The Calorie Deception

What the ‘experts’ always get wrong

Dr. Jason Fung
13 min readOct 31, 2024

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‘A calorie is a calorie’.

Many experts parrot the phrase, as if I had asked them ‘Is a calorie a calorie’? I don’t know that anybody has ever asked that inane question. Instead, what I really want to know is this. Are all calories equally fattening? Are 100 calories of broccoli as likely to make you gain weight as 100 calories of cookies?

The answer is no, definitely not. Your grandmother could have told you the correct answer and thought you a moron for even asking it. Who ever got fat eating broccoli? Nobody. But many people have gotten fat eating cookies. Here the common-sense truth they don’t want you to know — some foods (for the same number of calories) are more fattening than others. It’s obvious. But ultra-processed food companies have funnelled billions of dollars trying to convince you that the opposite is true. The truth is simple — some types of calories are more fattening than other types of calories. We will discover why by the end of the chapter.

In The Obesity Code we discussed the concept of how obesity is a hormonal, rather than a caloric imbalance. We’ll take it one step further and explore how insulin and other hormones regulate the level of body fat. Once you understand the basic science of weight gain and weight loss, you’ll be in a position to…

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Dr. Jason Fung
Dr. Jason Fung

Written by Dr. Jason Fung

Nephrologist. New York Times best selling author. Interest in type 2 diabetes reversal and intermittent fasting. Founder www.TheFastingMethod.com.

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