31 ms·

A Chemical Hunger: Mysteries

137 points by apsec112 5y ago

InquilineKea 5y ago
Also loo up hypothalamic microinflammation by Cai
RappingBoomer 5y ago
i like this idea--explains everything
petemir 5y ago
And the 2nd. part: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/author/slimemoldtimemold/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/author/slimemoldtimemold/
- amelius 5y ago
  > A popular theory of obesity is that it’s simply a question of calories in versus calories out (CICO). > (...) I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model. It is popular on HN too, as evidenced by the replies I got here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27777157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27777157
  - imtringued 5y ago
    It's popular because it's thermodynamics but it completely ignores that our body doesn't know how to count calories. It only knows how to count macro nutrients and how full your stomach is and palatable food is engineered to avoid the feeling of satiation.
    - tomxor 5y ago
      So much this. Simple self experiment: If you are super hungry, try compare: 1. Eat a bowl of plain steamed rice (in hot water can make it go down easier) - you will very very quickly become satiated and stay that way, probably on less than a small bowl. 2. Eat cake, croissants, stuff that is sweet but not too sweet that you can keep eating it... initially you will stop, but then you will feel hungry again and keep going back for more - you can just keep eating on this stuff, even though the energy density is way higher. The other difference is the speed at which the energy is released, the rice will keep you going through the day, your body gradually extracting energy from it... the cake and stuff get's absorbed almost instantly and so your body has nothing to do but make fat with it - the only way your getting that energy back is through ketosis, which wont happen so long as you keep eating cake. It makes a lot of sense when you start to think about how things have been modified from their natural state, even orange juice is kinda bad in this sense - you can drink a glass of orange juice pretty easily, but there is no way you will be able to eat the number of oranges it took to make it in a single day.
      - getlawgdon 5y ago
        Not explanatory. White rice has a high GI and brown rice still has a moderately high GI.
- pedrocr 5y ago
  >It’s true that people eat more calories today than they did in the 1960s and 70s, but the diﬀerence is quite small. Sources have a surprisingly hard time agreeing on just how much more we eat than our grandparents did, but all of them agree that it’s not much. Pew says calorie intake in the US increased from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010. The USDA Economic Research Service estimates that calorie intake in the US increased from 2,016 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,390 calories per day in 2014. Neither of these are jaw-dropping increases. A 20% increase in food intake seems huge. The data I could find on weight over the same period puts people at only 15% heavier, so this seems to be underselling the difference.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Increased calorie intake and conversion to fat is the problem but why do humans increase their calorie intake and decide to convert their calories into fat? What button are they pressing that says "I want to be fat!".
    - PicassoCTs 5y ago
      Funny Wild speculation time: In ancient times, when the times got rough, there was always a pre-crisis-phase, aka you witnessed something traumatic, but were not yet impacted by it yourself. Stressing yourself out and triggering that "horror"-phase (movies/ evening news) makes your body go into the "binge" for reserves during crisis mode. Testable Hypothesis: End of the World screaming makes you fat, Continuous bored calm and mental safety feelings make you thin.
      - taneq 5y ago
        Should be able to see a significant uptick in BMI across the population between 2019 and now if this is the case...
        PicassoCTs 5y ago
        A correlation between BMI and media consumption would be rather blatantly obvious i guess.
- RobertoG 5y ago
  That was an interesting read. I just left this comment in the site (maybe it would interest somebody here too): "Have somebody checked a correlation between breast feeding vs. infant formula in early infancy and hungry feelings in adulthood (or weight as a proxy of that)? It’s just an random idea, but it seems to me that the timeline of increasing obesity and increasing of use of infant formula could be correlated."
  - eukaryote 5y ago
    It is an interesting idea, but Australia has a breast feeding rate of around 90% and a large obesity problem
imtringued 5y ago
I remember some HN threads about impossible burger and other imitation meat. There were comments about how food engineering can produce food that tastes even better than regular meat. That was shocking to me. We already have hyper palatable processed food and they want it to be even worse?
- gambiting 5y ago
  I think there are different goals here which aren't necessarily overlapping. I would support making plant-based meat subtitutes that are so frikking delicious that people want to eat them instead of meat. Not because I'm vegetarian(I'm not) but because it simply makes sense from the point of view of ecological impact of animal farming. The modern western diets where people eat meat 3 times a day are crazy(in my opinion) - we just don't need that much meat. So from that point of view, yeah, it would be great if at least some people switched to plant based substitutes instead. Now obviously the problem is that we possibly have the science to make these substitutes so delicious, people will overeat them and in the process make themselves worse than had they just had meat. That is also a concern, absoluteley.
- pif 5y ago
  The root problem is that current technology doesn't help us: processed food can only be either palatable or calorie poor. The person who will invent low-calorie bread and cheese, she'll be the Messiah :-)
guerrilla 5y ago
