More on the thermodynamics of weight loss
Okay. I said I was through with Anthony Colpo, but now I’m going to quote from him once again. What gives?
What gives is that I’m stuck in the airport in Seattle – my flight to Chicago is delayed for almost four hours because of bad weather in the Windy City. I figured I would use this time to stick up a quick post about thermodynamics and provide a long quote from Robert McLeod, who writes Entropy Production, a physics (sort of) blog. As you can see below, he pretty much trashes Bray and other nutritional researchers who blithely use the 1st Law of Thermodynamics to prove the old a-calorie-is-a-calorie notion. To show the way the average nutritional writer looks at this law, I needed to find a quote. As it works out, the only thing I have with me is Anthony’s book The Fat Loss Bible, which just happens to have the perfect quote. So, sorry AC, I’m not really trying to pick on you. And you certainly aren’t the only nutritional writer who thinks this way – you’re just the only one who has a quote handy I can use.
The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to another. In other words, energy just doesn’t just magically disappear; it must be converted to something else. In the case of any excess calories you ingest, they will be stored as fat, used to accommodate an increase in lean tissue mass, or dissipated as heat through thermogenesis. Manipulating the proportion of protein, fat and carbohydrate you eat each day will not excuse you from the Law of Thermodynamics.
This is the way just about all nutritional scientists and writers look at the First Law. Let’s take a look at how a physicist sees it. Robert McLeod wrote a long post a while back reviewing Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories. Near the end of the post, he discusses the energy balance equation and one of our old friends, Dr. George Bray, who gave Gary’s book a bad review in an obesity journal. (I posted on this same review a couple of times here and here.)
Here’s what he says:
I was somewhat confused to see this [a nutritional description of the energy balance equation] Surely the nutritional scientists did not not really believe this, right? I mean, any idiot undergraduate students knows that the 1st Law is only useful in a closed system, and humans live on the planet Earth, not in an insulated box. Right?
Enter a rebuttal by G. Bray in the journal Obesity Reviews. Bray is a to be a major obesity researcher and one of the 2nd tier villains in the book. Taubes relates a story of Bray excising a section of a British report on obesity, where Bray removed the material pertaining to the relationship between insulin and obesity. He clearly has editorial support to make his case. Bray is one of the second-tier villains in Taubes’ book. Taubes has a footnote (p. 421), which suggests that Bray actively suppressed the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis.
“According to Novin, when he wrote up his presentation for the conference proceedings Bray removed the last four pages, all of which were on the link between carbohydrates, insulin, hunger, and weight gain. “I couldn’t believe he would make that kind of arbitrary decision,” Novin said.”
Unfortunately, to a physicist this energy balance hypothesis looks like a silly hand-waving exercise, not a serious argument. Frankly I was flabbergasted when I first read this article. This conservation of energy argument is on the same scientific level as the ridiculous “drink cold water to lose weight” idiocy. A human organism is:
- Not in thermal equilibrium with their environment. Last time I checked I have a body temperature around 38 °C and spend most of my time in 21 °C rooms.
- Capable of significant mass flows (e.g. respiration).
- Capable of sequestering entropy (e.g. protein synthesis).
Is wearing a sweater fattening (by insulating you from your environment)? Here’s a quote from the rebuttal,
“Let me make my position very clear. Obesity is the result of a prolonged small positive energy surplus with fat storage as the result. An energy deficit produces weight loss and tips the balance in the opposite direction from overeating.”
According Bray’s thermodynamics argument, wearing sweaters makes you fat. This illustrates the greatest fallacy of trying to apply the 1st Law to a human: it makes the implication that living organisms consume kilocalories for the purpose of generating heat rather than perform useful work (i.e. breathing, contracting cardio and skeletal muscle, generating nervous action pulses, etc.). In reality heat is the waste product of basal metabolism. The first law does not distinguish between different types of energy. Heat, work are all equal under the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Applying the 1st Law to living organisms is Proof by Tautology. Yes, 1 + 1 = 2, but this tells us absolutely nothing about the underlying mechanics. The 1st Law does not (I repeat N-O-T) tell us whether you store excess energy in the form of fat, or bleed it off into the atmosphere by dilating blood vessels next to the skin, sweating, etc. To do so would require an accounting of entropy.
What would a semi-rigorous description of the thermodynamics of a human organism look like? Look at the title strip on the top of the page. See that equation in the background?
[The above is the background of the header of Robert McLeod's blog]
This type of equation would be a bare starting point for energy balance in a complex system like a living organism. Good luck actually accounting for all the terms. Those Σs are sums.
[...] with “Dr. Mike” Eades putting some more well-deserved nails in the common “calories in calories out” myt… (with the help from an ever-antagonizing Anthony Colpo on the [...]
