[Chapter 5] You Don’t Get Fat from Eating Lava or Gasoline or Plutonium

Don't try this at home, kids...

This seems like a troll. Obviously, you will not grow fat on your body if you pop back 5 grams of plutonium (107.5 trillion calories), slide down a spoonful of molten rock (3,538 calories), and chase it with a gallon of gasoline (30.4 million calories).

Doing even one of these things would kill you dead.

This observation is a problem for the Banker Model, though.

After all, the first law of thermodynamics tells us explicitly that, at core, what matters are CALORIES. If you consume more calories than your body needs, the excess will be stored as fat. And clearly, if we consume calories in the form of voluminous quantities of gasoline, plutonium, or lava, there will be excess energy left over.

So why doesn’t that “energy surplus” turn into fat?

Those who defend calories-in-calories-out will snark and say something like “that’s not what we mean by calories, Adam! We mean calories contained in FOOD.”

Let’s put aside for a second the fact that the first law of thermodynamics says nothing about food vs. non-food calories—a crucial distinction.

Even so, the more precisely we follow their line of reasoning, the worse it becomes for the CICO crowd.

What these folks really believe is that what “counts” are the bioavailable calories in the foods we eat. Not just “calories in food” we might measure if we combust foods in a bomb calorimeter.

It’s not enough to swallow a Big Mac. You need to digest the Big Mac and extract the usable energy therein. THOSE are the calories that “count”—the gold coins the bank transacts with.

Thus, of course the lava-gasoline-plutonium argument can be laughed off. Those indigestible calories just pass through your body. Come on!

But hold on. The CICOs are not off the hook yet.

What exactly are these coins that “count”—in other words, the units of energy the body uses?

The body’s main energy currency is adenosine triphosphate, also known as ATP. We can also use creatine phosphate, NADH, and FADH2; and we store energy in the form of glycogen, triglycerides, and ketone bodies.

Sure, fine.

But when we’re told that “calories count,” which of these elements “counts”; and why; and by how much; and in what context? And how do the foods we eat correspond to the bioavailable energy we generate from them? And how does this quantity relate to the calorie labels on a box?

On we could go.

We could keep asking pesky questions like this. Inevitably, we will slip into complex discussions of biochemistry.

And that’s not good. Because the Banker Model relies at its core on PHYSICS. Remember: the idea flows from the first law of thermodynamics, and the first law doesn’t care about where calories come from (lava vs food) or how they are processed in the body (ATP vs triglycerides). A calorie is a calorie, after all.

Is this making your head spin? It should.

The deeper you follow the logic of calories-in-calories-out, the less sense it makes. It falls apart like tissue paper when tested, even by hypotheticals an 8 year-old or Reddit troll might throw at you.