Heat, Entropy & Thermogenesis

A summary post of ideas here, that I've likely stated elsewhere on the blog but wanted to gather in one place.  

Last week on Facebook, to the detriment of his credentials and credibility, Jason Boehm posted and deleted a post about calories and the Second Law of Thermo.  I queried what it had to do with the original point which was more of a 500 cals spinach vs. 500 cals Coke type nonsense, so he did address that in a second FB post that stands (minus lots of relevant input from people he deleted, labeled hateful and pretty much had a kitten over ... nobody called him a moron BTW, that's a clever tactic of those that can't hold up their end of an intellectual debate on the science ... can't leave the self-incriminating evidence).   But I digress.

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Calories, Starvation, and Bygone Gurus

As I am spending more time working on my upcoming book, Calorie Clarity: Entropic Thoughts on a Hot Topic,  I have had a bit less time for blogging of late.  I don't know what it is about this calorie debate, but just when you think the latest scheme to convince you that calories don't count has been beaten back, another huckster comes flying down the poop slide regurgitating the crap they swallowed on the way down.  Apologies to those who have eaten recently.  I use the term huckster because my name was used in vain in an exchange with one of the best hucksters in the low carb sphere, Dr. Mike Eades.

Who?  If you're asking that question, congratulations, you've either forgotten everything you've ever read on his blog or never read it at all.  Either of which would be a good thing.   Eades imagines himself a scientist in a doctor's coat and apparently still tweets his pearls of critical thinking wisdom.  Yeah, I'm being snarky because, well, it's a goose gander thing ... or is there a black swan needing some love somewhere?    Now a little while ago now, Tim Noakes gave leave of his own critical thinking skills and jumped on the LC "science" wagon.  A couple of days ago, Noakes tweeted a link to a 2007 post by Dr. Eades hailing it as an example of "supreme logic" in the (for some reason ongoing) debate over calories.

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The poor, misunderstood kilowatt•hour

I probably won't be around much longer.

You see Con Ed (my electricity provider) contacted me and said that because my usage this past year exceeded what my level payments cover, they will need to recalculate that payment.   Which got me thinking CON Edison.  Hmmmmm sounds conspiratorial.  So I investigated.

Well, they are pushing all manner of energy saving schemes!  How can I cut my bill?  And then I look at my bill.  My home intakes kilowatt•hours (kwh) ... but how can I know what to do to reduce that intake when I use:

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Must See "TV" for those suffering from CDS

BUMP!  Original posting:  1/24/11

CDS = Calorie Denial Syndrome

BBC Story about Low Carb Dieting - Part 1
BBC Story about Low Carb Dieting - Part 2
BBC Story about Low Carb Dieting - Part 3
BBC Story about Low Carb Dieting - Part 4
BBC Story about Low Carb Dieting - Part 5

(HatTip to Wolfstriked for linking to this in comments.)

Just a few thoughts on this aside from the content so that my opinions will not cloud your listening of the presentation:

I found it interesting that they showed both Westman and Foster exercising (running and playing basketball) in their intros in the piece.  Indeed they are interviewed in their gym clothes!  Then there's Dr. Mary Vernon horseback riding.  Did we need so many closeup chewing scenes?  And, lastly, was the full rear (albeit blurred) Sipowitz moment in the shower, actually that rather lengthy soaping/showering scene, really necessary as a backdrop to the discussion of ketosis?

ATP, Thermogenesis and Leptin Man's Electrons

A little update on the adventures of a man we call Leptin Man here at The Asylum, Jack Kruse.  I skimmed his latest (6 page!) manifesto, and near as I can figure, his focus is on ATP stores.  His metabolic pathway du jour is the Pentose Phosphate Pathway (PPP).  Among many many words, he writes:

TRUTH BOMB:  This pathway has only a few major endpoints, but they are all massively important for human life.  It is designed to optimally restore RNA and DNA synthesis by providing maximum recycling of ATP;  and it allows for optimal formation of bio-energenic substrates to make replenish the mitochondria’s ability to increase total adenine nucleotides to re-establish optimal ATP stores from beta oxidation of fats.

