My example seems to include the aspects of your argument against Cecil’s answer. Certainly, qualitatively. It would seem that if your argument is valid, so would that example.
RM Mentock, debating you is like pulling teeth.
Why? How? Discuss. Give some goshdarned reasons. Support facts with cites. You know, all the usual stuff. Try, if you will, to avoid cryptic unexplained comments. Descend to particularity, man. It won’t kill you.
Well, there was maybe three links to [url=“http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a971128b.html”]Cecil’s column, and I haven’t seen a refutation of it yet. I could repeat John W. Kennedy’s comments, which still seem appropriate, but they’re still on page one if anyone is interested–repeating them here would probably just get the mod involved again.
I’d be interested in hearing your objections to my arguments.
Arggg, Cecil’s
column.
Qualitative arguments do tend to get frustrating.
What arguments? You have given some. I responded to them. You have made a cryptic comment a few posts ago, which I asked you to clarify but you either can’t or won’t.
If you haven’t seen a refutation of Cecil’s argument here, then open your eyes and mind. You show no signs whatever of understanding what I have been saying for the last two pages. You post nothing that refutes my arguments, you just keep saying that you disagree.
You are in fact showing very “His4Ever” like symptoms: you make a point. I refute it. It gets to hard so you don’t respond, then a few posts on you simply assert the same position, without dealing with what I say.
I can lead you to water but I can’t make you drink.
In the other thread you say (of the major cite I refer to) that you “don’t see that it really supports the argument”. Increasingly I am finding that a typical comment on your part. You don’t say why that cite doesn’t support my argument. You don’t give any reasons. You don’t refute what that cite says. You just baldly assert that it doesn’t support my argument. Well thank you RM Mentock for clarifying that one.
Finally, my arguments are not just qualitative. You keep repeating that like a mantra, but it hasn’t been true since about two thirds of the way down the first page when I used that cite to provide quantitative specifics of how the body’s temperature control actually works (and it ain’t what you or Cecil assume).
Cecil’s answer has the appearance of being nice and firm and quantitative, but it does so by throwing away the hard part of the question, and answering only the part that you can answer using junior high science.
It doesn’t even go into the hard question, namely will drinking something cold (ie as opposed to hot) cause you not to put on weight.
So where are the specifics of your example or analogy that I asked for a few posts back?
You seem to be obsessed with this. 
That’s no reason to lash out.
That’s similar to how I view your posts.
Which part? I don’t see anything to refute.
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I’m not sure what it is that I assume, I’d be interested in hearing that.
Besides, the issue is not of temperature control, but of food calories and metabolism. How do you know that a specific spoonful of sugar isn’t just converted to heat, and the body’s temperature control opens up and dumps that heat? You wouldn’t say that sugar has no calories, even if that were true, right? That’s the part of my argument that hasn’t been addressed. How does your argument also not apply to food?
The body’s metabolism adjusts in a complicated way–here’s the first site I found with google–and there is not a one-to-one ratio of calories consumed and weight gained/lost. How is food any different than ice water–that’s what you haven’t established. It’s a hard question, it’s probably true.
And where do you show that it doesn’t? In the sense of what we are talking about.
Like I’ve said, I think perhaps the fundamental schism between us is how we view the question.
My understanding is that the question is whether beer consumed cold will result in putting on less weight. The questioner’s theory being that because the body maintains a specific temperature, it must warm up the beer to that specific temperature and will consume additional calories in doing so.
Cecil’s answer is yes, that theory is broadly correct, although he then goes on to calculate the precise amount of cold liquid that would have to be warmed to consume the precise number of calories in the cold beer and finds that you would have to drink a lot of extra cold liquid (beyond just the beer) for the equation to balance.
So the question of temperature control is absolutely crucial: if the body had no temperature control, it would not warm liquid or beer or whatever, and the whole scenario outlined in the question would not arise.
The assumption that Cecil makes is that the body’s temperature control mechanism will use additional calories to precisely the value that it will take to warm the beer and water, rather than using other strategies such as restricting heat loss by vasoconstriction, and applying the heat saved (which the body would have created anyway) to warm the beer/liquid.
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I’m sorry but either you are yanking my chain, or you are not explaining yourself very well or you have no understanding at all of what I am saying.
Firstly, you are theorising wildly, and in contradiction to all available evidence. Check out that major cite. Find anything at all in that page where it says that your body will “open up and dump heat” simply because you eat some sugar. I thought I was the one being accused of empty theorising.
Secondly, no of course I wouldn’t say sugar had no calories. What on earth makes you think I would? What does this have to do with anything, let alone my arguments?
