xep comments on Intermittent fasting no better than typical weight loss diets, study finds

[–] xep@discuss.online 0 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

A good proxy for this general capacity in a human body from organic digestible material is kcal.

What I'm getting at is that measuring the 'energy' of food is meaningless. It's a waste of time at best, and when someone is mislead into thinking that they can eat 100 kcal of sugar (if we can even accurately determine that!) instead of nutrients then it can even be harmful.

You can quantify this work

In the human body? How do you propose to do this?

food isn’t really what we eat either

I'm pretty sure we generally eat food. We surely don't eat energy.

If you have an alternative to this

Let's start by not talking about energy at all. It's biology and chemistry.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 1 child comment

[–] AliasAKA@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The oxidation of sugar, which is accomplished in our bodies, can be directly measured. The end products are CO2 and H2O. If you fully combust sugar in a bomb calorimeter, the energy release is equivalent. So whether your body breaks apart something, or fire breaks apart something, they are calorimetrically equivalent, which is why people even bothered with kcals for food in the first place.

Edit: I should note just to head it off at the pass, aerobic oxidation in the body is about 35% efficient. You can measure this by looking at the metabolites formed, and the remaining 65% of the theoretical energy can directly be measured as heat, so when I say that whether our bodies do it or a calorimeter does it, I mean that the total energy is conserved because the laws of thermodynamics apply. If you eat more sugar your body will oxidize it and yield the same stuff, or possibly store it as fat. If you eat protein you can do the same measures, it’s just a slightly different process to enter the metabolic pathways. Fire is just a chemical process and reaction, after all, it’s not special. Your body also does chemical reactions.

Whether you see value in it or not, kcals observe a physical reality which has value within human cells and can be used to describe how human bodies interact with food in an energetic landscape. It does not purport to solve all of human nutrition, and nobody sane uses it for that. It is used as a gross representation of energetic equivalence, for which it serves its purpose reasonably well.

So again, if you believe your interpretation of human nutrition and biology and chemistry is novel or more useful, then submit to a journal your recommendations. Journals even accept review papers which are simply syntheses of existing papers, you don’t even have to conduct experiments. You can literally just go on pubmed and synthesize a paper and submit it for publication.

Don’t submit to a predatory journal though that uses a pay to publish format. Submit to an established, peer reviewed journal.

Conversely, just publish it on bioarxiv or something and then post it here for people to go to and review, though this is not as good as getting it peer reviewed.