\\Greg

Thanks

The assertion is that beyond your small intestine the energy wasn’t going to be available to you anyway.

Your point about a possible reduction in the need for heat production is interesting, though.

Anyway the real point here, for me, is about instrumentation, measurement, and scientific method. The closed system you describe does account for everything at a macro level. But it wouldn’t reveal a (possibly) significant variance in the distribution of energy within the system.

If the variance is significant, and if in fact our definitive tables on the nutritive value of foods don’t account for that, it would be a pretty big failure of scientific method, and an important thing to correct.

On an even more meta level, I’m viewing this whole thing as another test of whether online communication can actually enhance rather than preclude rational discourse.

Along those lines, this caught my eye:

http://postpunkkitchen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=111242

The thread begins:

My boyfriend sent this to me and said essentially “See? Raw food isn’t the right way to eat.” This article (blog?) is so dumb. First of all, the only concrete example of getting more energy from the cooked food than from its raw form is an EGG. Come on! Who is going around eating raw eggs thinking they are the right way to eat an egg? The rest of the info just seems unfounded. I’d be interested to see the study. Nevertheless, there’s no way I would eat a cooked banana over a raw banana, or any other fruit/veg. Seems like boolsheet.

And I thought, sigh, it’s hopeless. But then, farther on:

Roughly the same idea about cooking and calories with citations. Your boyfriend is misinterpreting it, but I don’t see why the blog post itself is dumb. It’s not making any claims about what we should currently be eating and there’s a link to the podcast the author is talking about. If you were interested in reducing your caloric intake without eating smaller portions, for instance, you’d want to be eating more raw food, not less.

And finally:

Yeah you are right, I posted without looking into it more and while I was still mad from my bf’s comments. Sorry all!

Believe it or not, that made my day.

Also, I recall from my days at Penn State that original calorie work was done by locking the subject in a room for a period of time and measuring the intake & outflow of energy. This type of closed system measurement would include the little guys in the subject’s gut.
http://www.das.psu.edu/about/history/armsby-calorimeter

\\Greg

I don’t actually want to view, I want to listen to the audio tracks. Many, many videos of lectures — and I listen to a lot of lectures — work quite well as audio.

I know various ways to download the video and convert to audio, but it’s just not very convenient. I want to point a podcatcher at service that take a set of YouTube URLs and emits an RSS feed with MP3 enclosures.

… another tour of your techno intestine:

That’s a /great/ analogy!

We have a saying at my house: “Any food that is unusual will have health claims made for it.” I suspect that extends to any dietary pattern.

I like and have used Peter Krumin’s guide for one off extractions using ffmpeg from the terminal: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/how-to-extract-audio-tracks-from-youtube-videos/

Kinda humorous stretching an analogy- video consumed part way as aural intake. Not all content calories consumed!

I broke out my slow cooker after listening to that and put a kangaroo stew on the go :)

There are various services that will take a YouTube URL and return an MP3. But the Cadillac solution for me would be:

1. Favorite a video
2. Subscribe to favorites
3. Receive MP3s as enclosures in the subscribed RSS feed

If anyone knows about (or has created) that, please do let me know.