By: Kennedy Shelley
The energy balance theory is the way most of us think about weight.
The idea that calories in has to be less than calories out is the way to lose weight is the prevailing model in the diet industry.
In other words, if you are fat, it’s your fault you ate too much.
But what if it’s wrong and we’ve known why for over 70 years?
GERMANY WAS WHERE THE RESEARCH WAS
Prior to WWII most of the world’s obesity research was taking place in Germany, the land where the calorimeter was discovered.
Scientists there started seeing a serious problem with the idea that calories in had any bearing on fat storage.
One of the first clues was puberty. Young men muscled up as teens, and young women started gaining fat in the hips and breasts.
To the Germans, this obviously meant that fat storage was hormonally-based.
The Austrian and German diet and fat experts were endocrinologists, who were doctors who specialized in hormones. America’s diet doctors in the ‘50s were statisticians who didn’t understand biology.
Most of our current thoughts on obesity came about because of observational studies in the 1950s and ‘60s, not double-blind trials.
In other words, no one was locked in a lab and given a special diet to see what the result was, America’s diet experts looked at big populations, tried to figure out what people ate and then tried to figure out if this is what made people fat.
The easiest thing to measure was calories, so it was obvious to them that ounce for ounce, pound for pound, fat has more calories, so reducing fat would make you thin.
ARE ALL CALORIES EQUAL?
But this implies that all calories are equally used by the body.
Is this true? Prior to WWII, the answer was no. The diet scientists then knew that 100 calories of sugar would set off an insulin response and increase glucose in the blood which the body would work to store as fat.
The same number of calories in fat would not spike insulin or glucose and the body would convert it to energy in the liver.
Unfortunately, much of this knowledge was lost or forgotten about for nearly 60 plus years.
Gary Taubes’ book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, makes the case that when many of these Jewish scientists came to the US, they were excluded from positions at many of the Ivy League schools because of anti-Semitism so their ideas were not taught to a generation of doctors.
The American view of obesity focused on energy balance assuming all calories are equal, and some are more dangerous than others. Especially fat, which was assumed to go straight from your mouth to your bloodstream.
Somehow, they forgot that cholesterol is present in every cell in the body and is manufactured by the liver.
But the message of calories in, calories out has been particularly important to sugar, and carbohydrate manufacturers who want us all to think that a calorie is a calorie.
Pepsi Co. and Coke are major sponsors of nutritional groups who push the eat less and move more mantra, and groups that look at the body’s hormonal responses to food are left to fend for themselves.
Freedom Health News is fighting back against this idea. We have been doing more and more articles pushing back against this idea that all calories are equal. For instance, in this article we have shown that sugar is particularly dangerous to your health.
Your food triggers your hormones and this is going to affect your weight and your health.
