dsdfsdf

What's more important, the two pieces of paper he received or the fact that his own arguments clearly depict he doesn't understand? He says:

" Does anyone – even Jonah Lehrer or the neuroscientists he consults – think that the brain, perhaps in cohort with the gut, is making decisions about how much we should eat, on how long we stay hungry and when we get full, so that we don’t overshoot by 20 calories a day. That’s matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent. (We consume, on average, about 2700 calories a day, so matching energy in to energy out and not overshooting by 20 calories requires better than one percent accuracy.)"

"...we actually have to be perfect in our matching of intake to expenditure or we’re going to get inexorably fatter (or leaner, if we err on the side of going hungry), or at least we have to average perfection over decades."

His argument is that the body is not accurate to within 20 calories a day. He appears unaware of the fact that this kind of regulation, which I agree isn't possible on a day-to-day basis (the brain never says "don't eat that last 1/12 of a candy bar"), is unremarkable when amortized over time. That is where his scientific inexperience shows. "Averaging perfection over decades" happens all the time and is perfectly unremarkable. He is oblivious to this fact.

This is a fatal error. Regardless of how it fits into his larger argument, he gets this basic and fundamental point wrong. When an author can't get facts like these straight, I become suspicious of the rest of his arguments. And indeed, a random sampling shows they are fundamentally broken. I would not trust him to explain any kind of complex science.

This article is my introduction to this author. After reading it, and being incensed at how thoroughly bad it was, I researched the author's previous work, his background, and the list of accolades he has received. It's distressing to see someone who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about being rewarded as a serious expert. The things he says are either false or nonsensical. He generates controversy. He knows how to sell books. That's about it. Whatever scientific reputation he has is based on tricking people who don't know how to dissect an argument.

This article is inane. Just a sample:

"Twenty calories, after all, is a bite or two of food, ... an absolutely trivial amount of overeating that the body then chooses, for reasons we’ll have to discuss at some point, not to expend, ... , so that we don’t overshoot by 20 calories a day. ... That’s matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent."

The author, despite his qualifications, is numerically illiterate. Anyone who has seriously worked with numerical data understands the law of large numbers. If my body works to maintain some caloric level e, then over time the full meals I skip for seemingly no reason, or the second helpings I mysteriously decline, amortized over a scale of months, will balance out my caloric intake with severe accuracy. (Assuming I am predisposed to maintain a specific weight.)

Secondly, stating that weight gain is due to eating more calories than you burn is neither tautological, vacuous, nor inane. It might not be satisfying to the author, but it is a cogent and useful explanation of why people gain weight. Other, worse examples that institutions might give that would give people fewer clues about how to combat weight gain: "you've angered some god," "you're predisposed to be fat," "you're eating the wrong kind of food." The link expressed between consumed calories and stored mass is not logically trivial. Stating that I should eat fewer calories clues me in to track and reduce the calories listed on the side of foods I buy. If you want to get pedantic, a tautological explanation would be you're getting heavier because you're gaining weight.

It isn't worth dissecting the rest of the article. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand.

P.S. - it isn't a mystery to anybody why people get fat