give a shit about thermodynamics. People who bring up thermodynamics right after calories and calories, I don't know shit about thermodynamics. I guarantee. I'm sure you're right. Right, because if you do, you know what a closed system is, right? Which is like, nothing gets in, nothing comes out.

And our bodies are not closed systems. You're constantly eating food, breathing air, like you're in an environment. Yes. And there are quite a few research papers that I read and they'll lead up to this that were like, can we stop with thermodynamics and human bodies? Right, a bunch of researchers were like, this is not what it's about everybody. I love thinking of you doing only if it's a closed system

and then lifting up a microphone and dropping it on the ground, be like, yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Zing. So I decided to look into, like, where did we get this idea of calories and calories out? Where does it first sort of appear?

Yeah, what fucking message board did this first show up on? The message board of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in the year of 1959. Wait, really? So there is this paper that gets published in this nutrition journal by an MD named Max Wyshnowski. Calories in calories out is sometimes referred to as Wyshnowski's rule. He laid out an analysis of existing literature on weight loss and calories and food and all that kind of stuff. And concluded that each pound of fat lost or gained, each pound of fat tissue contained 3,500 calories.

Oh, that's the origin of this thing too. Mmm-hmm. This comes up a lot. We're gonna get so many little Rosetta Stone moments of like, wait a minute, that thing comes from this. This is the basis of like, if you switch from like, I don't know, a super size meal to a non-super size meal over the course of a year, that'll save you 17,000 calories and then you'll lose 6 pounds in a year or whatever.

Like this 3,500 number is always invoked in these conversations. Yeah, switch from whole milk to skin milk and before you know it, you will have dropped or whatever, like this 3,500 number is always invoked in these conversations. Yeah. Switch from whole milk to skin milk and before you know it, you will have dropped three pounds without even thinking about it or whatever. Yes. So he determines that each pound of human fat tissue, human adipose tissue, has the, what he calls the caloric equivalent of 3,500 calories. And so from there, he concludes that cutting 3,500 calories

from your diet would lead to the loss of one pound of fat tissue. Right. Years later, there's this very influential medical textbook. It's called Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease. And it takes up this Wichnowski's rule and writes that losing one pound would require an energy deficit of 3,500 calories. So that's where we start to get it seeping out into medical usage world is like, okay,

we're training up future healthcare providers using this rhetoric. It sounds really solid, and it makes a lot of sense on its face. Right. And you can see how it becomes individual diet advice, because then it can easily be, well, if you cut 500 calories a day, then you'll lose a pound a week. Right. And it seems like here's the answer, right? We figured it out, everybody.

Yeah. 1959, we did it. Yeah. You can totally see for all of those reasons you could see why this takes off, right? Yeah. And also, this is an idea takes off, right? Yeah. And also, this is an idea from the 1950s.

Yeah. We have had really substantial advancements in the last 60 plus years, and we're still kind of in a tough spot with figuring out a bunch of this stuff, right? Yeah. In those 60 years, though, a bunch of the assumptions that Max Wyshnowski made in developing this calories and calories out sort of approach have since been disproved.

I know where you're going with this, so I'm remaining silent. Go! No, tell me where you think I'm going with it. My understanding of the current science is that the human body isn't just like a little calorie processing machine, that your metabolism slows down and speeds up according to all kinds of internal systems. So if you eat 3,500 calories fewer, you don't just keep losing a pound a week until nothingness until like the singularity, your body eventually is going to adjust and you're going to plateau.

Totally, totally. And even like a highly active people, if you sort of like applied this kind of formula of calories and calories out to Michael Phelps, who eats like 7,000 calories a day, you'd be like, that guy's getting fat, even with the levels of activity that he has. But he's not, right?

Like there are people that we all know who like eat very small amounts in our fat people, or eat very large amounts in our thin not, right? Like there are people that we all know who like eat very small amounts in our fat people or eat very large amounts in our thin people, right? Like he assumes that it's a weight loss is a totally linear process. And like it's almost like a ledger, right? Like you make a deposit or you make a withdrawal and that's it.

But he's using a bomb calorimeter to determine all of this and human beings are not containers of pure oxygen suspended in water. When you take in less energy, your body also expends less energy. So over time, it does get harder and harder to lose weight. You lose less and less weight over time if you're restricting calories. And not only that, but when you lose weight, you're losing fat, yes, but you're also losing muscle mass. Right.

