Statistics is, as Dean likes to point out, a very useful branch of mathematics containing many truths. It is also, unfortunately, often misunderstood by non-mathematicians and often abused, both intentionally and (more often) not.
One of the frequently used statistical tools is a test for significance. If you take a random sample of the population, and then test some question on it, afterwards you have to ask the question, “what is the likelihood that I got this result purely by chance in how I happened to select my sample, rather than because it’s truly representative of the population as a whole”. As stated, however, that question doesn’t have a useful answer. Instead, what people do is first establish a confidence level, e.g. 95%, 99%, 99.9%, etc. and then ask if their results are significant at that confidence level.
So, what does it mean that your results are significant at the 95% confidence level? It means that if you were to keep repeating your experiment forever (on different populations), you’d expect that the results you got were actually representative of the population as a whole in at least 95% of the runs that you do. But that also means that you’d expect up to 5% of the times that you do this, your results won’t be representative of the population as a whole, and you got them by chance.
The tricky part here is that “up to”. Statistical significance is inclusive of less permissive tests; that is, everything which is significant at the 99% level is also significant at the 95% level. Thus you can’t tell, merely because someone states their results at the 95% confidence level, whether the odds of them getting their results by chance were 95% or .0001%. Here, human nature comes to our rescue. Tests for statistical significance are so easy to run (many computer programs will do it for you with no work at all) that human nature urges people to state their results with the best confidence level they can.
I keep mentioning 95% because it’s the generally accepted minimal level for publicizing results. Individual fields will vary, of course.I should also point out that statistical significance is very closely related to sample size. The large the sample, the less likely it was that you just got (un)lucky in how you random picked your group.
Something else important to keep in mind is that the confidence level is not an estimate of how likely a study is to be wrong, it’s a lower bound for how likely a study is to be wrong. (Bear in mind that wrong in this case means, “having no known relation to the truth”, not “being opposite to the truth”.) If there were imperfections in how the sample was selected, this adds to the chances that the study is wrong. If there were biases involved with how the test was administered, this also adds to the chances that a study is wrong. If the people in the study might give incorrect results (e.g. lie about how much chocolate cake they eat every day), this also adds to the chances that the study is wrong.
But there are not just problems with how a study is conducted. There are also problems with how a study is interpreted. One of the common errors in interpreting studies is to mistake who the population being studied is. This has the same effect (for the person trying to interpret the study) as sampling bias in the study itself, and we just saw a pretty spectacular example of it.
In his post, Aziz links to a study which tries to answer some questions about people who have lost and kept off large amounts of weight. That is, it’s using a sample of people to try to examine the population of people who have lost and kept off large amounts of weight. Unfortunately, Aziz thinks that this study refutes Dean’s claim that people who lose large amounts of weight and keep it off are an insignificant portion of fat people. Clearly, it can do no such thing, because it doesn’t address the population of fat people, it only addresses the population of fat people who have lost large amounts of weight and kept it off.
What Aziz is doing is a bit like look at a study of athletes who have won gold medals in the Olympics and trying to use it to claim that athletes who win olympic gold are not uncommon at all. I think that the confusion is coming from the fact that the sample size is quite large (about 800, which is huge considering how many academic studies use fewer than 20 people). But in a country with 300 million people, however you slice it, there are 3 million people in the 99th percentile. Finding a few hundred people who share some trait only proves that that trait isn’t limited to the 99.99997th percentile (800 people are 0.00000267% of a population of 300,000,000). And if you found them by specifically going looking for them, it says nothing at all about the population which you specifically ignored.
This doesn’t mean that this study shows that fat people who lost a lot of weight and kept it off are a small fraction of the population of fat people. It says nothing at all about that question, except as an existence proof that there are at least a few.
{ 32 comments }
Thank you.
I wonder where I would fit in that study, if at all.Â
Â
I take some satisfaction in pointing out to a succession of doctors that I weigh fifty pounds less than I did upon graduating High School, and asking how may over-sixty people they know who can same the same without serious physical ailment.
But I do not "diet" and certainly do not "exercise", so it appears I would not have fit the "study".
Plus, of course, I am still fat.
ctl,
isn’t the significance level an UPPER bound on how likely a study is to have occurred by random chance? i.e.: at 95% confidence, the study’s results would have occurred by chance no MORE than 5% of the time.
it is also incorrect to state that human nature is coming to anyone’s rescue. 95 and 99% are standard values in scientific literature. people are rarely, if ever, going to report significance values for 93, 96, or 99.99999%, regardless of how easy it is to test for significance at those values.
lastly, where on earth did you get the idea that sample bias means a study is "wrong"? sample bias only means that the study is right for the sample population probed, and cannot be generalized to some other, presumably more inclusive, population.
