There is a correlation, it's just not a perfect one.

Dan Aris

Ummm...what?

That's generally brought up in the context of surveillance. Do you view reviews, by customers, of the products and/or services they've received from companies serving the public as being in the same category as overly broad and privacy-invading surveillance?

'Cause to me, that sounds like the kind of transparency a free market is built upon.

Dan Aris

I'm sure that happens too! ^_~

Dan Aris

There is one sure way to reduce negative reviews: Make sure your product and/or service is good quality.

Nothing can entirely eliminate negative reviews, because sometimes people just get a lemon product, or the person giving them service was having a bad day, or they're just ornery people who can't be satisfied. But if you do your job right, monitor your employees to make sure they're not slacking off or mistreating your customers—and, of course, the best way to do this is to make sure they're satisfied with their jobs in the first place—and don't skimp monetarily on the quality of your product, service, or employees, then you're likely to get more good reviews than bad.

Dan Aris

Except that that's not always true.

If they're in a monopoly position, sure; they can theoretically raise prices whenever and however much they want. If they're not, however, then they might just have to reduce the execs' bonuses this quarter, instead. (After all, if they could have raised prices before, why didn't they?) If you look at the statistics on where the profits of corporations have been going more and more over the past 40 years or so, you'll see that there's plenty of room for compensation at the top to be reduced to pay for all this sort of thing.

Dan Aris

Yes, seriously.

For a great many people, "switching ISPs" basically means moving. Because if you're lucky, you've got an option of DSL or cable, with DSL being effectively useless for anything but simple web browsing and email.

This is why we need true net neutrality—which means separating the medium from the message. Force the people who own the lines to at least lease them to anyone who asks, basically at cost...or, even better, break up the companies that own the lines so that that's all they do, and all the other services are part of a separate company.

Dan Aris

You're (apparently willfully obtusely) mixing up objective truth with what one believes to be true. It's always easier to remember facts that one has already learned (particularly from one's own past) than lies one has made up on the spot.

Dan Aris

I'm aware of this. However, I've seen some articles which explain that even this small difference is enough to cause problems—either that, or that it's something to do with how the fructose and glucose are connected. Or something; I'm afraid this type of chemistry isn't my strong suit.

Now you're just oversimplifying beyond the point of reason. That's like saying because they're all made up of the same elements, we might as well just drink gasoline.

Our bodies treat sugars (simple carbohydrates) and starches (complex carbohydrates) quite differently. Pretending otherwise because they're both examples of carbohydrates will get you laughed out of any biology class anywhere.

Or...maybe there's actually something different about a low-fat, high-carb diet and a low-carb, high-fat diet that convinces our bodies to store less energy as fat, and your attempts to rationalize away something that challenges your worldview are just that.

Dan Aris

You are also being overly simplistic about it.

Yes, obviously, one calorie of energy gained from an apple is equivalent to one calorie of energy gained from a chocolate bar.

But the point is, we don't eat food purely for the energy they give us, and health in general and weight gain in particular are governed by much more than the pure thermodynamics of the intake vs usage.

For one thing, maybe I can extract more calories from that apple than you can. And it's also known that eating certain types of food makes the body more likely to store energy as fat if they're eaten around the same time, regardless of how much energy is being expended. (More or less.)

So if you and I took identical meals, and ate them, and then performed identical exercise, there's a good chance that one of us would end up putting on more weight (or losing more weight) than the other. Because our body makeups and chemistries are different, our metabolisms are different, and our gut flora are different.

So yeah, if you want to be as stupidly pedantic as possible, one calorie is identical to every other calorie. But if you want to actually talk about something meaningful like health, different foods can be very different in the effects they will have on us, even if they have the exact same calorie count.

Dan Aris

Don't look at me, it was his term ;-)

Dan Aris

You're welcome to argue that over there in your world of spherical cows in a vacuum; however, I live in the real world, where real humans have a very important psychological aspect that simply can't be ignored. Thus, a diet that might be, in theory, absolutely ideal, but which leaves anyone attempting to eat it feeling hungry and lousy all the time really isn't going to be useful.

Good for you. You're lucky. That doesn't mean that everyone is that lucky, or that people who aren't as lucky as you are lazy, or have no willpower, or are otherwise just not as good a person as you. It means that they didn't get as good a number in the genetic/metabolic lottery.

No. That is exactly the fallacy that I have been trying to refute this whole time, and you seem to be simply ignoring it.

