Ummm… what I remember from biology lectures is that an incredible amount of the energy you make is lost as “body heat”. Wouldn’t this heat–from calories you’ve already burned just by living–be what heats up the cold beer or water? It seems to me (just intuitively, no calculations here) that you’d have to drink quite a lot of fluid before it made you so cold that your metabolism would increase.
Ignore me if I’m wrong.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a971128b.html
It’s not a case of cold increasing your metabolism, just that energy is used to warm the water to body temperature and hence the body has less to store as fat.
FWIW many moons ago when I did my HSC physics exam(don’t know the US equivalent, I was 18 and in the last year of secondary school before going on to uni), one of the questions was to calculate how much iced water needed to be consumed at a meal. From memory it was well over 100 litres.
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Regarding the column of dieting with beer:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a971128b.html
Regardless of the usefulness of the cited calculations there apparently is some sort of “beer diet”. A graduate student at one of the schools I attended had to go back to his native country for a stint of mandatory military service, and they weren’t going to let him get away with escaping by being overweight. This was one fat dude – they took a picture of him in the company of a group of pregnant wives of faculty and grad students, and he looked the most pregnant of all. He went on, he told us, a “beer diet”. We were skeptical.
A couple of months later he was a new man! I don’t know if he drank one glass of beer a day without eating anything, or if he threw up after drinking beer, or what he did, but his excess poundage was gone. With his moustache shaved off as well he was virtually unrecognizable.
(Hey, maybe he just changed places with a thin relative, a la Bugs Bunny?-- Nope.)
So there is SOME sort of “beer diet”, but I don’t know how it works.
The discussion about dieting with beer:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a971128b.html
and the number of calories to heat water is all very
well, but the whole premise is wrong. Your body produces more heat than it needs just through being alive, and has to get rid of that heat. Generally only in extreme circumstances (when you are very cold) does your body engage in additional activity (shivering) to keep warm enough. That is why putting on more clothing keeps you warm (clothing doesn’t create heat, it just keeps in more of the heat you are giving off).
So if you drink something cold, all that would usually do is decrease the extent to which your body deliberatly loses heat either by sweating less or by making you conscious that you are cold so that you put on more clothing or turn up the heating or whatever. In fact, where I live (Brisbane, Australia) my body spends most of its time desperately trying to lose heat, and a cold drink certainly is not going to cause my body to anything other than be grateful it can stop sweating so much.
No calories are going to be lost at all except in situations of extreme cold, where you are actually going to shiver to keep warm.
Think of it this way. You drive your car from A to B. Now you drive your car from A to B, but with a can of ice cold beer resting on the engine. Are you telling me that in warming up the can, the engine’s going to use more fuel than it did on the first trip? Of course not, it’s already got excess heat aplenty.
(edited by moderator to fix link, though I don’t know why I bother since the link was already provided several times in this thread)
[Edited by Arnold Winkelried on 01-31-2001 at 11:59 AM]
I can’t beleive coming to the Straight Dope I’d find so many misguided souls. At one point, I was on what could be called a 9 month bender. Beer consumption was huge (upwards os a case in a day if I paced myself). I went from 302 lbs. to 215 in that time. I looked great afterwards. However, I went in for a physical and learned how it happened so fast. Beer has a good amount of calories. And I drank Miller Lite! What happens is, the calories from the beer aren’t scrutinized by your body. It doesn’t care where the calories come from, just that they’re there.
So, pump enought calories in your body and your stomach won’t rumble. Your body thinks it has enought fuel coming in and doesn’e complain. There is about 1 gram of protein and no fat in each can (12 oz). Then the body starts using its fat reserve for the excess fuel needed that you physiologically don’t feel.
However, while the calories fake you into thinking you don’t need food, the beer doesn’t give you all you need, and the body (a parasite, ask a biology professor) feeds on itself. So while you’re burning excess fat for energy, you’re also sacrificing muscle, and more inportantly cells from organs that reserve key minerals for any shortfall. In addition, if you’re dieting with beer in a way the helps you lose weight, you won’t be replacing those stockpiles.
Oh, those vitamin tabs you buy? Trust me, not gonna help.
There may be 0 grams of fat, but there are plenty of carbohydrates. Your body can use those for energy just fine, and convert them into fat if you have an excess very easily as well.
http://www.storeybeer.com/articles/previous/enthus/nutrit.htm
As for using burning fat causing muscle atrophy, I find that hard to believe, as that would mean I would have shriveled up when I started working out intensively last year.
Your body, I would think, would use muscle tissue if you aren’t getting enough protein. But as you pointed out, beer has plenty of that.
If for some reason you are going to stick to a diet of beer, though, I would think vitamin tablets would definitely be a good idea. I take one 100% RDA across the board tablet anyway (that pesky vegetarian b12 problem).
Og, and I wasn’t aware the body stockpiles minerals? Presumably some medically knowledgeable doper could find a link or more information?
I know I’m obsessed with this, but frankly I think Cecil is wrong in his column linked above (for the reasons stated in my previous post), and I was interested to read todays column because it backs my point of view.
and
Which all just backs my point namely that it is largely a myth (repeated uncritically by Cecil, and by howstuffworks for that matter) that the body would consume additional calories to warm up ice water. In fact, the body will just use some of the excess heat that it would have created anyway to warm the water, because the body’s metabolism is inherently inefficient, and is a net exporter of heat.