Quite so.
Listen, if it was as simple as people made out, then we should have ample studies which look like this:
"We started with a population of 50 individuals each with between 60 and 100 pounds of excess body fat. We gave them X dietary regimen and Y exercise regimen, with regular coaching and tracking. At the end of year one, the group lost an average of Z pounds. At the end of five years, we had J dropouts, and of those who remained, Q% had achieved and maintained a loss of all the overweight."
The truth of the matter is that anyone could conduct such a study. Jenny Craig could do it tomorrow (and odds are very high that they have actually done it and kept those numbers internally at some corporate level).
Those who have released such studies routinely find the same: the dropout rate is very high, and of those who manage to stick with the program long-term, most of them who were obese at the beginning wind up still significantly overweight at the end. Yes, even if they kept exercising. Yes, even if they kept watching what they ate.
They don’t tell you this, typically, because it’s doubtful many of the clients of Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, the YMCA, etc. would stick for very long if they were told, "yes if you stick with us you can reasonably expect to lose a significant amount of weight and feel a lot better and be a lot healthier, but odds are high that you will always have a weight problem until more research is done."
This isn’t defeatism. It’s honesty. And it helps to alleviate the horrible self-browbeating that fat people go through, because once they trip over into pathological obesity their ability to escape it is very small. They can make it better, but curing it won’t happen for most of them. It just won’t. And it’s a dodge to say it will if they just try harder. Indeed, telling them they can do it if they "just try harder" may in fact be quite dangerous to their health and their goals.
We need more research, because it very much appears that our bodies are not equipped properly for dealing with more than a certain amount of overweight. Most of the research bears this out. It shouldn’t even be controversial.
^Really?? Please provide a scholarly article to back that up. A statement like, "Most of the research bears this out. It shouldn’t even be controversial" absolutely needs to be backed up by some sort of reference. Â
Again, none of you naysayers have ever provided a single reference. Until you do, your logical thinking approach is just a lot of hot air.Â
Well, the article Aziz provided is a good start, since it demonstrates clearly that many of the program’s participants were still fat after five years. Their "success" was in “only” rebounding 20 or 30 pounds.
You’ll find copious scholarly documentation right here that should be more than ample for you.
The research very clearly shows that watching what you eat and exercising are good for you. They retard or prevent obesity’s onset. They improve health and general well-being. They help people with a moderate amount of weight to lose to do so. But they don’t, usually, cure obesity.
If you doubt me, simply provide me the study which shows that a majority of obese people on X program take off all the excess weight and keep it off after five years. If you can ‘t (and I happen to be quite certain that you can’t, but I would love it if you could embarrass me and prove me wrong) then you might want to dial it back just a leetle bit on pronouncements that obese people can fix their weight problems by just eating less and exercising more and showing a little more discipline.
(Arm-waving generalizations about how they got fat in the first place are already stipulated so you can dispense with them.)
By the way, how many morbidly obese people have *you personally* known, or better yet treated, that you have witnessed becoming normalweight and staying that way? Based on any program at all?
I’m not even going to dignify that with answering your question. You’re just going to complain that clearly any of my friends who were previously obese and are now not through diet, exericse and lifestyle changes are the 0.1%.Â
Dean, if it makes you feel better thinking it’s not your fault you’re overweight, then by all means continue to lie to yourself. I’m not going to try to try to take that away from you.Â
Zach,
Yes, in theory the significance level is an upper bound on how likely a perfect study’s results are to have happened by random chance. In practice, getting better than 99% is usually quite expensive, since expense scales with sample size and people don’t usually do studies where the answers are so lopsided that you can get high confidence levels with small sample sizes.
(Confidence levels do, however, assume perfect studies. Error can creep into the study from many sources besides simply being unlucky in who you randomly chose.)
In my post, I defined wrong to mean “having no known relation to the truthâ€. You’re right that technically a study with a sample bias is a perfectly valid survey of the participants. But studies are done to answer questions. They don’t exist in a vacuum. And if a study has sampling bias, it’s likelihood of having produced an incorrect answer to its motivating question increases. That’s my point. (People don’t, generally, care about the data in a study; they care about what can be concluded from that data. Studies are a bit like guns — studies don’t draw conclusions, people draw conclusions. But at some point it becomes reasonable to talk about the wrong person being shot even though the gun shot the person that it was aimed at, and it’s reasonable to talk about a study being wrong if the conclusions which are drawn from it are wrong.)
