And I improved all my health markers and my weight by simply starving myself of any food at all. Sure, eliminating calories leads to weight loss, but the point of “a calorie is not a calorie” is that I could have done exactly the same thing by consuming 10,000 kilo-calories of charcoal a day too. A human being does not burn its food via combustion and pretending it does doesn’t even work over the extremely short run, and it certainly never works over the long run. This idiot, I’m sure, didn’t keep that weight off following that same diet… in fact my guess is he’s the same weight or heavier 5 years after the fact. Statistically that’s true of the vast majority of people who lose a significant percentage of their body mass by the means of any dietary or exercise change, BTW.

A calorie of A is not the metabolic equivalent to a calorie of B because a calorie is only a measure of thermodynamic conversion by direct combustion in a bomb calorimter and cannot tell you anything about metabolic usage of A or B. Thank you for pointing out that you can lose weight and improve your BMI by eating Twinkies… you can do the same thing by sucking your brain out through a straw, or for that matter amputating only one limb; those are also examples of false equivalence and poor quantitative reasoning.

And, yes, when I see people fight to spread what I know to be extremely harmful mythological beliefs, I have a bone to pick.