The August issue of The Lancet features an editorial and a set of articles on obesity. An excellent point from the editorial:
"One important premise is that the increasing weight of people worldwide is the result of normal response by normal people to an abnormal environment."
The editorial goes on to advocate for a meaningful public health response to the obesity epidemic, but acknowledge that this has so far been lacking.
Meanwhile, an article gives hope that the scientific analysis of obesity, which has also been... lacking, might be arriving at a new found sanity. The article, "Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight" discusses the gap between advice and calculations of calorie deficits and the actual response to calorie deficit that occur in dynamic biology.
In other words, what we already know: weight loss is not a linear calories in vs. calories out because we are flesh and blood. Calories in vs. calories out is for diesel engines and nuclear reactors, not human beings. The article accompanies a web-based model of the authors' mathematical calculation of how weight loss actually works.
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