Btw.. the site you linked to was some random joe’s site. To clear things up.. that’s not at all scholarly.  When considering if a site is scholarly or not, a big dead give away is if it’s all text with poor quality figures.Â
I saw a few article citations, but they had nothing to do with establishing only 0.1% of the obese population can lose weight and keep it off.Â
Hey.. I have a fantastic idea, how about we just keep swaping back and forth url’s that don’t directly link to any articles that address the issue..  Sounds FUN~!!! I’ll start.. http://www.pubmed.com    ready set… GO!
I’m still waiting for a single scholarly article that establishes only 0.1% of the obese population can lose weight.Â
Whoever finds it, please provide a direct link to the publishers website that has the download link for the article. I did the very same thing yesterday, it’s where Aziz found that article and ripped off my data mining work like the thief he is.
John Dakota: the site you linked to was some random joe’s site. To clear things up.. that’s not at all scholarly
Exactly. You’d think that he’d be able to provide something better than an old, obscure website full of cherry picked data and bizarre, meaningless assertions (e.g. "The average calorie intake in the 13th century was up to 5000 calories a day.")
I mean, the VAST majority of obese people will just regain the weight, right, even if they continue to restrict calories? Must be tons of peer-reviewed studies showing this.
Let’s see em.
Edgar get it right….Â
In this blog WE DONT OBEY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!!@!!
You’re right. Because thermodynamics are about as relevant to this discussion as organic chemistry is to a discussion about riding a ferris wheel.
Thermodynamics mean nothing at all. Nothing. After 5 years, energy balance means nothing to the obese. It’s like hitting the singularity of a black hole: the laws of nature break down.
Dean -
You are correct in your assertions that obese folks (specifically morbidly obese folks) have an overwhelming tendency to be unable to maintain any weight loss achieved from dieting. Folks tend to underestimate this when they view obesity as necessarily about self-control.
The calories in/calories expended equation is relevant enough, but what some ignore are the many factors that determine how quickly those calories are burned, stored or excreted.
But there is a sentiment that’s detectable in your assertions in this area that may bug folks (read: me) … a sort of defeatism or acceptance of inevitability because of genetic/biological determinism. I fully admit the possibility that I’m reading too much into it.
Obesity can be genetically foretold in many cases, but it can also be staggeringly environmental, and in a subset, quite reversible. Again, I get the impression (which could be mistaken) that you lump them together.
So let’s start off with the presumption that a certain portion of obese folks are born that way because their relatives were exceptionally good at surviving by storing fat during the lean caveman days, while another portion are just gluttons.
I don’t know what the proportions are, but for this exercise let’s say it’s 50/50.
That 50 percent who are gluttons may have essentially eaten themselves into a vicious feedback loop that does its best to keep them obese. A lot of these you probably know:
1. Fat cells multiply when one gains fat (especially during adolescence), whereas the newly acquired fat cells shrink when weight is lost, waiting to enlarge again.
2. As one gains more fat cells, especially around the abdomen, the body secretes hormones that make you crave food more, a component of fat’s evolved survival mechanism.
3. As we age, our metabolism changes, leaning towards the storage and acquisition of fat. One of a bunch of these metabolic dimensions is a relative decline in lipolytic/anabolic (fat burning/muscle buildng) hormones and a rise in lipogenic/catabolic (the opposite) hormones.
4. Certain modern diets that predispose one to gain weight involve a lot of hormonal peaks and valleys that also predispose one to get hungry and eat more, and binge when one does eat.
I can go on listing factors, but you get the idea. There is a feedback loop that is incredibly hard to break, that gets harder and harder to break the fatter you get. By the time you’re morbidly obese, even if your DNA did not determine that you would necessarily be that way, it can be incredibly hard to break this cycle.
A "Diet" by the popular definition of the word will fail long-term most of the time because it’s viewed as a transitory period of eating less and/or exercising more.
That said, there are ways to break this feedback loop and lose weight long term … ways for that portion of obese people who have eaten themself into their predicament to retrain their metabolism.
potential strategies:
1. Shifting the hormonal state to anabolic and lipolytic. This is one of the side effects of high protein/low sugar, low simple carb diets like Atkins or South Beach, for example. This is also accomplished by building muscle via weight training.
2. A long-term diet with reasonable portions and the right components combined with physical activity is of course a necessary component, though as you intimate, might not be sufficient.