Dr Eades
Would the thermogenic process underlying protein breakdown explain night sweats. On very low carb days (well under 30gms) if I have eaten quite large amounts of protein in particular I suffer extreme night sweats. The low carb intake would suggest to me this is not reactive hypoglycemia – and also this generally happens about 2-3am, a good 6 hours or more after eating. Is it the body’s way of burning off the excess calories have eaten in protein? interestingly on the odd day i have eaten more carbs than I should – no night sweats occur.
Or is this happening because to my shame I dipped into anorexic tendencies for a tear or two – (despite managing to maintain muscle through exercise and eating minimal protein i weighed under 100lbs, low carb however got m back on the right track as it freed up my obsessive restriction). I now weigh around 110 (5ft 4) and am happy to maintain at this – but the night sweats remain disruptive. Your thoughts would be much appreciated – is excess protein the cause?
Ps finding your articles have been a godsend, and has really helped on my road to requiring a somewhat normal attitude to nutrition.
Hi , Dr Eades.
Anthony Colpo et al, are examples of nonscientists taking an idea from science and running with it in strange directions.
Let’s review The First Law of Thermodynamics :
Energy can be transformed ( changed from one form to another) , but cannot be destroyed.
Matter of course is just energy in a particular form.
So, the total energy in the universe is fixed, and has been fixed since the Big Bang according to classic physics. And if you can establish an energy – impermeable subset of the universe, then the amount of energy in that subset will be fixed. ( That’s much harder to do than it sounds.)
The law is considered valid, but of late, some questions have surfaced. How does vacuum energy ft into that picture? Some theoreticians think that in the vacuum of subatomic particles, strange particles are coming into existence and vanishing spontaneously all the time. The nature of subatomic particles is of interest: they may just be “vibrating strongs of folded space-time”. Which suggests the conditions under which space -time is folded might not be unique to the Big Bang.
The First Law might only apply under certain conditions, and not others in other words. Then there’s the huge question of Dark Energy, which appears to be accelerating the universe’s expansion. We don;t know what it is, or how it maty illuminate the First Law.
Then there’s the idea that our universe is just part of a larger multidimensional structure; we have no luck explaining physical observations with only 4 dimensions, and if there are more, we have to think about how energy and matter – or something else- in other spaces might influence the universe we can observe.
How any of thi splays into obesity is not a question real physicists are addressing. This is just another case of nonscientists ( Anthony Colpo et al) latching onto an idea from science and running with it in strange directions.
The First Law does not “prove” the caloric hypothesis because a human being is not a closed system. Matter and energy from the environment escape back to it. The question of how much of what is ingested is packed away in fat cells as opposed to used to power physiological processes or eliminated as waste matter and energy is not answered by the First Law. The First Law demands that no matter or energy be created, or destroyed, and in sum, as far as we can tell , none is, but that ‘s the end of the First Law’s reach.
And it might not even reach that far. Much remains to be learned about energy and matter, and we’ve reason to suspect that the First Law may be a special case, applying only under certain circumstances. It’s even possible the entire law may be discrded, eventually.
Sometimes to understand a system, it’s necessary to look at extremes.
Here’s an extreme for you. In the devlopment of Type II diabetes, insulin resistance goes up. Many Type II diabetics experience a strange phase where appetite rises ( due to cells refusing to accept food, so they’re actually starving), and there food intake goes up in response, but they lose weight, and sometimes quite rapidly. In fact, rapid unexplained weight loss is one of he first things physicians ask patients about when diagnosing Type II diabetes. These patients can be ingesting 4,000 or 5,000 calories and still be shedding weight.
That is impossible according to the caloric hypothesis. But then again, lots of things we observe about weight are impossible under the caloric hypothesis: drugs causing weight gain with absolutely no change in food consumption, thin rats gaining weight when intestinal flora from obese rats is transfused into them ( and no change in food consumption), site – specific differences in fat cell behavior ( lypodystrophy, male-female site – specific differences, etc.) Those are only some examples.
The caloric hypothesis us dead. Too bad there are so many people around like ( Anthony Colpo et al) who don’t know it yet.
Gary Taubes has very valid criticisms of the complete failure of dieting for the successful long term treatment of obesity.
Linda Bacon Ph.D. is another person to look into Dr Eades, as well as Matt Metzgar’s blog which has new articles on obesity. I encourage all on here to look into them and even make Anthony aware of them.
If there is one thing crystal clear in the scientific literature it is that dieting does not work. It just raises your bodyfat setpoint trying to protect you from future dieting. People who pimp caloric deprivation give out horrible advice. I hope Anthony sees he is being just like he cholesterol theory proponents on this issue. I hope he comes around, but probably won’t.
Anyway.
Take care , Dr. Eades.
Razwell
Energy 1 = Energy 2 100 calories food = 100 calories into closed system
[...] More on the thermodynamics of weight loss. [...]
