Dr. Michael Eades. Why Do Low Carb Diets Work for Weight Loss? When You Lose Weight on Any Kind of a Diet, Where Does it Go?
Feb 4, 2023 Dr. Michael R. Eades received his BSCE degree in Civil Engineering from California Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), Pomona, California and his MD from the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences (UAMS). After completing training in General Surgery as UAMS, Dr. Eades (along with his wife) founded Medi-Stat Medical Clinics, a chain of general family medicine outpatient care centers in central Arkansas, where he practiced general family medicine for over a decade. In 1996, Dr. Eades co-authored (with Mary Dan Eades, MD), their first joint book project ‘Protein Power’, which became a national and international bestseller, selling over 3 million copies and spending 63 weeks on the NY Times Best Seller List. The Drs. Eades have appeared as guest experts on hundreds of radio and television shows across America. Their work has been featured regionally and nationally on NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC and seen in such publications as Newsweek, the NY Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. Please consider supporting Low Carb Down Under via Patreon. A small monthly contribution will assist in the costs of filming and editing these presentations and will allow us to keep producing high quality content free from advertising.
Transcript
0:01[Music]
0:16I want to ask everybody a question a couple of questions in fact I want you
0:21to think about two things during this talk the first one is
0:27why do low carbs work for weight loss because I’m going to give you a really concrete reason that you’ve probably
0:33never heard before so think about why low carb diets work for weight loss and
0:39also the other question is when you lose weight on a low carb diet or when you
0:45lose weight on any kind of a diet for that matter where does it go so Ponder Ponder those questions while
0:52we while we move along oh and uh
0:58I hate to go to these meetings because I’m so busy I can’t listen because I’m scribbling down citations so I’ve put
1:04all these citations on my website it’s proteinpower.com front slash low carb
1:09USA bokeh so don’t bother trying to copy anything down it’ll all be there there’s even a little video included in this and
1:16the video is going to be on there too so this all started my my thought
1:22process on this started back in night in 2007 back in the early 2000s about 20
1:28years ago not quite 20 years ago I decided for whatever reason to start blogging about low carb issues and one
1:36day and and September of 2007 I was you know
1:42plotting along through my meaningless pitiful life and all of a sudden I was
1:47embroiled in this huge internet controversy and it in the grand scheme
1:52of things it was just a tempest and a teapot but when you’re in the middle of the Tempest in the teapot it’s a huge
1:57deal and I had written this this post as a calorie always a calorie and somebody that had a popular website
2:05at the time who will remain unnamed uh attacked me over it and somebody said
2:10something to me in the comments about it and I answered them back and said well I think he’s wrong and that fired him off
2:16and the next thing I knew he had published a 50-page book on why I was an
2:22idiot and not only why I was an idiot why Richard Feynman who’s a biochemist and Gene fine both of him wrote a a uh a
2:31paper on the thermodynamics of low carb diets and Gary Thomas who’s a good friend of mine they were all idiots and
2:37the guy admitted that he had never read Gary’s book but just associating with me was enough to make
2:43him an idiot so I got into this big deal with this
2:48guy and it was all over this blog post and so this is really what got me thinking about this because I didn’t
2:54think about it when I wrote the blog post and this blog post was about the uh the Ansel key starvation study in
3:00Minnesota and I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with that and it started out he had recruited 37 I think conscientious
3:08objectors gave him 12 weeks of a uh really a normal diet their typical diet
3:14and then put them on a 24-week starvation diet and after the 24 week
3:20starvation diet they went from looking like this this one guy when he came in to looking like that 24 weeks later and
3:28they all looked like that they were all skin and bones they had all kinds of
3:33problems they slept all the time they were lethargic they obsessed on food they developed psychiatric disorders
3:40some of them resorted to self-harm it was a miserable experience for them and they were kept under lock and key so
3:47this was you know a good study would never make it through an Institutional review board today
3:52but anyway we’ve got we got a lot of good data from that study but what I wrote about this study other than just
3:58describing it I had just read a study by John yudkin who is a hero of mine and he
4:05had uh he had recruited a few students and some faculty members at the college where where he was in London and he
4:12wanted to see what the nutritional adequacy of a low-carb
4:18diet was because people back then this was in the 50s well he wrote this paper in the 70s but back in the 50s and 60s
4:25there were a lot of people going on low carb diets and people were saying well it’s nutritionally inadequate so he
4:30wanted to see what it was if it was nutritionally adequate so he told these
4:35people all about how to do a low carb diet it just left them to their own devices and they kept food Diaries and
4:42what ended up happening and this is the paper and what ended up happening is that they
4:49started out with 2330 calories and they spontaneously reduced their caloric
4:55intake to 1560 calories and if you look at the diet that that Ansel Keys put these poor guys on who
5:03starved they were on a 1570 calorie diet but it
5:08was a high carb low-fat diet they actually had a little bit more protein on the Yadkin diet and so the same diet
5:16that these guys starved on the edcan people who were also young and not
5:21really obese they spontaneously restricted their calories to a little bit lower than that and did fine and
