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Metabolic Scientist Explains Why Calories are not the Cause of Obesity (eye opening research)

you propose something interesting Dr Noritz so you suggest potentially that calories don't cause obesity y can you elaborate a bit once SEC yeah I would stand by that statement calories don't cause obesity and the typical response to that before you can even get another word out is some suggestion that you're breaking the laws of physics um that you know calories and calories out is a manifestation or an expression of dynamics that applies to humans so to say calories don't cause obesity would be to deny that and you must be a loon maybe I'm overintellectualizing this but I it's what I do so I'll do it anyway um the word cause is very particular and the statement calories don't cause obesity is not the same as saying calories don't matter or calories in calories out equals weight change doesn't apply those things can coexist but when we say cause I think we're talking about pathophysiology ideology what is the driving force and that doesn't necessarily need to be calories you can have that calories in minus calories out equals weight change equation hold over the long term without calories being the driving force but rather calories being the consequence so I'll give you another way to think about calories which is as or not a way to think about calories a way to think about obesity which is a disorder a primary metabolic disorder in fuel partitioning so when you eat food the chemical energy in that food is released can call those calories your body then has to decide well what do I do with these calories there lots of things it can do it can build lean tissue it can sort in fat it can expand it as things like non- exercise activity thermogenesis and then Downstream of that your body Downstream that decision is going to kind of compensate so say you store the energy in fat tissue body can then Downstream compensate with increases in hunger and decreases in energy expenditure to make the calories in versus calories out math work but the calories in and the calories out are consequences not cause the cause is something Upstream which is dysfunctional fuel partitioning I'll pause there for any challenges because we can add layers to this we can go very deep on this now after today's video I put a link down below for seed daily symbiotic if you're trying to change your diet up I would recommend you add a good quality probiotic or at least some good fermented foods in if you don't go that route but seed is a unique probiotic because it has a Prebiotic and a probiotic in one capsule so you see there's two sort of capsules in one so it breaks down in different areas of your gut so you have a better likelihood of proper colonization of the bacteria in the lower part of the intestinal track where you want the bacteria to colonize so seed is super unique with how they're built but also it's the only probiotic that I personally would recommend I think most probiotics are garbage because they all break down in the Hostile gut so seed is unique and I definitely recommend you check them out and that is a 25% off discount link for people that watch this channel so again 25% off in the top line of the description underneath this video which came first the chicken or the egg in this case so if someone is how did they become obese in the first place was it a calories in calories out situation that got them there I could see like once you're already there that there's a fuel partitioning situation but what about prior to that well the fuel partitioning exists a priority to having obesity if your say hormonal milu is such that you're going to store more calories and fat and that's going to lead to Downstream more hunger and less energy expenditure you can do that with small fat cells like it doesn't need to be the the steady state of obesity actually it more describes the dynamic nature of um uh obesity development uh the point of the matter is that you can uncouple fat gain which is what we're primarily interested in from calories now this might be heresy to say but I think this is best actually done in animal models where you can control things um well so imagine you have Mouse group X and mouse group Y and you can manipulate Mouse group X and you can do this where they gain more fat and end up weighing more even eating the same calories and with the same locomoter activity they're moving the same amount we can do this um and so that shows you can uncouple you know calories from uh obesity and weight gain um and the laws of physics applied to rodents just as they do to humans so that demonstrates the the principle you can actually even feed that one group fewer calories and they'll end up being having more fat than the um other group but what I'd emphasize is then imagine you took that group of rats the ones predisposed to Fat game because of dysfunctional fuel partioning right you separated them out from group y so even though group X eats less has more fat than group y now we're just looking at group X then you ask the question are they going to more fully manifest the Obesity phenotype if they have restricted food intake kept to that parate feeding schedule or if they're given access to unlimited food and the clear answer to that would be well they're going to more fully manifest the Obesity phenotype when they're given access to more food you could even say more calories that's another layer how like calorie and food access can matter there are other things Beyond just the you know purely metabolic but what sets the stage for the fat development is what your body's deciding deciding to do with the calories and this can become confusing when you think about things like well I'm going to try to make the argument that you know