This post is a reaction from reading Adele Hite’s brilliant and hilarious post on a talk by Walter Willett: https://eathropology.com/2016/04/20/walter-willett-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-data/. Walter Willett is the Chair of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, and is recognized as a leader in the field of nutritional epidemiology.
Please go read Adele’s post. It’s a short read. Then come back to read the rest of this post.
I know it’s “just rats”, but I had 8 rats that had become obese on a refined foods (REF) diet over a 9 month period (well, they became obese in two weeks, and maintained it over the rest of the 9 months).
I then put them into cages with access to a running wheel for 5 weeks. And I switched half of the rats to a healthy control (CON) diet.
What happened?
The rats on the REF diet continued to increase in weight while the rats on the CON diet lost weight.
Okay, that’s expected. Eat a healthy diet and lose weight.
According to Willett’s argument, the CON rats should have lost weight because they exercised more and ate less. Likewise, the rats that stayed on the REF diet should have ate more than before being placed in the running-wheel cage, and should not have exercised much at all. This is classic CICO.
Okay, let’s take a look, first at amount of food consumed:
Doh! BOTH groups of rats consumed less food after being placed in the running-wheel cages. Even the rats continuing to eat the REF diet and gain more weight over the 5-week period consumed LESS food than before being placed in the running wheel cages!
The same story emerges when we plot energy consumption per rat by diet condition:
Well, obviously the fat rats on the REF diet must have been stupendously lazy and not run in the wheels at all, otherwise how could they lose weight while eating less? On the other hand, the rats switched to the CON diet both ate less and exercised a lot more in order to lose their weight. Right?
Oops! The rats switched to the healthy CON diet actually ran less distance per week than did the rats that stayed on the REF diet!
Holy balances and scales Batman! What gives?
Perhaps CICO and its adherents (WW and the good folks at the Harvard School of Public Health) are wrong?
Oh wait, but these are just rats. This scenario would NEVER occur in humans…
aaron blaisdell's blog 