The Skinny on Fat (The Truth About Obesity, Part 2)

(Crossposted to Hank Kerchief because he knows his logical fallacies, and I'd like him to see Mr. Fumento's email and respond to its overall validity purely in argumentative terms, if you have the time, Hank.)

Interesting response. A very defensive response filled with ad hominem attacks, wild assertions given without a shred of evidence, and irrelevant sidetracking. I'm not the least bit surprised.

You can post this for me, but actually in his original book Atkins did claim you could eat 5,000 calories or more and not get fat so long as you ate the way he advised.

Having never seen the first version of the book, I can't confirm this. And I'm not taking the word of someone that resorts to the sort of statements and insults made below to "defend" his basic argument. However, I really don't give a damn whether the first edition said that or not, since without knowing what else in the old book is different from the current edition, we can't extrapolate anything meaningful information from the single data point. In any case, we know that people did lose weight even following the instructions in the original book, or else Atkins's nutritional approach would have ended up on the dust heap of history after a few weeks on the bestseller lists like every other fad diet, instead of growing into a multi-million dollar empire.

Besides, assuming it is true, it was removed from the current edition. Atkins decided he was wrong and corrected the error. Would that certain others could follow his lead.

Yet it's still built into his message, because he says that you can eat all the fat and protein you want but it won't convert to body fat so long as you keep carbs very low. Therefore, he's still saying you can an unlimited amount of calories and with no exercise.

Note that instead of saying "it's still built into his book," a statement that can be instantly proven to be false, instead Fumento simply says "it's built into his message," a nebulous term that can mean whatever Michael Fumento wants it to mean. Anyway, the book doesn't say, by any stretch of the imagination, that you can consume an unlimited number of calories and do no exercise, thus Fumento's conclusion is false. I don't know if Fumento actually has a copy of the first edition of the Atkins book, but he either has no copy of the current edition or else is intentionally lying.

It would be idiocy of him to have said to keep calories to within the 1,500 to 2,000 range...

And yet he did. Funny, that.

If people did that, they'd be thin regardless of how much they ate.

A mindbogglingly ignorant statement. If people did that, AND got a "regular" amount of physical activity, AND had none of the many medical problems that can cause weight problems, then they'd maintain their current weight, or at best lose it incredibly slowly, over a period of 1-2 years or more. If they were already overweight, simply choosing a 1500-2000 calorie diet would not make them magically thin.

But as I've found repeatedly (and as you can see on my hate mail pages devoted to Atkins acolytes)...

Anyone who posts controversial statements on web sites will get hate mail as a result. In fact, I just got a piece of hate mail from Michael Fumento! (See below.) It has absolutely ZERO bearing on the efficacy of Atkins; he includes the statement merely to attempt to stir up sympathy for Michael Fumento. Another classic logical fallacy.

...people like the fellow who wrote in have serious mental problems.

Ah, the basest, saddest logical fallacy of all: "If you disagree with me, you're a mental patient." What an pathetic man Fumento is to resort to such tactics. (A single vile insult like this, by the way, would get Fumento instantaneously laughed out of any serious academic debate, even if every other point he had to make was beyond criticism ... which is certainly not the case here.)

Absolutely none have ever accepted my challenge to send me a photo of them even though almost all talk about how wonderfully slim they are.

So many logical fallacies in this single sentence it's hard to know where to begin. ALMOST ALL Atkins followers talk about how wonderfully slim they are? Complete Barbra Streisand on its face. Second, Mr. Fumento hasn't exactly gone out of his way to advertise his little "offer." I certainly haven't heard of it before. Third, why would anyone want to send such photos to Mr. Fumento considering how he treats those that disagree with him? Fourth, the statement is yet another logical fallacy: The Unprovable Assertion. We have no way of knowing that nobody has ever accepted his challenge. We just have to take his word for it, because he's Michael Fumento. Sorry, no. Fifth, we have no reason to believe Fumento would accept at face value any photos sent to him. I certainly do not believe he would, nor should he, since photos alone would prove nothing. The person sending the photos could have used a different diet, gotten a gastric bypass, or just used Photoshop. In short, his "challenge" is meaningless on all levels.

