Macro partitioning
High-fat diets promote obesity in humans primarily by facilitating fat storage with minimal energy cost (0-2%) compared to carbohydrate conversion to fat, which is energetically expensive (25% heat loss), making high-fat diets more efficient for weight gain.
Understand that your body handles different foods differently. Converting carbohydrates into body fat is metabolically expensive and inefficient, losing 25% of the energy as heat. In contrast, storing dietary fat as body fat is highly efficient, costing almost no energy. This metabolic difference makes high-fat diets particularly conducive to weight gain when energy intake is excessive.
In contrast, the deposition of dietary triglycerides into adipose tissue requires very little energy (0-2%). As a consequence, de novo lipogenesis from carbohydrate would be very unfavorable to increase body fat stores.
Why this rating
Based on controlled metabolic studies measuring substrate oxidation and synthesis.
Source
Regulation of Body Weight in Humans
Eric Jéquier et al. · Physiological Reviews · 1999
DOI 10.1152/physrev.1999.79.2.451
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