if you just eat 10,000 calories can you know and you're not active can your body not gain weight can it decide I'm just going to expend this energy what I'd say to that is we know that acute feeding trials do not translate to long-term results so not enough time is typically given for metabolic adaptations to kick in that would bring you back to a quote weight homeostasis so what we're interested in here is chronic obesity development which I would say the more strongly supports a fuel partitioning issue um than a primary calorie issue and on top of that I think it's a more functional way for people to look at the problem because focusing on calories and this is more of an opinion statement but I think tends to lead to a mindset of you know what will affect the scale tomorrow morning which might end force people or direct people to eating things that might actually adversely affect their fuel partitioning think about like the you know 90 calorie ice cream bar or something um rather than focusing on things that will more favorably affect their hormonal milu to favor fuel ptioning things like say macadamia nuts or avocado and when you look at the literature eating like low calorie sugar Rich things to mean I mean it will tend to lead to weight gain fat gain things that are quote high calorie like this is a pretty like conspicuous thing under our noses macadamia nuts I know of one trial one Interventional trial where they just said eat more macadamia nuts and in four weeks there was actually a significant reduction in BMI like I guess how do you a very high level question is like how do you square that was it that they were filled up by the fat and if so again we're talking about like hormonal muu not about calories as a direct driver yeah you can tell I'm struggling with this because there's a way to go down it that's very academic and there's a way to go down it that is more um clinically applicable and I've kind of in this conversation chosen the Middle Road and maybe that's not helpful but I guess I would just challenge people to think about the assumption that just because thermodynamics applies does that necessarily mean that calories are the driving force M or could they be more like the steering it's more like the wheels of the car rather than the steering wheel yeah like there's nothing implicit in calorie balance that makes calories the cause so that singular word cause I think has a lot of weight that we don't tend to think about I think in some ways maybe exercise is a little bit of the same discussion right you think about okay if I eat more but I exercise more that's more energy moving through the system right it's energy flux if I eat a lot more and I exercise a lot more there's a lot more energy moving through the system and I think of this as okay well is that sort of an accelerator to correct this fuel partitioning right like if I'm going through daily life and I'm just walking into doing my normal motions and I have X amount of sort of transactions occurring in my body but if I Accel it all by eating more and moving more I have more transactions more opportunity to change my physiology and so we no one's denying that exercise burns calories and that that's great like sure that's absolutely a thing but is a lot of the effect that we're seeing potentially with obesity and exercise is it these Downstream effects that are happening as a result of okay we're correcting the metabolic Machinery so to speak yeah I think it's a very good way of looking at it um I think high level it explains why some things like resistance training is great because it while may not burn quote a lot of calories in the short term it stresses your body in such a way that then going to partition fuel towards building that lean tissue with positive metabolic effects another thing that your description brought to mind was just the extent of heterogeneity in how people respond to overfeeding um so for example there was a trial in the '90s uh I think it was LaVine at all I think it was in science where they overfed people 1,000 calories beyond their calculated needs and there ended up being a tfold variation in fat storage which was primarily um attributable to changes in non-exercise activity thermogenesis neat the reason I think this is very interesting um is one like we all we all know those people and I'm one of those people where it's like you feed me more I will just have more energy my body temperature will go up I've done this experiments my body temperature will go my heart rate will go up I'll Jitter all the time and the energy will just be expended my body is very good at compensating for quote excess energy and some people aren't so what accounts for that physiologic difference is it something that is inborn to me or is it something that we can manipulate at a behavioral level this is why I thought about it when you said what you said is like if you have structured into your life more activity and that's just like habitual to your life then I would imagine the extent to which you you know eat a little more a little less each day there's going to be more space for your body to play with like energy expenditure conservation tweaking you know what I mean like you said there's more transactions throughout the day so I think there's lots of layers to think about this but um bringing it back again to the like the tension between talking about calories and calories out is just like a principle of physics and then the clinical application like what does it mean that there are say in overfeeding experiments 10-fold variations in fat storage just from meat cuz you combine that with the difficulties in generally you know calculating energy expenditure in the first place or energy intake Beyond like errors on nutrition labels but like people aren't measuring their you know