Which burns calories. Which burns calories, right? So that also really complicates this. Right. Wait, do you wanna hear one of my calories and calories out, zingers? Oh, yes, please. You're like, I know you said it wasn't the clapback episode,

but. But, I have a clapback. I've never actually used this. The thing is, I always get people are always saying, like, oh, calories in, calories out is true. And I'm like, well, it's an accurate theory, but there's just two problems. The first problem is calories in, and the second problem is calories out. And it turns out both of those things are actually significantly more complicated.

Yes. So by today's standards, the evidence that Max Wyshnowski was using to create this Wyshnowski's rule, this calories and calories out thing, would be considered weak. It would be considered weak evidence by today's standards, right? You're getting cocky on them. Since then, researchers have found a ton of things that influence our ability to lose or gain weight from hormonal influences to genetic markers, to environmental changes, right? Like there are lots and lots of things, and none of that is captured in this very simple equation.

The exact thing that makes it so sort of like tempting to believe is the reason that it's like not very accurate or useful. It's just like a simple number. Earlier you mentioned your body does sort of downshift. It gets harder, right? To lose weight as time goes on. In 2011, this researcher named Kevin Hall does some research to directly challenge Wichnovsky's rule. What he found was that if you only factor in

that metabolic sort of downshift and burning fewer calories, Kevin Hall found that Wyshnowski's rule over predicted weight loss by 100%. Oh, wow. So basically people are cutting 3,500 calories from their diet and they're losing half a pound, not a pound. Over time, right? So like, part of the way that this works is it's a declining graph, right? The longer you restrict your calories and the more you restrict your calories, the more your metabolism downshifts, the fewer calories you burn and the harder weight loss gets, right? He did this sort of like

over the course of a year, he said that calories and calories out would say you would lose twice as much weight as you actually would given the way that your metabolism down shifts, right? And I'll also say like there is some research most famously with the biggest loser study that finds that calorie restriction in the long term actually damages your metabolism and that down shift is permanent. In 2015, just four years later, there's a paper

that is released in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and they tried to do this sort of omnibus, like, here's everything that's wrong with calories in calories out. It's authors essentially concluded that the rule is easy to use, Wichnowski's rule, and calories in calories out is easy to use, Wichnowski's rule and calories and calories out is easy to use,

but, quote, lacks a contemporary scientific foundation and leads to a large error in weight loss prediction, even over the short term. That's the mic drop. That's the actual one. That's the mic drop. It doesn't account for anything we've learned in the last like 64 years. Right. There are a few things that they point out. One, they point out that it doesn't account for anything we've learned in the last like 64 years. There are a few things that they point out. One, they point out that it doesn't account for the energy that's actually expended

in digesting your food. We now think that between 10 and 15% of the calories of a given food are actually just used in the digestion of that food. Wow. So take like 10% off the top, it also doesn't account for a ton of stuff that we've learned about your endocrine system and hormones and how those influence body shape and size.

It doesn't account for cortisol or grellen or insulin. All of those are hormones that are known to impact your digestion, your blood sugar, your hunger and satiety cues, right? Like all of that kind of stuff is completely left out of this. It also doesn't distinguish between what the difference is between calories from different sources. It's not distinguishing between calories

from fat versus carbs versus protein, sure. But also, I didn't think the jury was still out on calories from alcohol. What meaning like they don't count for like making you fat or something? I am gonna send you a quote from a doctor. Okay, it says there's a big debate on whether alcohol calories are even usable,

whether you can even turn them into fat. It's not easy. Says Ken Fujioka MD, a weight loss expert at Scripps Health in San Diego. When you look at various studies, you actually get mixed results. Some studies say it's not a problem, don't worry about it. Others say it's associated with weight gain, so it's a real open mess. Wait, so... Yeah, dude! So it might be the case that just like booze calories don't count Ed McMahon might be right. I know I'm writing our inevitable diet book in my head right now Like actually I include that not to be like everybody go get wasted but to be like

