I voted down throwaway8879's comment below, then I noticed they had a more substantial comment in an earlier submission of this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18037552

From throwaway8879's earlier comment:

> A calorie is a calorie. If you're overweight, consume fewer calories.

I just posted about soybean oil's miraculous inflammatory properties [1]. Soybean oil has the same number of calories as butter. Humans have eaten butter for thousands of years. Butter is stable at room temperature. Soybean oil was used to make paint in the early 20th century [2], then industry figured out how to "refine" it to make it edible. All calories are NOT equivalent.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054952
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil

The goal of this article is to point out that the pontifications of pseudo-experts like throwaway8879 are worthless to people who would like to lose weight. The "advice" of most conventional medical professionals to their overweight patients is similarly non-helpful.

The article also points out that Science has figured out a few clues that would help people find weight loss easier to attain. One of the insights I noted early in the article is how people's metabolism is very dynamic: when a person eats less than they usually do, their body burns fewer calories. My understanding is that this is one of our species' survival mechanisms, just in case a famine is coming on.

From the friends I've had who've successfully lost weight, I suggest that their weight problem started with stressful childhoods. One fellow was rather chubby when I knew him in college; he recently commented about growing up on food stamps. When he graduated he got married and started a business. At some point he realized he didn't need to eat so many Twinkies, started bicycling, and has lost a lot of weight. (I don't know what order his transformation came in).

Another friend similarly had a stressful childhood - her family picked on her, and she was always broke. At one point over the past ten years, she realized she had weight she wanted to lose, changed her strategies for eating and exercising, figured out how to deal with her stresses, started her own business that's now doing pretty well... She's now lost most of what she wants to lose.

Two years ago a new acquaintance told how she was going to get weight-loss surgery. She'd gained and lost her excess weight several times. "When did you gain it originally?" It was associated with the birth of her first child... She wasn't that into the child's father. She'd already had her mind made up on the surgery, and she has lost a good bit of weight, but ... as the book title goes, "feelings buried alive never die". It is always better to address the root cause of a condition than to treat it symptomatically.

I try to eat nutrient-dense foods. This means avoiding beans, refined wheat, most other grains, and most refined oils. These "foods" have calories but fewer of the supporting vitamins and minerals that people require for better health. My staples are milk, juices, eggs, potatoes, tomatoes... liver... bone broth... cheese... etc. Sometimes I make my own whole-wheat bread in a bread machine. I do make an exception to my no-grain policy for white rice, because billions of Asian people probably aren't entirely wrong. I'm working on some dandelion roots for a constant stream of free green vegetables.

Yeah, the article could be shorter. But the harmful media prattle about an "obesity epidemic" has been ongoing for decades. The problem is solved, but there's too much profit in keeping people overweight. IMHO, the various pseudo-experts can't gracefully retract their decades of bad advice, so the media's usual strategy is to continue their "blame-the-victim" coverage of the problem. This article is at least a step in the right direction.