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A Fein(man), Fine Mess of Thermodynamics

I was truly baffled beyond all bafflement (is that a word?) that Feinman & Fine wrote "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics, let alone that it passed the peer review process to be published in any reputable journal.  In the abstract they write:

Here, we propose that a misunderstanding of the second law accounts for the controversy about the role of macronutrient effect on weight loss and we review some aspects of elementary thermodynamics.

Here I propose that it is their apparent misunderstanding of thermodynamics, as put forth in this "study", that accounts for most of the gimmickry surrounding low carb diets in the community.  In the section entitled "Thermodynamics", they write:

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Cold Adaptation, BAT & Thermogenesis

Lerner posted a link to this study in comments on another post:  Cold-Activated Brown Adipose Tissue in Healthy Men.  A small part of the study where they looked at BAT activity for the three subjects with the most BAT under neutral thermal conditions caught my eye, and I think this is central to some of the confusion Kaptain Konfusion has introduced into this whole discussion.  They tested all subjects lying on their backs in a chamber, first for one hour in thermoneutral temp, next for 2 hours at 17C.  For three subjects they retested in thermoneutral temps for the entire time.  

There was no detectable brown-adipose-tissue activity in the three subjects who were retested under thermoneutral conditions. Brown-adipose-tissue activity was recorded in Subject 2 at 856.5 kBq during exposure to cold and 0 kBq in thermoneutral conditions, in Subject 3 at 587.2 kBq during cold exposure and 0 kBq in thermoneutral conditions, and in Subject 4 at 250.0 kBq during cold exposure and 0 kBq thermoneutral conditions.

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Some thoughts on cold exposure

Richard Nickoley/Free the Animal has posted a follow-up post entitled Cold Therapy and Adaptation and Ray Cronise.  Although he comments a few times, this comment addresses Ray's thoughts on it all.  So far I see no need for a warning label on this one ;-)  In any case, Ray presents some excellent information on the topic and I urge my readers to go take a look before diving into the icy water and trying to work up to hours on end in same.  For my part, after reading Ray, I think I may well get an inflatable pool and some pool dumbells and such and put it up in the back yard to exercise in this summer.  There's a town pool here, but if I have to drive somewhere I know compliance suffers, and although I have access to facilities where I work, no student gets to see me in a swimsuit!!

I admittedly don't know much about Ray as, in all honesty, I've only recently heard of him and Wim Hof what with all the recent buzz.  But he sounds knowledgeable and measured.  He has also apparently done extensive self-experimentation with appropriate equipment.  For example he seems to have looked at his body's metabolic rate response to various durations, etc. of cold exposure.  For all the recent hoopla over Kruse's TEDx talk, surgery and MRSA *epic* biohack, we learn from comments (if Lerner could save me the time to link again in comments that'd be great) that he didn't do the usual hormonal panels, etc., and he's not doing the metabolic rate measurements, etc.  We've apparently gotten all the documentation/proof we're ever going to get on that front ... Jack has moved on to using CT to treat patients and made some videos there.  

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The First Law of Thermo still doesn't violate The Second Law

Well, I've been meaning to weigh in on the Bray overfeeding study (Effect of Dietary Protein Content on Weight Gain, Energy Expenditure, and Body Composition During Overeating) that made a bit of a splash a little while back. George Bray is especially hated by ardent low carb advocates because he wrote a particularly unfavorable review of GCBC published in Obesity Reviews.   Bray is what Adam Kosloff refers to as a "Calorie Wizard":

Regardless of diet, it is a positive energy balance over months to years that is the sine qua non for obesity. Obese people clearly eat more than do lean ones, and food-intake records are notoriously unreliable, as documented by use of doubly labelled water.  Underreporting of food intake is greater in obese than in normal-weight people and is worse for fat than for other macronutrient groups.  Accepting the concept that obesity results from a positive energy balance does not tell us why energy balance is positive.  This depends on a variety of environmental factors interacting with the genetic susceptibility of certain individuals.  Weight loss is related to adherence to the diet, not to its macronutrient composition.