Thirdly, nothing about my argument is specific to liquid. Substitute “sugar coated rocks” if you like. If you think that the type of substance consumed (food or beer) has anything to do with what I am saying, you truly do not understand.
When did I ever say that there was?
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Who said that it was? You, I believe. I have never so much as mentioned food. But everything I say would apply equally as well to food as calorific liquid.
But that’s how they calculate food calories. It seems to be the same as the way it was done by Cecil. If you want to compare the two, one should do it the same way, right?
Sure. So what?
Well, that’s what Cecil did. Nothing wrong with it, so far as I can tell. So far.
Kalt, in the other thread you said that if you slept on the outside of the blankets you would use more calories. The major cite above regarding temperature control suggests that you may or may not, depending on the ambient or shell temperature. If you disagree, cite please.
Also from the other thread
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by RM Mentock *
Look at it differently. What if you just lowered the outside ambient temperature, and the thermostat mechanism that you envisage shuts down so that the body doesn’t lose as much heat.
[/quote
Your habit of referring to facts that I have proven by external cites as mere opinions or things that I envisage is wearisome. As you very well know, the body does have a thermostat mechanism. Or are you suggesting that the body’s temperature maintenance occurs by magic or co-incidence?
Pretending that that is some mere theory that I have “envisaged” is disingenous.
You are not going to win this debate by assuming the conclusion.
Cite please?
I accept that if it is cold enough (the major cite given by me suggests a skin temperature of 20C) you will start to burn more calories. Neither you nor Cecil nor anyone else has yet provided any cite to confirm that skin temperature to be sufficiently commonplace for it to provide a reasonable basis for answering the question Cecil was asked, nor have you or Cecil or anyone else shown that at that or any other temperature, the body increases metabolism to an extent such that effectively the whole of the heating of the beer or liquid or whatever will be heated by the increase in metabolism such that the one to one calculation completed by Cecil would be accurate.
It took a while but as near as I can tell, the cite that you are talking about is the one Truth Seeker posted, and you repeated. I would have to disagree here. If you are colder, you will burn more calories, seems to be straightforward and I seem to remember graphs like that from that website–although I can’t bring up the webpage right now.
This is not the pit.
I was only asking you to apply the logic that you have applied to water, to food.
I thought that everyone agreed that you lose weight in a colder climate. Do you disagree?
His calculation seems to be as accurate as any other calorie-count calculation, such as for sugar or bacon. That’s the context here.
If you apply the same analysis to sugar, you’d have the same shortcomings that you say Cecil’s calculation for water has–just eating sugar is not necessarily going to make you gain weight. But the calorie count is valid.
We are talking about two different questions here. Your last couple of paragraphs show quite conclusively that you are not dealing with the question that I am. My understanding is that this question is one involving increased calorie consumption due to consumption of a cold substance.
We are wasting our time.
RM Mentock: Given that your metabolism is inefficient and therefore your body is constantly dumping excess heat under normal circumstances, how does dumping some fraction of that heat by ingesting cold liquid increase the number of calories burned? All you’re doing by drinking cold water is reducing the amount of heat that needs to be dumped off the top of your head.
ntucker, yes, I think that is a reasonable restatement of Princhester’s argument.
If you rely upon that one link, you have to make some sort of inference–as near as I can tell, the only place it addresses ingestion of anything is ice at 45 degrees (113 degrees Farenheit). I was just pointing out that the inferences that you make can be applied to other aspects of weight loss and result in conclusions that are not in accord with observations–so we have to have more data or different studies before we can be sure of what the actual answer is.
Then why…
That’s not an answer to the question I asked. Your evasiveness and failure to provide any real reasoning is the reason you’re losing this argument.
Then look harder. Try this (my emphasis):
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Well you’ll have to explain better what you mean because I don’t understand your arguments, and I note that ntucker doesn’t either. You make a few cryptic comments, I ask for clarification and it is just never forthcoming.
Thanks, I seem to have missed that one on that pass. There may even be more–but even that one seems to be at 20[sup]o[/sup]C, where shivering occurs. The metabolism can rise before that, without shivering.
Can it? Cite please?
Actually, I think you’ll find that it does. Slightly. But the point remains that mostly above that level, vaso constriction is the more important temperature maintenance method.
And of course, Cecil’s answer does not allow of only a slight rise in metabolism. His answer depends on every single bit of the rise in temp of the beer being accounted for by metabolism increase.
Same page.
I don’t think we have to hold Cecil to that level of proof. There are all sorts of mechanisms that I can imagine that would throw that off, without being really germane to the discussion. Ballpark figures would be enough–that’s all that’s required of food calorie counts.