Indeed, if you go to the www.lowcarbfriends.com site you see such personal testimonials accompanied by photos of fat people!

A) He's right, but only because the purpose of that site (which I've never heard of before reading this email) appears to be a support group, not a giant ad for the Atkins Diet. And, of course, most people on all diets and nutrition plans fail, because they don't stick to them properly in the first place. There is no reason to believe, nor has anyone here argued, that this is any different for those that try Atkins. This is merely a fact of human behavior, not an argument that "Atkins doesn't work." Fumento is simply pointing and giggling, "Look, fat people!", not making a legitimate argument.

But in any case, it took me all of thirty seconds to find these photos on that site:

Nicko68 - click on photos to see larger image	Before Photo	Current Photo
started Atkins: 10/20/01 beginning weight: 395 current weight: 207 goal weight: 190 height: 5' 9.5" age: 33 location: Ontario, Canada email: xxxxx@xxx.net 188 pounds lost!
I thought I was going to be fat, unhappy, and have really low self- esteem for the rest of my life. This Way of Eating has really changed things for the better. Trying it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. added 10/15/01

So it certainly isn't just a site full of photos of fat people.

The point is, it doesn't really matter to them whether the Atkins diet really works as a diet. It solves some other inner need of theirs, as does any cult.

Again with the insults.

Yet when it IS challenged as a diet, they become absolutely ferocious.

Unlike Michael Fumento.

You can challenge any other diet book or author out there and you won't get the utterly fanatical responses you get from Atkins' apostles.

Translation: Atkins is more popular than whatever other diets Fumento has attacked. Again, totally irrelevant to the subject of Atkins efficacy.

Just an embarrassing, pathetic response from beginning to end.

By the way, aruanan, did you actually forward this entire thread branch to Fumento, including the discussion of Taubes's article and Fumento's extrapolations from it, or did you merely zap him posts 245 and 247?

By the way, Taubes posted an extremely detailed response to the Fumento attack on him aruanan linked to and posted an excerpt from in post 234. That article can be read here. (Also included on that page is a link to Fumento's rebuttal to the rebuttal.)

"...it does not have iron in it, which I am allergic to..."

I am very curious about what this means. You cannot live without iron. Hemoglobin requires iron. Without it you would have no red blood cells, but then, you wouldn't them since you would be dead.

Hank

Uh, by searching SPECIFICALLY for "Fumento" and "wrong", you are setting up a logical fallaicy of your own (non-support, fallacy of exclusion, unrepresentative sample?). By including hits that only include the word "wrong", you are leaving out all the evidence that he is right. Anyway, I did as suggested and did a Google search for "fumento wrong" and got this:

Your search - "fumento wrong" - did not match any documents.

Ooops!

Now, when I did a search on "fumento" and THEN "wrong", I did get ten pages of hits. But when you actually LOOK at the pages returned, many of them were either written by Fumento or are supportive (8 out of 10 on the first page, 6 on the second).

I don't think there's a logical fallacy for just making things up.

I don't think it's that simple. Our bodies are not simple warehouses or bank vaults but complex chemical factories. What we eat dynamically influences how our bodies process and store what is eaten.

Well, yes, and since the body is a complex chemical factory, it has to act within the confines of biochemistry and its own limitations on what it can do in light of its storage capacities for the macronutrients when it's faced with unusually large amounts of any one macronutrient. I have described this above in the relative shifting of substrate oxidation based on intake.

However, on the matter of overall energy basis, it is as simple as more kcals taken in than expended = weight gain; fewer kcals taken in than expended = weight loss. Certain other factors, such as one's level and type of physical activity (combined with the types of substrates), will determine whether or how much of one's weight gain or weight loss is in fat mass or fat free mass. For instance, if you go on a moderately severe energy restriction and reduce your physical activity to that of a sedate lifestyle, you'll lose a lot more fat free mass (muscle mass) than someone who maintains a higher level of physical activity. Both will lose weight, but it's the one who keeps physically active that will lose a larger percentage of that weight as fat.