5:27that was the whole deal of my calorie is a calorie really a calorie and which set this guy off and
5:35started this whole thing and started me thinking about it all and when I wrote back about this because
5:40one of the things that came up was this concept of a metabolic advantage and when I wrote about this is I said you
5:48know the metabolic Advantage is at the max about 300 kcals per day now
5:54the uh that this was all in 2007. now in 2012 uh David Ludwig’s group did a
6:02really intensive study on a bunch of people I’m not going to go into a lot of the details on the study because this is just a lead up to what I really want to
6:08talk about and when he did this uh they found that lo and behold
6:15the total energy expenditure differed by approximately 300 calories per day so it
6:21it kind of confirmed what I had guessed at uh in terms of this so-called metabolic advantage and I want to talk
6:28about the metabolic Advantage because it used to appear in all kinds of papers and it’s kind of antiquated now because
6:34what we really are talking about is increased energy expenditure if you’re on a 2000 calorie diet and it makes you
6:41expend 2200 or 2300 calories then you got a 300 KCAL increased energy
6:48expenditure from the diet and that is the cause the metabolic Advantage is the
6:55result so when you hear metabolic Advantage just think increased energy expenditure
7:01now everybody talks about the when they talk about diets and calories they talk
7:06about the first law of thermodynamics now here’s what Gary had to say about it and good calories bad calories is this
7:12conviction that positive caloric balance causes weight gain is founded on the belief that this proposition is an Inca
7:19controvertible implication of the first law of thermodynamics
7:24and it’s basically calories in versus calories out the kaiko guys now when you this is a
7:32metabolic chamber and what happens in a metabolic chamber because this is the way you measure increased energy
7:38or total energy expenditure you’ve got to look at the decrease in oxygen the
7:44increase in CO2 which is a combustion product put it through all these equations and bingo you come out with it
7:50and this is what a metabolic chamber looks like so you’re going to see that this is an expensive proposition to put
7:55people on metabolic Chambers which is why they don’t use them a whole lot because they are really pricey another
8:01thing that’s really pricey is doubly labeled water which is another way to determine increased energy expenditure
8:06and all the people that we’re I’m going to talk about who are the kaiko team all think that that doubly labeled water is
8:13the gold standard and I’ve heard them say it in talks that’s the gold standard for measuring energy expenditure but it
8:19too is expensive when liftsin came up Nathan lifson from University of Minnesota came up with it back in the
8:24late 1940s to do it on he didn’t do it on people he did it on mice but if he did it on
8:30people it would have cost about 250 000 in experiment and now it’s down to about 600 bucks it’s more reasonable but
8:36they’re still expensive which is why people don’t use them that often so anyway and in 2016 Kevin Hall and his
8:45group did this big study that sort of kicked off this whole calories in
8:50calories out versus the carbohydrate insulin model you all know what the carbohydrate insulin model is Right more
8:56or less okay that’s kicked off this this real debate about it and what what they
9:02found in this study was that uh and what they did is they put people on what they
9:09call the basic diet the BD which was a low-fat High carbohydrate that it was 300 grams of carbohydrate a day and 30
9:16grams of fat another 91 grams of protein and the people on the ketogenic diet
9:21were on 30 grams of carbohydrate a day uh and I think 225 grams of fat I can’t
9:27remember exactly but anyway they did this in a metabolic chamber and they did doubly labeled water and they put them
9:33in there they put them which I think is kind of unfair they put them on the Baseline diet the high carbohydrate diet
9:38first for two weeks then they follow it up put two weeks on the ketogenic diet
9:44with them having the same amount of time on the metabolic chamber two days at a time every week on all four weeks in the
9:50doubly labeled water the last two weeks of the experiment and the uh and and what they came up with on this uh is
9:58that compared with the basic diet the ketogenic diet coincided with an increased energy expenditure of 57
10:05calories a day kcals a day and 89 calories during sleep and and 151
10:12calories using doubly labeled water and they and
10:17all these people that had gone around promoting doubly labeled water and saying that it was the gold standard now
10:23said well it’s not as good in this study as the metabolic chamber because it came out higher of course and they said the
10:3057 is it’s just an artifact so it really is zero increased energy expenditure so it really is all just calories in and
10:37calories out and subsequent to that there have been just paper after paper
10:44after paper from both of these groups and every time a paper comes out the other group attacks it and then the next
10:50group writes a paper and then the other group attacks it and it’s just going down the pathway of attacking attacking
10:56attacking and what has ended up happening is that the calories in calories out guys have got this down to
11:01where it really is very little difference between the two of them but in terms of excess energy expenditure
11:07but what the interesting part of it is is even the calories in calories out people say that low carbohydrate diets
11:14are good for people who have metabolic issues who have you know type 2 diabetes
11:20who have high triglycerides low HDL who have you know all the things that go
11:25along with the uh the metabolic disease or syndrome that um
11:30Ben talked about this morning but anyway as all theories do they all became more
11:37and more complex over time and this is the calories in calories out model it used to just be calories in versus
11:43calorina and that’s this whole you know giant long algorithm kind of a thing and
11:49not to be outdone the carbide insulin model people did the same thing they have this elaborate description uh of
