I.e. if I eat complex carbohydrates to the value of 1000 calories, are these just as likely to increase my body fat as by eating fat or sugar to the value of 1000 calories?
The calories are the same. Once your body has converted the consumable compounds to a common hub comound (say acetate) then there is no difference between the foods that were converted, whether protein, fat, or carbohydrate.
However, not all food compounds are equaly well absorbed, assimilated and converted. Many starches are poorlly digestable, and so are long-chain fatty acids and tanned proteins. Not all foodstuffs that contain those compounds are equally easily digested. A great deal of your unrefined foods passes right through your gut in sheaths of collagen, cellulose, and similar poorly digestable natural plastics. Even animals that can digest that protection with the help of microbes usually need to digest the food twice, either by fermenting it more than once on the first pass through, or by eating it again once it has passed through. Coprophagy reigns OK! Ask any rabbit or termite for example.
Give a peckish bunny a bash at cat poo, and you will see what I mean.
Bon appetit or happy dieting, depending on your preferences,
As a follow-up to Jon's comment on varying efficiency of digestion. The calorie values given on most food usually take this into account and are lower than the calorie value one would obtain by burning the food and measuring the heat output.
There's also another twist here. A lot of the energy in raw calories is used up converting the food from it's natural form, to a form that the body can store. So the process of metabolising Sugar, Fat and Protein to a form that the body can store(Glycogen for short term energy storage, visceral fat for long term) has different metabolic pathways, with different efficiencies depending on the startpoint and the end-point. So, even 100 "Calories"(As measured by their heat given off when burnt in a calorimeter) of pure fat, sugar and protein have different residual effects on weight gain because they go via different paths with different efficiencies on their way to becoming that bulge of fat on your body.
Protein to Sugar is inefficient. Sugar to fat is relatively efficient, and fat to sugar to fat is inefficient. So, if, for some odd reason you want to eat loads of "Calories", but don't want to gain unwanted fat - eat protein.
As a side issue, it is this metabolic chemistry factory inefficiency that keeps our bodies warm, so, even if you are a complete couch potato, simply the processing of your food, and it's inherant inefficiency, which is seen as heat production, is what keeps you warm. In rough terms, a completely sedentry male uses up around 1200 colories of energy digesting and converting food, and a females, around 800. The rest of the colorific intake is used to keep your brain/heart etc working. A colorie intake above around 1800 calories for a sedentary man and 1400 for a woman gets deposited as fat(All these numbers vary on build/metabolic rate/use of muscles etc etc, but they give you an idea for "Mr/Mrs Average)
The calories obtained for the nutritional information on the food label is NOT obtained from burning, as this overestimates the number of calories people can extract from food. Rather, chemical tests are used which mimic the chemical digestion process in the body.. Source.
Perhaps worth considering the effect of sugars and carbohydrates on blood sugar levels, ie in foods that release energy very fast, often referred to as foods with high glycemic index value like refined carbohydrates.
If blood sugar rises too fast and high after consumption then the bodies blood sugar balancing act kicks in to remove sugars from the blood and store them as fat.
When the rate of absorption through digestion is high, eg with calorie sources that have a simple mechanism then the chance of raising sugar levels too high increases. Varied calorie food types that take varying times to breakdown to useful energy will smooth the release of energy into the body over a period and reduce the likelihood of the need for rapid sugar-fat conversion.
1000 cals of sugar could also make it easier to increase consumption. Think of the post Chinese meal munchies that happen when the sugar level drops as the insulin removes too much of it and triggers initiates a hunger response.
The complex role of appetite based on the interaction with blood sugar, fat and satisfaction/hunger signals has until recently been largely ignored for the simpler model of pure calorie counting. This makes for interesting reading:
Perhaps worth considering the effect of sugars and carbohydrates on blood sugar levels, ie in foods that release energy very fast, often referred to as foods with high glycemic index value like refined carbohydrates.
If blood sugar rises too fast and high after consumption then the bodies blood sugar balancing act kicks in to remove sugars from the blood and store them as fat.
When the rate of absorption through digestion is high, eg with calorie sources that have a simple mechanism then the chance of raising sugar levels too high increases. Varied calorie food types that take varying times to breakdown to useful energy will smooth the release of energy into the body over a period and reduce the likelihood of the need for rapid sugar-fat conversion.
1000 cals of sugar could also make it easier to increase consumption. Think of the post Chinese meal munchies that happen when the sugar level drops as the insulin removes too much of it and triggers initiates a hunger response.
The complex role of appetite based on the interaction with blood sugar, fat and satisfaction/hunger signals has until recently been largely ignored for the simpler model of pure calorie counting. This makes for interesting reading:
No. If you restrict the number of calories in your diet, you will
not show any difference in weight loss whether or not your restrict
calories from fat or calories from carbohydrates. This has been
studied fairly extensively, and there's no evidence there's any
difference in actual weight loss.
This figure is from a paper entitled "Comparison of Weight-Loss Diets with Different Compositions of Fat, Protein, and Carbohydrates."
Each different color represents a diet. The difference between two
diets are significant (i.e. not due to random effects) if the bars
around the colored dot do not overlap. You can see that all of
the bars overlap, meaning that there was no significant difference in
weight loss or in waist circumfrence between any of the diets.
However,
this does not mean you will experience the same success in a diet which
restricts fat as you would in one that restricts carbohydrates. Our
bodies react in different ways to eating different foods, and fats help
us feel satiated. In these studies, participants ate and only ate what
the researchers gave them to eat, but you will not have this type of
enforcement.
Research suggests that a balanced calorie
restricted diet is the best way to diet. Too little fat and you will
often feel hungry; too little carbohydrates and you will feel tired and
weak. Also, keep in mind that high fat/high protein diets place you at
a greater risk for heart disease. The most important part of losing
weight if you are obese or overweight is to better your health, and
such a diet runs you the risk of losing those benefits.