3. More drastically, surgeries like gastric bypass have as much or more to do with how the procedure retrains the body’s metabolism and chemical urges as they do with physically limiting how much one eats.
Of course, I’m skimming the surface. But my main point is this: many obese folks have been dealt a tough hand in the DNA poker game. But many obese folks have essentially eaten and sat themselves into a tipping point where their bodies are heavily inclined to maintain and gain even more weight.
In the latter case, the tipping point can be quite hard to reverse, but not impossible. In both cases, each group is still well served by eating healthier and being more active.
PS – As a side note, I tend to think that abdominal liposuction could be considered as a legit medical procedure (rather than cosmetic) at some point, given the role of abdominal fat in chemically making people fatter, as well as its role in chronic, systemic inflammation tied to everything from heart disease to cancer.
ctl,
sure, but regardless of what questions you intended to ask, data containing sample bias can still answer many interesting and important questions. it’s all about making sure that you restrict your questions to a realm where they are answerable by the data you have. obviously if you are only interested in one motivating question to the exclusion of all others, if that is the only metric of "success" you are reasonably willing to accept, then you are better off just re-taking the data with better sample controls in place.
Speaking of statistics, in baseball which totally loves statistics three things can happen:
You win, you lose or it can rain.
For those who have requested research:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VB8-46634CC-18&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=57d2e35cc10e78adf6b6c8ef6f8f822a
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=17469900&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google
Here are two links to abstracts of review articles (sorry, not sure these are available for free online) that discuss the problem
For those who have requested citations about the lack of efficacy of behavioral interventions, here are links to abstracts of two review articles. I’m not sure either one is available for free online though.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VB8-46634CC-18&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=57d2e35cc10e78adf6b6c8ef6f8f822a
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=17469900&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google
I’ve tried twice to link to a couple of review articles but apparently the links are being rejected. Here’s the reference info. I’m not sure if either one is available in full online though.
Am Psychol. 2007 Apr;62(3):220-33. Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: diets are not the answer. Mann T, Tominama AJ, Westling E., Lew AM, Samuels B., Chatman J.
BMJ 1994;309:655-656 Controversies in Management: Dietary treatments for obesity are ineffective. CS Wooley, DM Garner.
Both the articles are not freely available online, you can read the abstracts though. Â I’ll read the full articles tomorrow when I’m back at work and have access to the university servers.
Anyway, Â we’ve never claimed that diets alone are sufficient. Â There has always been a second component, you may remember it, it’s called exercise. Â Now when you combine diet, and exercise and enact a third thing, you may also remember it, it’s called a fundamental lifestyle change, then obese people have a chance at losing weight and keeping it off. Â In fact this is particularly what the article I cited, and Aziz ripped off, demonstrated. Â
Anyway, what we asked for were references that supported your contention that the vast majority (~99.9%, that’s the number Dean established, not me) of obese people is incapable of losing weight. Â I take that to mean they are physically incapable of losing weight. Â That is what I and Edgar have been asking you and Dean to support with references.
Nice effort though, those articles were far better than Dean’s fruit fly news story.
John Dakota wrote:
In this blog WE DONT OBEY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!!@!!
I do not believe that is a fair assessment of the situation.
It may be true that weight is the result of net calories absorbed minus net calories expended. That’s not what we’re talking about measuring, though.
You’re only measuring gross calories in, and calories expended through specific means. It doesn’t count undigested calories or radiated heat.
I’ll try this formula:
dm/dt = (Cal consumed – cal expelled – cal burned – cal radiated) / (9 cal/gm) /(unit time)
Your claim is that because "Cal consumed" and "cal burned" change, dm/dt must change. There are two non-trivial terms you’re ignoring.
So.. Â undigested calories don’t get counted in the overall net equation, big deal. Â I’ve never said you have to ‘calorie count’, i’ve said you simply have to run a calorie deficit in one way or another. Â That means you expell more energy than you take in (take in is not necessairly defined as your mouth). Â
Also, what are you talking about radiated heat? Â What in gods name do you think radiated head is derived from in a body? Â Last I checked it was an increase in energy expenditure, or the localization of blood to a particular area of your body. Â That’s still calories out. Â Hell when you’re sitting you still use up calories. Â
Dishman, comeon man.
JohnDakota,
I’m not particularly interested in Dean’s exact number, I personally suspect it’s higher than 1% but probably not higher than 15%.   I think I’ve done some legwork here, so quid pro quo; can you finally show us the study where ANY behavioral intervention or combination of interventions results in long-term reversal of obesity for at least a third of the participants? I would like to think you understand now why the National Weight Loss Registry does not demonstrate that.
