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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.
You don't need official diets for CICO it's self evident. Reduce food consumption and/or increase activity until you lose weight. Still haven't lost weight? Decrease/increase.
Problems:
People tend to lack self control. If you had self control you wouldn't be fat.
People tend to over-weight the activity part. So really just forget about CO and reduce CI until you start to lose weight. See problem one.
Expand to why you're poor and struggle with addiction.
Its well known that certain medications lead to weight gain: do you believe they do so because they reduce the self control of those who take them? Does hyperthyroidism cause significant increases in self-control, and does hypothyroidism erode self-control? Do GLPs work because they increase the individual's self-control?
If not, then factors other than self-control are at play.
Those conditions (likely) don't change the "amount" of self control you have, but they do change how much your desire to eat is weighted in the semi-conscious calculation of what you end up choosing to do. Self-control is your ability to over-ride unconscious, animal instincts in favor of conscious choices. In the case of a medical condition that makes you hungrier, it does in fact require more self control to not eat more, but that doesn't mean that it isn't ultimately a question of self control that determines whether or not you eat more.
Hypothyroidism typically reduces appetite, yet you still gain weight despite eating less. Similarly, hyperthyroidism typically increases appetite, yet you lose weight even though you're eating more. Thyroid hormones are needed to make a lot of metabolic processes run, and if you don't have enough (hypothyroidism) then your temperature goes down and a dozen other processes don't work well and stop using up calories, so most of what you eat ends up in fat storage. If you have too much (hyperthyroidism) then your body temperature goes up, a dozen metabolic processes go into overdrive, and you lose weight despite eating more.
You could argue that someone with hypothyroidism could still use self-control to eat less and not gain weight, which is technically true. They'd probably end up in the hospital, but they could do it.
Where this hypothetical is from?
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