Why the first law of thermodynamics has no place in human nutrition
By David GillespieMay 23, 2010Big Fat Lies 
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The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can’t be created or destroyed. Many people (wrongly) think Sir Isaac Newton worked this one out, but it seems it was more likely a Welsh lawyer (score one for the lawyers!).
It’s a law about physical forces that unifies a lot of previous theories that related to heat and mechanical energy. In the nutrition and diet industry, it usually looks more like “energy in must equal energy out” or just “the energy balance equation”. They will even sometimes do an actual equation (I guess to make it look more scientific).
Weight Gain (Energy Balance) = Energy In (Food) – Energy Out (Exercise). 
The First Law has been hijacked by the nutritionista because it kinda sounds like it should apply to dieting. As a result it is used more today in human nutrition than in any other domain of human endeavour. The First Law is quoted every time you watch or read any information on diet products, exercise or weight loss programs. And the government throws it your face even more regularly than that.
We are told the only way we can lose weight is to either consume less energy (calories) or burn more energy (by exercising). Fat has almost twice the calories per gram as protein or carbohydrate. This is why fat is often the target of calorie restriction hysteria. Gram for gram you can eat almost twice as much of a carbohydrate and not unbalance your equation.
Sounds logical, right? And I guess that’s why this simple message has so much traction with advertisers.
The only problem is that it is utter nonsense.
The First Law certainly says that when we gain weight there will be an accompanying increase in the number of calories consumed (or decrease in the number burned). It is an equation and in equations each side must equal the other, but that does not necessarily mean that increased calorie consumption causes the weight gain.
It is equally logical to say that gaining weight is the driving force in the equation. In other words, weight gain causes us to consume more calories.
It is equally logical to say that gaining weight is the driving force in the equation. In other words, weight gain causes us to consume more calories.
When a child grows they increase their body size and weight. These growth-hormone driven changes cause the child to consume more calories, not the other way around. Not even the most rabid nutritionist would suggest that feeding a 10 year old like an 18 year old would help you get past those awkward teenage years more quickly.
Growth happens because our hormone clock says it should. Calorie consumption just keeps up (so that the energy balance stays, well, … balanced). We are perfectly happy to explain the equation that way when we talk about people who grow vertically. We’re even happy to accept that pregnant women gain weight (other than the baby of course) because hormones tell their bodies to fill the baby-pantry.
Eating is the way we put on weight, it isn’t the reason we put on weight. When a car accelerates, it does so because it has access to more petrol. The petrol doesn’t cause the acceleration, but it does enable it.
But for some reason when Norm grows horizontally, causation is magically reversed. Nutritionists lurch from physics into psychiatry and the cause suddenly becomes greed or sloth (or both).
Just like height gain, weight gain is caused by hormones, but this time it is hormonal dys-function. The fructose half of sugar causes us to become resistant to our main appetite suppression hormones (insulin and leptin). When this happens our appetite is not shut-down when it should be and we just keep eating. And just like a Toyota with a stuck accelerator, our weight accelerates out of control.
Once we understand that weight gain is caused by hormonal dysfunction (a stuck accelerator) many (previously) mysterious things become clear.
A diet that asks you to consume less calories by exercising willpower is doomed to failure. Imagine how successful you’d be if you asked a child to exercise some willpower and stop growing. Fighting hormones with willpower is about as effective as paddling upstream with a barbed-wire paddle. Perhaps this is why the best indicator that you will be heavier in five years is being on a diet now.
Lap band surgery restricts the fuel supply without the need for willpower. It’s like clamping a fuel line in the car analogy. Less fuel gets through for a given squeeze of the accelerator. But our bodies are nothing if not adaptive, so they just ramp up the demand for calories (they push harder and longer on the accelerator). Perhaps this is why a lap-band driven ‘remission’ lasts only 10 years (at best).
Exercise burns so few calories that very few people can commit the time (or willpower) required for it to seriously affect energy balance. But even if they could, using more energy just increases the demand for energy (any gym junkie could tell you that). Lumberjacks eat more than office workers because they exercise more.