Look that is a thing that I really thought was like a bedrock thing Look, that is a thing that I really thought was like a bedrock thing. No, it is a really open question about how your body processes calories from alcohol. I mean, this is kind of the calories in problem. Yeah, because two people might eat the same meal and like, you know, both have a hamburger and a beer. And one person will like be able to use 800 calories and the other person will be able to use 800 calories and the other person will be able to use

like a thousand calories. Right, totally. So that's actually another point that these authors of this paper bring up. Is there like, look, look, look, look. Even if we came up with the best possible population level modeling of what will generally contribute to weight loss or weight gain

at the population level, that's not going to translate into individual behaviors, because it can't capture individual biological differences. You can restrict calories all day long for someone with lipidema. They're not going to lose weight in the same way that a person without lipidema would lose weight. And there's just not really like a handy-dandy calorie calculator

that incorporates all of those things and can just go, all right, your personal calorie level is this. Like, no, we don't know how to do that. And even if we did, again, calorie restriction doesn't produce weight loss to blood. It slows you way down over time. The thing that these sort of authors conclude with in this paper is genuinely that models like these, these kinds of universal models

of like everybody needs to eat this many calories or restrict this many calories and that will lead to this kind of weight loss cannot be used to predict any individuals' weight loss or gain. That is how far they go. It's not just like, there are some exceptions where this wouldn't apply. It's like, this doesn't work for any individual. Like, stop using it.

And I think that's also like borne out by our personal experiences, right? Like, if anybody's tried to lose weight, you know that you plateau real hard and like the longer you go, the harder it gets. That's not you losing your willpower or whatever else we've have sort of learned to attribute that to. That is your body kicking in and like a bunch of bodily systems kicking in to downshift how much energy you burn and to conserve energy and to make sure

you have enough energy to continue to live and survive. And none of it's in your control at all. It's just like an automatic thing that your body does, basically. Yeah, totally. So when this 2015 paper comes out, the debate around calories and calories out is just sort of continuing to go. There are a bunch of different perspectives on calories and weight loss and what really works and what really

doesn't in the research. But they pretty much all agree on one thing. This straightforward, like just restrict calories thing, calories and calories out just doesn't work. The most recent entry into this sort of set of like, maybe it's this, maybe it's this, maybe it's actually this about sort of weight loss and calories is a 2022 paper from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that actually argued that the brain is the primary organ that governs weight loss, not consciously, but nearly all subconsciously.

We're trying to like consciously act our way out of a thing that is happening in our bodies without our awareness. Right. We're trying to be like, no, you just need to have enough willpower. Well, a lot of the research shows that like willpower around food is just like how much Grellen is in your system. Right. In that same article, they say, quote, BMI is highly heritable and genetic differences explain approximately 75% of BMI variability among individuals.

Whoa. Other papers that I read put it at 80%. My understanding of people who have lost weight and kept it off for a long time, because like those people do exist, is that basically it's ongoing calorie restriction, and they're also exercising a lot more. Their body never kind of gets to the lower set point

and the amounts of weight that people are able to keep off over the long term are relatively small. It's like people that have lost like 10 to 20% of their body weight. The data on this is really bad because the only source of data on this is this thing called the National Weight Loss Registry, which is self-reported and no one knows how true any of it is.

Yeah, I will say in all of the research that you and I have done for this show, maybe you have seen something I have not. I have yet to see data that shows someone who was fat for their whole life becoming thin and staying thin. That's interesting. Yes. Right?

So like, I have definitely heard about people who are like, oh, a game 20 pounds or 30 pounds through my pregnancy. And now I need to lose it. Yay. I have heard stories and anecdotes and seen data about thin people restoring their thinness. I have not seen or heard stories of fat people becoming thin and staying that way. That's a really good point. I've heard this from doctors that when somebody comes in who has lost more than 10% of their

weight, the doctors will be like, oh, you were only at that higher weight for like three months, right? Yeah, usually these like brief periods. But yeah, that's a really interesting distinction. I also have not heard of like someone who's just been fat their whole life taking it off and keeping it off Although I'm sure those people exist because it's a big country and something about it. Yeah, I'm not gonna say it doesn't exist I'm just gonna say like it doesn't show up very often in the research because so much of the research is geared toward like How do we find effective methods of weight loss? Yeah, all temporary. And all of which is built around the expectations of thin people and thin bodies, right?

I'd bring off for any of this up to drive us toward like better weight loss solutions or any of that kind of stuff. But just to illustrate how deeply wrong-headed our assumptions about weight and weight loss are and fatness and fat people are, it's incredibly clear in this research that calories in, calories out is not a thing.

It shows up kind of everywhere, and we've just sort of accepted it pretty uncritically, and researchers are not accepting it uncritically. It's also very interesting that these findings bounce around kind of technical fields, or like more stemmy fields, which is like, oh yeah, it's really difficult for anybody to lose weight and like a lot of it's inherited. And then when you look at the sort of the sociological

conversation, the popular conversation and the political conversation, it's like none of that stuff has jumped over. No. The conversation about it is like, well, like we're doing a municipal project to help everybody lose weight. It doesn't engage with this literature at all.

