Alan Aragon Research Review ~ Answering some questions about Thermodynamics
I'm once again honored to contribute to this month's edition of Alan Aragon's Research Review. This time I was interviewed and answered the following questions:
This is premium subscription content, but AARR is always worth the price in my opinion! Plus you'll get access to all archives (including past contributions from yours truly from the May-June issues of 2013 and 2014).
I missed getting to have my dedication in there, as I didn't think of it until after submission, but I wanted to dedicate the article to my grad school advisor Dr. Owen F. Devereux. Dr. D died a couple years back or I would have been proud to send him my writings on thermodynamics. He wrote a book called Topics in Metallurgical Thermodynamics that was his main area of research. I called it the bane of my grad school existence, but really it wasn't. Through applying the concepts of that book to my research I really learned and understood thermodynamics. Folks often wonder what my seemingly irrelevant advanced degree has to do with any of this nutrition stuff. Well, we applied the concepts to corrosion which is electrochemistry. Biochemistry is living electrochemistry. This means it involves enzymes and reaction coupling to get chemicals to do things they wouldn't otherwise do spontaneously. But in the end the concepts are the same. If you're a subscriber, I hope you'll enjoy! If you're not, you might want to consider subscribing now ...
Comments
to do with any of this nutrition stuff. Well, we applied the concepts
to corrosion which is electrochemistry. Biochemistry is living
electrochemistry. This means it involves enzymes and reaction coupling
to get chemicals to do things they wouldn't otherwise do spontaneously.
But in the end the concepts are the same."
By your reasoning carpentry and orthopaedics are the same because they both involve using hammers, saws, drills and screws.
I've
done five years of biochemistry (including a research masters). From
experience I'd argue that electrochemistry is a very minor component of
modern biochemistry. Real world biochemistry is mostly applied biology.
It is not the dry theory and metabolic pathways contained in textbooks.
The
reality is that NONE of the nutrition bloggers have any real expertise
in the field. At best they have expertise vaguely connected to some
field of nutrition research (eg medicine, biochemistry or neuroscience).
If you want to be a nutrition EXPERT you need a PhD and be willing to
spend decades as an ACADEMIC researcher. [There is no such thing as a
'private' researcher.]
You can't be an expert in any field just
by reading textbooks and scientific papers. The vast majority of what
you need to learn comes from practical experience and feedback from
colleagues.
If you've really studied biochemistry then you wouldn't make the argument you do about the actual chemistry part. The thermodynamics is the same. Biological systems run on electrochemical "engines". The "bio" part doesn't change the rules of the game.
When I was doing research, the vast majority of what I needed to learn came from studying the literature. Without that you don't know what questions to ask, and if something unusual turns up you fit it in with what your supervisor thinks. This kind of thing can be disastrous for scientific progress.
Many years ago scientists thought modern disease was caused by 'bad genes' rather than poor diet, because that was what Richard Dawkins said, and nobody bothered to read the genetics literature to find out whether he was talking nonsense or not. I once said to him 'genes don't work like that', and he said it wasn't his problem, it was for the geneticists to sort out. I was astonished. Did he really think reading the literature was unnecessary? Yes, he did.
Alan Aragon has it easier - he trains sportsmen. Sportsmen can always compensate for the impossibility of doing calculations via some additonal crazy excercise level, or abstaining from one for a while. And excercise is easier to tabelarize than "conditions of life" like the weather, sunlight, diarrhea etc. Metabolic ward studies have it easy - as everything is in the lab. Normal people in everyday life can't just use this thermodynamics of their bodies for anything useful.
3,6mg = lifetime weight loss from conversion of weight to energy. That's not much. Laws of thermodynamics are about energy, and this is the only weight loss from energy creation that you have.
Rest of weight fluctuations come from moving things around. Eg. someone eats fat, fat is incorpodated into the tissues, this leads to additional 20kg of weight, then this person gets a liposuction and looses eg. 25kg of weight. See - high weight fluctuations with no "thermodynamics" involved whatsover. Many "pathways" of the same type exist - the most obious one being water, that flows through us even naturally. Same with protein - eg. incorporated into the skin, then the skin is shredded (it location becomes outside of the body). Again - no thermodynamics, while weight changes.
Of course some of the flows that cause weight changes are related to the energy production via chemical reactions. But this is not about "thermodynamics" but fulel supply management, and waste removal! The power plant analogy would be the coal storage, and sludge storage rather than the actual energy production itself. So thermodynamics doesn't apply here, its just logistics.
Converting mass that goes through us to energy units (calories) via some voodoo process in order to calculate... mass changes looks like a nonsense. If you really want to balance inputs and outputs then measure mass itself - at least you don't commit a thinking fallacy then - at least the units you count in are real, and describe what physically happens.
Many of your arguments are wrong and/or irrelevant in the overall context and I just don't have the time to answer this here in a post which is basically an announcement.
When the human body burns its fuel (obtained from food or stored previously in the body) the fuel becomes CO2 and water which are quickly expelled from the body, and hence the body loses weight. If you burn more fuel than what was obtained from food (in this case the body burns a part of the previously stored fuel in addition to that obtained from food) there is a net weight loss. If the body burns less fuel than is obtained from food, there is a net weight gain.
Regards,
Rad.
I wonder if you agree with the below statements:
1.
CICO applies without doubt in a conceptual sense but with the proviso “ all else being equal”. The discussion is usually about calorie intake and fat gain and almost always “all else” is equal. Sometimes (seldom) it is not ; e.g growth spurts in adolescents, or in very ill people.
2. Laws of Thermodynamics as applied to living organisms are not possible in a practical sense. We cannot (with present knowledge) formulate equations in this field.
I'm going to have to add exfoliating to the Calorie book tho. :-)
1. The discussion may be about calories and fat gain (or loss) but obviously it holds always and in every living being. Obviously during growth we use some intake to create that mass, some add more lean with fat and/or lose more lean with fat, but the vast majority of excesses and deficits over the long term come and go from fat mass because that's how we are physiologically designed to store energy.
2. If the laws of thermo didn't apply NuSI couldn't do their metabolic chamber study ;-) Just because exact equations can't be formulated doesn't mean that approximate ones are impossible. Why should we bother putting MPG ratings on cars? Exact equations on engine efficiency are impossible, right?
An interesting question is how energy is partitioned and possibly optimized in our bodies. An approximate mass/energy balance may be possible by experiment. Why this is never discussed in research is an interesting question in itself.
Sautterron brought up exfoliation as a term in CO I hadn't yet considered. Perhaps because skin sloughing would be an infinitessimal term included in REE.
Alan doesn't require a lifetime commitment. $10 gets you access to all back issues. Perhaps worth your investment. I'm sorry but I can't engage further here and you'll have to comment on relevant content on this blog if you feel it's worthwhile.
>>> Chemists can spend entire careers ignoring E=mc2 because the changes in mass in chemical reactions are so small they're impractical to measure. The only places where we deal with enough energy to see changes in mass are in nuclear and particle physics experiments. <<<
So why are you going on about it as if it has any meaning?? The meaningful energy associated with chemical reactions is bond energy. All macros contain certain potential calories (when burned) per gram. When they are burned, the grams are exhaled as CO2. Liposuction removes lipid (and other stuff) without it being burned off - like siphoning gas from a car. No thermodynamics needed in that case, just as there are no thermodynamics essentially to fat gain when ingested lipid finds its way into fat cells.
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