This is all really complicated for something that basically boils down to calories-in, calories-out. (Mostly tongue-in-cheek.)
But I’m also noticing that we’re all talking about somewhat different things. It’s almost as if there’s even less familiar shared common ground when talking about nutrition than there is about training.
Our personal experiences seem to muddy things up. Like how any discussion of, say, “a 1 mile run” has very little common ground between a marathon runner, a sprinter, a weekend-warrior 5k runner, a Westside-era powerlifter, and a sedentary home-office worker. It’s a different experience with notably different physiological effects.
There’s probably some snobbery that comes across with this, but I do believe that spices and seasonings often serve to compensate for bad food selection and cooking technique. There is a historical truth to that. E.g., the sauces of French cuisine were used to cover up the off-flavors of spoiled meat. “We need the nutrition, how do we get it down?”
Ignoring seasonings altogether, there is a difference in how much people eat of a piece of meat if it’s undercooked, overcooked, or cooked “just right”. We’ve all had a dry chicken breast or pork chop. We’re generally going to eat less of it, even if we start out at the same level of initial hunger.
For me, I can eat as much dry meat as my body can handle, and get strong signals to stop eating it. But still be hungry and want more food… just not that.
Same goes with vegetables. Raw broccoli, steamed broccoli, over-boiled limp broccoli, and roasted-to-sweetness broccoli have different effects on palatability without actually changing the raw ingredients.
I’m certain that clarified nothing.
Maybe what I’m trying to get at is that there are many things that affect palatability (desire to eat and keep eating a single thing) and hunger (desire to keep eating something, but maybe not the same thing). And that those are two different things.