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Viliam comments on Open Thread, Aug. 8 - Aug 14. 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (71)
Yes, but more importantly, I ask whether the difference between "food labels" and "actual food digestion" may depend on the specific person. To use your example, some person may be able to better extract calcium from food than other person, either because their genes create different enzymes, or because their gut flora preprocesses the food differently.
Now apply this argument to the calories themselves. Is it possible that two people eat the same food, yet one of them extracts 1000 calories from the food, and the other extracts 1500 calories?
Well, you have just returned my question. I was curious whether there are ways to spend calories that most people would forget to think about when thinking about "work".
For example, whether it is possible that we could observe two people the whole day and conclude that they do the same things (same kind of work, same kind of sport) and therefore their "calories out" should be approximately the same, while in reality their "calories out" would differ because one of them e.g. wears a warmer sweater.
Adding these two questions together, I am asking whether it is possible to have two people eat the same food, do the same amount of work and sport, and yet at the end of the day one of them gains extra calories and the other does not.
Yes. Off the top of my head some factors which will affect this: bowel transit time, the general condition of the GI tract including the amount/efficiency of digestive enzymes, gut flora particulars.
Certainly possible. In fact, I would expect this to be true for the same person at different ages: a 20-year-old who loses weight at a certain food/activity level would eventually become a 40-year-old who would gain weight at the same food/activity level.
Obviously; things like lactose tolerance seem like clear examples of this, and Lumifer's list seems like the sort of things I would expect matter in less obvious but more important ways.
I'm not really sure how to pinpoint individual differences. I'm going to stop here but I honestly think it would be nice to break this down further. A potentially harmful practice could be taking some sort of average ability to digest food, and then start deriving standard deviations from it. I'm saying 'harmful' because I (1) do not know how to do this and (2) I have no idea if this is the right thing to do.
I'd imagine that people who had a less economical digestion would probably have less offspring, but that's just a guess.
It would be greatly helpful to have a list of energy spendings by the body, then. Can someone provide directions?