11:57how this all works and recently David Ludwig came up with a paper that was
12:03really pretty good because it simplified these uh a lot and he shows that the
12:08energy balance model and essentially the energy balance model says which is the calories in calories out it says that
12:14we’re a wash and a sea of processed foods High caloric intensity Foods or density
12:21foods and because we’re in this we can’t resist it so we eat and when we eat we
12:27go into positive energy balance and the uh because we’ve got all the the reward
12:33from eating this food we go into positive energy balance that sends up uh these all these circulating fuels in our
12:40our blood which end up going into adipose tissue for storage the carbohydrate insulin model says the
12:47primary drivers are a High car glycemic load or a high carb diet the high carb
12:52diet acting through insulin through Gip and glp1 but mainly Gip I would say increase adipose tissue storage it sucks
13:00nutrients out of the bloodstream the brain reads that is hey I’m hungry and
13:06so we eat more and that gives us a positive energy balance because we’re in this cycle
13:11and that’s the carbohydrate uh energy model now the fly in the ointment with this is
13:17even though they’ve gotten the excess energy expenditure down to almost zero and this fighting back and forth and
13:25they even won’t let it go with that and it goes on and on and on but anyway the uh the fact is that whenever low carb
13:32diets are studied they always do better than high carb diets irrespective of what this energy expenditure difference
13:38is that everybody’s fighting over and the public health collaboration which I know some other people have talked about
13:43in the UK has done uh they’ve they’ve tallied up I
13:50think 67 studies that fit their parameters of a low carb diet of duration and subjects and all this of
13:56low carb diets versus low-fat diets in terms of weight loss and when you look at that you find out that they’ve got
14:03yeah 67 studies and what you see on this is that 58 of the 67 the low carb diets
14:10lost more than the low fat and in 37 of the 67 low carb diets
14:16showed significant weight losses compared to low fat and on the low fat that’s none of them showed significant
14:21weight loss so irrespective of what they’re doing with all this metabolic chamber stuff and the energy in an
14:27energy out in the real world when you compare low carb diets to low-fat diets the low carb diets generally Triumph
14:34now let’s go back to this uh this picture from Dr Ludwig’s slide or his
14:40article this is the important part because the figures here and the figures is the first law of thermodynamics
14:46dictates that a positive inner energy balance must exist as Body Energy stores
14:52increased okay so that’s the first law of thermodynamics and what they’ve done is
14:59this is what the kaiko folks use the first law of thermodynamics because energy can either be created or
15:04destroyed so it’s a conservation of energy equation and they are using that and
15:13they have conned the carbohydrate insulin insulin metabolism carbohydrate
15:18insulin model people into using it too and it’s the wrong paradigm
15:24and what I want to talk about is what I see is the right Paradigm but I think it’s the wrong Paradigm but everybody
15:30insists on using this first law of thermodynamics so if if you look at the again from
15:37Gary’s book the fact remains that no matter what people eat it’s calories that ultimately cannot eat more calories than your body uses and you’ll gain
15:44weight fewer calories and you’ll lose weight so Jane Brody from The New York Times and uh the Mistress of idiocy let me
15:53state that we have an implicit faith in the validity of the first law of thermodynamics the calorie is a calorie
15:58calories in equals calories out that Dr John Taggart he was the head of the physiology department at Columbia University and this is what he said
16:06according to Gary quoted him he said this at an obesity conference uh years ago
16:15now what Gary says here’s the here are the context is the first law of thermodynamics the law of energy
16:20conservation this law says that energy is neither created nor destroyed and so the calories we consume will be either
16:26restored expended or excreted this in turn applies and this part on yellow is important any change in body weight must
16:34equal the difference between the calories we consume and the calories we spend and thus the positive or negative
16:40energy balance change in energy stores equals energy intake minus energy expenditure a Delta weight loss the
16:48difference in weight loss equals Cake House in minus kcals out
16:53now the way that this is usually thought of it runs in this direction and if you
16:58eat a lot your cake house go up and if you don’t exercise your kcals out go down and your weight goes up and Gary in
17:07good calories bad categories positive that the opposite Could Happen uh which
17:12you kind of got from Pennington which we’ll talk about anyway that if your
17:18weight loss goes up that can make you eat more calories and make your exercise
17:23go down so what would be a condition that would cause this do you think why
17:29would your weight going up cause your calorie increase to go up in your your output to go down
17:36well here’s one example this is a teenage kid I don’t know how many of you have had teenagers but they eat like
17:43Hogs and they sleep all the time and what’s happening is they’re converting they’re growing
17:50and when they grow they’re increasing their weight and so to keep up with this
17:55increase in weight they’ve got to eat more and they exercise less and yet they
18:00don’t get fat because all this all of this energy caloric energy is going into building
18:08body structures so that’s your where you’ve got the energy coming in minus
18:13the energy going out and That’s a classic case if you’ve got a metabolic defect the same thing can happen if
18:19you’re sensitive to carbs you eat carbs and you can do this carbohydrate insulin model where you’re sucking all the fat
18:26into your adipose tissue it makes you hungry and you continue to eat more and are probably lethargic
18:32now I want to shift to the real subject that I want to talk about this is pretty
