Ftrain, by Paul Ford

With a very nutrition-minded friend at a cafe in Soho; an athlete and scientist. He shares my birthday. During the meal (a fez of couscous, filled with mysteries, in what once seemed normal but now seems like a gigantic portion and served with white bread, both redundant and ridiculous--I put that aside in exasperation) I presented my recent findings. We then had a soft tiff about the utility of kilocalories. He finds the caloric assessment of foods foolish, even risky, given that humans do not mechanically burn but rather metabolize food. Both of us got our backs up then. My friend has a biochemistry jones and has done much more research than I have. And he's got some fervor on this subject, as do many people who have gone deeply into it.

The calories-are-not-all-equal hypothesis makes intuitive sense, and yes, when it comes to long-term life management the fact that we are not steam engines is worth considering. But I also keep reading the opposite--i.e. this summary from a Gina Kolata review of Gary Taubes's book Good Calories, Bad Calories:

It’s known, though, that the body is not so easily fooled. Taubes ignores what diabetes researchers say is a body of published papers documenting a complex system of metabolic controls that, in the end, assure that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. He also ignores definitive studies done in the 1950s and ’60s by Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University and Rudolph Leibel of Columbia, which tested whether calories from different sources have different effects. The investigators hospitalized their subjects and gave them controlled diets in which the carbohydrate content varied from zero to 85 percent, and the fat content varied inversely from 85 percent to zero. Protein was held steady at 15 percent. They asked how many calories of what kind were needed to maintain the subjects’ weight. As it turned out, the composition of the diet made no difference.

But then participation in the Columbia/Rockefeller study ranged between 15 and 56 days. In the geologic time-frame of weight loss this is not long. The study itself is entitled "Energy intake required to maintain body weight is not affected by wide variation in diet composition." It concludes:

Similar results might not have been obtained in a group of obese individuals or lean individuals susceptible to obesity. There may be an interaction of diet composition and predisposition to obesity, with higher dietary fat content facilitating the expression of a more efficient metabolic phenotype (27). In this regard it is of interest to note that the three subjects (subjects 1-3 in Table 1 ) with highest BMIs had lower CORREC kJ on the higher-fat diets, whereas all but one of the other adult subjects had equal or higher CORREC kJ on the higher-fat diets. It is also possible that fat’s putative enhanced efficiency as a metabolic substrate is seen mainly in circumstances of positive energy balance.

Finally, the physical activity of some of our subjects was somewhat diminished by their restriction to a metabolic ward. There may be interactions between physical activity and diet composition that predispose to fat accumulation (28); such interactions were not examined in this study.

It has been noted that obese individuals have a preference for high fat-foods (29). This preference, based on palatability, may favor obesity by increasing total caloric intake. However, from our results here and with the caveats mentioned above, such fat preference probably does not provide obese individuals with an intrinsically more-efficient fuel source. Variations in fat intake from 0% to 70% of total energy under conditions of equal energy intake produced no significant changes in body weight over periods of observation averaging 33 d.

So there you go.

In the end, of course, we got through it, my friend and I, figured out what the other person was saying. He told me a great deal about eggs. Suggested carbs in the morning, meat later, which is pretty much the track I'm on. We probably don't disagree on much. I know from my passion for bread that there's something up with it. I like bread like I liked smoking.

My friend is just the first of many people who have their own ideas about health and food. I imagine the more weight I lose the more people will have to say on the subject. My job, as a newcomer to the world of the healthy, is to listen with suspicion, but to listen. Who knows what is snake oil, or not? Snake oil being a rich source of Omega-3 fatty acids, with anti-inflammatory properties. In time I will better understand the relationship between the brain and its body, the brain being of course a tremendous consumer of calories.