Reddit mentions of Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism

This isn’t a personal attack, but debating this with people who haven’t read a single nutrition textbook is impossible. I’m talking about the only CICO that anyone could possibly mean in this discussion.

Obviously the human body as a system does not violate the conservation of energy. Not a single person who is sufficiently educated to cite a law of thermodynamics is going to argue that a meal plan can violate it. So I don’t know why you would crusade against a misinterpretation so outlandish that nobody is ever going to present it.

> there is a lot of variety to choose from to find what works for each person.

There’s a functionally infinite number of diets to choose from, in terms of simply which combinations of foods you’re eating, but they’re all just different ways to achieve adequate amounts of a finite number of nutrients necessary for life processes. If you’re getting same nutrient load from one combination of foods or another one, and they’re calorically similar, those diets aren’t really different in the parameters of this topic.

CICO is a reductionist attitude towards nutrition that states that guessing your caloric deficit and staying under it is a viable solution to maintaining a healthy wait over long periods. That claim has been disproven, for decades, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any reputable figure in the field defend it. Playing the CICO game tapers down your metabolic efficiency, and you end up reducing your average burn rate, and having to restrict your caloric intake more and more to avoid a backlash of weight gain, because you’re perpetually keeping your body in a highly anabolic state, and decreasing your insulin sensitivity, so it’s chomping at the bit to store every calorie as fat. The explosion of popular support behind cyclical calorie restriction, which is called intermittent fasting now (16/8 and other feeding windows, “one meal a day”, etc) is still traversing social media, but it’s been a widespread position in nutritional science for, again decades. I can think off-hand of a couple of studies that came out about 20 years ago on Ramadan fasting, which showed transient improvements across several endocrine parameters. The references in this paper are a good resource on the subject.

https://watermark.silverchair.com/znu00407000981.pdf

If you are interested in the subject, here are two texts commonly used in metabolic science courses:

https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Nutrition-Metabolism-Sareen-Gropper/dp/1305627857

https://www.amazon.com/Biochemistry-Jeremy-M-Berg/dp/1464126100

Vegans are religious fanatics about their diet. Reading their books, checking their websites and joining their groups is like essentially saying that you should join a church group and read the Bible to learn if Christianity is true. The sources are all biased in favor of the belief.

Instead of reading blogs and websites, people should go to Google Scholar and actually search for real scientific papers on the topic and they should buy a real textbook on how the fuck human metabolism works. There are real life Biochemists who study human metabolism for a living, but no one wants to read their work. Instead, they'd rather read the blog of some dude who looks buff in his photos or a blonde girl with a nice ass that says her juice date made her hot, not her amazing genetics. Here's a good starting point. Notice how the WHO finds that a mixed diet increases protein absorption if you check:

TABLE 6-7 Example of Calculations Needed for Adjustment of Protein Allowances for a Diet with 33%, Animal- and 67% Vegetable-Source Protein.

TABLE 6-6 Values for the Digestibility of Protein in Humansa

33% of the diet from animal sources. By golly gosh, that sounds like a balanced diet! But I think your own experience at least proves to you that vegan doesn't work.

Dieting is still a form of disordered eating which can be a quick spiral back into eating disorder behaviors. The fact that the brain only functions at 60% if backed by evidence. Its even in my advanced metabolism textbook. What research have you read that supports that its good for people with eating disorders? I can send my grad research if you're interested in reading it.