18:37basic just so we’re all on the same page what’s the calorie calories the amount of heat it takes to raise one gram of water one centigrade so one gram of
18:44water is one cc that’s what’s called a little calorie a little C calorie a Big C calorie which
18:51is a KCAL which is what we use in nutrition is the amount of heat it takes to raise one liter of water one degree
18:58Centigrade now a liter of water weighs a kilogram so let’s do a thought experiment here
19:04we got a really accurate kitchen scale we’re sitting around one day with nothing to do and we take a liter of
19:11water and 100 degrees it’s fresh off the boil we pour it into a a thin walled
19:18stainless steel cylinder we cap it off so there could be no evaporation we set
19:23it on the scale and it’s a it’s a gram we’ve already zeroed out the the bottle
19:29so it’s a gram and we’re so Waterway is a kilogram we’re in a room that’s 20 C
19:3520 degrees C and we go away and and do something and we come back six
19:43hours later and now the waters has assumed room temperature it’s 20 degrees C
19:48okay the water still weighs a kilogram it hasn’t changed
19:54but it lost 80 calories so if you look at it from this perspective
20:00where 80 calories down but the weight hasn’t changed because heat doesn’t weigh energy
20:07doesn’t weigh you cannot weigh energy and so it’s idiocy to talk about the
20:14first law of thermodynamics and compare weight that you get on a scale to compare mass to energy
20:22all right so everybody kind of follow me on this okay because you can’t weigh calories
20:28now and so the weight is is zero so the first law is it the first law of
20:33thermodynamics we should be dealing with no not really not not in my opinion now this guy is one of my heroes this guy
20:41named Max clyber he came up with a collaber line and I talk about another talk but this is book The Fire of life
20:47and I just checked before I came up here and you can go on Amazon and get you a copy for 273 bucks fortunately I got
20:54mine about 25 years ago at the suggestion of Jules Hurst who told me about it uh Jules Hersh is an old time
21:01obesity researcher and anyway what collaber it says is forming hypothesis is one of the most precious faculties of
21:07the human mind that is necessary for the development of science sometimes however hypotheses grow like weeds and lead to
21:14confusion instead of clarification think about those diagrams I showed you of how calories in calories out of expanded in
21:20the carbohydrate insulin model has expanded uh they they so it’s the operational Concepts yes so one has to
21:27clear the fields that the operational Concepts can grow and function Concepts should relate as directly as possible to
21:33Observation measurements and blah blah blah and then we’ve got Albert Alfred
21:38Pennington mentioned a little bit ago and Pennington is sort of a pivotal character you may never have heard of
21:45him he’s a pivotal character in low carbary because Pennington learned about
21:51low carb from Blake Donaldson who was an old-time New York Doctor Who used to put people on Carnivore diets and he learned
21:59about low carbon carnivore diets from wilhelmer steffensen so you’ve got that connection with Pennington and then
22:04Pennington was the guy who taught Robert Atkins the Atkins diet okay as he picked
22:10that up from work with Pennington so Pennington says and I love this quote because it
22:16happened to me it says the concepts and here he’s talking sort of about the carbohydrate insulin model so the
22:22concept dawned on me was such Clarity that I felt stupid for having not seen it before and he said once he realizes that
22:30frustrating incongruities resolve themselves into a consistent pattern everything fitted together like
22:36clockwork that’s exactly what happened to me when it dawned on me what I think
22:43the real reason is for weight loss and low carb diets now back in 2014 these
22:49two guys uh mirman and brown who are Australians wrote this paper uh called
22:54when somebody loses weight where does the fat go and I didn’t get this paper until about
22:59two years after it was written and once I read it I began to obsess on it and I kept thinking about excuse me I kept
23:07thinking about this a lot in terms of low carb diets and when I
23:13um when I got it I looked up these guys on PubMed to see if they had anything else published on this and they didn’t
23:20and I thought wow that’s weird to come up with because they were writing about different stuff it’s weird to come up with a paper like this you know have any
23:26other literature on it so I I looked around a little bit and I googled Reuben meerman the lead guy and lo and behold
23:33he’s got a TED Talk okay a TED Talk maybe that’ll be enlightening so I got
23:39the Ted Talk and I watched it and it was it was very good and I’ve got a little excerpt of it that’s a sort of the core
23:46piece of this Ted talk now you got to know that when you watch this I want you
23:51to think because when I decided to do this talk originally I thought
23:56I’m going to gather all this stuff and do this demonstration up on the stage and I thought about that for about 30
24:02seconds and I talked to my wife about it and she said put it on the video so anyway you’ll see the video and you can
24:08imagine me up here doing this so let’s watch this short little video having Dark Side of water
24:14so every time you exhale
24:19out comes a bit of carbon dioxide you can’t see it this is the problem this is why people don’t know
24:27how you lose weight so there you go I’ve trapped some breath I’ve inhaled that five percent of the air in there is now
24:34carbon dioxide because uh it’s come out of my lungs I’ve got some liquid nitrogen here and
24:41I’m going to use that to freeze this air liquid nitrogen’s minus 196 very handy
24:48um where did that’s right there in fact I’ll just pour it straight on so
24:54be a little bit careful with this stuff I use it all the time if I look a little blase I don’t mean to
25:01um it’s please respect this stuff if you play with it the way you would respect boiling hot water now if you pour it
25:07onto a balloon the balloon does not pop which is incredible
25:13the nitrogen is minus 196 oxygen turns into a liquid at minus 183.