My first point is that simple changes over a small range don’t necessarily have a proportional impact on calories absorbed.
On my second point, I was less than clear. By "calories burned" I was referring only to exercise.
For a given ambient temperature, core temperature, level of insulation and surface area a human body will radiate some amount of energy. That leaves two adjustable parameters, not even considering sweat. People will adjust those parameters such that they maintain their core temperature.
The amount of heat produced by the body is highly variable (more than a factor of 4 between strenuous exercise and sleep). Minor variations in heat production add up to a potentially significant portion of the total daily expenditure.
My meaning still isn’t clear, I know.
I’m trying to say that there are more free variables than diet and exercise alone.
JohnDakota,
You’re the one making a claim. You’re claiming that more than 1% of obese people can lose > X pounds and keep it off for more than Y years. You’re the one who has the responsibility of producing evidence for it.
Also, thermodynamics is not necessarily relelvant. It’s possible that a calorie deficit will result in a person dying before they become thin. This isn’t necessarily implausible — the body might change it’s muscle/fat reduction strategy so that after a while of being on a caloric deficit, but long before you’ve gotten rid of all of the fat, you’ve lost so much muscle that your heart won’t be strong enough to keep you alive. I’m not saying that I believe it, but it is plausible. It would also explain why obese people find it so hard to stay in a caloric deficit — their survival instinct might eventually kick in to get them to go back to being caloricaly positive.
Do you have any good reason to believe in iny particular behavior model that the body follows in extreme obesity? The body is a complex system regulated by tens of thousands of chemicals in complex relations to each other; do you have anything beyond your own intuition and a few success stories to explain why you believe that you know how the body regulates itself in extreme circumstances?
For all you (or I) know, the situation that I described above is common, and the success stories are people whose bodies have an unusually high preference for burning fat over muscle in a caloric deficit.
I hope not, of course. I want to lose about 40 pounds of fat, and I simply don’t accept the idea that it’s impossible. My diet is getting better, I’m back to lifting weights regularly, and now that it’s getting to summer time I’m going to take up riding my bicycle 4-6 times a week. Plus I dance at least once a week and I’m a roller derby referee, so I roller skate about twice a week. I fully believe that I can lose that much fat, while building muscle, in about a year (that is, trying to average losing about 1 pound of fat per week).
Elizabeth,
No, you’ve done NO legwork. Â Those articles you provided didn’t even remotely address anything I’ve demonstrated or contended. Â All they did was show diet alone didnt work, thanks for pointing out the obvious.
Dishman,
So if you wanted to do an accurate determination where all the calories were burnt it would be highly difficult. Â Thanks for coming out, I never said accurate measurements of where calories are exactly expended would be easy. Â Just read a few articles on that subject in any model system and you’ll see that while the researchers go to great lengths to be as accurate as possible, they’re still highly presumptuous about where energy is expended.
All I’ve said is that if you burn more than you take in you’ll inherently lose weight.  That is of course unless obese people function like fusion reactors.  Â
ctl,
Firstly, Dean claimed only 0.1% of the obese population can lose weight, and any example we provide showing obese people losing weight are these outliers.  Scan the threads, its pretty obvious this is the case.  For god sakes it’s even in the main text of his original thread! So what we’ve said is we don’t believe his 0.1% (or even the fact that the population is small).  The onus is on him and his affiliates to prove their point.  But as you can see, they’re slowly moving the bar as they see they’re losing.  Elizabeth wont even provide articles that deal with the fundamental issue now, but of course she thinks she has (experiments addressing diet alone dont measure the phanomenon we’re discussing). Â
"Also, thermodynamics is not necessarily relelvant."
Say what?? Thermodynamics is ABSOLULTELY RELEVANT!!  The people who explain away thermodynamics are the same people who dont understand thermodynamics.
If you’re looking for a wikipedia article that has a thermodynamic law saying "Obese people can only lose weight if they burn more energy than they take in," I’m not surprised you’ve failed at finding it. Â Thermodynamics is never presented that specifically because it applies to ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING IN OUR LIVES. Â
If you bothered to understand thermodynamics you’ll quickly notice the First Law;
"In a thermodynamic cycle the net energy supplied to the system and the net work done by the system is equal to zero."