Not only does it not engage with the literature, it engages with literature that has been actively disparaging and debunked. Right. Like, it's like actively like, no, let's pull out the bad stuff that doesn't work and that people feel bad and that everyone hates. And that we've all tried a bajillion times.

Like, let's do that. Okay, so I'm gonna move us on to the next thing. That was assumption number one. We got moves to make here. So try part height structure. The next assumption that I wanted to look at is the idea that the calorie counts that we see on food labels or restaurant menus or whatever, are

an accurate and useful sort of set of information in understanding how our bodies use those calories. I am so interested in this. I am so excited to tell you about it. There's no way those Chipotle calorie things are accurate. There's no way. Okay. So all of this calories and calories outshit

assumes that human bodies operate in the same kind of way as a calorimeter. We don't. Digestion takes time. It's like a bunch of chemical reactions are happening in your body, it's real slow. And our bodies don't actually extract all of the calories in a given food.

You might be eating 200 calories worth of something, but your body might only be able to absorb 100 calories of it. Right. Before we start the section, I want to give a content note specifically for Michael Hobbs. Oh, no. This section is going to include poop stuff. So I apologize in advance for poop stuff. I could see it coming.

You could see it coming. Uh-huh. I've been 10 steps since I heard the word digestion the first time in the episode. Yeah, sorry about that. I'm see it coming. You could see it coming. I've been 10 steps since I heard the word digestion the first time in the summer. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm panicking. The veins on my neck sticking out, yeah. So some folks may have heard that we use nine calories in each gram of fat and four calories each

per gram of protein and carbohydrates. I have absolutely come across this, yeah. Those numbers come from a sort of surprising source, I think. They were developed about 120 years ago, and the person who really put this on the map was a chemist and a chemistry professor named Wilbur Atwater. Is this a name you've ever heard before? I don't think so. He's a son of a Methodist minister who's also a law librarian, normal combo. He's born in 1844, so we're talking about the 1800s here. And he grew up during the temperance movement. Do you know about the temperance movement?

Yes, like a bunch of ladies saying like, don't drink. Yeah, pretty much. Like his father, in this case, the minister slash law librarian was a huge advocate of temperance. Oh, okay. I say all of that as a huge advocate of temperance. Oh, okay. I'd say all of that is a way to say this dude was like presumably around a lot of rhetoric around quote unquote resisting temptation.

Oh, right. Atwater was a professor of chemistry at Wesleyan after he graduated from Yale from 1873 until he died in 1907. So he was therefore decades. He was the USDA's first chief of nutrition investigations. He also in 1896 published the first guidebook to the nutritional values of different foods that we eat.

It was called the chemical composition of American food materials. What it tried to do was spell out how much fat carbohydrates and protein is in each food and how many calories are in each food. Right. So we've identified calories and he's trying to break foods into their constituent parts. What do the calories mean, basically? Yeah. It is also worth knowing that the aforementioned women's Christian Temperance Union

ended up running a campaign against Atwater because he ran an experiment on the caloric value of liquor. So he had a test subject in the study. He put this test subject on a diet of mostly alcohol for six days. Nice. And was like, well, this person didn't die. They kept living, their body kept working.

So alcohol is a food. And the women's Christian temperate union was like, fuck off, get out of here. I love the days of science where it was like, let me just hit someone with my car and like, someone happens. And that was like, that was like a study. I'll make this guy drunk for six days.

Yeah. So at this point, French and German scientists had sort of done some work to define calories and learn some basics about how they worked, but it wasn't clear whether fats and carbs and proteins were all utilized in the same kind of way. So that's what he tries to figure out.

Can I tell you how he figured that out, Michael? Is he just setting up which are like fat and carbs on fire? So we talked earlier about calorimeters and bomb calorimeters in particular. He's measuring the calories in a given food. And then what he wants to find out is what's the caloric availability of that food? So like of those calories, how many can your body use? So the way that he does that is he calculates the caloric value of a food, and then he feeds that same food

to a bunch of different humans. No, no. I know where this is going now. I know why you warned me. He collects their poop after they eat that food, and then he burns the poop in the bomb-callerimeter. No. Chloric value of the food.

