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You could only dismiss this with that much arrogance if your body digested every single calorie of food you ingest with 100% efficiency, which it doesn't. And you need to conclude that people are all motivated by food to exactly the same extent, which is also not true.
(It might still be wrong, but the debunking needs to be less pithy and more thorough).
It's important to realize that saying it's not a "calorie problem" is not the same as saying "it has nothing to do with calories".
It's saying it's the wrong place to try to find a leverage point for defeating it.
What Taubes is claiming is that talking about calories to someone who is obese doesn't help them. Like Nicholson's character says in "As Good As It Gets", it's like describing the water to someone who is drowning: it's information that is true, but doesn't solve their problem.
How you do that does matter though, because how easy it is affects how likely it is that you would succeed at weight loss.
This is like saying it doesn't matter what means of transport you take to work because if you keep moving you'll get there eventually. It's kind of true, but it's missing the point - it's obviously better to e.g. cycle than to crawl.
Edit: before you nitpick about one being faster I'll change my analogy to walking forwards vs walking backwards at the same speed.
You ignire the fact that human bodies have various systems to keep weight in place. E.g. with a calorie surplus most people will inadvertedly do more small movements to burn up to 600kcal/day without even noticing.
Without those systems, with just a 100kcal a day, you would gain 5kg of fat a year.
Calories are a unit of energy, not weight. Conflating the two is sloppy thinking.
Eat nothing but grass and you will die of starvation. Yet ruminants live on grass, and its energy content can be measured with a calorimeter. Thermodynamics are a poor mechanism for understanding biology.
The number of calories are largely irrelevant. The hormones direct what is done with those calories. Is it used or stored. The body has multiple ways of burning more or less energy.
Stating that this isn't a problem if thermodynamics isn't saying thermodynamics isn't real. It is just saying that it doesn't apply in this problem, i.e. it is an irrelevant factor.
It is similar to saying speed isn't the reason you are late to work today. There was an accident and the freeway was locked up. Speed is still real. It just doesn't explain anything.
does it literally say it "has nothing to do with"?
Ctrl-f tells me that no, it does not.
If a problem were solved, then the problem would be solved. But that doesn't mean that every problem is best described as a "solve the problem"-problem .
Indeed, if the mass that exits the body (including via respiration) is more than the mass that enters it, then the mass of the body decreases. This is obvious. If you think that people advocating different focuses don't believe this, I think you are for the most part mistaken.
When people say that something "is an <X> problem", I think they generally mean (something along the lines of) that the most useful way (or, one way among the more useful ways) to think about the problem, is to think of it in terms of <X> , or that <X> is important to think about when trying to solve or understand the problem.
So, when someone says "It is a hormone problem, not a calorie problem", they aren't saying that human bodies violate conservation of mass, they are saying that the best way to understand the problem is through hormones, and how the hormones influence the mass in vs mass out.
When someone is drunk, they tend to behave differently. Surely you understand this? When someone is hungry, they tend to behave differently.
"In the future, eat less and exercise more." Is not an atomic action that a person can take at a given time. A person in the moment makes a decision as to what to do in that moment, and this can include thoughts or other mental actions with the goal of influencing their future decisions.
But, if one's current "decision" to do something in the future is only a mental action with the goal of influencing the future actions, then to succeed in influencing those future actions, doing things that influence one's body chemistry and thereby influence one's future actions, can be helpful, and possibly more consistently effective than merely making some mental actions.
Suppose one wants to act in a professional and formal manner during a meeting which takes place in a few(?) hours. If one has this goal, then it may be helpful to currently refrain from drinking large quantities of alcohol.
If one has adhd and needs to be able to focus on some task later in the day, that may be a reason for them to not refrain from taking their prescribed medication.
Our decision making processes are not like a RL-agent simply getting data in and sending actions out, but always using the same process, but rather, our interactions with the environment can influence our decision making processes.
We can get drunk. we can consume caffeine. We can consume things that influence thought processes in more radical ways (like, hallucinogens or whatever). A railroad spike through the brain can drastically and in a long-term way alter someone's behavior.
If someone has an alien brain-slug on their head that compels them to punch spotted dogs that they encounter, the solution to this is not to tell them "stop punching spotted dogs", but to tell them to remove the alien brain-slug. This is true even if the former would result in them sometimes successfully resisting the compulsion to punch spotted dogs.
(?) : I don't actually know how long it takes for someone to become drunk or cease being drunk, as I've never really been around people while they have been drunk.
I am neither a journalist or a scientist, but experiments done on my own body for the last 20 years (body hacking, you could call it) has led me to conclude pretty much the same thing as described in this article. I.e. it works on my own body - I dont know what works for others.
> The conventional approaches don’t work because while we can sustain eating less for a while, eventually the hunger gets us because we’re semi-starving ourselves.
I interpreted him as saying it is a viable approach scientifically, but one that does not practically work because people get hungry while taking that approach and quit.
we get hungry because we are over stimulated. from sight to smell to sounds..every one of our sensory organs is primed to consume more food for the experience. not necessarily for calories.
There is a difference between "hungry" and "hungry". Doing some fasting will teach the difference. One is a feeling of withdraw, not unlike from an addiction, we know there is food available and that it is pleasurable and our mind tells us to go and grab it. The second one is more physiological, a very different sensation and comes from the core/stomach. You feel like a black hole in your core.
When you eat at very specific hours you'll get an urge to eat around that same hour even if you took a big meal a few hours before. That's the addiction speaking.
What you are mentioning is the first one, cravings, these can be biased/manufactured by society and ads. I suspect that if we only really ate when we are physiologically hungry there wouldn't be any overweight issue.
He's arguing for eating different types of foods (fats instead of carbohydrates). I have no idea if that's a good idea or not, but there would be no violation of the laws of thermodynamics if it did work. (Admittedly headline is awkwardly worded)