25:21so the oxygen in the balloon is turning into liquid carbon dioxide turns solid I’ve got a
25:27big bowl of it there but it turns solid at -78 so in the
25:33balloon now I have Frozen well I have liquefied oxygen and Frozen
25:41carbon dioxide and when I take it out you’ll see them so
25:47just take a while for the balloon to go a little bit clearer at the top the nitrogen in here
25:54is 79 nitrogen the nitrogen is in the top of the
26:00balloon but now look at that liquid down there can you see that
26:06that’s the oxygen from my breath that I hadn’t used but once it’s all gone
26:13there’ll be some white powder left right the white powder is breakfast
26:19that’s the carbon dioxide the carbon atoms I ate in the last 24 hours
26:25and when I blow on them they get warm enough to turn back into gas
26:30and they vanish and people think there’s nothing in the balloon the balloon has mass
26:37those atoms have mass you can see carbon dioxide has mass when you solidify but when you breathe it out you don’t see it
26:43and we’ve been confusing people by talking about kilojoules or calories and
26:48they’re really important but people do not seem to understand that when you lose weight you’re losing atoms you
26:55can’t just turn atoms into nothing in fact science teachers out there you need to change the way you teach chemistry
27:01because those people and many in this room think that you can turn atoms into energy well it’s one of the founding
27:07principles of modern chemistry you cannot turn an atom into Pure Energy it’s called the conservation of mass
27:12okay now in the in the paper that
27:18he wrote they had gone out and done a survey in Australia they had questioned
27:2350 family doctors 50 dietitians and 50 personal trainers and they said hey when
27:29someone loses weight where does all the weight go well it’s interesting what they found out because the majority of doctors and
27:37the majority of everybody for that matter said that it goes out as energy and heat you lose weight because you
27:43dissipated as heat others a lot of doctors said others
27:48basically because probably they didn’t know what was going on and so they just said other some said feces especially the trainers
27:56they must have some kind of fixation the uh it be some said it comes to muscle
28:01some said it’s sweat and urine which is actually right to a certain extent some
28:06said they don’t know you notice the doctors no doctors ever since he doesn’t know so
28:12and then two two lonely dietitians came
28:17up with the right answer then he goes out as CO2 and H2O
28:23so that brought me to a great new book that my wife and I are going to write
28:29that’s called breathe more and weigh less breathe your way to healthy weight loss and that’s all you have to do
28:38so now I want to talk about the mass balance equation and the mass balance
28:44equation says Mass equals mass in versus minus Mass out so a change in weight is
28:50mass in minus Mass out and when I listened to this guy give the
28:55whole talk that’s the part you saw but the rest of the talk it dawned on me that he had failed to comprehend his own
29:03message because he says in there to eat less and exercise more and that’s how you
29:10lose weight the only difference he said is you don’t dissipate in his heat you breathe it out as atoms but he said eat
29:17less and move more and then he went on on the latter part of the toxin don’t fall prey to these ketogenic diets and
29:24these low carb diets and these fad diets because they don’t work any better than anything else because all you need to do
29:30is eat less don’t get sucked into the you know to the ketogenic diet the low
29:35carb diet and all that and so that was his message and that’s when I realized that he didn’t really
29:41understand because what makes the mass you got food going in you got drink going in you’ve got oxygen going down
29:46what comes out is O2 Ketone CO2 feces methane methane comes from burps that
29:52are called irritations that comes from the other end it’s called something else you got water just Vapor urine sweat and
29:58tears and all this stuff except for the oxygen and the CO2 can be weighed which
30:04is a pretty low-tech operation now you still need to measure the O2 and the CO2
30:09and you need something metabolic chamberlike to do that but it’d be real easy to measure the mass in versus the
30:15math out even the insensible water loss I found a paper on that from back in the 1950s these guys two British researchers
30:23went out and they tried to figure out what the insensible losses were for various diets and they contracted with
30:30some company that must have been a famous company because they featured it prominently in the article the name of it and they put it
30:37um they put the beds of their subjects the scale under the beds of their
30:43subjects so that they could measure insensible loss and this this scale was
30:48accurate to win the two grams and they put these people in bed and they didn’t let them get up and they just breathed
30:54and they they laid there and they had a weird way of circulating them in and out
30:59so that they could put this together but it shows that the insensible water was 60 70 grams per hour on a high fat diet
31:07a little less on a high protein diet and way down at the bottom on a high carbohydrate diet so you can’t even measure insensible weight loss because
31:14that included water vapor going out and whatever perspiration that they had they gathered in the bed clothing
31:20so this is the mass balance equation now how much energy you get in a spoonful of
31:26sugar according to Atwater who developed all these you get a teaspoon is five grams of sugar so the energy in there is
31:3220 calories okay now if we switch over to Uncle Al who we saw earlier in this
31:39thing he says that uh we he says one teaspoon equals five grams of sugar too
31:44he also says E equals MC squared okay we’re all familiar with that equation
31:49but sometimes we don’t know exactly what it means it means e in the case of the
31:54spoonful of sugar equals five grams times the speed of light squared the speed of light square is a big number it
32:01is a huge number so how big is it well the the bomb that exploded over Nagasaki
32:09at the waning days of World War II was 21 kilotons of TNT
32:15a teaspoon of sugar is a 107.4 kilotons of TNT that’s a lot of energy but that’s
32:23not the energy we get when we eat the sugar the energy we get comes from breaking the bonds the energy is
32:29released from that now if you look at E equals m c squared and you solve it for Mass you look at
32:35Delta Mass the change in mass the change of energy divided by the speed of light squared you get the masses equal to 20 K
32:43Cal divided by the speed of light squared Dr Boswell I don’t know if she’s in here she talked yesterday about doing