That said, though, if you use 2500kcal of energy throughout a day, this means that you've got to absorb at least 2500kcal of energy (regardless of the blend of macronutrients) to stay in energy balance. If your intake is less than expenditure, your body must take that from somewhere; it cannot create more energy than it takes in in the form of food. If, over a period of time, you are in energy deficit, that total amount of deficit has to be supplied not from the outside world via food but from body stores: glycogen (about 3 days worth max), lean body mass (mostly your skeletal muscles and organs--they aren't considered storage forms, though they can be catabolized to provide amino acids for protein synthesis and energy use in either the glycolytic or ketolytic pathways), and fat. As body stores are used, your weight decreases accordingly. If you maintain an energy deficit of 150 kcals per day over 100 days, you'll have used up 15,000 kcals of energy--it will have to have come from your body's internal resources. If you keep up your level of physical activity, a large portion of that deficit will have been made up through fat oxidation.

In the same way, if you absorb more energy than you expend, those absorbed macronutrients have to be disposed of in some way. They can be stored to various degrees of efficiency (glucose: limited; protein: none, unless you build more skeletal muscle, which takes a lot of work; fat: virtually no effort at all). However, once the capacity of glycogen stores is reached, and once the body has shifted substrate usage as far as it can toward glucose oxidation and away from fat oxidation, if you're still in excess energy balance, the excess will be stored as fat.* There is no place else for the excess energy to go. You can't eat anything that will dissolve it or make it disappear (though you can surgically remove it, but this still has metabolic consequences). You can't exhale it. You can't pee it away. Once the nutrients are absorbed, there is no other way short of storage or energy expenditure to take dispose of them.

And your body won't stop absorbing nutrients, because your survival under austere conditions depends on being able to take in as great a quantity of macronutrients as easily as possible. Aside from the luxury of living in a diversified economy with little necessity of physical activity for survival and an almost endless food supply, one is never entirely sure where his next meal is coming from. The body is adapted or designed (take your pick) to absorb and store huge quantities of energy (mostly as fat) against the days when there is little or nothing.

This is just the default state of being for surviving in a world of scarcity. When this physiology is put into the context of an inexhaustible supply of food, into a world of wealth, it's absolutely unremarkable that widespread obesity should occur. When it's put into this context along with historically low levels of physical activity (people around the turn of the 20th century expended much, much greater amounts of energy per day than at present), it's completely unremarkable that diseases related to physical inactivity should codistribute with diseases related to and perhaps exacerbated by obesity.

The bottom line is that if you expend more energy than you take in through nutrients, the difference will be taken from the substance of your body--your body's mass will be reduced. If you expend less energy than you take in through nutrients, the difference will be added to the substance of your body--your body's mass will be increased.

*A small portion of human body fat comes from de novo lipogenesis, the major portion from dietary fat--when fat cells reach capacity, more fat cells are made from fat stem cells. Once made, they can be filled and depleted of fat, but they won't die; they will, however, when depleted, send out hormonal messages saying, "Hey, we're getting empty; you're in danger of starvation. You better start eating." It's better to keep from increasing one's number of fat cells to begin with than to try to keep them empty.

That said, though, if you use 2500kcal of energy throughout a day, this means that you've got to absorb at least 2500kcal of energy (regardless of the blend of macronutrients) to stay in energy balance. If your intake is less than expenditure . . .

Determining total caloric intake is fairly straightforward. It's the expenditure side of the equation that gets complicated. That's where the Atkins diet makes fresh new sense to me. It makes sense that some foods would require an expenditure of more calories to digest and process than other foods. It makes sense that some foods would trip the saity chemical signal at a lower caloric level than other foods. Conversely, it makes sense that some foods would condition the body to crave more of the same food--a bad thing if the food has a high caloric value and you're trying to lose weight. It makes sense that some foods would wreak havoc with insulin levels or interfere with liver function, impacting the fat storage process. It makes sense that some foods would cause the body to retain water excess to bodily needs. It makes sense that some foods would cause a person to feel more inclined to sleep or rest and less inclined to physical actvity.