Diets, surgery and exercise do not affect the cause of weight gain (which is the hormonal dysfunction created by fructose) and so, they don’t work. Yet they remain the only targets of the billions spent ‘combating’ obesity in this country. All because the nutritionista hold true to a law of physics which has been misapplied to nutrition for the past 60 years.
When nutritionists first started guessing what made us fat, only one of the four major appetite hormones had been discovered. Then, it was (almost) acceptable to squeeze the square peg of a physics law into the round hole of human biochemistry. But those days are long gone and so too should be our tolerance for that kind of guesswork.
Many careers have been built on propagating this nonsense and there are many who will fight hard to protect it. But that should not be an excuse for inaction in the face of a human health disaster of truly epic proportions (pun intended).
The Myth of Overeating on a Raw Food Diet
Filed under Raw Food Controversies by Frederic Patenaude
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•	There is a myth currently being spread in the raw food movement , hurting people as it goes.
It is the myth of overeating.
The myth of overeating goes like this:
– The cause of all diseases is overeating
– Even when people eat raw, they still overeat, therefore that’s why they don’t do as great as they expected
– Try to eat less and less, and you will feel better. Eventually, you might even need to eat only tiny amounts of food, because your body is utilizing the calories better. Who knows, one day you might even become a breatharian, living on nothing but air? 
Someone recently forwarded me a link from a popular raw food forum, where a raw-food author criticized my recent article on “Why I’m Mad at a Raw Food Movement.”
The funny thing is that he didn’t want to say my name, but gave away the name of my book. Not so subtle…
In any case, the entire conversation revolved around overeating.
The author in question blamed me for promoting a diet that includes a lot of fruit, and said that under no circumstance should you eat 4 bananas in one meal, because that would be “overeating” and therefore “bad”.
Of course, nowhere in the article was “overeating” defined. So why not start there?
Here are several definitions I have found for overeating:
– gluttony: eating to excess (personified as one of the deadly sins)
– Overeating can refer either to eating too much at one time, or to eating too much on average.
– Gluttony, the act of eating to excess (either to discomfort or more than required for proper health)
So basically, overeating is simply eating more than what the body needs to maintain proper health, or eating too much at one sitting, and therefore going over the digestive capabilities of the body.
So if everybody agrees that overeating is simply eating “too much”, then maybe we should figure out “how much” we need to eat, in order to know what’s overeating and what’s not.
Why Calories Are Important 
The most important element we get from the foods we eat is energy, or calories. That comes in the form of carbohydrates, fats or protein.
Then of course our food provides us with the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that we need.
The calorie concept is still extremely valid even when we analyze raw food nutrition. Why? Because it is a fairly accurate evaluation of the amount of food a person needs to eat every day to meet her needs.
A calorie is simply a unit of energy. Because our cells need simple sugars to live, there is certainly a certain amount of energy that we need to get from our food every day. If we go under this amount, the body will break down its own fat reserves to meet its needs. If we go over this amount, the body will accumulate fat reserves for the future.
It’s best if you think of calories as simply “energy”.
The amount of energy (calories) that a person needs every day will vary greatly according to these basic factors:
– Height, weight and muscle mass (each pound of muscles requires an additional 25 calories per day to “maintain”)
– Gender (men will generally need more calories than women)
– Activity levels (athletes need more calories than sedentary persons)
There are many ways to calculate how many calories you need per day. You can use simple calculators (for example, at www.fitday.com) to figure out your basic metabolic rate (the number of calories you need every day, without any physical activity).
You can even go to a gym and step on a special machine that will measure your body fat, your muscle mass, and your basic metabolic rate.
So you will get a certain number, for example: 1500 calories per day.
That will be your minimum to maintain your weight and muscle mass. Then you will need to add on top of that any physical activity you have for the day, and add in calories for that.
An easy but imprecise way to figure this out is to simply take your ideal weight, and multiply it by 10.
That’s your basic rate.
Then add to that basic activities (walking, working, etc.), and fitness training (running, yoga, etc.)
The online fitness calculators can help you figure out these numbers.
In general, a fit and active woman who doesn’t need to lose any weight will want to eat around 2000 to 2500 calories per day.
A fit man will probably want to eat anywhere from 2500 to 3500 calories per day.