32:49long division there’s a long division problem for you divide the speed of light which is 300
32:57kilogram kilometers a second into 20 kcals and what you find out is that goes to
33:04zero or damn near and so there’s no change in energy with a change in I mean
33:09no change of mass with a change in energy now this is Wilbert Olin Atwater he’s
33:15the guy that came up with how many calories are in all these different foods and how much we burn and he did
33:21this back in the late 1800s and he came up with a proteins 4K Cals roughly carbs
33:26four kcals per gram and fat nine K cows per gram he got in big trouble back then for two reasons number one because he
33:34was the first guy to do this in animals and he did it in humans and he announced that animals and humans are the same
33:40they’ve got the same metabolism you know the calories worked the same with them and every body got bent out of shape
33:46with him especially with religious people because they thought wait a minute we’re not animals they’re different we’re us we’re Divine beings
33:53and they’re animals and so he caught a lot of flack for that the thing he really caught the Flack for was because
33:59he found out that there were calories usable calories and alcohol and the temperance movement was huge then and
34:06they came down on him like a load of bricks because alcohol was actually a food and he got
34:13involved in the temperance movement and did all his Mia culpas but he got they got been out of shape at him for a
34:19couple of reasons so now this is going to be my only tricked up slide because he would be spinning in his grave with what I’m
34:25going to do because this was kind of the inside I had on this thing if you take the protein and the carbs and the fat
34:31and you invert them instead of four grams four Cake House per gram you get
34:360.25 grams per KCAL same with carbs
34:42and fat is 0.11 grams per KCAL now you may be able to see where this going because this is mass in minus Mass
34:49out and I call these heavy kcals and light kcals and it brought to mind another
34:56idea for a book that I think we’re going to do an homage to our good friend Gary towns
35:06and so if you if you look at these things if you if you go the next step and you say let’s assume that an average
35:13person consumes 300 kcals a day and that totals up to a million and 95
35:20kcals a year okay if you take the 95 million 95 kcals
35:25how much mass is that well okay caliber carved 0.25 grams 100 carbon in the diet
35:31that comes out to be 273 plus grams 274 kilograms it comes out to be 603 pounds
35:38so this is not just 603 pounds of food this is 603 pounds of carb okay there’s
35:44other things in the food but car even if but this is theoretical it’s just another
35:50um it’s just pure carbs now if you take the same 1095 or million 95 000 calories
35:58all carbs 630 pounds of food is 100 fat that’s 0.11 grams per KCAL uh or kcals
36:07per gram you end up with 120.5 kilograms you end up with 265 pounds big
36:13difference 603
36:19265 the difference of 338 pounds that you’re going to eat and remember we’re
36:24looking at mass in versus Mass out not weightless energy in energy out so this
36:31makes a big difference now that’s a theoretical dial let’s look at a real diet 2500 calories a day low
36:38fat high carb 55 carb 30 fat 15 protein here’s the low carb high fat diet 10
36:44carb that’s 62.5 grams of carb a day that’s kind of the middle 75 fat 15 protein you
36:53get 520 grams on the low-fat high carb the low carb high fat 363 grams
36:59that’s 157 grams a day difference it’s about a third of a pound a day you
37:06molt a little over a third of a pound a day you multiply that by a week and you’re looking at 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 grams
37:14of pounds a week that’s something I want people to lose on low carb diets so it uh you know it calculates out now
37:22I kind of got this out of order and turned my slides and didn’t have a chance to get it fixed and I’m an idiot because I didn’t put a legend on it but
37:29it’s easy enough to figure out red is protein yellow is kind of yellowish like fat green is carbs like plants and we
37:37always look at everything by calories and so you can see wheat flour by these
37:43are 100 the same way so you’ve got wheat flour you got a rib eye steak you got 67
37:49percent of the calories in ribeye 33 percent is protein 67 fat 85 percent of
37:57carb in the wheat flour 10 percent uh protein and five percent fat but if you
38:03look at them by weight it’s kind of a different picture you look at it by weight the rib eye steak is 54 water
38:09blue is water there wasn’t water in the last one because it didn’t have any calories 22 percent fat 23 protein and
38:16the wheat flour has got 75 percent uh carb and only 12 percent water so if
38:21you’re eating a low carb you know Melba toast without butter God help you diet or you know crackers or all these kind
38:29of things you’re not getting very much liquids you get a lot of liquid in the ribeye steak and that makes me wonder
38:34because we know when people go on low carb diets they start peeing a lot is it because they’re getting the water from
38:41the food I mean I know that when insulin goes down your release sodium in your
38:46release fluid but a part of it is probably because they’re eating foods that are higher in water content I want
38:52to do a quick thought experiment too it’s kind of like the thermos experiment here two guys of equal weight and you
39:00take guy a and Guy B and you put them on diet a and diet B and the diet a is 200
39:06grams carb 300 I mean 200 grams protein 300 grams card 500 grams fat okay that’s
39:13a lot of food and diet B 400 grams of protein 400 grams carb and 200 grams of
39:19fat you look at that and that’s a kilogram each of them eats a kilogram
39:26but this guy’s getting 6 500 calories and this guy’s getting 5 000 calories
39:31but they’re going to be exactly the same on the scale
39:36this extra 1500 calories isn’t going to be reflected in their weight so when we’re talking about weight loss
39:43and low carb diets it’s mass in minus Mass out
39:50and just some final thoughts on this I got the chamber data from the Kevin Hall
39:55study the rule the first one that I talked about where they compared the two and it was this massive spreadsheet with
40:01about 30 tabs on it and it had all kinds of date on it and I thought I’m going to be
40:07able to go through here and show all this because they had you know the oxygen in the oxygen out the CO2 out the
40:14ketones out ketones away the they had all this stuff out but in the chamber
40:19stuff they didn’t have the water volume that they had so oh God I can’t do this so then I looked at the at the doubly
40:27labeled water tab on the spreadsheet and they had a bunch of stuff but they didn’t have
40:33something else I needed and they didn’t have the days matched up so I couldn’t