Even if you are already borderline cold when you drink the iced water with the beer (and lets face it, who drinks cold beer on a cold day?) then the body will not maintain temperature by using more calories, it will just minimise blood flow to the extremities, or make you feel cold so you put on some more clothing.
Only as a last resort, if the iced water makes you so cold you actually shiver, would additional calories be consumed.
Cecil’s answer is either wrong, or so lacking in appropriate qualifications as to be near enough to wrong.
I see no quantity here.
Pardon?
A nonquantitative analysis is of no use in settling a quantitative question.
No. The point is that the body has other methods of maintaining temperature that come waaaay before the last resort of shivering. Therefore, to suggest in an unqualified fashion as Cecil does that drinking ice water burns calories is wrong. Quantative analysis might tell you the point at which you start to shiver but that does not have any relevance to the qualitative point that shivering comes last, not first as Cecil’s answer suggests.
In fact I would go so far as to suggest that the characterization of this question as being purely quantitative is precisely why Cecil and Howstuffworks and so on consistently get this question wrong. They are so busy showing off their junior high school physics (for one mark, how many calories does it take to raise one litre of water by one degree) that they totally overlook the basic threshold physiology question namely: does the body (as anything but a last resort) use the mechanism of increasing metabolism to maintain body temperature?
Regarding the comments about the protein in beer
>>There is about 1 gram of protein
>>But as you pointed out, beer has plenty of that.
Lets think this through. From: http://www.sugar-bureau.co.uk/energy_zone/protein.html
>For people who are sedentary or have low levels of activity, the daily protein requirement is equivalent to 0.75g per kg of body weight. So a person weighing 60kg would need 45g (60 x 0.75) of protein per day.<
Other sites I tried used ideal body weight instead of actual, and larger conversion factors. But some of them were touting protein powders, so who knows. In any case, 1g of protein per day is woefully inadequate. A guy with a weight of 18 would need about 61 grams. Not 1 gram. But is the 1 gram correct, and what about a caseful.
\from: http://www.fosters.com.au/beer/about/nutritional/nutritional_info.asp
<The protein content of beer is typically 0.3 to 0.5% and up to 0.9% for dark beers and wheat beers. The fat content of beer is less than 0.1g/100mL.<
That looks like about 1.4g/12oz. bottle or can, although I’m not putting much effort into the math. A 12-pack would then have about 17 grams, still too little, and a 24-pack would have 34, or a little more than half the protein needed per day. A small, nasty voice in the back of my head is saying that this is why god created beer nuts.
Unfortunately, beer nuts are packed with calories. So you’d have to dring 43 1/2 beers per day to get enough protein. Unless you went with the darker beer. Either way, I think you’d end up ingesting too many calories to loose weight.
weight of 180 lbs.
I have often wondered why so many heavy drinkers look very slender. Beer and other alcoholic drinks contain plenty of calories. I would have thought that it would tend to follow that heavy drinkers would tend toward the porcine.
I think that drinking beer does two things:
It fills the stomach, although for only a short while on its journey to the bladder and provides calories.
And in itself tends to deaden the appetite, at least for me.
Without proteins, IIRC the body can not manufacture muscle, although the calories can be metabolised into fat.
I think that over time, weight would be lost with the repalcement of eating opportunities by drinking ones and the loss of muscle due to the lack of proteins for the building thereof.
Result: skinny looking person with a slightly distended belly stretched from too great a quantity of beer and poor muscle tone due to wasting. If the calrie intake from food were redced by the beer consumption then fat would go as well.
Or, in the famous words of Talking Barbie (Mark I), “Math is hard.”
Actually JWK math is easy. What is hard, is knowing how and when to apply the math, particularly to real world questions with enormous numbers of variables.
I am reminded of the mathemetician whose house burnt down. He was woken by smoke in the middle of the night, got up and found bucket full of burning paper. Next to that he noticed another bucket full of water. He said to himself “bucket full of water plus bucket full of burning paper sums to zero” and went back to bed.
His math was correct, his application of it was crap.
Your postings on the topic of this thread would be a whole lot more impressive if you had anything to say, beyond throwaway lines.
In fact, the question Cecil was answering was
[quote]
So if I drink my Bud Light ice cold, I won’t gain any weight, right? [/quote}
You believe that to be a purely quantitative question which can be answered by pure math? Dream on, Bud.
Princhester, I think you hit the nail on the head.
I’ve always been bothered by that business about drinking cold stuff to loose weight, and believed there had to be more to it than being off by a factor of a thousand calories or somesuch. I’m a bit annoyed at myself (an engineer) that I didn’t realize that, as you say, people are dumping heat literally off the top of their heads all the time, and a glassful of cold water more or less wouldn’t make any difference.
Another automobile analogy: Everybody knows that your gas mileage will suffer when you run your air conditioner, because of the extra energy required to run the compressor. Everybody also knows that running your heater doesn’t make any difference at all, because the engine needs to dump heat anyway - sending it into the passenger compartment or overboard makes no difference. Same thing with the cold water.
As long as you don’t do the math or perform a quantitative experiment, you’re doing magic, not science.
Riiiight. So if I was to say that the Moon’s surface is made of dust and rock, not green cheese, would that be magic not science because I’ve never been there?
Get a fucking grip.
There is such a thing as relying on widely reported and understood science without doing it one’s self.
The physiology I am describing is basic. I studied it in junior high school at age 14. Look up any cite you care to on the means used by the body to maintain body temperature and you will see that I am right.