Taxes, surcharges and freedom.

[Rosbjerg]

So, uh, there are pretty clearly 'good calories' and 'bad calories'.

 

Only contextually, if you energy heavy food and don't exercise then it's bad - but it's more because you don't exercise.. While excessive workout and a low energy diet would also be pretty bad for you. In which case the "good" calories would be bad.. so again, it's contextual. I've seen people live on a pretty much fast-food only diet and be in perfect health, simply because they used all the energy - and my gf, who is vegan, is gaining weight (no offence honey) simply because she isn't using the energy intake - and no, she's not eating unhealthy vegan food.

[Walsingham]

So, uh, there are pretty clearly 'good calories' and 'bad calories'.

 

Only contextually, if you energy heavy food and don't exercise then it's bad - but it's more because you don't exercise.. While excessive workout and a low energy diet would also be pretty bad for you. In which case the "good" calories would be bad.. so again, it's contextual. I've seen people live on a pretty much fast-food only diet and be in perfect health, simply because they used all the energy - and my gf, who is vegan, is gaining weight (no offence honey) simply because she isn't using the energy intake - and no, she's not eating unhealthy vegan food.

 

No wonder she's not using it. I'd be curled up in a foetal ball, whimpering, if you put me on a vegan diet.

[Humodour]

I've seen people live on a pretty much fast-food only diet and be in perfect health

 

On the inside? No. Only need to look at LDL vs HDL or trans fats vs natural fats, or essential vitamin and mineral intake to see why (let's take an easy example of iodine and thyroid malfunction, or vitamin B12 and anaemia + lethargy). Unfortunately in many cases, the health impacts of a bad diet (fast food or otherwise) can often take years to observe.

 

Fatness is not what I consider when I discuss health, really, because if you're fat I'm sure you're already well aware you're ****ing your body over (being fat exerts a hefty and obvious physical and psychological burden in terms of mood, energy levels, ability to perform tasks, constantly getting sick, etc). Fatness is not good for your health, but it is easily noticed and controlled (ensure your calories eaten are roughly the same as your calories burnt - simple).

 

That said if you were really observant you could get by on a fast food diet (depending on the fast food) and still be reasonably healthy... but you'd need to have a pretty decent grasp of nutrition and eat very selectively to ensure you were covering all the appropriate bases... so it's a bit of a moot point.

[Zoraptor]

Also with the diet information please read and consider Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. Very rigorous researcher and great book.

 

Protip: There's no such thing as a "good calorie" and a "bad calorie." Energy is energy.

Protip: You're wrong.

Protip: He's right. A calorie is just another name for (~ 4.2) joules which is just another name for energy. In the nutritional sense it is the digestible energy portion of foods, but it's still energy. The 'objective' measures for 'goodness' of calories are things like Glycaemic Index.

 

I'll only deal with the more egregious errors in the rest of your post.

 

..as Zoraptor ignorantly pointed out thinking it meant that all trans fats must be OK for you).

 

No. I pointed out that your "ban all trans fats!!!!!" idea was stupid and unworkable; that you didn't know that there were natural trans fats; you didn't know that some are (apparently) beneficial; and that you didn't know some could be metabolised. Your attempt to wriggle out of the evidence of your own ignorance is noted, sadly without so much as a hint of surprise. To whit, from you:

 

For a start, trans fats should be banned in every country.

[And]

Don't confuse trans-fats with the naturally produced fats (saturated or not) - it's ignorant.

[And]

Trans-fats are the worst type of fats. They aren't required in any food and are orders of magnitude worse than saturated fats. They are not natural fats and are produced by only partially hydrogenating oil

[And]

This is analogous to how heavy metals cause damage to the body. They don't cause immediate damage and are harmless in small mounts, but they never leave the body because the body can't process them.

 

And, from me:

Yeah, ban all animal fats, steak, mince, milk, butter [And]

[links showing natural trans fats, then] It's not that vegetable oil produced trans fats aren't bad, of course. But what you are doing is making a blanket statement..

 

Glad you read the link on vaccenic acid though (even if you missed that it was two separate links to two natural trans FAs), 'tis ever a pleasure to lift somewhat the dark shadows of ignorance with the bright light of knowledge, even if it is unappreciated and unrewarded.

