When I was at the University of Tennessee in the late 1990s, one divisional colleague sent a form letter to outside providers admonishing them for referring such patients, to dispel their belief that an endocrinologist could somehow cure obesity—such sacrilege!—that a doctor could somehow upend the first law of thermodynamics, which espouses a simple mantra: a calorie is a calorie. That mantra, recited with almost religious fervor, has set medicine back at least fifty years, and maybe more.
