Is there a European alternative for a MealSquares-like product, i.e. one that is eaten, not drunk?

A nice website, but of course I am looking at it from a position of a LW fan; I don't know how it will seem to other people.

One part I didn't like was the rationalization video about "why death isn't so bad". (Spoilers: because if you know you will die, it motivates you to do important things faster.)

To illustrate why it is bad, imagine the reversal: if you would get immortality, would you rather trade it for mortality (defined as: you will die in a random moment during the following 100 years) as a cool way of Getting Things Done? I would think such decision is quite stupid for several reasons. First, the random moment may happen even today; I don't see how that helps you accomplish plans that take more than one day. Second, plans that require at least several decades of work become unlikely even if you work hard. Third, it limits the total number of plans you can accomplish.

Generally, the whole reasoning about the benefits of death is motivated thinking. We already know the bottom line (almost certainly we are going to die, probably quite soon); and the real reason is that our bodies are fragile, and it is extremely difficult to coordinate humanity on fixing this problem (all the necessary medical and technological research, plus the necessary economical and political background). That's it. It would be too much of a coincidence if this situation would also be somehow optimal.

(However, optimizing the website for me could make it less attractive to an average reader.)

EDIT: The quotations from "The Last Christmas" should be formatted differently than the surrounding text. For example use dark grey font, and a vertical line on the left (something like "font-color: #333; border-left: 2px solid #333;"). Don't separate different quotes by bullets, but enclose them in different "div" tags (with the vertical line it should be visible where the next "div" starts).

On the "Arguments" page, the different arguments should be probably formatted by headings ("h2"), not bullet points. I think in general that the bullet points look ugly, unless used for a list of short items.

The motte of "calories in, calories out" is a purely descriptive post-facto theory.

It is a also a predictive ex ante theory. It successfully predicts the change in your weight on the basis of your persistent net energy balance.

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?

... then continue. Eat LESS and exercise MORE. Still doesn't work? Eat LESS and exercise MORE. I guarantee that at some point you will start losing weight

What people who complain about this actually want: a strategy that fat people could use to lose weight without negative side-effects...

Sure. People want a lot of things. I want the ability to fly, it's just that pesky gravity that gets in the way. Wouldn't it be great to jump off a cliff and soar without the negative side-effects of going splat! shortly thereafter?

Was it a strategical decision to bundle a good link with a bad one? One is about abstract math, the other is a political opinion, what exactly do they have in common?

I thought that to most LW'ers the weak version of "Calories in, Calories out" was uncontroversial.

EY likes to say that "mass in, mass out" works even better for predicting changes in weight.

Can we get in some agreed upon middle ground?

A simple daily-iterated formula to start: WEIGHT = WEIGHT - WEIGHTBURN + FOOD

My assumptions are that WEIGHT is the person's current weight. WEIGHTBURN is the amount the person burn per every day from energy consumption + bodily maintenance. FOOD varies from person to person.

My questions for you:

But it is possible that some of the "calories in (the mouth)" may pass through the digestive system undigested and later excreted? Could people differ in this aspect, perhaps because of their gut flora?

Not unreasonable. I remember reading that while brocoli has more calcium than milk, the composition of milk allows the calcium to be absorbed better. In fact, the components of brocoli seem to contain something that actually inhibits calcium absorption!

More generally, I assume your reasoning here to be that actual food digestion is not a 1:1 to, say, food labels. Correct? (I assume that food labels use some sort of average, say, 10,000/100 = x per 100g. Correct me if this is wrong please!)

Also, what if some people burn the stored fat in ways we would not intuitively recognize as work? For example, what if some people simply dress less warmly, and spend more calories heating up their bodies? Are there other such non-work ways of spending calories?

Define your 'work'. Is it physical activity without any body maintenance? Keeping your body temperature, for example. Digesting food also takes 'work'. I don't think you can burn so much calories from exercise alone, in fact. Calorie counting is a better choice for fat loss than walking/running distance.

In other words, that there is such a thing as "metabolic privilege", which is usually denied or ignored by the "calories in, calories out" proponents.

Huh? The individual metabolism (aka the "metabolic privilege") is what primarily determines the "calories out" part. No one denies that people have different metabolisms.

The CICO theory says that the only way to lose weight is to have a negative calorie balance. You can achieve it in any way you want -- by lowering the CI part, or by increasing the CO part -- but it has to be there for you to lose weight.

The claims that all calories are fungible or that the CO part is stable are just strawmen.

a) all calories in the food you put in your mouth are digested;

This is certainly not true. Usually calories in food are measured burning the stuff and measuring the calories emitted, but of course our digestive tract doesn't work like that. This means that we always absorb less calories that are in the food, indeed cooking was a great revolution in human history because it allowed more calories to be extracted from the same amount of food.

b) the digested calories are either stored as fat or spent as work; there is nothing else that could happen with them;

This, on the other hand and with the caveat of a), seems pretty uncontroversial. There are different deposits of long-term energy, such as glycogen in the liver, glycogen in the muscles and adipose tissue. But other than accumulating or being used to produce ATP, I have never seen any reason to believe that calories are used for something else.

c) the calories are the whole story about nutrition and metabolism, and all calories are fungible.

