In a study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and explained in an article in the Washington Post, the Harvard School of Public Health has more or less proclaimed that getting fat is not a matter solely attributable to taking in more energy than is expended, as there are different types of energy, upending a century or more of settled understandings in physics, from the Washington Post article:

The findings add to the growing body of evidence that getting heavier is not just a matter of “calories in, calories out,” and that the mantra: “Eat less and exercise more” is far too simplistic. Although calories remain crucial, some foods clearly cause people to put on more weight than others, perhaps because of their chemical makeup and how our bodies process them. This understanding may help explain the dizzying, often seemingly contradictory nutritional advice from one dietary study to the next.

Apparently it is now possible to follow a regimen of eating more and exercising less  in order to lose weight, as these newly-discovered energy forms actually cause people to shed weight the more calories of them are consumed:

Similarly, while it was no shock that every added serving of fruits and vegetables prevented between a quarter- and a half-pound gain, other foods were strikingly good at helping people stay slim. Every extra serving of nuts, for example, prevented more than a half-pound of weight gain. And perhaps the biggest surprise was yogurt, every serving of which kept off nearly a pound over four years.

Thus eating more of foods containing this mysterious energy source prevents weight gain.  Theoretical physicists from across the street at MIT took a break from devising extra-dimensional universes to fit their latest Grand Unified Theory in order to investigate the Harvard Public Health study.

“We think they might have found dark energy’s anti-energy”, said Able Wonker, a leading researcher in the MIT Department of Physical Darkness.  When asked how in the world they could have found the anti-component of something they’ve never before detected themselves, Mr. Wonker glared at the interviewer, pushed his horn-rimmed spectacles further up the bridge of his quite prominent proboscis, and sneered, “We’re smart enough that we don’t need physical evidence to know that it exists. So long as it fits our equations we know it’s true.”  He stalked away when asked how many of his equations contained imaginary numbers or unicorns. 

The world of philosophy, barely holding on by a thread these days, as physics and biology have rendered their musings mostly irrelevant, suffered a devastating blow to what was left of its academic domain with Harvard’s announcement.  Logic had been the one remaining stronghold for philosophy, but Harvard’s announcement conclusively proved that logic is irrelevant in understanding human, particularly American, obesity.  The researchers were able to show that correlation is not just indicative of causation, but in fact is causation:

Among all the foods studied, potatoes stood out. Every additional serving of potatoes people added to their regular diet each day made them gain about a pound over four years. It was no surprise that french fries and potato chips are especially fattening. But the study found that even mashed, baked or boiled potatoes were unexpectedly plumping, perhaps because of their effect on the hormone insulin.

When asked how the study could possibly have proved in a scientifically-defensible manner that potatoes caused the weight gain, the researchers explained that it was true because a great many people believed that potatoes, especially potato chips, made one fat, dispensing for all time with the philosophical premises of logic with the air-tight reasoning that if enough people wish a thing to be true, then like Santa Claus, it will be true.  They added, “Besides, once we had employed the same logic to conclude that obesity is not caused by consuming more calories than are expended, the rest was easy.” 

The Harvard School of Public Health is being celebrated for having finally freed the human mind from the tenets of reason developed over the last four centuries (in the West; several millenia in the East) that tended to always point to the individual as the cause of his own obesity.  Their emancipation proclamation has been remarked to be as significant and profound as the one issued seven score and eight years ago, and is expected to similarly have its greatest effect in the South, where more than anywhere else, people were struggling under the yoke of oppressive reason in trying to escape personal culpability for their burgeoning waist lines.