 

So, uh, there are pretty clearly 'good calories' and 'bad calories'.

No, there is clearly 'good' food and 'bad' food. How the food is metabolised is far more relevant as 'good' food and 'bad' food can have exactly the same energy production value (calorie) yet be widely differing in apparent health effects.

 

Now, here is a list of how much caloric energy the mains types of hydrocarbons generally produce in the body

Hydrocarbons usually produce death in the body, what with them being poisonous and all. Fortunately most people don't ingest benzene/ butane et alia.

:1440x900 smugface:

Edited October 13, 2011 by Zoraptor

[Guard Dog]

That said if you were really observant you could get by on a fast food diet (depending on the fast food) and still be reasonably healthy... but you'd need to have a pretty decent grasp of nutrition and eat very selectively to ensure you were covering all the appropriate bases... so it's a bit of a moot point.

I remember a show on this a short time ago. A guy did a one month fast food only for three meals a day, gained no weight and his cholesterol & triglycerides remained the same. Obviously he was smart about what he ate but all the fast food joints serve menu selections that are not too terrible. Salads, grilled chicken, etc.

[Volourn]

Fast food is awesome. Disputing this fact makes you wrong. Places like subway and pizza joints tend to have a large selection of veggies for exmaple.. I bet I'm healthier than the majority of people who don't eatt fastfood. Trust me on that.

[Humodour]

To reiterate, so that the point is not lost with Zoraptor grasping at straws, there are energy-producing molecules of oils, fats, cholesterol, carbohydrates, etc which are good for you ('good calories'), and there are those which are bad for you ('bad calories'). They're all energy sources, but not all are equal when considering health impacts. They can't be conflated when purchasing food without health consequences.

 

Glad you read the link on vaccenic acid though (even if you missed that it was two separate links to two natural trans FAs), 'tis ever a pleasure to lift somewhat the dark shadows of ignorance with the bright light of knowledge, even if it is unappreciated and unrewarded.

 

Oh dear, you're being a ponce about a small number of natural trans fats (which are found in trace amounts in some animal products, and not relevant to the situations where one would want to ban trans fats e.g. in fast food and processed foods, much like fat content is not relevant to purchasing vegetables) because you managed to find two natural trace trans fats on Wikipedia, and yet the core point of my post was entirely on the mark - that artificial trans isomers produced by the partial hydrogenation of unsaturated oils, which constitute the immense bulk of consumed trans fats, are extremely bad for the body due to a lack of binding sites which can recognise them.

 

As a further note, it is suspected that the reason those natural trans fats do not appear to cause harm to the body is precisely because they are found only in trace amounts (the amounts which you would continue to find in food if trans fats were banned, since any cooking process produces trace amounts due the potential - depending on the kinetics - rearrangement step of many chemical reactions).

 

So, uh, there are pretty clearly 'good calories' and 'bad calories'.

No, there is clearly 'good' food and 'bad' food. How the food is metabolised is far more relevant as 'good' food and 'bad' food can have exactly the same energy production value (calorie) yet be widely differing in apparent health effects.

 

There are molecules which when metabolised produce 'x' calories but have deleterious health consequences due to things like geometry, bonding, polarity, etc compared to other molecules which also produce 'x' calories. And as such it is appropriate to say that there are good and bad calories. Calling molecules/food calories in the first place isn't very exact (since what produces the energy, of which calories are a non-SI unit for measuring it, is the dephosphorylation of adenosine triphosphate into adenosine diphosphate via the citric acid cycle), but people understand what it means.

 

Now, here is a list of how much caloric energy the mains types of hydrocarbons generally produce in the body

Hydrocarbons usually produce death in the body, what with them being poisonous and all. Fortunately most people don't ingest benzene/ butane et alia.

:1440x900 smugface:

 

Carbohydrates, proteins, alcohols, fats, etc, are all hydrocarbons. You could argue that the existence of an oxygen (e.g. ethers, glucose, alcohols) or a chlorine atom (chlorohydrocarbons) or whatnot makes these not strictly hydrocarbons but that is a rather exclusive definition of hydrocarbons. If it is a carbon chain primarily constituted of carbon and hydrogen it's fair enough to call it a hydrocarbon.

[Oblarg]

Some molecules produces more calories than others (and in this sense can all be thought of as 'calories' themselves), and further the different molecules have different levels of benefit (or hindrance) in the body.