No. Minus, Chloric value of the poop, equals what calories you absorbed and used. I refuse to understand how poop works, but is that accurate? Does that give him a reasonable count? No. OK.

For more than 50 years, researchers have known that these atwater factors are not necessarily wrong, although possibly totally wrong, but not the whole picture. OK. So I just sent you a quote. This is from an article in the New Scientist. OK. It says, well, at the new scientist. Okay, it says,

Well, at Water took into account the fiber in food, which we can't digest, Hello, sweet corn, as well as the nitrogen extracted from protein and excreted as a urea in our urine, he didn't take into account the heat given off during metabolism. This is known as diet-induced thermogenesis and is the significant energy cost of converting protein fat and carbs into the amino acids, fatty acids, and glucose that our body needs. So, okay, so the food to poo pipeline is leaving out a bunch of extra stuff that would have

affected the calorie counts. Totally. And I think this is another place where it's reasonable to assume that because of all the sort of individual differences that we talked about before, this is probably not super useful as an individual guideline. Right. This is a little part of the picture. It's a real, old, dusty little part of the picture. Do we have a better estimate now on like fat carb calories? Like have these numbers been adjusted? Or are we just like, eh, we think they're in the ballpark? They may be in the ballpark, but again, it's less about whether or not those numbers are right or wrong and more about how they're contextualized within other body systems.

The reason to drill down on these kinds of numbers would be to get a better sense of how to restrict calories for weight loss. And we already know that that's not actually like a super functional method across the board. Again, not saying it doesn't work for anybody, but like for the most part, when we look at these numbers in the aggregate, it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people. Well, we also know from our snack wells episode that this thing of fat being way more caloricic is like one of the reasons why we got like decades of low fat Dietary recommendations. Yeah, it's all this stuff really matters

Even if it's like on pretty shaky like poopy foundations Yeah, I mean, I think all of this stuff matters not because of what it means for like how to maintain or lose weight But because of how it influences the diet industry and how that diet industry shapes culture and shapes our cultural understandings of each other's bodies and our own bodies, right? So like that's the stuff that I find most fascinating about all of this is just how far apart those worlds are of like science and research versus what is able to be commodified, what is able to be sold, what is able to be used for advertising. Right.

And this belief that it's like, it must be real because it's numbers. Totally. And I would also say like, listen, we talked about like calories in calories out gets deployed in this like totally fucking bad faith way, right? Yeah. But I also think we deploy it in pretty bad faith ways with ourselves too. The self-talk that folks will use when they are restricting calories can be really, really cruel and can be really, really unforgiving. And that also becomes how they sort of learn

to think about other people who they perceive as failing to lose weight, which includes fat people, right? Okay, so the next sort of assumption that I wanted to look at is this idea that we should all be aiming for 2000 calories a day. Oh yeah. I think most of us presume that 2000 calories per day is sort of the correct amount of calories to eat if you want to maintain the same weight.

Right, even though every fucking label says on it, like this is not recommended for individual use, like, not a low calorie food. Yeah, like, it's even on there of like, don't use this. And then everybody uses it. Yeah, that's right. So Mary and Nestle wrote a great piece for the Atlantic called, why does the FDA recommend 2000 calories a day? I learned so many things from this piece. One, nutrition labels are super fucking new. They've only been around since 1994. Oh, wow. Before 1994, labels on food were super duper limited. Basically, manufacturers pretty much only had

to report nutrition information in their foods if they were making a big nutrition claim. Oh. Or if that food was fortified with vitamins or minerals or protein. Wait, so if I picked up a lucky charm box in 1992, it wouldn't have any information on it, it wouldn't have the ingredients.

It would be because cereal is fortified with vitamins and minerals. Oh, interesting. Okay. That iconic nutrition label of black text on a white background with those sort of horizontal lines in the US has only been around since 1994. They were adjusted a couple of times. In 2006, they added a line for trans fats. Yeah, I remember that.

In 2016, they updated them again. Those changes didn't show up until 2020. Basically, they changed a bunch of serving sizes. Interestingly, ice cream went up in serving size from a half a cup to two thirds of a cup. Yeah, but those are not conserving sizes. They also dropped their requirement to label the content of vitamins A and C.

Because as it turns out, Americans generally get a lot of those. So instead they swapped that out for vitamin D, dietary sources of vitamin D, which Americans generally don't get enough of, according to the FDA and USDA. That seems like a good change. Right, I was like, sure, these all seem like reasonable, but the other thing that they did with that most recent

label change, which you might have noticed, I definitely did, is that calorie counts on packages got huge. Oh, yeah, they did the like graphic design update. Yeah. They got really big and really bold, and they were like, this is the number that matters. Yeah. So here's where we get into a wild territory.