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Flashback! Adam Kosloff Edition of Insulin Wars Series

As promised in response to my Salvaging the Hypothesis post, Adam Kosloff of Caloriegate blog, recently provided me with a copy of Beyond Caloriegate.  My original post began with something like: "Let me start by saying I had never heard of this guy before reading Jimmy's post, but wonder, if LC is so great, why would one need a "Survivor's Guide"?"  Little did I realize late in 2010 when I published the original, that this was Adam Kosloff, the man behind the original GCBC for Dummies (as I call it) website.   Although Adam acknowledges that the website is outdated, we can probably attribute a large proportion of the remaining "can't store fat w/o carbs" faction of TWICHOOB's to this very fact (that it has not been scrubbed of this erroneous information).


So,  I've written to Adam with my thoughts on his new book.  I quickly came to the conclusion that it would be fruitless to pursue this vein any further.   I'm not even sure exactly what it is that Taubes believes anymore to be honest.  Because he used to use the phrase "excess calories" all the time and now he's pretty much dug his heels in that calories don't matter.  He used to say that the causality arrow was backwards -- that it is because they are getting fatter that obese eat more and perhaps become sedentary.  Now we're back to overeating being an "inane" concept.  It's all those insulin spiking foods -- including the pasta and bread and whatnot -- but now that's not even really it, because without sugar you can probably eat all of that and stay lean (The "SEA corollary" of TWICHOO - SEA = South-East Asian).  Perhaps it's time to demand of Gary Taubes to tell us what exactly his hypothesis IS these days.  Or better yet, instead of the incessant claims that CICO is debunked, doesn't work, etc., how about YOU pony up the evidence for a change.  The Pima ain't it!


As I told Adam in my email, the ball has been in Gary's court for a very, very long time.   The most "hostile" interview he has ever agreed to has been on the Oz show.  That's how much confidence he apparently has in his position.  If he's not willing to address the science, in a forum that he can't control via the workings of Jimmy Moore, what's the point of others trying to do that for him?  So this previous post of mine will stand as my answer to Caloriegate and Beyond Caloriegate, because as I see things, nothing much has changed on the other side of this debate.  And contrary to what I think Adam hopes, there's nothing agnostic about his "black box" because it requires denouncing that calories count and basically claims TWICHOO is the biggest badass component of the box we have to work with.   Thus all my criticisms and debunkings of TWICHOO ultimately answer to challenges to us "Calorie Wizards" as Adam calls us in the book.


I do, however, reserve the right to reclaim the "black box" concept for it's rightful CICO owners ;-)  I by no means coined the phrase, but I believe I've used the phrase enough times to stake my claim on behalf of believers in The First Law of Thermo everywhere.  Perhaps I'll do a post on it at some point.  Hmm... I do have a CICO post in the works.  It might fit nicely at the end. 

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Set Point ~ Settling Point Part II: Substrate Balance & Body Composition

Continuing the discussion of Point 9 from this paper, and Part I,

Although less obvious than the fact that energy intake must be equal to energy expenditure, weight stability also requires that the substrate mixture oxidized be equivalent, on average, to the composition of the nutrient mix consumed. When “substrate balance” is not achieved, changes in body composition occur, which in time are bound to elicit adjustments in food intake.

The contributions made by carbohydrate and by fat to the fuel mix oxidized is reflected in the ratio of CO2 produced to O2 consumed. This ratio is known as the “respiratory quotient” or “RQ.” It varies between the values of 1.0, when CHO is the predominant fuel, and 0.7, when oxidation of fat provides most of the body's energy. The ratio of CO2 produced to O2 consumed during the biological oxidation of a representative sample of the diet consumed is defined as the “food quotient” or “FQ”. Stable body compositions will only be sustained if the average RQ matches the average FQ of the diet.

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Join the Discussion On: Obesity and energy balance: is the tail wagging the dog?

Ripe for the weekend ... Has Gary Taubes been right all along? Is the whole tautology of the First Law of Thermodynamics whacked? Do we have this direction wrong?  Well, apparently quite a few have seen the paper I'll be sharing with you through Google Docs, and thought just that!  First, I'd like to thank Matt Metzgar for the PDF.  

OK, so what's this all about?  

Obesity and energy balance: is the tail wagging the dog?
JCK Wells and M Siervo .   European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2011), 1–17.

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SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE FOLKS

But marilynb aka mhb here has decided to share my link over at the LLVLC discussion board attributing the sharing to Matt.  Yes, he provided me with the PDF, and it's not "my" (or his) PDF, but I was sharing it through my Google Docs account via a link for my readers for the purpose of discussion.  I do not appreciate that being linked about without even properly acknowledging the source.  If you want to share and discuss, do it on your own account folks.   Some people are rather ... pathetic.

