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A blow to the CICO theory of obesity: Pre-fertilization-origin preservation of brown fat-mediated energy expenditure in humans
I find this noteworthy for three reasons —
There’s possibly an easy and natural intervention for obesity. The Japanese neurotically dress for the weather, so how great will the effect be for those who accept the cold? “College woman walking to a party in winter wearing a short dress” was a joke when I went to school, but it was apparently pro-natal. Is it the fluctuation which is most significant? Does it need to be tied with the day-night cycle?
This is more evidence that humans are shockingly attuned to specific conditions they evolved in, which should be reverse-engineered to find more potentatial interventions for human flourishing. We are much more animal than we like to admit.
How many other “willpower problems” have less to do with willpower and more to do with 2nd and 3rd order effects which are hidden from us, or which compound invisibly? There are probably many more for obesity alone.
A) CICO necessarily follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is perhaps the most confirmed scientific theory of all time. The day you disprove it is the day physics gets really, really weird and reality as we know it ceases to make sense. So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory, which is to say it is as cold and hard of an absolute as we know to exist in the universe, no amount of obesity cheerleading will change that.
B) The effects noted in the study are frankly not that big. Like a 3% increased likelihood of active brown adipose tissue, which might increase total energy expenditure of the bodies resting metabolism of up to 5%. So conceiving in the winter gives your baby a slightly higher chance of being slightly better at burning energy, which is only a benefit if you live in a post-scarsity world.
"You eat too much and you dont exercise enough" remains the core of any and all successful diet criticism.
The naive version of CICO compares your meal plan to your gym time. The normal version compares all the food (including drinks!) you consume vs. all your planned or incidental physical activity. The true version compares the bioavailability of all the nutrients you consume vs. all of your metabolic activity, whether that's moving your muscles, thinking, growth, healing, generating heat, or anything else.
I have yet to see any diet plan that uses the true model of CICO. The closest I've seen is a single number for "base metabolism" that you back-calculate from your weight trends.
I think you're pushing a strawman, but I'm open to seeing a diet plan that uses the "true CICO" model I described. Anything less precise can't follow from raw thermodynamics.
One CICO diet plan I know of is The Hacker's Diet. You don't need impossible precision because instead you borrow a page from control theory. You measure your change in weight, and if it's not as desired, you reduce CI to compensate. Closed-loop feedback.
That's exactly what I'm talking about: It's a Calories In, Calories Out, Body Weight system and that third variable is essential.
Skimming through the paper, it appears that the difference between cold and hot is about 100 Calories per cold day, or about one pound per month. A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.
Who are these 100% blank slatist CICO advocates? Especially around here in the land of "IQ is real and probably has a large genetic component."
Here.
CICO by the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds for force feeding and starvation. Everything between those extremes is confounded by biology.
Should I believe my lying eyes? When my wife and I tracked our weight and caloric intake for a couple years, we had a range of different intakes, and the trend line was bang on at 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk. It was noisy, yes, but probably about as noisy as any measurement we have for any biological research.1 Taking another look at the data now, it would be kinda dumb to think about modeling it as a step function, S-curve, or deadzone or whatever. Generally, one needs some justification for moving to some other weird modeling assumption.
1 - Moreover, it is utterly unsurprising that it is so noisy, due to the mathematical realities of numerical analysis and differentiation. If anything, it was extremely surprising that it worked so well!
Did you calculate your base metabolic rate (or whatever the fudge factor is called in your system) so that it all worked out? If not, you got lucky that it happened to be both correct at the start and steady over time. If you have adjusted it, then that means your calculations are on target, and adjusting the inputs so that 3500 kcal = 1 lb resulted in a trendline at 3500 kcal per lb.
This study gives some people a 20% headstart on your dieting goals (admittedly they didn't measure "CI"), which is a pretty notable difference.
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