The FDA says that they didn't actually intend this 2000 calories per day to be a nutritional guideline. What? Don't you guys make the labels? Can't you just not do it? They said that they designed it to be a popular education tool. Wait, well, what does that mean? That means that it was designed to be easy for consumers to understand what was in foods, but not necessarily meant to be like, here's the hard and fast information slash, not be a recommendation for every individual that you need to eat 2000 calories a day.

They were like, no, no, no, we picked 2000. In part because it was a round number that people's brains could hook on to more easily, right? Essentially, they wanted consumers to be able to compare the nutritional value of different foods to one another and kind of compare apples to apples a little bit. But in order to do that, they had to standardize serving sizes, they had to standardize calorie counts, they had to come up with this standardized system so that everybody was getting the same sort of information. Right.

So you can have a Snickers and a Mars bar, one in each hand, and you can say like, well, this one is 25% of my fat, and this one is 31% or whatever. What do you want to pick? Exactly. 2000 calories a day was not based on nutritional or medical best practices. It was not based on recommendations from scientists. It was not based on recommendations from scientists.

It was not based on research into any kind of sort of optimal diet or weight management or any of that kind of stuff. It was based on Americans self-reported calorie intakes through USDA service. No way. This show loves self-reported dietary information. I have a bullet point in my notes that just says, Mike, tell us what's wrong with self-reported calorie index, but we already did that in this episode, like twice, and in other episodes multiple times. So I'm like, we're good. Yeah, I bring this up.

I bring this up at parties now. Like, this all of the data is just a garbage. It's nonsense. So in those USDA surveys, what they found was put all together, men, women, and children, self-reported, consuming between 1600 calories a day and 3,000 calories per day. Oh, see, I was just gonna say,

I mean, most people underestimate the number of calories they're eating per day because, like, we all want to seem virtuous and eating less is virtuous. So the 2000 is like way too low, but if the range of self-reported calories is between two and 3,000, that means the actual numbers are significantly higher. So they essentially decide to aim for kind of the middle of that range. The FDA initially proposes a recommendation of 2,350 calories per day. Okay. Anytime you issue rules, which are like the things that a state agency can just decide for themselves, they don't have to

wait on Congress or the president or the state legislature or anything else. You have to have what's called a public comment period, right? So I'm going to send you, this is like a little bit of a long quote. This is from the Marion Nessel piece about how did we get from 2,350 calories per day as sort of generally the middle of that range that they were provided to 2,000 calories a day? It says, despite the observable fact that 2350 calories per day is below the average requirements for either men or women obtained from doubly labeled water experiments, most

of the people who responded to the comments judged the proposed benchmark too high. Nutrition educators worried that it would encourage overconsumption, be irrelevant to women who consume fewer calories, and permit overstatement of acceptable levels of eat less nutrients, such as saturated fats and sodium. Instead, they propose 2,000 calories, as consistent with widely used food plans, close to the calorie requirements for postmenopausal women, the population group most prone to weight gain, a reasonably rounded down value from 2350 calories, easier to use than 2350 calories, and therefore a better tool for nutrition education.

Whether a rounding down of nearly 20% is unreasonable or not, the FDA ultimately viewed these arguments as persuasive. Wow. Yup. So it's just like, it was easier. It appears from this account that the primary reasons were this is going to seem irrelevant to women who are already restricting calories, so they just won't pay attention at all. And if we tell them 2350, then they're going to eat more than that. So we have to tell them less.

So it also like accounted for people eating more than 2,000 calories. They thought that they would say 2,000 and people would eat more than that. It has introduced this, what is in retrospect, an entirely arbitrary number. Right. So it started out with bad data and they were like, here's kind of the middle of that bad data. And then they were like, no, that's too high. Yeah.

And then walked it back to 2000 calories. And it just seems like this like very clear example of the ways that our public policy around food and the information we have access to is just always shaped by our social sort of fears and anxieties around fatness and fat people and our disgust anxieties around fatness and fat people and our disgust or rejection around fatness and fat people, right?