If you have three meals per day, that means each meal could be between 600 and 1500 calories each.
– One banana is 100 calories.
– One apple about 60.
– One large mango: about 150 calories
– One avocado: about 250 calories (mostly coming from fat)
So if “overeating” is simply eating more than your body needs, why would it be “overeating” to eat 8 bananas at one sitting?
Is there any logical reason to think that this might be “too much”, other than the irrational fear of fruit?
8 bananas gives you about 800 calories. If a person has three 800 calorie-meals per day, they will get 2400, which is about what the average person needs.
But can you digest 8 bananas at one sitting?
Although this may seem like a lot of food for someone new to the raw diet, the body has the ability to digest a fairly large amount of fruit. It’s easy to see from how light you feel, even after a fairly large meal, and how easy it is to digest it.
So if your body needs it… and you can digest it, is it overeating? Absolutely not.
Undereating is the Real Problem
There is certainly a problem with “overeating” in the raw food movement, but it’s not what our raw-food author thinks.
The real “overeating” problem is the excess of fat, in the form of avocados, nuts, seeds, oils — which almost every raw foodist eats in rather large quantities, because they are not used to eating appropriate amounts of fruits and vegetables.
As they are overeating on these foods, which the body only needs in small quantities, they are also “undereating” on the real nutrient-rich foods: water-rich fruits and vegetables.
What tends to happen is a pattern of “undereating” on small, insufficient meals of fruits and vegetables, followed by binges on nuts, seeds and fats to compensate on the lack of calories.
For example, a lot of raw foodists eat ridiculously small quantities of food in one sitting, leaving them malnourished and hungry.
For example: a small salad containing lettuce, dressings, and a few fruits.
A few hours later, they are hungry… but they’re also afraid of overeating, so they try to eat this ridiculous small meals again. Eventually, the caloric deficit becomes so great that they binge on a 3000-calorie meal to compensate.
Stop These Anorexic Behaviors!
With a normal, cooked, Standard American Diet, high in fat and salt, it doesn’t take a lot of food to reach your maximum number of calories per day.
In other words… the food doesn’t weigh a lot, but is rich in calories.
So because of that, we’ve been accustomed to exercise a certain restrain when it comes to eating, because we know from experience that eating a large amount of food leads to digestive problems and weight gain.
That’s because the food is dense in calories. But another problem with it is that it’s also has a low nutrient density. For the same amount of calories, you get fewer vitamin, minerals and anti-oxidant.
With fruits and vegetables, it’s completely different.
The food is low in calories, but nutrient dense.
A pound of food doesn’t contain a lot of calories, but for the same amount of calories, it contains more vitamins, minerals and other nutrients than any other food!
Therefore… you have to eat more! And at the same time, you are better nourished.
For example, let me show you how you could get 2000 calories on a Standard American Diet:
BREAKFAST:
– 3 medium pancakes, whole wheat
– 1 cup of orange juice
– 1 sliced pear
– 3 Tbs. fruit jam
LUNCH:

– 1 mixed salad
– 3 Tbs. salad dressing
– 1 roll
– 4 ounces tuna fish
– 1 apple
DINNER:
– Plate of spaghetti with sauce
– No dessert
Now let’s take a look at the “raw” equivalent, while keeping our fat percentage fairly low. 
BREAKFAST:
– Smoothie made with 6 medium bananas, 1 apple, 3 cups of spinach

LUNCH:
– 5 big mangoes eaten with celery and lettuce leaves
DINNER: 
– Large salad with ½ avocado, three large tomatoes, and an entire head of lettuce
– 2 cups of freshly squeezed orange juice
So… what’s your reaction when you compare the amount of food in the first, pretty Spartan menu, and the second raw, low-fat menu.
It’s a lot more food! In fact, most people when they look at the first menu, will think they will starve on that amount of food. There are no desserts and no snacks, and the amounts are pretty normal.
Yet on the second menu, most people will think they cannot possibly eat all of that!
But the amazing thing is that both menus provide the same number of calories… with important differences.