I have come to the conclusion through monitoring by own body's responses to foods (as measured by weight gain and loss, frequency and type of food cravings, perceived sense of energy and vigor, cholesterol and triglyceride levels etc) that a diet filled with starches and heavily processed foods filled with sugar causes me to gain weight and feel less healthy. Conversely, a diet built around meat, fat, and simple vegetables tends to bring me back to my ideal weight very quickly and make me feel more energetic and healthy. It also dramatically reduces my triglyceride and "bad" cholesterol levels and blood pressure (currently 100/65).

That's only my personal experience--not a scientific study.

Great thread! Thanks for the ping.

I am so grateful that I finally tried low-carbing. It's wonderful!!! :^)

It's the expenditure side of the equation that gets complicated. That's where the Atkins diet makes fresh new sense to me. It makes sense that some foods would require an expenditure of more calories to digest and process than other foods.

No, the expenditure side of the equation is not complicated at all. Total energy expenditure has been measured repeatedly and accurately in vivo using doubly-labeled water. Resting metabolic rate is accurately measured through respiratory gas exchange. Relative quantities of substrate use can also be determined by using labeled amino acids or labeled fat.

There is little other than physical activity (or growth, either into an adult or a more muscled individual) that one can do on the energy expenditure side to increase energy expenditure. There is a slight increase after eating called the thermic effect of the meal. But hopes to raise energy expenditure through such means as ephedra, guarana, and other herbal preparations are mostly null since all except yerba mate failed to show any significant change in energy expenditure. Yerba mate showed some signs of increasing fat oxidation. But when almost all the world was lean, almost all the world wasn't drinking yerba mate. And when large numbers of people increasingly became fat, it wasn't because they stopped drinking yerba mate.

It makes sense that some foods would trip the saity chemical signal at a lower caloric level than other foods.

The body is most effective at monitoring kcal intake in the form of carbohydrates and proteins, least effective at monitoring kcals through fat intake. It's relatively insensible to fat intake. Of the three macronutrients, proteins take the most energy to oxidize since they must first be de-aminated. Proteins provide only about 5% of energy supplied from substrate oxidation during exercise. The rest comes from glucose and fat. Both glucose (6 carbon molecule) and fat (3 and greater carbon chain) have to undergo catabolism to produce the 2 carbon acetyl-CoA that is used in the TCA cycle to make ATP and NADP to provide energy. If you eat a preponderance of one macronutrient, you can push substrate usage in that direction. This happens the most with proteins and carbohydrates, the least with fats. In other words, eating a lot of fat won't result in so much fat being oxidized that the excess calories in the fat consumed become negligible in terms of weight gain.

As far as satiety goes, most people eat so rapidly that they over-run satiety signals (as I asked an obese individual once, "How do you know when you've eaten enough?" The answer, "When it hurts."). Besides, satiety doesn't have any necessary relationship with meeting a daily total caloric need.

...makes fresh new sense to me...It makes sense...It makes sense...it makes sense...It makes sense...It makes sense...It makes sense...

Remember, "it makes sense" is just another way of saying, "This appears to me to be real based on what I believe to be true" or "this confirms my prejudices or what I want to be true; therefore, it is true". This doesn't bear any necessary relationship to reality. For example, what makes sense to a child is usually so out of touch with reality that children need to be cared for by adults who have experience in order to protect them from things that make sense to them. That man couldn't travel any faster than 15 miles per hour made sense to a lot of people at one time. That an electric generator could never be more than 50% efficient made sense to a lot of people in the scientific community at one time. That man could not fly made sense to a lot of people at one time. That there was no such thing as disease caused by organisms too small to see made perfect sense to a lot of people for a long time.

I know what works for me, and what doesn't. Atkins works.

I am about 15 lbs. overweight AND I walk 1.5 miles on my treadmill each night besides walking all over the AF base at work and working in the yard on weekends.