So what does this have to do with obese people losing weight and keeping it off? Fat is simply stored energy.  So if you supply less energy than you need in a day, and you have fat stores (which obese people have ridiculous amounts of), their bodies will access the fat stores to maintain the activity and work the person is doing.  By extension of this daily calorie deficit they’ll lose weight.  Maintaining this over the long term a person loses lots of weight.  If you adjust and supply your body with enough energy to maintain daily activities you maintain weight.  Do you now see how thermodynamics absolutely applies?
"It’s possible that a calorie deficit will result in a person dying before they become thin."
Have you ever heard of a fat person dying of starvation?  If even 1% of the population were this sort of genetic freak we’d have seen literally THOUSANDS of them in the concentration camps during the 2nd world war.  I hate to use that example, but it’s the easiest way to quell this sort of ‘reaching for the stars’ BS explanation.  Clearly there were no fat people dying of starvation in the concentration camps, well not dying while still fat. Â
The body prioritizes what form of energy it uses depending on the type of work it’s doing (aerobic vs. anerobic), and depending on what energy source is available to it.  The order is as follows;
phospho-creatine>glucose>starches>fats>proteins
Used first <————————————–Used last
Read any book on metabolism, (I refuse to link to wikipedia) and you’ll see this prioritization every time. Â If you want an example of how this applies in real life, think of the Atkins diet. Â That diet forces you to take in absolutely ZERO carbs. Â That means your body doesn’t have sugar and starches available to it to make creatine. Â By extension your body is always burning fat as it’s energy source. Â That’s why people drop weight so fast on Atkins. Â There are a lot of negative side effects of this diet (cholesterol spikes, artheriosclerosis, CHD) I would never suggest it in application, but I think the example is useful to illustrate the energy source prioritization in the body.
"For all you (or I) know, the situation that I described above is common"
Ctl, I know your example is a load of crap.  You just pulled that out of think air hoping I’d have no formal training in physiology, metabolism and nutrition.  Yes the metabolism of obese people differ from healthy people, yes they’re unhealthy.  But by no means  does that infer the fundamental principles of thermodynamics and energy prioritization differ in obese to heathly people. Â
They can lose weight. Â They need to be motivated, dedicated, and stick to a proper diet and exercise routinely. Â They need to find something that makes them want to lose weight and keep to a long term program. Sounds simple, I know it’s not, but that’s just the reality of things.
JohnDakota,
I’m sorry, you’re just not pulling your weight in this discussion. Argument by assertion simply isn’t all that interesting.
hahah.. you’ve done NOTHING but assert. Would you like me to direct you to a book on metabolism that you will not even read? I’ll be happy to do that. Hell I"ll even give you the page numbers to read.
JohnDakota,
So providing you with references to two review articles discussing the evidence doesn’t count as backing up assertions? Interesting. Have you actually read them yet?
If it’s something I can obtain locally I’d be happy to read it. It’s hard to imagine a book on metabolism, though, that would counter the real-world evidence of the small percentage of people who manage to lose weight and keep it off compared to the number who try.Â
JohnDakota,
I don’t suppose that if you’re a troll, you’d be willing to say so now.
Dean has said that no one has ever proved that more than %.1 of obese people can become thin long term. No one has still seen any proof that more than %.1 of the population of obese people can. You seem to want people to believe that, you have to provide the evidence that it’s possible.
By the way, when a person goes into keytosis (carb deprivation), their body has a strong preference for using protein for energy over fat. Protein is much, much easier to convert into the intermediate forms used in the bodies energy cycles than is fat. This is especially true for the sort of molecules which the brain uses for fuel.
Also, you can only use the concentration camps as proof of anything if you can actually cite data about it. For all you know there were plenty of dead fat people and they just didn’t make for compelling photographs. It’s not exactly like you were there and took a survey of all of the corpses yourself. It’s not like you have any idea how many morbidly obese people went to concentration camps.
"By the way, when a person goes into keytosis (carb deprivation), their body has a strong preference for using protein for energy over fat. Protein is much, much easier to convert into the intermediate forms used in the bodies energy cycles than is fat. This is especially true for the sort of molecules which the brain uses for fuel."
Prove it.. i’m getting annoyed with people complain i "assert" but never prove (even though i’ve provided a useful scholarly article, and references to metabolism texts when necessairy), all the while they assert endlessly and think it’s fair game.
"Also, you can only use the concentration camps as proof of anything if you can actually cite data about it. For all you know there were plenty of dead fat people and they just didn’t make for compelling photographs. "
Ya.. because when the allies were liberating the concentration camps the first thing on their mind was "how can we keep the fat people from ruining the pictures of the beautiful emaciated concentration camp victims."Â Give me a break.Â
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