Thermodynamics for Dummies
From Chapter 6: Thermodynamics for Dummies, Part 1 in WWGF:
P72: Obesity is not a disorder of energy balance or calories-in/calories out or overeating, and thermodynamics has nothing to do with it. If we can’t understand this, we’ll keep falling back into the conventional thinking about why we get fat, and that’s precisely the trap, the century-old quagmire, that we’re trying to avoid. . . .
P73: All the first law [of thermodynamics] says is that if something gets more or less massive, then more energy or less energy has to enter it than leave it. It says nothing about why this happens. It says nothing about cause and effect.
Zorback from Nalpak
A good metaphor to explain the inanity of invoking the laws of thermodynamics as an explanation as to why someone gets fat, or loses fat, is the Fenway Park metaphor.
I grew up in Boston and am a Red Sox fan, which I think is a prerequisite for growing up in Boston. So imagine I use the laws of thermodynamics to explain any phenomenon in which, when a system gets bigger, well, “there’s no getting around the laws of thermodynamics,” as the New York Times so eloquently put it in 2004, it must be caused by thermodynamics.
Imagine, too, that I have a visitor from out of town who never heard of baseball or the Red Sox. They might as well be from another planet, so why not a spaceling touching down on terra firma in my backyard? Miraculously, he speaks fluent English.
Imagine, too, that I have a visitor from out of town who never heard of baseball or the Red Sox. They might as well be from another planet, so why not a spaceling touching down on terra firma in my backyard? Miraculously, he speaks fluent English.
After explaining reality shows, Oprah, and Bieber Fever, I tell him about the Sox, and he is intrigued. They don’t have sports on Nalpak and he barely understands the concept, but he’s game for putting on a disguise and going to a ballgame. So we go to the ballpark and try to get a couple of tickets, but the game is sold-out, which prompts the following exchange:
Zorback: Why can’t we watch the game.
Me: Fenway Park is too crowded.
Zorback: Well, that seems obvious. Why is it so crowded?
Me: Fenway is filled to the brim because more people entered the stadium than left it.
Zorback: Um, OK. But why did more people enter? Why can’t we get inside?
Me: Fenway Park is like any other place, like a restaurant. You do have restaurants, don’t you, Zorby?
Zorback: Sure, but—
Me: So it’s just like when a restaurant gets crowded and you can’t sit down to eat – more people entered the restaurant than left it, so there are a lot of people and energy inside. Same with Fenway: When more people enter the turnstiles, it’s going to get more crowded. There’s no getting around the laws of thermodynamics.
Zorback: Maybe the quality of food, the prices, and the time of evening have something to do with why the restaurant gets crowded? Are the Red Sox really popular?
Me: Why, yes. How did you know?
Zorback: That might explain why there’s so many people going—
Me: There’s no getting around the laws of thermodynamics.
Zorback: What about these people who are selling tickets around the corner, can we get a ticket from them?
Me: Yes, but they are really, really expensive.
Zorback: Why are they so expensive?
Me: The New York Yankees are in town and whenever the Yankees are playing the Red Sox, the ticket scalpers charge an exorbitant amount of money for the tickets.
Zorback: Hmm, there must be a reason for that! Just like a really good restaurant will have higher prices and will be harder to get into.
Me: You can't be serious, Zorback! There’s no getting around the laws of thermodynamics.
Zorback: Uh, I see. I noticed a lot more people are outside today. Does this have anything to do with what you call a “weekend,” and when you explained to me about how people like the sunshine and heat, I noticed it is 78.2 degrees with 98% clear skies, while the last two weeks here it has been raining, with no sunlight, and I computed the mean temperature at 43.6 degrees.
Me: That’s nice, Zorbster, but I don’t know where you’re going with this one.
Zorback: Maybe the beautiful weather, the weekend, the popularity of the teams playing, and someone told me that you call this match-up 'Game 7 of the American League Championship Series.' Maybe they have something to do with—
Me: Zorby, Zorby, Zorby. I feel like a broken record, but you must understand by now that there’s no getting around—
Zorback: Yes, I think I understand. You people are morons.
