To recap: so taking in more calories than you burn will cause you to gain weight, though calorie intake and expenditure are in turn controlled by a number of mechanisms.

Wrong. If I have diarrhea I lose weight, even through I don't burn more calories. Burning isn't the only way calories can leave the body.

It's an effect that much easier to see in my own weight data than adding 800 kcal per day in maltrodoxin into my tea.

We may not be able to conclude anything more from the NWCR data than that a significant minority of dieters do succeed at long-term weight loss, some through calorie-restricted diets, some through low-fat diets, and some through low-carb diets.

You ignore the issues with self reported diet plans. In general people are not good at reporting what they eat. Given equal diets the person who loses weight is more likely to report that they follow the society approved model of dieting to explain why they have lost weight than the person who doesn't lose weight.

One other relevant detail: the second study found that "A significantly greater percentage of participants who consumed the low-carbohydrate than the low-fat diet reported bad breath, hair loss, constipation, and dry mouth."

If you have high testosterone you are more likely to lose hair than if you have lower testosterone. If you starve the body of fat you lower testosterone and get less hair loss. That not a sign that the low fat diet is good.

I rather eat the diet that gives me high testosterone even if that means I will lose some hair.

I want that my brain can synthesizes steroids as much as it wants even if I have to pay the price in bad breath and lost hair. Most of the paleo crowd is purposefully making that trade.

Just imagine: "It's doctors and pharmaceutical companies that caused your cancer in the first place. That chemotherapy and radiation therapy stuff they're pushing on you is obviously harmful. Don't you now there are all-natural ways you can cure your cancer?" If someone says that to you, then knowing that the universe is unfair, and that sometimes the best solution it gives you to a problem will have serious downsides, well knowing that just might save your life.

We do live in a world where over years doctors engaged in cancer screening procedures that didn't reduce mortality and which produces radiation that does cause some cancer. It took time and good data to get cancer doctors to stop killing people by overtreating them.

The nutrition researchers unfortunately don't have good data.