Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
This is begging the question.
You assume that caloric consumption is determined almost entirely by activity level, and therefore any evidence against this theory must be wrong somehow.
My post of course, was about body temperature, not really about the causes of obesity, but I do understand the temptation to latch onto the hottest and most bikeshedd-y of all culture war items: the CICO thesis.
In any case, since I can't resist either, I will propose that higher body temperature provides a possible mechanism for people to burn a much higher (or lower) amount of calories than can be explained by the Mifflin-St. Jeor Equation.
What evidence?
I didn't see anything especially notable in the post except for this wild claim I'd never heard of before of skinny people often putting away over five thousand calories a day in the past.
There's obviously some degree of RMR difference between people (and the existence of people at the tails of the RMR distribution does not contradict CICO in the slightest btw).
However, it's notable that people are eating way more food these days than at basically any point in the past. That figure is a little rough since it doesn't actually measure what people are eating - those numbers show a similar story but they only seem to go back to the seventies. So it's a little hard to imagine that our ancestors had significantly higher metabolisms while eating significantly less. Small changes are possible and not that interesting to me.
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