[PART I – MYSTERIES]
[PART II – CURRENT THEORIES OF OBESITY ARE INADEQUATE]
[PART III – ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINANTS] Runner up ti

A Chemical Hunger – Interlude A: CICO Killer, Qu’est-Ce Que C’est?

submited by

Style Pass

2021-07-16 08:30:07

[PART I – MYSTERIES] [PART II – CURRENT THEORIES OF OBESITY ARE INADEQUATE] [PART III – ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINANTS]

Runner up titles: Son of CICO, 2 CI 2 CO, Revenge of CICO, CICO 2: Judgement Day, CICO Returns, CICO! Here We Go Again, CICO’s Bogus Journey

Part of the problem is that CICO means different things to different people, and covers a number of loosely related hypotheses. We found it hard to disentangle these when we were writing Part II. A number of times we circled back to our section on CICO and tried to reorganize it, or re-write it entirely, but we weren’t able to figure out a way to clarify the argument to our satisfaction.

But feedback on the posts has proved extremely helpful, and we think we can now do a better job explaining what we meant. Special thanks to commenters-on-the-blog Richard Meadows and Grat Ivar, to fellow bloggers Alvaro de Menard and Stephen Malina, and commenters on MetaFilter and Hacker News, for helping us clarify our thoughts on this.

One way to interpret CICO (or one sub-hypothesis) is that it claims there is a strictly linear relationship between calories eaten/burned and weight change. This is specified if we take “weight gain = calories in – calories out” literally. Essentially, this hypothesis says that overeating by the same amount should always lead to the same amount of weight gain.