But 10-15 pounds isn't obese and might just mean the weight charts are wrong at least for many people. I know people who weigh 20-25 pounds more than they should according to those charts who look fine and are very healthy. Some people at the so-called proper weight sometimes aren't as healthy as those who are over. But I've seen 10 year olds who weigh over 200 pounds that can't walk half a block and can't be outside for over 10 minutes in the summer because they're so fat and have a hard time breathing.

Gee, I drive the whole way back from North Carolina (8 LONG hours) anticipating another logic lesson, but I get nothing!

We've been waiting 2 1/2 days for you to actually refute anything in post 252. You seem to have all the time in the world. So do I.

Me too.

We've been waiting 2 1/2 days for you to actually refute anything in post 252. You seem to have all the time in the world. So do I.

2 1/2 days? How do you figure?

Heck, I only got pinged to this thread at 10 o'clock last nite.

You seem to have all the time in the world. So do I.

I'm glad you think so. But last nite we were in Duck, North Carolina packing to come back from vacation, and we were driving all day today. I'm not sure where "all the time in the world" comes from.

But there doesn't seem to be anything to refute. The first one is a post to a blog, and the other is a letter to the editor from Consumers Union.

I would suggest every one read the book "Diabetes Solution", by Dr. Richard Bernstein, M.D. F.A.C.N, C.W.S. This book is aimed mostly at Diabetics, and how to get their blood Sugar under Control. But is also contains a complete section on weight reduction. His premis is that the culprit is Carbohydrates, from Sugar...

He is a Diabetic type I who has been taking Insulin most of his life, and has worked out this system. It is all based on cutting out sugar, in any form, processed, or otherwise.

Doctors more and more are coming to belive that sugar is the culprit in our Socity....

Tell me more! Please! (I'm 6'4"/285+ and want do peel off about 50-80 pounds or so...)

Before I start...I must say this, this whole thing must be a long term lifestyle change for you if your going to do Adkins...then you should do it and eat that way for life, which I believe is a pretty good thing. Also keep in mind that I am not a nutritionist or anything related to it (I'm actually a software developer by trade)...I have no agenda to push or money to make.

In simple terms Adkins is a new way to eat...not a diet. The traditional American diet has morphed into high-carb, high-sugar consumption. Americans are in love with sugar, microwaved "healthy" choice meals, bread, and french (damn them) fried potatoes. All these things will make you fat. Your body takes a longer time to process carbs than it does proteins, and carbs (starchy/sugary foods) easily produce fat unless you go to the gym everyday.

I didn't really get anal about following and understanding some of the more fundemental things about Adkins...I've kept it simple. This is my typical menu for the whole day:

Breakfast: Eggs (anyway I want, with real butter and/or cheddar/mozerella/swiss cheese too!) + a meat of some kind. When I got tired of eggs, I ate the left over meat and veggies for dinner the night before. Portion size equal to a cereal bowl.

Lunch: Salad w/skinless chicken or tuna with REAL dressing (not the diet stuff) I've gotten so used to eating a salad for lunch, I feel guilty if I can't get to one. If I get tired of salad, I had lunchmeat w/mayonaise(the real stuff) lettuce and pork grinds(my potato chip substitute). Portion size equal to a cereal bowl.

Dinner: Meat, chicken (NOT fried), fish (NOT breaded), vegatables, about a 1:1 ratio between the meat and veggies. Portion size equal to 2 cereal bowls. You can have burgers on the grill till your hearts content....just put everything on them as usual except for the bun! It is important to NOT only to eat meat...keep the meat/veggie ration at about 50/50.

I've bascially given up bread, noodles, milk, rice, anything potato, sugar (I use Splenda now), regular pop, and anything else that is really high is carbs. Contrary to Adkins, I enjoy a couple scoops of ice cream, or a slice of cake/pie once a week. Try it, it works. If you have time and the means...get the book too.

I've bascially given up bread, noodles, milk, rice, anything potato, sugar (I use Splenda now), regular pop, and anything else that is really high is carbs.