Let’s take a look at the nutritional analysis for the first menu:

Now let’s take a look at the food from the second menu:

Here are some important differences:
– The raw menu contains 4.5 times the vitamin A, twice the vitamin B, almost twice the vitamin E, 50% more copper,
– Both contain the same amount of calcium (which is still adequate), almost the same iron
– The cooked menu contains twice the fat
– The cooked menu contains an amazing 4172 mg. of sodium, compared to less than 200 on the raw menu (which isn’t completely accurate because I didn’t add in the celery). The official recommendations for health are now less than 1500 Mg. per day!
Overall, it is clear that the raw diet is more nutritious, and also more balanced. Actually, I was a little lazy and didn’t put all the greens in. The actual values are even higher than what’s being shown.
And an interesting fact: the raw diet contains more than twice the natural water, even without adding any liquids. With a lower sodium content, this makes the raw diet clearly more hydrating.
BOTTOM LINE:
– Fruits and vegetables contain more nutrition PER CALORIE. However, it is still necessary to consume enough food to meet your needs.
– Overeating is consuming more food than your body needs or your body can digest. If you eat enough to meet your needs, you won’t be overeating.
– A big problem in the raw food movement is NOT overeating, but rather UNDEREATING fruits and vegetables and overeating concentrated fats.
By the way, if that seems like too much food for you, don’t worry. You can eat more often at first.
ANSWER TO QUESTIONS: 
Doesn’t eating raw foods require fewer calories?
Because fruits and vegetables are easy to digest, they do require less energy (calories) digest. However, This difference is probably less than 5%. Because raw-foodists tend to have more energy, they will easily increase their exercise and activity by at least that much, so in the end they require the same amount of calories or more than the average person.
How many meals should you eat every day? 
Ideally, 2 or 3. But initially, to make it easier to consume a large volume of fruits and vegetables, you can eat 4 to 5 times. Overtime, you’ll be able to make larger meals that will last you several hours, without any digestive issues.
Why did every experiment on life extension found that restricting caloric intake was the only was to lengthen life?
All experiments on caloric restriction were done on animals such as rats, who have a short lifespan. Laboratory rats are not fed their normal foods that they found in the wild, and are not as active as well. So feeding them 30% less of the toxic, artificial food they normally received extended their lives. The same would happen if you would cut by 30% the food intake of the average American.
However, eating a natural diet of fruits and vegetables is completely different. Eating an adequate amount of it will not shorten your lifespan.
The greatest proof that caloric restriction doesn’t work is the fact that almost all life extension specialists end up living an average or below average lifespan.

Is it a sin to eat at night or before going to bed? 
Ideally, you want to leave a few hours from your last meal until your bedtime. However, it is not necessary to avoid eating at night completely. To improve your digestion, exercising before meals will do a lot more than avoiding eating at nighttime.
If for whatever reason, your schedule only allows you to have a dinner rather late in the day, you’ll still be fine. Just make sure that last meal is low in fat and easy to digest.
In any case, lunch should be the largest meal of the day.
Some not so good news for the “calorie restriction” folks
Posted on 09/04/2012 by J. Morris Hicks 
6 Votes 
Severe Diet Doesn’t Prolong Life, at Least in Monkeys
That was the headline for an article about “calorie restriction” in the New York Times on 8-29-12 (See link below). While researching the optimal diet for humans back in 2003, I explored many kinds of diet-styles, some of which would be labeled severe or extreme by the mainstream. They included fruitarian, raw-foodist and calorie-restriction.
Ultimately, I chose the whole foods, plant-based diet-style that was recommended by Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Dr. Neal Barnard and other prominent physicians that I know and respect. I was looking for a diet-style that would promote health, reverse disease and be relatively convenient for my lifestyle. I finally concluded that a simple and easy diet that reversed heart disease and type 2 diabetes was good enough for me. I later designed our 4Leaf concept around that premise as described by Dr. Campbell thusly:
The closer we get to eating a whole foods, plant-based diet; the better off we will be.
Rhesus monkeys didn’t fare too well on the CR diet.
What about the “calorie restriction” diet? That’s the “severe” diet that has been featured in the news this past week. Wikipedia defines CR as a dietary regimen that has been shown to increase both median and maximum lifespan in a variety of species.
