I came across the following article on MSN Health today:
Metabolism Fact and Fiction
The article is supposed to tell you what is fact and what is fiction in regards to metabolism and weight loss. However, some of what they claim to be fact is more along the lines of fiction.
On the very first page, it says, "different studies have suggested that 5 or 6 ice cold glasses of water could help you burn about 10 extra calories a day, equaling about 1 pound of nearly effortless weight loss each year."
I hate statements that say, "Studies suggest" without any references to the studies. I've seen such "studies suggest" statements before, when in fact there are no such studies.
But, let's say there's a study or two that shows 5-6 glasses of water will help you expend an extra 10 calories per day.
Big deal.
On paper, everything else being equal, yeah, you might lose an extra pound per year. But in reality, it doesn't work this way. You can't micromanage your body like this. First, the calories you eat each day can vary dramatically from one day to the next, even if you're perfect at meal tracking. This is because you can't measure precisely what's goes in your body. That 100 calorie yogurt you eat, for example, may have 80 calories or 120 calories (there's a margin of error on food labels).
Also, our bodies are pretty good at making adjustments to small changes in energy balance, so that our weight stays pretty stable when it comes to small changes. I wrote about this in another blog. You need much larger changes in energy balance to "jolt" your body into losing weight.
On the second page, the article mentions research from Utah that indicates drinking water may boost metabolism. However, this research, to my knowledge, was never published in a scientific journal (I did a PubMed search for one of the study's authors, E. Wayne Askew, and nothing turned up). This strongly suggests that the methodology of this study wasn't strong enough for publication, and its results may have been questionable.
On the third page, the article says that your metabolism drops as you lose weight, which makes it harder to keep off. While it's true that your metabolic rate decreases with weight loss, this has nothing to do with why you regain weight. In fact, one study clearly showed that resting metabolic rate was not related to 4-year weight gain in women who had lost weight.
The decrease in metabolic rate is perfectly proportional to your weight loss (there's a direct relationship between body weight and metabolic rate), so you can't stop the decrease in metabolic rate no matter how hard you try.
On the seventh page, the article says you will boost your metabolism by 100 calories if you add 3 pounds of muscle. This is false; 3 pounds of muscle will only boost your metabolism by 18 calories.
The rest of the articles were accurate for the most part.
Articles like this make me think that we really need a factcheck.org of the nutrition world.