*****
In Chapter 7 of WWGF, entitled: Thermodynamics for Dummies, Part 2, Taubes wrote:
P77: [T]he energy we consume and the energy we expend are dependent on each other. . . . Change one, and the other changes to compensate.
“In most instances, energy intake can be interpreted as a crude measure of physical activity,” wrote Walter Willett and Meir Stampfer in their 1998 textbook Nutritional Epidemiology.
Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard medical school wrote:
An animal whose food is suddenly restricted tends to reduce its energy expenditure both by being less active and by slowing down energy use in cells, thereby limiting weight loss. It also experiences increased hunger so that once the restriction ends, it will eat more than its prior norm until the earlier weight is attained. (2007. What Fuels Fat. Scientific American)
And, as Hugo Rony wrote a mere 71 years ago:
Consistently high or low energy expenditures result in consistently high or low levels of appetite. Thus men doing heavy physical work spontaneously eat more than men engaged in sedentary occupations. Statistics show that the average daily caloric intake of lumberjacks is more than 5000 calories while that of tailors is only about 2500 calories. Persons who change their occupation from light to heavy work or vice versa soon develop corresponding changes in their appetite. As a result of this adjustment marked decrease or increase in appetite may be a physiological response of the normal hunger mechanism.
This is why you can’t just take obese tailors and prescribe them the job of lumberjack to lose weight. Likewise, this is why you can’t successfully prescribe a couch potato engagement in continuous vigorous activity and expect them to lose weight in the long term, or at least expect them to not get hungrier.
Gary Taubes, in his blog, posted about the inanity of overeating with a similar exchange to that of Zorback from Nalpak, but applied to the field of overweight:
Gary Taubes, in his blog, posted about the inanity of overeating with a similar exchange to that of Zorback from Nalpak, but applied to the field of overweight:
If the experts had ever been open to a little skeptical thinking from others or had they been appropriately skeptical themselves, this might never have happened. What’s been needed (and still is) was for someone (a reasonably smart 14-year-old would suffice) to ask the obvious questions and then insist on intelligent answers. Here’s how such a dialog might go:
The experts: Obesity is caused by over-eating, by consuming more calories than are expended. There’s no getting around the first law of thermodynamics.
Us: But all that law says is that if somebody gets fat, they have to consume more calories then they expend. So why do they do that?
The experts: Because they do.
Us: That’s not a good enough answer.
The experts: Well, maybe they can’t help themselves.
Us: Why can’t they help themselves?
The experts: Because they can’t.
Us: That’s not a good enough answer either.
The experts: Because the food industry makes them do it. There’s so much good food around and it’s so tasty, they can’t help but eat it.
Us: But obviously some of us can, because we don’t all get fat. Why is it only some people can’t help themselves?
The experts: Because they can’t.
Us: Try again.
The experts: Well, it’s complicated.
Us: What do you mean complicated? We thought it was easy. Just this eating-too-much, exercising-too-little, calories-in-calories-out, thermodynamics thing.
The experts: Okay, how about this? [Now quoting from an NIH report published in 2000.] “Obesity is a complex, multifactorial chronic disease that develops from an interaction of genotype and the environment. Our understanding of how and why obesity develops is incomplete, but involves the integration of social, behavioral, cultural, physiological, metabolic and genetic factors.”
Us: So what do all those have to do with eating too much and the laws of thermodynamics?
Experts: They contribute to making fat people overeat.
Us: How do they do that?
The experts: We don’t know. It’s complicated.
Us: Then maybe there’s another way to look at it. Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that’s why we eat so much and appear — to you anyway — to be kind of lazy. We’re compensating for the loss of calories into our fat.
The experts: Yeah, well, maybe. Your guess is as good as ours.The laws of thermodynamics tell us nothing about what causes obesity, nor do they explain that in biological creatures, including us moronic human beings, intake and expenditure are dependent variables: "Change one, and the other changes to compensate."
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