But they point out that there has never been a randomized clinical trial of CR in humans. They mention the first study in primates, the one that began at the University of Wisconsin in 1989 and whose results were reported this week. From the article by Gina Kolata in the New York Times:
The results of this major, long-awaited study, which began in 1987, are finally in. But it did not bring the vindication calorie restriction enthusiasts had anticipated. It turns out the skinny monkeys did not live any longer than those kept at more normal weights. Some lab test results improved, but only in monkeys put on the diet when they were old. The causes of death — cancer, heart disease — were the same in both the underfed and the normally fed monkeys.
That’s certainly not good news from the calorie restriction folks, but I doubt they will change their eating habits because of it. There is a group called The Calorie Restriction Society that was formed in 1993 and I have included a link to their site below in case you’re interested. Here’s a paragraph about their philosophy from that website:
Calorie Restriction (CR) is the consumption of a diet with adequate quantities of all essential nutrients, except that the energy content of the diet (caloric intake) is safely reduced (by as much as 10-40%) below the amount of energy (calories) that the body would tend to naturally desire, absent any special dietary measures.
As any scientifically responsible review of research in the field of gerontology will quickly reveal, the only valid life-extension method that has any proven scientific backing behind it at all is Calorie Restriction (CR), from which “The Calorie Restriction Society” derives its name.
Dr. Roy Alford, shown here with Biosphere 2, where he spent two years. Is that a glass of milk in the picture?
While studying about the “optimal diet” for humans back in 2003, I discovered Dr. Roy Walford, who is one of the pioneers of the calorie restriction theory. Among other things, he was one of eight people who lived in Biosphere 2 for two years (91-93).
Although I respect much of his work and have read at least one of his books, I ultimately chose not to follow his regimen when it came to “calorie restriction.”Later I heard that he died at the age of 79.
From Wikipedia: Roy Lee Walford, M. D. (June 29, 1924 San Diego, California, USA – April 27, 2004) was a pioneer in the field of caloric restriction. He died at age 79 of respiratory failure as a complication of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s or motor neurone disease). He was a leading advocate of calorie restriction as a method of life extension and health improvement.
The Bottom Line and the Good News. With our recommended 4Leaf diet-style, you can eat all you want of the right food for humans—whole plants, still in nature’s package. That means no calorie counting, no constant effort to cut back on calories and certainly no calorie restriction. Another problem I have with the CR theory is that they appear to advocate seafood and dairy, which are simply not a part of our 4Leaf formula.
The Calorie Myth Part I – Raw Food Weight Loss
Dec 21, 2011 | Uncategorized | 114 comments
Share post on ...http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://180degreehealth.com/the-calorie-myth-part-i-raw-food-weight-loss/http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://180degreehealth.com/the-calorie-myth-part-i-raw-food-weight-loss/http://twitter.com/share?url=http://180degreehealth.com/the-calorie-myth-part-i-raw-food-weight-loss/&text=The+Calorie+Myth+Part+I+%E2%80%93+Raw+Food+Weight+Loss+http://twitter.com/share?url=http://180degreehealth.com/the-calorie-myth-part-i-raw-food-weight-loss/&text=The+Calorie+Myth+Part+I+%E2%80%93+Raw+Food+Weight+Loss+https://plus.google.com/share?url=http://180degreehealth.com/the-calorie-myth-part-i-raw-food-weight-loss/https://plus.google.com/share?url=http://180degreehealth.com/the-calorie-myth-part-i-raw-food-weight-loss/mailto:?subject=The%20Calorie%20Myth%20Part%20I%20%26mailto:?subject=The%20Calorie%20Myth%20Part%20I%20%26 
http://180degreehealth.com/2011/12/the-calorie-myth-part-i-raw-food-weight-loss/raw-diethttp://180degreehealth.com/2011/12/the-calorie-myth-part-i-raw-food-weight-loss/raw-diet“When Atwater burned foods in a bomb calorimeter… he assumed that humans could use all the energy present in a food and digested in the body. If foods burns in the bomb calorimeter, Atwater seemed to conclude, it produces the same amount of energy value in our bodies. But the human body is not a bomb calorimeter. We do not ignite food inside our bodies. We digest it, and we use calories to pay for this complex series of operations. The cost varies…”
~Richard Wrangham; Catching Fire
Tis the season for people to start making New Year’s Resolutions to lose weight. Oh what fun! And so, I figured what better time to do a multi-part series on the huge scientific fallacy and oversimplification that is, for lack of a better phrase to describe it, The Calorie Theory.