Anyway, anyone wanting the full text can email me and I'll be glad to provide it.  I'm going to have to rethink how to share full texts apparently.

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Countering Anti-Energy Balance, CI=CO Arguments ~ Part II: We Can't Calculate It

This one is the strawman argument that I think irks me the most.  Because, ultimately, this argument is meaningless when it comes to the fact that our bodies MUST obey the First Law of Thermo ... and don't go on with the BWBS.  

Some claim the calorie levels reported for most foods are off by as much as 30%.  This could well be true - especially for things like hamburger.  It's also been shown that we absorb fewer calories from whole unprocessed foods than from highly processed/refined.  Add microflora to the mix and we extract more or less of the same food than our neighbor.  Also, different fats, carbs and proteins actually have differing energy density.  For example sucrose and starch yield slightly different calories/g (if memory serves sucrose is slightly less than 4, starch slightly more than 4).  

But does that last paragraph prevent us from getting a pretty good idea of CI?  I'd say not.  For one, it's average intake over time that's important, not that I ate the 100 cal cup of fauxgurt vs. the 80 cal cup.  For another, it's the amounts of food in the end, not the exact calories.  So, for example, if I decide to go participate in some study where I eat my usual foods for a month and some poor schmo is tasked with weighing and measuring all foods provided - uneaten portions, one can gauge my intake pretty well.  Perhaps I eat 250 cal/day less than one other study participant or 250 more than another.  So?  Also, perhaps the three of us actually "intake" the same number of calories in the end b/c of our digestive efficiencies.  Does it really matter to me, and a CICO approach to bodyweight whether +250-gal gets to eat more than me?  In the "it's not fair" department, I suppose ...

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Fasting Insulin & Weight Loss

Some folks have been having a bit of a go at me over at Peter/Hyperlipid's blog.  I guess it all started by Peter taking some sort of offense to my post on his Potatoes and weight loss post entitled Insulin Caused Cerebral Stress.  My intent with my post was not to mock Peter.  It was to point out how so inconsistent with observations the carb/insulin hypothesis is, so as to elicit elaborate explanations such as the scenario Peter described to explain a simple phenomenon:  Voight lost weight eating potatoes by estimating his energy needs and eating a controlled amount of predominantly potato-derived calories.   Peter, himself, started that post discussing the time/pages he had spent developing his theory.  I don't question/contest that what he says regarding insulin, sensitivity, etc. may actually be true.  I do believe, however, it is irrelevant.  I say that because I just do not see consistent evidence to support his assertion that:

The ultimate determinant of weight loss is fasting insulin. ~Petro Dobromylskyj

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Don't be a Yo Yo! (Effect of weight change on energy expenditure)

Effects of experimental weight perturbation on skeletal muscle work efficiency, fuel utilization, and biochemistry in human subjects

Or in plain English, what happens to your metabolism when you gain or lose weight.

Maintenance of a body weight 10% above or below that “customary” for lean or obese individuals results in respective increases or decreases in the energy expended in low levels of physical activity (nonresting energy expenditure, NREE). These changes are greater than can be accounted for by the altered body weight or composition and are due mainly to altered skeletal muscle work efficiency at low levels of power generation.

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Of Mice & (Wo)Men: When's the last time you saw an 5'4" 130 pound fat woman?

I'm always amused when a rodent study that seemingly counters the calorie-based theories on obesity comes down the pike.  In predictable fashion, someone in the LC webosphere will pick up on it and use it as an example to counter calorie-based theories on weight/obesity.   A recent example of this is brought to us by low carbers' favorite comedian edutainer, Tom Naughton:  Fat Mice & The Laws of Thermodynamics that referenced the following study:  Mild calorie Restriction Induces Fat Accumulation in Female c57BL/6J Mice.  

Now Tom starts out misrepresenting things by picturing a fat mouse, likely an ob/ob.  This study actually involved females of the strain pictured below:

Kind of a cute little critter, no?   The study was also conducted in the context of calorie restriction and it's demonstrated increase in longevity of mice.  They are not a mutant strain genetically predisposed to obesity.

