Dogman quoted:

The theory that weight gain boils down
'calories-in, calories-out' is the last man standing in the diet wars.

Old time low carbers have known this is false for a very long time.
Calories are a useful approximation in a limited set of applications.

The real equation is grams of fat into storage minus grams of fat out of
storage equals net change in the amount of fat. Find a plan that drives
fat out of storage and you have a winning system all else being equal.
Find a plan that only included limited times of hunger and the win gets
even bigger. Early low carbing moves fat out of storage better than
other plans. All along low carbing results in less hunger for more
people.

The principle anchors the comforting American belief that personal
responsibility explains all of our ills.

If personal responsibility worked you could go to the mall and not see
fat people. Some of these concepts are much easier to test than the
adherents want to believe.

Humans instinctively crave food that is carby, fat and salty. The carby
part is addictive so products stress carbs. Chemicals other than sodium
chloride can be added to alt to increase appetite. Companies don't even
have to have a deliberate plan to take advantage of these instinctive
cravings. All companies need to do is make more of the products that
sell better, make less of the products that sell worse, keep trying
variations on products to continue development to incrase profitability.
Any product that hits the instinctive human cravings will sell better.
Any product that triggers addictive behavior patterns will sell better.
The market will tune the rest until we have vast numbers of fat people
even wtihout any intent for that to happen.

It validates all that wasted
time on the treadmill that people like Kolata and others endorse.

Exercise is beneficial for other reasons.

Try running the calorie arithmatic as if this were one of its valid
applications. A marathon is a pound of fat. To exercise enough to
force loss it takes so much time on the tradmill employed people lose
their jobs and married people lose their families. But check out the
numbers to prevent weight regain and the story is very different. Half
an hour every day or an hour every other day burns as many calories as
the typical weight gain between diets. That's a pretty good
preventative. Now check the national database of the folks who have
managed to keep off weight they lost. The huge majority of them
continue to exercise often and long. It's nearly enough to account for
the entire database.

It keeps us watching shows like The Biggest Loser.

Think of how these folks work. When they are not doing other exercise
they are on treadmills to fill out 16 hour days. it comes down to "A
marathon is a pound of fat". They keep these folks doing at least that
much work every day. They do it to the exclusion of their jobs and away
from their families. They don't do it as their "job". They do it as
their "life".

It leaves the door
open to low-calorie, high-carbohydrate food products that make the
economy hum, are portable, do not require we learn to cook, make
children stop crying, and taste good. Any efforts at reporting science
to the contrary will always have a rough road."

And all that industry need do is observe what sells well, make more of
it, and advertise it. No ulterior motives othe than profit are needed.