For a half decade I have been tediously challenging the idea that cutting calories can lead to sustainable weight loss. If the medical literature is any indication, it is not. Sure, there are success stories, and there are methods that involve being at least somewhat calorie conscious that may indeed work – due to the combination of factors involved in the system as a whole. But overall, from a statistical point of view, cutting calories in an act of “intentional weight loss” is a useless, short-term fix at best. And, “the single greatest predictor of future weight gain” according to Paul Campos at worst.
And in the process of trying to illuminate this fallacy, I really strove to find a way to eat a lot of calories and either stay lean or actually lose body fat. Instances where I, for example, ate 4,000 calories of raw fruits and vegetables and still lost body fat was something that I looked at as being evidence that calories are definitely NOT the only factor involved with weight loss. Or how about the example of the gorillas in captivity that DOUBLED their calorie intake and still lost a considerable amount of weight? And of course everyone wonders how the raw vegans like Freelea and Durianrider manage to eat more calories than is normal for males and females of their age, height, weight, and activity levels and still look like emaciated prepubescents. Or hey! What about that Jon Gabriel guy who eats “whatever he wants,” but always adds lots of live foods and whey protein and has lost 200 pounds? These all seem like very interesting contradictions to the calorie theory. Do they disprove it in any way? No. Because these phenomena are all very easily explained.
It appears that I, as I so often do, have overlooked some important variables that aren’t normally accounted for in The Calorie Theory. While I (and Stephen Guyenet) have talked at great length about palatability, and how factors in palatability such as water content, fiber content, calorie-density, sweetness, chewing time, and particle size affect the number of calories we have an appetite for automatically – it seems there is something else about these foods of great importance that make them very different from other types of food…
We absorb fewer calories from such foods. And the difference is not small. It’s huge. The biggest differentiating factor probably being whether a food is raw or cooked.
This may not seem like a major thing, but in a world where the calories in a doughnut and the calories in raw apples are on an equal playing field, this turns the entire world of calorie counts and food labels completely on its head – because you absorb a lot more of the energy in 500 calories of doughnuts than you do 500 calories of apples. And, thrown in there with that, is the huge variability in the digestive capability of one person compared to another. One person might absorb 400 of the 500 calories in a bag of raw apples while another can only absorb 250.
This is even more important as it pertains to humans, as humans have the weakest digestive tracts of any creature. Our digestive tracts have changed over the millenia to be small and weak for the same reason our muscles have (compared to other primates especially)… because we don’t need them. Why divert energy to stellar digestion (diverting energy from brain development as some researchers such as Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler have proposed) when we can chop and cook and blend and crush the heck out of our food to make it maximally digestible? For the same reason, humans have really small mouths per pound of body mass compared to all other primates – most of which spend 5-8 hours per day chewing.
So what about the gorillas that doubled their calorie intake and lost tons of weight? It turns out gorillas only absorb about 50% of the calories they ingest from “browse” or leafy matter – the natural diet of a gorilla (and keep in mind their digestion of plant matter is vastly superior to our own).
What about Jon Gabriel who eats lots of raw nuts and seeds, sprouts, and eats everything in a big, giant salad? With lots of protein? We absorb fewer calories from protein due to the increased cost of digestion, and fewer still from raw foods – to the point that the Giessen raw foods study done on raw foodists showed a horrifying frequency of underweight and amennorhea directly proportional to the degree in which the percentage of the food eaten was uncooked. This obviously explains away the raw vegan waifs as well, along with the known hypermetabolic effect of protein restriction and calorie-wasting effect of fat restriction. Big parts of the 80-10-10 Low-fat raw vegan diet. Oh the irony of calorie restriction bashing while inadvertantly restricting calories!