Our bodies don't "just need a certain amount of calories per day" (or week, or whatever time period). They need a certain amount of nutrients of the right types. Calories are important, yes, but they're not the be-all and end-all. We need proteins, and vitamins and minerals, or we'll develop all kinds of interesting diseases from malnutrition. We need a balanced diet.

It's not about how often one eats, or even how much one eats, though obviously those are important at a higher level. It's about what one eats when one does eat. And different people's bodies are different, in various ways and for various reasons, so there isn't one hard-and-fast rule "this is what you must eat, in these amounts, this frequently"—which is why you can cheerfully eat loads of carbs and I can't. (Well, I'd be cheerful temporarily, but it would catch up with me in the end ;-) )

Dan Aris

Hah! An excellent point, and one I hadn't even considered.

In any case, while I definitely agree with you, every time there's a story about nutrition, weight, or health in general, there's a large number of comments that express exactly that fallacy.

Dan Aris

In other words, if we treat humans as a machine, in which you can simply flick a switch marked "stop eating when you have actually eaten what you need," everything's hunky-dory.

Unfortunately, humans are very much unlike that sort of machine. Even a human with a great deal of what we generally term willpower is, by and large, dependent upon his body's signals to indicate when he has eaten enough. When those signals are interfered with, it's not just a matter of being a good enough person to stop eating, it's a matter of how do you actually know when to stop?

Even then it gets a little dodgy, but sure, we'll grant this for the sake of argument.

But that's not what we're talking about, are we? We're talking about being healthy. In particular, we're talking about what causes people to gain or lose weight. And while yes, eating twelve thousand calories of pizza and not exercising will cause you to gain weight, and eating a small bowl of brussels sprouts and running a marathon will cause you to lose weight (and probably die ;-) ), there's a lot of middle ground where the details of the food you're eating (percentages of carbs, fat, proteins, etc, and what kinds of each of those) matter more for what you can get out of the food than the straight-up calorie count.

Sure. I don't think any of that is in dispute. But that's not what you said. (And as I understand it, there are also more nuances than simply energy density, but that is starting to get into details where I'm fuzzier on how it all works.)

Furthermore, it's also not feasible for a great many people in this day and age to "spend a day being active all day" more than once in a while. I know I work at a desk all day, and a lot of other people do the same. That makes it highly impractical to get the kind of exercise you're talking about. And just increasing exercise a little bit doesn't even always help. Indeed, I moved 3 years ago to be closer to my job, and started walking a mile and a quarter to and from work most days...and my weight didn't even budge.

However, last fall I cut nearly all carbohydrates (simple and complex—that is, sugars and starches) out of my diet, and lost 50 pounds in 4 months. Yes, I was eating a little bit less, but not nearly enough to account for the amount of weight I lost. And I was having bacon and eggs for breakfast many mornings, and plenty of other very rich foods—just not sugary foods or starchy foods. (And it was hard to do. But suffice it to say that I had some strong motivation specifically to cut out carbs for that period of time—the weight loss, in my case, was a nice bonus.)

Now, that's just an anecdote. On its own, it would mean very little. But given that the article we're both commenting on is about a scientific study that shows that I'm not the only one that can be true for, I think it's quite relevant.

Dan Aris

The lack of understanding betrayed by this is almost ludicrous.

They didn't need to eat a "hipster diet" 50 years ago to avoid getting hugely fat, because an enormous part of the problem is the percentage of our food today that is processed, and the percentage that contains vast amounts of sugar (and particularly high fructose corn syrup). Which is exactly what (many of) the "hipster diets" strive to emulate.

I realize that on Slashdot, where people tend to be highly math-oriented, it's a popular fallacy to believe that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. However, studies like this one have been coming out for years now showing that that's simply not true.

Some kinds of energy are easier for our bodies to extract from food than others. Some kinds of food make our bodies feel more full than others. And our bodies need more in terms of nutrition than just calories—so, contrary to one of your other posts, no, a 12 thousand calorie diet of pizza cannot be healthy, unless the toppings on that pizza are very carefully selected to provide the nutrients that our bodies actually need.

It would be nice if nutrition were a simple formula, where you could just calculate calories in minus calories expended and come out with a nice, pleasing mathematical formula. But the human body isn't a spherical body in a vacuum, and "calorie" isn't a unit of nutrition, no matter how much you try to make it so.

Dan Aris