Another Against The NIH “Study”

Keith says in “A Calorie is not a Calorie, and Other Dietary Heresy” over at Theory to Practice:

it’s your insulin levels that will determine what is to become of the calories you’ve ingested. A high insulin level (resulting from consumption of a high carbohydrate meal) will do two things, primarily (1) it will shunt the excess ingested calories to be stored as fat, and (2) it will shutdown the release of FFAs from the body’s fat deposits. The flip side of this is the maintenance of a low insulin environment via the elimination of simple carbohydrates and the limitation of complex carbohydrates. In other words, and from a purely biological or homeostatic perspective, lean people are not those who have the willpower to exercise more and/or eat less. They are simply people whose bodies are programmed to send the calories they consume to the muscles to be burned rather than to the fat tissue to be stored —the  precise reason that Lance Armstrong and his ilk can get away with the massive amounts of carbohydrates they consume with no (outward) noticeable affect. A less active a person would tend to go the other way, shunting off calories to fat tissue, where they continue to accumulate to excess. This shunting of calories toward fat cells to be stored or toward the muscles to be burned is a phenomenon known as fuel partitioning. It is also why I think of the body more as a capacitor, rather than a simple thermodynamic machine; a capacitor whose charge/discharge properties are controlled primarily via insulin, the level of which is primarily controlled by the type and amount of carbohydrate ingestion. So, is a calorie just a calorie? Well, no more than a bullet is just a bullet, I suppose. Would you rather be shot by the rubber variety, or a “cop killer”? Keep that metaphor in mind before you fork-up that next mouthful of pasta.

The people at the NIH are suffering from a Pythagorean fallacy: that numbers, not the identity of a thing, is its essence — they think health is a numbers game and depends on a proportion; they don’t recognize the need to look at causality and the identity of things.