So the key is to kill the major part of the carbs in your diet.

Looking at it that way actually makes a lot of sense. I'll eventually get around to reading the book (along with the rest of my mammoth reading list that I'm almost constantly working through), but if it's all this simple, then perhaps I have the answer in front of me.

It won't be the easiest - I love potatoes, pasta AND rice (I was practially raised on it - a hazard of my dad's family being from Louisiana is that there is a pot of rice on the stove almost daily; we consider it a must-have staple). But I suppose if I work with the notion of a modified version of the diet (if I have rice, cutting out something else?), and get back on my daily multi-vitamin (fat-soluble, of course), things should begin to make themselves evident in short order...

It won't be the easiest - I love potatoes, pasta AND rice (I was practially raised on it - a hazard of my dad's family being from Louisiana is that there is a pot of rice on the stove almost daily; we consider it a must-have staple).

You are not alone. Those were staples of my diet for nearly 20 years. Just about everyday, I'd have a heaping pile of rice (at least 3-5 servings worth) on my plate along with lots of corn. In fact, rice and corn were my favorite foods. I'd mix them together and think I was eating as healthy as could be. I never dreamed that they could be making me fat.

In fact, I had it so backwards that during times when I did try to lose weight, I'd cut back on the meats and increase my consumption of rice and corn.

Going low-carb is the way to go. I've been low-carb since April 1st and my body has already dropped 57 pounds. I should also mention that this has coincided with a very aggressive exercise program. I now walk (power walk, not stroll) 7-10 miles a day.

Anyway, it did not take me long to not miss the carbs. Where before, I would crave rice and corn to have with my dinner, I now crave peppers, mushrooms, onions and cheese. Where before I would crave pancakes and toast for breakfast, I now crave eggs and bacon. In fact, it used to be that I couldn't function in the morning without my cup of coffee. Now I can't function without my eggs. Forget the coffee. I stopped drinking that four weeks into my program. Not because I thought I had to but because I started not liking it (especially since I couldn't put sugar in it anymore).

I never did officially adopt the Atkins plan (not Adkins as others commonly mispell it). I read several low-carb books and took ideas from all of them. But I do not adhere to any given one. That allows my diet to be flexible - I can make adjustments to it along the way without worrying about whether or not I am sticking to the rules. (I think that is the downfall of many dieters, their plan is too rigid and they end up giving it up entirely after a while.)

Worse thing you can do (not that I think you will) is to use a low-carb plan as a "quick fix" to drop some pounds so that one can get back to the "normal" diet. No, there has to be a commitment here for a lifelong change in one's diet. Sure, it can be modified once your target weight is reached and more carbs can then be added. But one must regularly check his weight and adjust accordingly to keep it in the target range. For a committed low-carber who has reached his target weight, it might be okay to have pizza every once in a while or even a potato or some rice, but the days of ice cream slathered over hot apple pie are probably gone forever.

"I'd rather see a quote from the original book, in which Atkins allegedly said we don't have to exercise"

My own personal experience it that it is true that you don't have to exercise to lose weight on the Atkins type diets.

I've been following one of these diets about 2 and a half years now and one of the things that struck me is how difficult it is motivating myself to jog or lift weights when weight is lost so effortlessly even when I don't exercise.

My motives for exercising now are that I want to be strong and in shape, not that I need it to help lose weight.

OTOH, in the past, when I followed the low fat regime, based on the premise that dietary fat was the culprit, I jogged 3 miles every morning, and still struggled to maintain my weight targets.

I cannot take vitamins with iron or any other kind of iron supplements, they make me extremely ill. I do, however occasionally eat foods that contain iron, such as broccoli. Eaten in very small portions with other foods, they do not affect me the same way iron supplements do. If I eat too much at one sitting, I have severe stomach problems. My daughter has the same low tolerance for iron. When she was a baby, we had to make sure her formula contained no iron or she'd had severe projectile vomiting. We are both chronically anemic due to this, but it is just something we have to live with.