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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread, Aug. 8 - Aug 14. 2016 - Less Wrong
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Yeah, I feel about this similarly.
The motte of "calories in, calories out" is a purely descriptive post-facto theory. If you lost weight, it means that your organism somehow spent more calories than it gained, and if you gained weight, it means that your organism somehow spent less calories than it gained, but the details about the calorie flows are completely unspecified.
The bailey of "calories in, calories out" is: "You complain about not losing weight? Just eat less and exercise more, dummy! You say you already tried that, but it didn't work for you? Congratulations, you have successfully violated the laws of physics, go collect your Nobel Prize!"
What people who complain about this actually want: a strategy that fat people could use to lose weight without negative side-effects... or admitting that for some people such strategy doesn't exist for metabolic reasons. The motte version of "calories in, calories out" is definitely not such strategy, but the bailey consists of pretending that it is.
In reality I think it's likely that different people are overweight for different reasons. Adenovirus 36 infections for example do correlate with overweight.
Partly because "The infection with Adv36 accelerates differentiation and proliferation of the 3T3-L1 human preadipocytes into adipocytes [27,43,44] and increases the concentration of lipid content in fat cells."
Saying it's "calories in, calories out" suggests that the fact that the virus results in more adipocytes (fat cells) in lab cells is irrelevant.
Lab animals with their controlled diets also got more overweight.
Investing money into finding out how to cure Adenovirus 36 seems important to me from a public health perspective but a group of researches of obesity who believe in the calorie in, calorie out maxim won't direct their research that way.
It seems like we have the technology to produce vaccines against some types of Adenovirus.