 

Gosh, didn't take you very long to start saying nonsense, did it?

 

Even if we were to assume that "benefit" and "hindrance" to the body is even at all defined as a property of food (it's not), we really still have absolutely no way of determining it. As I have mentioned repeatedly (and as you have ignored), the majority of modern nutrition is based almost entirely on worthless correlative studies and not on actual understanding of biochemical mechanisms which would explain your proposed "benefit" and "hindrance."

 

Humans eat foods, above all else, for calories (and to a lesser extent protein). Not for trace elements (which are already present in most first-world diets - how many cases of scurvy or pellagra have you heard of recently?). For energy, to make the body work. In that respect, the idea of a "good calorie" and a "bad calorie" is laughably absurd. At first glance, one might think it would be less absurd in the context of long-term health effects of various foods, but since we really don't know ****ing anything about that, it's just as nonsensical.

[Zoraptor]

To reiterate, so that the point is not lost with Zoraptor grasping at straws, there are energy-producing molecules of oils, fats, cholesterol, carbohydrates, etc which are good for you ('good calories'), and there are those which are bad for you ('bad calories'). They're all energy sources, but not all are equal when considering health impacts. They can't be conflated when purchasing food without health consequences.

And to reiterate, that is a constructed difference where two largely unrelated properties ('healthiness' and 'energy richness') are being conflated together artificially. A calorie is a measure of energy produced, nothing more. 'Healthiness' ('goodness') is how healthy something is. You can have healthy high energy foods and unhealthy low energy foods, they're not directly related concepts.

 

Oh dear, you're being a ponce about a small number of natural trans fats (which are found in trace amounts in some animal products, and not relevant to the situations where one would want to ban trans fats

I provided the direct quote from you, there was no nuance just a blanket statement. It's a worthwhile point because all too often it is precisely what politicians do, make sweeping statements like "Ban all X!!!!" without sufficient knowledge of what they're actually banning. It's good to see you acknowledging that there are natural trans fats and such now though, some progress is being made. If you'd done so at the time instead of propagating a bunch of rubbish like saying all trans fats are artifical and similar to heavy metals there would not have been any problem.

 

There are molecules which when metabolised produce 'x' calories but have deleterious health consequences due to things like geometry, bonding, polarity, etc compared to other molecules which also produce 'x' calories. And as such it is appropriate to say that there are good and bad calories.

No, it isn't. It's appropriate to say that they are 'bad' foods.

 

Carbohydrates, proteins, alcohols, fats, etc, are all hydrocarbons. You could argue that the existence of an oxygen (e.g. ethers, glucose, alcohols) or a chlorine atom (chlorohydrocarbons) or whatnot makes these not strictly hydrocarbons but that is a rather exclusive definition of hydrocarbons. If it is a carbon chain primarily constituted of carbon and hydrogen it's fair enough to call it a hydrocarbon.

No it isn't, hydrocarbon has a very specific definition, "In organic chemistry, a hydrocarbon is an organic compound consisting entirely of hydrogen and carbon" to quote Wiki's perfectly serviceable one- if you described a protein/ fat/ sugar as a hydrocarbon in a chemistry exam you would get a big red X through the answer. The most technically correct term for what you want is probably the nice catch all "organic molecules" though 'digestible organics' or 'biological energy sources' or similar term would probably be more descriptive.

 

It's actually quite amusing/ unfortunate in a way, as hydrocarbon is just about the only family of organic molecules I can think of without a single significant use as a foodstuff whatsoever, outside of oddities like petrol eating bacteria.

[Rosbjerg]

No wonder she's not using it. I'd be curled up in a foetal ball, whimpering, if you put me on a vegan diet.

 

Hmm, perhaps I should slip her a sausage...

[Gorgon]

mm huh

[Walsingham]

I'm really losing interest in this debate with the personal attacks. Besides which, who says "ponce" any more?

[Malcador]

I'm really losing interest in this debate with the personal attacks. Besides which, who says "ponce" any more?

 

Ponces.

[Walsingham]

I'm really losing interest in this debate with the personal attacks. Besides which, who says "ponce" any more?

 

Ponces.

 

[Rosbjerg]

Well, yes I think this discussion came to an end..