Fitness

wouldn’t that paint a pretty distorted picture?

It can still paint an accurate picture, if understood within scope. You can't outrun a bad diet with normal amounts of exercise. Even if it is true that you can outrun a bad diet with exercise that exceeds a particular threshold, it's still a useful finding that under that threshold, the correlation drops to near zero.

Anecdotally, I know that my appetite adjusts naturally to my activity level, for the most part. The exception was during periods of my life when I was running more than 20 miles (32km) per week, where my calorie consumption hit a plateau even when my calorie expenditures exceeded that. I also tended to lose weight when backpacking in forests and mountains, but part of that was diet, too (of eating only what I packed in).

So if it turns out there is an amount of exercise that allows for a bad diet, it might very well be such a high activity level that it isn't relevant to broad population-wide public health principles.

I haven't had a chance to read the study yet, but I wonder if they were trying to narrow the focus in on impacts on "regular people" rather than all humans.

I know people that rise bikes as serious amateur athletes and they regularly consume 90g of carbs for 5-6 hours multiple times a week while training, and I'm sure some serious athletes push carb intake even higher. They have very specific reasons for doing this and maybe that might skew data so athletes have been excused?

Yeah it's pretty sketchy to stretch the claim that far based on their data. It's also just a hard sell when you can very easily observe the typical caloric intake of professional athletes and note how high it can get without any sign of obesity. But the general point still does seem to stand, you can't just start working out and expect to lose a bunch of weight without also adjusting what you eat.