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Insulin Wars VIII: Adam Kosloff of Low Carb Survivor's Guide

Let me start by saying I never heard of this guy.  But wonder, if LC is so great, why would one need a "Survivor's Guide"?  But I digress.

This is my latest installment in response to Jimmy's roundtable of "experts" on James Kreiger's series on insulin;  “Insulin…an Undeserved Bad Reputation”, Part 2,Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Kosloff starts out with a long "preamble" directed to James as if he were corresponding with him.  I am not privy to their interactions and will defer to James to discuss this part when he has the time to draft his own rebuttals.  I will comment on my observation that Kosloff seems to come at this from the viewpoint of having bought into the carbohydrate hypothesis hook line and sinker, and basically he disagrees with "calories count".

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Of Thermodynamics, Complexity, Closed Systems & Equilibrium

In light of this recent post, I've been thinking more and more again on this topic.  And when Adam Kossloff liberally quoted from Entropy Production's author Robert McCleod's rebuttal to rebuttal or whatever in the Taubes/Bray dust-up, I just had to weigh in on this.  

Let me preface this by saying that I have a bit of a unique perspective on this issue having learned and applied thermodynamics in the context of several disciplines,  from both a scientific and engineering perspective.  I've worked in a number of fields and interacted with many who have only been exposed to these concepts in one context or the other.  Now what I'm about to say is obviously a generalization,  so keep in mind I'm not saying "all", just in general.  But one thing I've noticed is that engineers and physicists tend to not really "get" chemistry, or worse, biology, because they are used to things being cut and dry.  I've heard some certifiable geniuses in engineering disciplines make some extremely ... well ... stupid comments about something biological.  For the physicist, drop a ball off a cliff and pretty much we can figure the time it will take to reach the bottom, its velocity at impact and all that.  But one can mix A & B in a test tube, and almost inevitably the resulting amount of C that might be produced differs from predictions.  It is almost a given that one will be asked to provide possible explanations for the differences between predicted and observed values when writing up a lab report.  Throw in something living, like bacteria in a petri dish, and it only gets worse.  So the physicists and engineers tend to resort to the "it's all too complicated to explain" refrain because there are just so many other factors at play that we can't possibly seek to understand or explain.

The same happens to biologists and chemists looking the other direction.  Truth is, in most undergraduate programs, the bio majors (or softer life science related fields) and many chem majors take a different physics class, one that is not calculus based, and may not even be required to take a course in differential equations or even calculus.  The equation at the top of McLeod's blog looks daunting, as do many of the discussions of Hall & Chow.  So one can feasibly be a bio/chem/biochem whiz and still that thermo equation might as well be written in Chinese.  So that equation looks foreign so geez ... how can we ever seek to understand something so complicated?   It's a form of intellectual bullying IMO.  Make something so complicated that it can't possibly be understood and you can baffle with bullshit all day long.

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The First Law of Thermodynamics

I've been fighting off a cold so begging off housework in favor of goofing off at my blog today.  Lots on my mind so I've been rather prolific!

I get tired of hearing this misstated time and again by both people who should know better and those ill equipped to comment on such matters, but who do anyway.  I'll abbreviate The First Law of Thermo as TFLOT.

Calories In = Calories Out + Energy Stored is a fact.  This boils down to simple conservation of mass in the end as I discussed in a bit of a rambling post HERE.    From hereon out I'll use CI and CO for calories in and out respectively.

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Fat Accumulation: Taubes v. Frayn ~ ASP in vivo in humans

This is actually a re-posting of the cited article, but I've updated the post significantly since the original.

Coordinated release of acylation stimulating protein (ASP) and triacylglycerol clearance by human adipose tissue in vivo in the postprandial period  Jumana Saleh,* Lucinda K. M. Summers,† Katherine Cianflone,1,* Barbara A. Fielding,†Allan D. Sniderman,* and Keith N. Frayn.  1998.

This paper demonstrated ASP actions in vivo for humans in the postprandial (post-meal) period.  ASP levels were measured locally to the adipocytes  (venous output side) and systemically in the arterial "supply" side.  This was important because many who would dismiss the action of ASP look at systemic ASP levels and claim no connection.  However, this paper demonstrated otherwise:

Abstract 

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