There is much more to the story here than meets the eye, and it all makes for very interesting thought for food. Thanks to highly intelligent author Richard Wrangham and the fair maiden that gifted his book to me on my 20,000 mile pee parade this summer. Enjoy this passage from Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human pertaining to the human inability to absorb sufficient energy from raw foods, with a subtle condescension that is beyond priceless…
“To judge whether the energy shortage experienced by raw-foodists is biologically significant, we need to know whether raw-induced weight loss interferes with critical functions- ideally, for a population living under conditions similar to those in our evolutionary past. In the Giessen study, the more raw food that women ate, the lower their BMI and the more likely they were to have partial or total amenorrhea. Among women eating totally raw diets, about 50 percent entirely ceased to menstruate. A further proportion, about 10 percent, suffered irregular menstrual cycles that left them unlikely to conceive. These figures are far higher than for women eating cooked food. Healthy women on cooked diets rarely fail to menstruate, whether or not they are vegetarian. But ovarian function predictably declines in women suffering from extreme energy depletion, such as marathoners and anorexics.
Raw-foodist men sometimes also report an impact on their sexual functions. In How to Do the Raw Food Diet with Joy for Awesome Health and Success, the author, Christopher Westra, wrote: ‘In my own experience, starting on living foods brought about a change in sexuality that was dramatic and completely unexpected. In just a few weeks, the number of times per day I thought about sex decreased tremendously.’ Westra believed that seminal emissions are designed to remove toxins from the body. After a few weeks of a raw diet, he said, the intake of toxins had fallen to the point where ejaculation was no longer necessary. In a similar way some raw-foodists regard menstruation as a mechanism for removing toxins and therefore regard its cessation as a sign of the health of their diets. Perhaps it is unnecessary to note that medical science finds no support for the idea that toxins are removed by seminal emissions or menstruation.
Reduced reproductive function means that in our evolutionary past, raw-foodism would have been much less successful than the habit of eating cooked food. A rate of infertility greater than 50 percent, such as was found in the Giessen Raw Food study, would be devastating in a natural population of foragers. And since the Giessen study was of urban people enjoying a life of middle-class ease, such dramatic effects on reproduction are mild compared to what would have happened if these German raw-foodists had been searching for food in the wild.
Most raw-foodists prepare their food elaborately in ways that increase their energy value. Techniques include mild heating, blending, grinding and sprouting. Any system of reducing the size of food particles, such as grinding and crushing, leads to predictable increases in energy gain. The German raw-foodists also had the advantage of eating oils produced commercially by industrial processing. Koebnick’s team found that about 30 percent of the subjects’ calories came from these lipids, a valuable energy source that would not have been available to hunger-gatherers. Yet even with all these helpful conditions, at least half of the German women eating raw foods obtained so little energy from their diet, they were physiologically unable to have babies.”
Let me cut it to the chase - It's the reduced metabolic rate!! Vegans don't eat enough calories. They are busying themselves with micro nutrients, organic or not, fiber and all that but they forget about the first thing that counts - Calories - you should have enough calories to have your machine work. 
Here are the symptoms for low metabolism as Matt enumerates them: 
1.	Thinning hair, dry hair or hair loss
2.	Slow finger nails growth or cracked/brittle nails.
3.	Dry skin esp near the hands and lower legs and feet.
4.	Thinning eye brows.
5.	Slow growing leg hair & beard.
6.	Loss of menstrual cycle.
7.	PCOS
8.	Infertility, miss-carriage, pregnancy complications.
9.	Constipation.
10.	Bloating or delayed stomach entine.
11.	Irritable bowel syndrom or small intestine bacterial growth (SIBO)
12.	Heart burn, indigestion, nausea after eating.
13.	Dry mouth.
14.	Excessive thirst.
15.	Frequent urination, night time urination, strong sudden urges to urinate.
16.	Belly fat esp w low muscle mass and poor strength.
17.	Puffy eyes
18.	Water retention.
19.	Low platelets. 
20.	Low red cell count.
21.	Low white cell count.
22.	Low sperm count.
23.	Reduced size of testis.
24.	Low testosterone.
25.	Low progesterone.
26.	Adrenal fatigue
27.	Tooth decay and sensitivity.
28.	Anxiety.
29.	Depression
30.	Insomnia.
And there are more - way more. 