40:38use the water intake from the doubly labeled water for a water intake in the chamber and although they collected
40:45feces they didn’t measure it so I couldn’t get that so basically the the rudimentary calculations I did showed a
40:52difference but I mean it’s it’s not accurate but this should be a way should
40:58Inspire some researchers to actually look at this because it just wouldn’t be that hard to study and I think we’d see
41:04some really good data now when I started thinking about all this I thought okay I’m going to go to the scientific
41:10literature and see what everybody says about it and I was absolutely absolutely
41:16flummoxed I mean I was gobsmacked because there was only one paper by this
41:22guy named rncb Al bite whose name I noticed I just misspelled there should be a c where that s is who’s a
41:28mathematics professor at the University of Puerto Rico and his his paper on this is totally mathematical and
41:36uh I used to be good at math because I was an engineer but that ship is sale but that was the
41:44only paper that I found on this now I have readers who call me all the time or email me all the time and they ask me
41:49about some obscure herb or some weird supplement and I’ll look it up on PubMed and there’ll be 50 or 80 papers
41:57and I look up this which seems to me to be fundamental and there’s one paper and
42:02it’s theoretical and then I did some Googling around and some searching and I found out that Auntie manidan who is
42:08actually a sort of acquaintance of mine he used to comment on my blog and we went back and forth had co-written the
42:14paper with with our incibia albite they had a paper written together so I
42:19reached out to ANSI since I knew him and said hey what’s uh what’s the deal going on with this and I got an email back
42:25from this I’m busy writing another paper I’ll let’s talk later and that was not
42:31that long ago and now he’s got a new paper out that is on uh is on pre-pub and he co-wrote the one he co-wrote with
42:39rncb Al bite is also on uh on pre-pub and I’ve got those all listed in the
42:45table of coming in the in the sites I mean on my website on the address I gave you
42:50so now I guess it’s time for um we need to say thank you very much and I
42:56await everybody lining up to throw tomatoes and stuff at me and there’s the uh there’s the site to go and get all
43:02these papers if you’re interested so really thank you very much I appreciate your attention
43:12hey Mike that was just wonderful I loved it um I just wanted to add a comment uh not
43:18as much a question it’s interesting for me when you invoke this idea of mass reconciliation and you think about the
43:25untreated type 1 diabetic who in the absence of insulin just begins wasting away even in the midst of eating an
43:34abundance lots of calories lots of calories and it’s interesting to note of course they’re excreting
43:40um glucose which is a mass itself but even you note the hyperventilation that accompanies it we always talk about how
43:48the patients hyperventilate or the individual due to the acid-base reconciliation and the the uh the
43:56respiratory compensation you know of the ketoacidosis and yet I can’t help but
44:01look at that through the lens of what you’re presenting that yes hyperventilating allows them to improve pH but at the same time it becomes
44:08another way to get rid of a lot of CO2 that they get is accumulating in part
44:15because they can’t stop burning fat and that CO2 has to get out of course
44:20they’re also breathing out and urinating out a tremendous amount of Ketone but even the hyperventilation is going to be
44:27getting rid of a lot of CO2 helping the body get rid of that mass that they
44:32can’t keep because insulin is too low to let them no anyway good point I liked it thanks thanks
44:39uh thank you my name is Alan Green and um definitely a lot of different paradigms for me to think about I’ve
44:45heard it said that you the first the first law of thermodynamics is when
44:51you’re trying to solve for weight loss is um you’re trying to solve a physics problem when you really have a hormonal
44:57problem um I know from my own Journey um and I’m I have a question
45:05yeah it it is um
45:11I the the mass I yeah so I guess my question is do you
45:19can you lose weight through um
45:24generating Heat and the the reason I asked that question is I was 425 pounds
45:30I got all the way down to a thousand calories today and I just simply got cold when I was fat I got hot
45:39um and I’ve heard it explain that well your your body is wanting equilibrium
45:45um so when you eat too much it’s trying to burn some of it off and when you don’t eat enough it’s so you have all these hormones
45:51counteracting that so how does that tie in with the mass and it may well be that
45:56that you’re producing more heat because you’re you’re with this whole excess energy thing that I talked about but
46:04that’s not why you lost weight the reason you lost weight is because of the CO2 that you blew off probably from
46:10breathing a little bit faster for the water vapor that you breathed out from the perspiration from those kind of
46:16things because it’s a uh it’s a it’s a mass situation you got atoms and you’ve got to get rid of them and they weigh
46:22and energy doesn’t and energy is just sort of a secondary process so is my
46:28body trying to save and conserve in those different areas yeah well if it’s if it’s why does it happen if you’re
46:35these leasing heat I doubt that it’s trying to conserve I suspect that it’s it yeah yeah I suspect that it’s burning
46:42off and when and when the fat Burns off to generate that heat it’s going to release carbon dioxide and water
46:50and so uh you end up you will end up having a weight loss but it’s not the heat that’s causing you to lose weight
46:56it’s the atoms that you lose right
47:03hi so I just a question popped into my mind does this mean we should just cut back on our fluid intake if we wanted to
47:10lose weight cut back on what fluid intake stop drinking water or cut back
47:15there no well water doesn’t have any it doesn’t have any calories and you’re
47:20going to equilibrate with the water anyway and you’ll just pee it away so I don’t think that cutting back on
47:27your fluid intake it’s going to make a big difference on that oh well it is mass and that’s because all this is so
47:34nobody’s looked at this before so nobody knows the answers to any of these questions so it’s just kind of a guess but I would say that by cutting back on
47:42fluid intake you probably wouldn’t I mean you maybe generate some immediate weight loss if you didn’t drink a glass
47:48of water but I don’t think that you’re going to generate you know long-term weight loss just by cutting back on
47:54fluid consumption okay thank you
47:59excellent talk so my question is uh if you look into the sports medicine literature there’s the discussion that