caloric intake to a t um so with all the variation and difficulty in calculating like how can you really implement this effectively over the long term rather than focusing on what variables will favor fuel partitioning or trying to discover physiologically like why am I a high neat responder and my dad isn't then we share similar genetics and how you can tweak those things what's your take on I've asked this question before on like the constrained energy model in this case I mean it's kind of interesting it's almost like we each have our own individual sort of I don't want to call set point that's kind of a wait I guess I could just call it set point but it's I mean that would explain some of these things I know it's you know it's not totally flushed out but what's your take on that um I think each so set point I think you're people have like a set point multiplier is that a good way to explain it where it's like your set point will change based on your environment and metabolic challenges um so I know like even with way less exercise I weigh way less now on a low carb diet than I did in a higher carb diet I've always been a small person though so the environmental change in my diet and lifestyle will change my personal W weight set point but it was probably set somewhere on the lower end to begin with whereas other people might be something different and I think about it more as people talk about maintenance calories I think about it more as like kind of like different people have different uh depth buffers I I've done this before and I think probably other people can as well but the fact of the matter is I can do it like I can maintain my weight at 2,200 calories if I feed to 4,000 calories for a month I do not gain an ounce I just Jitter more and my body temperature goes up my heart rate goes up so different people have abilities to compensate differently and I think some people have generally lower set points or smaller buffers that provides a challenge but it's not anything that I think is fixed in stone and I do tend to think it's modifiable it's very interesting from an academic level what things could modify it um to kind of boil out to something like really subcellular for example there's um literature on insulin signaling it's something called the Ral a derp axis which changes your mitochondrial Mor morphology changing Fusion Vision Dynamics and if you have like a little bit more Fusion balance you end up actually with you um larger charges across a mitochondrial membrane things like that where you actually can have a higher potential for energy expenditure this has been shown like really primarily in vitro and preclinically so I'm not saying this has been demonstrated in humans but the complexity of just how our physiology and our hormones affects our morphology even at that level and what those Dynamics could mean cuz we're not just like running on batteries or in a bomb calorimeter we're built up of cells with organel that have fluctuating Dynamics in every minute and how our environment intersects with that is so incredibly complex that I think less so carbs versus not carbs fuel partioning versus calories I probably have a chip on my shoulder about the reductionism of um obesity physiology yeah which is why I say things like calories don't cause obesity CU they're relevant too but I don't see them as any degree and to any extent a pathophysiological explanation for the phenomenon which I think requires a lot more nuance and humility both from a scientific advancement point of view but also just and this is my opinion but how perspectives like that trickle down into what is effectively patient blaming including patients blaming themselves and we're still seem to be stuck in this like you know everything in moderation balanced diet approach which I just I perceive is hurting a lot of people again that's my perspective but now doing an emotional audit on myself I think that's where I come from when I say calories don't obesity now let's really dissect and intellectualize what the word cause means because I know that statement's going to get reactions but I want those reactions as a foundation to then have that discussion I think I think you're dead on with that I think that that discussion needs to be had because when you get down to the the the guilt and the shame that people carry with them uh because of overeating or undereating or whatever the case may be like that is definitely going to dictate the decisions that they make and that's going to dictate their biases it's going to dictate whether they have success with it or not right you have a lot of people out there that have restricted calories for a very long time or tried to without the kind of success that they would hope to have or mathematically would make sense to have um yet they still believe that is the hard and fast only way simply because we're not having these discussions and so then they continue to blame themselves more and it just becomes ugly and I again I'm not saying that calories don't matter I know you're not either but I do agree that these discussions need to be had we need to be opening up the playing field a little bit more so that there's an open mind to these discussions an open mind to the literature because we're never going to really be able to liberate people from like the psychological turmoil they put themselves through I'm not even going to say obesity I'm just going to say the psychological turmoil that comes with overeating and and obesity and whatnot until we have these discussions yeah so well Dr norwitz where can everyone find you man um I'm at Nick norwitz on basically all social media n i k n o r w TZ and uh yeah there's no other Nick Noritz is so I'm easy to find right on my man thanks thanks

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