Hi Dr. Mike,
I have been following your blog for quite a while now. It has truly been a lifesaver. I’ve been eating low carb for a few months now (to lose weight) and wanted to try and understand the mechanics behind it – your posts are superior to all other ‘explanations’ out there.
I hope this is in an appropriate section, but I would greatly appreciate your help. Hopefully it will be a bit of a challenge for you! Quick bit of background; I’m a 23 year old post-grad student living in Aus, at a healthy BMI of 23 (but I’m very very tall, so that never seems to have been a good indication). I have lost 10kg eating low carb, and am ALMOST there… 3kg to go! I religiously count carbs (even the ‘negligible’ ones in cheese, lettuce etc.) AND calories and have been tracking my weight loss. I have calculated my BMR using the Harris Benedict equation and ‘predicted’ daily losses accordingly. For the most part, my weight loss corresponded quite well with the predicted values. I have been restricting to around 1300cal per day (my BMR is approx. 1800 and I have accounted for a decreasing BMR due to decreasing body mass by calculating a daily BMR based on body weight). I have also made sure I eat around 100g protein a day to prevent/minimise muscle loss.
Recently, I have hit a stall. My weight has remained the same for the past 3-4 weeks, despite eating only 1300cal/day and <20g carbs. I have tried everything to break through… I introduced exercise (cardio), I had a large calorie day etc. Nothing has worked. I am at the point of giving up. Low carb has freed me from a severe binge eating disorder I struggled with… I can feel that creeping up again because the results are not there! The math says I should have lost… the reality is quite the opposite.
Could you please shed some light on this? Is there some kind of explanation? Most sites blame 'starvation mode' for stalls… But after reading your posts, I understand it is not that simple.
I would deeply appreciate ANY help/explanation/advice you could offer.
Julie
[...] In Part 1, I predicted that Eades would respond to my Smackdown with yet another load of convoluted pseudoscientific bullpucky that did everything except present actual human evidence for MAD. And that’s exactly what happened here and here. [...]
I have no background in chemistry, well i did have 2 subjects but that was not interesting to me. Anyway, i agree with thermodynamics by the simple body compensatory mechanism. when we feel cold our thermoregulatory center will produce heat thus increasing blood flow into the surface of the skin to counteract cold. Since heat is produce by metabolism then the stored fats will be used by the body. How about outside body heat application? Im wondering if sauna and steam bath will do same effects?
well, chemistry doesn’t interest me much but the argument on how body compensate to maintain equilibrium like when the body is in low temperature or feel cold. The thermoregulating center will produce heat maybe by burning the fats and producing brain chemicals to aid this process. The heat will spread to the surface of the body to insulate the body from cold. I’m not sure how much kilocalories will burn in this process but i think its better than warming yourself from outside in with a sweater.
I’m surprised you’re quoting Anthony Colpo at all because he sure has a lot of negative things to say about you. To me he seems more like a deranged stalker than anyone who is worthy of getting into a discussion with.
I’ve just read Taubes’ GCBC which brought me to read the Bray review and Taubes’ rebuttal.
I have a couple comments – first Bray cited himself numerous times – check the end of his review, I’m not anal enough to count them, but could only snicker when I noticed.
And “bray” is a noise …. er..donkeys make….
Dr. Eades – thank you so much for your tireless work and wisdom – you’ve helped me enormously.
Dr. Eades,
I’m sorry but was this article stating that from a physicist’s point of view that cold or heat does not affect the body’s metabolism? The quote seems to sound like it’s ridiculous to think that wearing a sweater will cause you to burn less calorie, but if it helps keep you warm them it most certainly does. You’ve spoken in the past of uncoupling proteins and one of their main jobs is to heat the body (mainly UCP-1). Clearly being cold causes you to increase metabolism.
If you want any real world examples look at Michael Phelps who consume 10,000 calories a day and maintains his weight. If you do the math you’ll realize it’s impossible for him to burn that many calories through activity or normal metabolism. The fact of the matter is that the 4 hours he spends training all take place in water, which is highly thermoconductive. The same can be seen for people who climb Everest. They have trouble maintaining body weight and end up losing weight far faster than their activity and intake would dictate. It’s due to the cold.
There are plenty of real world examples of people using cold to more than double their weight loss. Hell the entire purpose of brown adipose tissue is solely to produce heat (and yes, research is showing is does exist in adults).
Sorry if I misunderstood this article and you agree with me, but from the sound of it I’m pretty sure you don’t agree. I’d like to hear your thoughts on it though.
I think you misunderstood my article because I do agree with you.
[...] Ireland Eddie Irvine Chris Irwin Jean Pierre Jabouille This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. ← TriStar Motorsports [...]
[...] apart (Dr. Eades is, you know, a real doctor with real clinical experience with real patients): The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D. » More on the thermodynamics of weight loss The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D. » AC Fat Loss Bible critique part II The Blog of Michael R. [...]