48:06fat oxidation is not as efficient and requires more oxygen so is the effect of
48:14a low carb diet maybe just that we’re required to breathe out more and breathe
48:20in less or breathe in more and breathe out less yeah you you you kind of breathe in more
48:27I guess and breathe out west because the RQ for low people on a all fat diet is
48:320.7 so there’s 0.7 as much carbon dioxide going out as there is oxygen coming in that’s called the respiratory
48:39quotient um but I you know I don’t uh I believe it’s like a 15 difference right from
48:47carbohydrate oxidation would that explain the weight loss uh no what
48:53explains the weight loss is you’re losing more mass and why you lose more men I mean when you when you you take
49:00food in you basically extract the energy from the food you extract it from the
49:05chemical bonds in the food and then you produce carbon dioxide and water and you
49:11use the water to uh you know to create intracellular water and newly formed
49:17cells you use the water for hydrolysis reactions you use the carbon for carboxylase reactions and then you get
49:24rid of what you don’t need and that’s what’s weird about the Stoichiometry with these problems that I used to hate
49:29in Biochemistry where they would give you some giant molecule and then you’d say Okay they’d have o2n and CO2 O2 out
49:37and CO2 out and then you had to make it all balance and she would think it would just all come out even but it doesn’t
49:43because all the the reactants are not necessarily excreted A lot of them are
49:48used and so I don’t know if that makes sense to you but a lot of the reactants are used in these stoichiometric equations
49:56so it’s not this perfect world like that it always struck me though that inefficient uh you know if you’re going
50:03to claim that it’s inefficient for exercise inefficiency sounds like an advantage metabolically to me and it
50:10sounded like it fit nicely with your theories thanks good
50:17thank you for giving me a new way to look at all this um
50:23number one is nothing that you’ve introduced us to talks about energy
50:29partitioning and how that can be shifted in terms of you know minute changes
50:35between maintenance and growth and reproduction Etc so that that’s still
50:40there hormonally influenced oh yeah absolutely absolutely and yeah I mean sorry you
50:47know you get rid of visceral fat you do all kinds of things but that’s not the reason you lose weight I mean you’re
50:53right calories don’t weigh is the tag line here uh number two is Atwater had
50:58huge tables with many many many many many many different entries and you know
51:04the ones that we typically talk about are kind of like approximations aren’t they yeah yeah so even that is right an
51:13average right right yeah exactly
51:18Eric Westman Durham North Carolina thanks Mike I need to say that I’m not
51:24the one who’s practiced low-carb keto diets the longest maybe currently but
51:29you and Mary Dan practice and if you had the years together many more years than
51:35I have so thank you and you know you um
51:41again you’re blowing my mind and the first calculation you did on your blog
51:47years ago that has changed my practice and in the way I teach is the five grams of glucose in the bloodstream just
51:54there’s just a teaspoon of sugar and this I think is going to be as important
51:59as that calculation was it seems very simple but it’s changing the discussion
52:04entirely from the caloric uh outside the body being an explanation
52:12for a change in mass I think that’s brilliant Mike thank you oh thank you so I mean so you agree with this I mean it
52:18makes sense to you right it needs to be studied by Ben bickman
52:25oh he he’s out there that needs to be studied by by Laura and Matt yeah I mean
52:31oh they’re not in here either how about any how about Kevin Hall uh actually I’d
52:38like to hear Gary Town said no I’d like to hear what Gary says about yeah well
52:44thanks I think this is a very interesting and
52:49novel approach I question how useful though um in thinking about carbohydrates for
52:55example excuse me cellulose is a carbohydrate but you’re not going to gain any weight
53:01eating Celia or you’re going to temporarily gain weight it’s going to go out but it’s not going to it’s not it’s
53:06metabolically for us nothing right um you know also
53:12the effect of eating a pound of cake versus a pound of beef is obviously as we all know quite different so I
53:19question how this is useful for people no
53:24well uh you yeah
53:31I don’t know how it’s useful for the ranking I don’t know uh I mean to me it
53:37seems pretty profound and that uh I mean what I promised at the start is I was
53:43going to show you why you lose weight on a low carb diet and that was I think that that’s how and that’s where the
53:49weight loss goes and as far as the implications I don’t know I’m hoping
53:54that over time people will look into this carefully and expand on it all I
54:00know honestly Manning it is and um and so if if some people but he’s like I am
54:06he’s just theoretical so can I help out I think this is extremely practical
54:12extremely helpful because you don’t look at calories on the food
54:17the calories don’t weigh anything right you you look at grams of carbohydrates
54:24or grams of fat or grams of calories don’t weigh anything that’s your message right yeah yeah you put the the the I
54:31might have to repeat the whole thing for those who you you put the hot water on
54:37the scale the calories go down because it it’s less hot and yet the weight hasn’t changed yeah that’s true so you
54:45don’t look at the calories on the products you look at the carb grams
54:50right is it practical advice from that that’s true that’s true why didn’t I think of that
54:56[Laughter] hi I’m sorry this thought’s kind of
55:03incomplete but it fits in with what some of the commenters were saying so if we look at it
55:09um weight gain so if you’re you know that the weight gain has to come from somewhere you
55:16don’t get you don’t gain weight from the air right and like I said this is an equally thought
55:22um just springboard whatever so you know you’re eating veggies you’re not get you’re not getting Mass from them
55:27because it’s cellular you know like another commoner said it’s cellulose you
55:32send it right out so you know I think it’s a very helpful Paradigm to think of for weight gain
55:40um because you know got to come from somewhere yeah it has to I mean you know an increase of an increase of the
55:47increase in the fates are conspiring against me
55:53increasing mass comes from an accumulation of mass and a decrease in weight comes from a loss of mass not a
56:00loss of energy in the the increase in weight doesn’t come from an accumulation of energy it comes from the accumulation
56:06of mass and it’s just got to be that way [Music]
56:18thank you
