Yes but care to expound on what the Nutritional God Encarnate says in rebuttal? ....:
From this article
The Fundamentals of Fat Loss Part 1 | BodyRecomposition - The Home of Lyle McDonald
So try again, Keif.
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I would mention that changing the macronutrient content of the diet can have a small impact in this regards. For the most part, switching out carbs and fat doesn???t do much despite what many claim. The difference in the thermic effect of food for carbs vs. fat is about 3% so for every 100 calories you switch out one for the other, you might see a 3 calorie difference in energy expenditure.
I???d note that carbs have a the advantage here with a thermic effect of 6% compared to 3% for fat. But the effect tends to be so small as to be irrelevant unless you are looking at whole scale changes to diet. Again, if you replace 100 calories of fat with carbs, you burn 3 more calories per day. If you replace 1000 calories of fat with carbs, you burn 30 calories more per day; you???ll lose an extra pound of fat every 116 days. Whoop de doo.
And while I know someone is going to bring up the issue of gluconeogenesis on ketogenic diets in the comments, I???ll only point out that the impact of this is small and disappears after about 2-3 weeks (when the body shifts to using ketones for fuel). As well, any increase in expenditure from this pathway is balanced against a loss of the thermic effect of carbs.
As well, direct research (by Brehm) shows that there is no difference in resting metabolic rate for ketogenic vs. carb-based diets; the thermic effect of food was higher in the high-carb condition. If there were a true metabolic advantage in terms of energy expenditure for ketogenic diets, someone would have been able to measure it by now. They haven???t and they aren???t going to and all of the theorizing about it doesn???t change the fact that direct research hasn???t supported the concept.
Now, protein has the biggest impact in terms of the thermic effect of food, switching out carbs or fat with protein tends to increase the energy out side of the equation but you have to make pretty large scale changes for it to be particularly significant. I???d note that protein also tends to be the most filling of all the nutrients and studies show that increasing dietary protein intake tends to cause people to eat less calories. Which is another huge confound; if increasing protein makes folks spontaneously eat less, it looks like it was adding the protein per se that did the magic. But it wasn???t, it was the effect of increasing protein on total energy intake that caused the fat loss. Like I said, a subtle confound that people tend to miss a lot.
Lyle McDonald
Posted August 12, 2011 at 12:26 PM
Last comment, Keif. And unless you look at really extreme diets, all the stuff you???re prattling on about add up to about 3/5ths of jack crap in the real world. Sure, compare 10% protein to 50% protein and it makes a difference from TEF. But all of the other pathways are mostly irrelevant theoretical nonsense, adding up to nothing in the real world. With most realistic diets, any differences from any of this amount to pretty much nothing. Especially not compared to total caloric intake.
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If I'm not mistaken the law of thermodynamics is in regards to a closed system. Well of course the Human system isn't closed, hence the various orifices we possess. But it's such a small amount of otherwise-based energy escapement that it's not worth mentioning. And even if you chance efficiency and switch to a high protein/low carb/ketogenic approach, after a few weeks it's not even worth worrying about then. Just like EPOC or the "Afterburn" effect. That's Lyle's point.