What if I told you that the idea that “People get fat because they take in more calories than they expend” is wrong?
That is exactly what this post does (in the Snippet tradition of contrarian ideas like here and here).
“Consider using the identical logic to describe, say, why people get wealthy. Economists would (I hope) be embarrassed by a money-balance theory of wealth: People get rich because they take in more money than they spend. Clearly wealthy people did. We know that because they’re wealthy. The increase in wealth is the positive money balance. But this says nothing about how or why they accumulate such wealth. In obesity research, this tautological logic — saying the same thing in two different ways but offering no explanation for either — was allowed to become the central dogmatic truth.“
Then what does cause obesity? “People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.“