Many people on many diets experience suppressed metabolism issues, not only vegans - they low fat, low carb, low calorie tend to shutdown thyroid function. 
He's listing the mistakes that vegans do and I agree that I do many of these 'mistakes' and yes - there's a point to consider correcting some of these mistakes. Here's the list: 
•	Not consuming enough calories - When you diet is vegetables based, even if you eat tons of vegetables - your calorie intake shall be small. You can fill your stomach, feel as if you are not hungry and you can do that on very low calorie intake. 
•	The cruciferous vegetables that are promoted by vegans because of their miraculous anti cancer capabilities have an enzyme called goitrogen which interferes with the formation of thyroid hormone in people with iodine deficiency. And guess what? Strictly nutritarian vegans don't consume salt and ARE iodine deficient... The good news is that cooking these cruciferous vegetables for 30 minutes can significantly reduce the amount of goitrogens but most vegans and raw-foodists insist on eating these things raw. 
•	Eating too many nuts and seeds as well as Avocados. These foods contain linoleic acid (LA). It's an omega 6 fatty acids which makes the ratio between omega 6 and omega 3 too high. LA also is known for suppressing the thyroid function. 
•	Consuming too many vegetable oils. These oils also contain considerable amounts of LA. 
•	Cleansing, fasting and detoxing thus lowering metabolic rate. 
•	Consuming too many watery foods, such as veggies, water melons, fruits. The high water content feels you up w/o many calories. The water itself is lowering the body temperature. 
•	Drinking too much water and herbal teas - for the same reasons. 
•	Consuming too little sodium. Sodium is the primary electrolyte in the extra-cellular fluid and is involved in fluid balance and blood pressure control. 
•	Doing too much exercise. Many vegans are doing too much exercise cause they believe the more the better, they believe they raise their metabolism - quite the contrary - yes while exercising the body metabolism rise but then, after exercise it drops and I experienced this personally. 
•	Eating too many raw foods. Eating raw food means chewing a lot, consuming your calories very slowly so at the end of the day you don't get enough calories. Cooked foods are easy to consume so you get you calories faster. 
•	Not eating enough protein, 
•	Consuming too many beans and legumes. 
•	Consuming too little B12.
Stress is a great opponent to metabolism. When stress hormones become elevated, body temperature tends to fall, stress hormones constrict the blood vessels in your extremities making the hands, feet, nose, ears especially chilly. Stress hormones are also diarethic making you want to empty you bladder no matter if it's full or not.

I experience this stress rush about one month ago. I was still in the cold state, w/o too many calories and then at that point I was exposed to some scary something that I wouldn't go into details here. I remember how I could feel my adernaline rush, my anxiety rising immediately to new heights, and then the shivering effect, I was trembling, shivering, I had to wear my coat... till that point that I understood that there's no threat and it was back to 
He suggests to forget about Joel Fuhrman's equation where you want to maximize N/C (nutrients/ calories). 
Instead he suggests the following equation: 
Metabolic Increase = (calories + carbs + salt) / (volume + water content). In other words he's saying that you want to have more calories, carbs and salt per volume and water content of food that you ingest. 
He's saying that he too came from this school of thought were any refined food like dry fruit was sub optimal, any form of salt is toxic and if you ate any amount of cooked food you were not quite ready to go all raw yet. But then when he talked to his raw-foodist friends they told him that just sprinkling a little bit of salt on their evening salad can improve his sleep significantly, he tried it and it succeeded.

So my take from all of this is not to exaggerate with the low calorie concepts - I should still have my metabolism working. And this is also one of the reasons I decided to double my fats consumption - instead of 50 grams a day of nuts & seeds - I consume now 100 grams per day. And yes, now my body can burn calories and I am no longer cold.

Yes, whatever Matt is saying is against calorie restriction but actually we should think and re-think calorie restriction - they are lowering the body temperature, the are living the life of a slaw, dead people walking... - and I am not sure if it makes sense.

As I said - this blog is all about my journey into health, longevity and fitness. I started it as a fat slob, I tried the weight watchers approach for a month, I changed to Joel Fuhrman and I now add some calories and less icy blue water.

I highly recommend this book to vegans, raw foodist and health nuts - read it before it shall be too late.