Well, this is obviously untrue, but usually "calories in, calories out" is used in the context of weight loss.

Could it be that some people are forced to eat large amounts of food just to extract the right amount of vitamins and minerals, and any attempt to eat less will lead to symptoms of malnutrition?

It can be, but the body is usually extremely efficient when extracting vitamins out of food. An inability to do that would be a serious business, most probably caused by a genetic disease, and surely cured by supplementation rather than eating large quantity of food.

maybe you cannot always get thin by eating less calories than you spend working; but if you eat more calories than you spend working, you will inevitably get fat.

I don't see how the first sentence would work. As far as I know, there are no hidden reserve of energy besides glicogen, muscle proteins and fat.

But it is possible that some of the "calories in (the mouth)" may pass through the digestive system undigested and later excreted? Could people differ in this aspect, perhaps because of their gut flora?

This is a certainty. Think for example to all the calories contained in indigestible fibers.

Also, what if some people burn the stored fat in ways we would not intuitively recognize as work? For example, what if some people simply dress less warmly, and spend more calories heating up their bodies? Are there other such non-work ways of spending calories?

That is called non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) and is the way that most of our calories are expended: keeping body temperature constant, providing energy to all the chemical reaction in the body, etc.

While reality seems to suggest that most people, both thin and fat, keep their weight stable around some specific value.

Yes, there is a set-point which is regulated by a complex interaction between various hormones, such as ghrelin, leptin, insulin, etc.

I have heard repeatedly the argument about "calories in, calories out" (e.g. here). Seems to me that there are a few unspoken assumptions, and I would like to ask how true they are in reality. Here are the assumptions:

a) all calories in the food you put in your mouth are digested;

b) the digested calories are either stored as fat or spent as work; there is nothing else that could happen with them;

and in some more strawmanish forms of the argument:

c) the calories are the whole story about nutrition and metabolism, and all calories are fungible.

If we assume these things to be true, it seems like a law of physics that if you count the calories in the food you put in your mouth, and subtract the amount of exercise you do, the result exactly determines whether you gain or lose fat. Taken literally, if a healthy and thin person starts eating an extra apple a day, or starts taking a somewhat shorter walk to their work, without changing anything else, they will inevitably get fat. On the other hand, any fat person can become thin if they just start eating less and/or exercising more. If you doubt this, you doubt the very laws of physics.

It's easy to see how (c) is wrong: there are other important facts about food besides calories, for example vitamins and minerals. When a person has food containing less than optimal amount of vitamins or minerals per calorie, they don't have a choice between being fat or thin, but between being fat or sick. (Or alternatively, changing the composition of their diet, not just the amount.)

Okay, some proponents of "calories in, calories out" may now say that this is obvious, and that they obviously meant the advice to apply to a healthy diet. However, what if the problem is not with the diet per se, but with a way the individual body processes the food? For example, what if the food contains enough vitamins and minerals per calorie, but the body somehow extracts those vitamins and minerals inefficiently, so it reacts even to the optimal diet as if it was junk food? Could it be that some people are forced to eat large amounts of food just to extract the right amount of vitamins and minerals, and any attempt to eat less will lead to symptoms of malnutrition?

Ignoring the (c), we get a weaker variant of "calories in, calories out", which is, approximately -- maybe you cannot always get thin by eating less calories than you spend working; but if you eat more calories than you spend working, you will inevitably get fat.

But it is possible that some of the "calories in (the mouth)" may pass through the digestive system undigested and later excreted? Could people differ in this aspect, perhaps because of their gut flora?

Also, what if some people burn the stored fat in ways we would not intuitively recognize as work? For example, what if some people simply dress less warmly, and spend more calories heating up their bodies? Are there other such non-work ways of spending calories?

In other words, I don't doubt that the "calories in, calories out" model works perfectly for a spherical cow in a vacuum, but I am curious about how much such approximation applies to the real cases.

But even for the spherical cow in a vacuum, this model predicts that any constant lifestyle, unless perfectly balanced, should either lead to unlimited weight gain (if "calories in" exceed "calories out") or unlimited weight loss (in the opposite case). While reality seems to suggest that most people, both thin and fat, keep their weight stable around some specific value. The weight itself has an impact on how much calories people spend simply moving their own bodies, but I doubt that this is sufficient to balance the whole equation.

Should we worry that if Trump supports eradicating mosquitoes, that will cause Trump opponents to oppose it?