It is this very familiar two step where whenever you criticize these things as like the 2000 calorie things seems kind of fake and arbitrary, you then get the response that's like, no, no, no, it's science. And then you're like, okay, let's talk about the science

and then the science is fucking trash. It's not science. Yeah, totally. I mean, I feel like you would be hard pressed to find like a hard core like nutrition researcher who would be like, those are good numbers. Good job, FDA. It's also weird how if the first step

can just be like admitting, like, okay, we chose this number because like we wanted to raise awareness of like the dangers of obesity, right? Like that's why we did it. Okay, fine, you chose this number because we wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of obesity, right? Like, that's why we did it. Okay, fine, you did that then, fine. But now we know more about obesity and we also know more that this isn't necessarily helping people.

And so if this is an ideological slash communications number, then we should probably change it so that it suits that purpose. And we should be clear with people that we designed this as a communications tool, not as dietary guidance. Right, which is the way that it's being used, my God.

Totally. It also makes these diets, these like 1200 calorie a day diets, which are like very common, even more chilling, right? Because in your brain, when you hear that of like, okay, I'm supposed to eat a thousand calories a day on like whatever diet I'm on, in your brain, you compare that to two thousand calories a day.

Like that's what my brain does. I'm like, oh, that's like half what you're supposed to be having. But if the original number was 2350 and it's based on self-reported data, which is artificially small, it's like a thousand calorie a day diet is like a third of what people should be eating in a day. Well, and when we get into like how calorie restriction messes with your metabolism and sort of changes how your body functions, it's not just a like, oh, we got this wrong, there are repercussions. And this feels like the most benign information,

just like how many calories are in a food, it's just a fact, here you go. And as it turns out, none of those things are exempt from being shaped by cultural values. None of those things were designed as guidelines and none of those things have neutral impacts. Right? Like those are all things that do have implications for your attitude toward food and your body image and all other kinds of things. How you feed your family. I feel a little vulnerable in this episode, I will say,

because this is all stuff I did not know. Meaning there, meaning there. It feels really, it feels a little arming. It's also chilling to contemplate just how entrenched 2000 calories a day is as a concept. It isn't something that's like the controversial number 2000 a day. Nope, it's like so predictable

that it would be used this way too. Right, yeah, if you're like, oh, we did it so that consumers can better understand, well, they would better understand in order to make different decisions. Right. So the idea that it would just be for sort of purely educational and informational purposes,

but that that would not influence your behavior is also naive. So that's it for this week. I wanted to start us off by like laying some groundwork of like, oh shit, calories are not as straightforward as we thought they were. Yeah, this stuff is really fraught, isn't it? Yeah.

It just, I feel like the deeper we go into this kind of stuff, the murky it gets, but it feels like a productive kind of murky. Does that make sense? Yeah, I feel like there we're coming to like a theory of Science and institutions on this show kind of like as we zigzag from episode to episode I'm always really struck at how consistent it is that Scientific institutions are like we have to twist the science to get this outcome that we want. And the outcome is always like, well, everybody needs to be thinner.

And I don't think anyone seems to have contemplated or asked really basic questions of, is this a goal that we want? Or is this gonna have really predictable unintended consequences? I really think the variable is bias. I think being biased against a group just makes you kind of like roll your eyes at their concerns. Yeah.

And all these things, it just seems like this like really obvious blind spot that nobody seemed to have contemplated at the time or brought up at the time in a way that feels very anti-science. Yeah, I mean, I think, listen, we talked about this a little bit way back in our episode on anti-science. Yeah, I mean, I think, listen, we talked about this a little bit way back in our episode on anti-fat bias. There are these sort of astronomical levels of anti-fat bias from healthcare providers directed at their fat patients.

You know, I would say the same thing about researchers and public health officials and bureaucrats and all of the folks who are taking up the mantle of continuing the quote-unquote obesity epidemic and continuing to drive this public health weight loss stuff were all products of a culture that is really deeply judgmental of dismissive of and rejecting of fatness and fat people. And the idea that because someone has an advanced degree in a hard science, they would have also overcome all of those biases and done all of that deep personal work to get right in their head, or that they wouldn't be subject to the same kinds of cultural

ideas as the rest of us, is wrong headed. We're all in the same suit. It just feels like really tricky and laden, and I think folks are looking for someone who could just step outside of our cultural context and be like, this is the truth. Here's an objective truth, and we just don't have that, because all of us are in it together.

Right. We're all in the same pond, and this podcast is the burning snickers, that is slowly raising its temperature. No, this podcast is the burning poop from the person who ate the stairs. Thank you.