I don't know about this, there's a lot of factors listed individually here but not in comnination. It could be something like "eats lots of sugar and doesn't move", like are those honey and starch eaters as sedentary as us? Then again, it woildn't totally surprise me if it were something like indoor lighting or something. Edit: The second article accounts for some combinatiins but not to my satisfaction. Also: > The USDA Economic Research Service estimates that calorie intake in the US increased from 2,016 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,390 calories per day in 2014. Neither of these are jaw-dropping increases. That does seem like a jaw-dropping increase if sustained over time and other varianles are held constant. So, huh? I have another idea though since it talks about lipostat theory: Isn't it known that cortisol exposure causes weight gain? What if it's simply that our life is morr stressful despite being objectively less chaloenging in some sense. This could be due to anything from less cardio to a bad news diet.
garganzol 5y ago
It's not just calories. It's how fast those calories get into bloodstream as a glucose. "Fast" carbohydrates are extremally efficient in this regard; you can eat a ton before hunger leaves you. And this is a big gotcha as we constantly overeat being fooled by our mind and carbohydrates with high glycemic index. So, it is not just calories: it's the amount and speed of insulin response to those calories.
- andylei 5y ago
  This is covered in the second part of the article: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-part-ii-current-theories-of-obesity-are-inadequate/#:~:text=Low-Glycemic%20Diet https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p...
jinpa_zangpo 5y ago
People are getting fat because they are consuming more calories. And they are consuming more calories because processed foods are engineered to make you overeat them. To lose weight, stop eating processed foods and learn to cook simple foods from scratch, minimizing the use of sugar, salt, and oil, three common appetite stimulants.
- nradov 5y ago
  For most people there's no particular need to minimize salt and oil in order to avoid getting fat. However certain oils, especially vegetable oils, tend to have other bad health effects.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  >And they are consuming more calories because processed foods are engineered to make you overeat them. I've heard this being claimed a lot, and have therefore often thought about it while eating fast- and other processed foods, picking around in it trying to discover the big conspiracy, but I can't seem to find any substantial differences with what I make at home from raw ingredients. The engineering seems to be geared more towards reproducibility of all the dishes over a large network of franchises around the world. It's still the same ingredients, they're just less tolerant of substitutions and deviations from the specs. Maybe it's really a matter of fast food being compared to food cooked by unskilled home cooks who just happen to be suffering from a socially induced panic about some arbitrary ingredient, and therefore tends to produce a result that's just plain unpalatable compared to something made by a professional or a seasoned home cook. No cook with any amount of self respect will make intentionally unpalatable food, and the French paradox clearly demonstrates that it's not necessary for food to be unpalatable to avoid obesity.
MrPatan 5y ago
Saying "Calories In Calories Out" is what makes you fat is as interesting as saying "Money In Money Out" is what makes you poor. It's tautologically true but doesn't help anybody.
- amelius 5y ago
  It's basically differentiating the original equation wrt the only quantity you can say something about, which effectively throws out all the things you know nothing about and which you can then "conveniently" ignore.
- jwdunne 5y ago
  It also assumes that the human body is a machine with singular inputs and singular outputs, as though it’s a pure function. But it’s more complicated than that. Especially when you bring homeostasis into it, where the body will adjust calorific expenditure downwards in response to sustained reduced calorific intake, as just a single example. But there’s lots of things going on that influence the calories coming in, the calories stored and the calories expended. It’s unfair to reduce it down so far. It leads to fat shaming by people whom have never struggled with their weight who justify their cruelty by parroting “calories in calories out”. Even worse, some of those will do silly experiments where they put on weight really really fast and then lose it just as fast, totally ignoring the fact that their body has been in the original state for a long time.
  - DJBunnies 5y ago
    It’s not cruel, it’s science. If it’s not working it’s not being done correctly. I struggled when I was younger.
    - jwdunne 5y ago
      Not sure if science ever justifies the cruelty of fat shaming mate?
      - gadders 5y ago
pif 5y ago
> Mystery 8: Diets Don’t Work As an obese person who tried several times to follow medical advise, this does not surprise me, not at all! Every diet is about calories and sport, which cannot hurt. But every diet completely misses the elephant in the room: hunger! Any medical procedure is only worth pursuing if it gives you a higher quality of life in the long term. A constant hunger cannot compensate for any weight loss.
- treeman79 5y ago
  The Satiety Index is for measuring how satisfied you are with various food. Enter the humble potato. https://scottabelfitness.com/potato-and-the-satiety-index/ https://scottabelfitness.com/potato-and-the-satiety-index/ I did a sweet potato diet for a month a couple of years ago for medical reasons. I was never hungry.
- garganzol 5y ago
  Constant hunger is a hallmark sign of insulin resistance. The good thing is you can actually measure it in HOMA-IR test.
- Ueland 5y ago
  > But every diet completely misses the elephant in the room: hunger! And this is why a new drug just approved in the US for obesity is hailed as a game changed, NovoNordisk's semaglutide. (Wegovy) The "only" thing it does is mange the hunger levels in your body so you dont feel hungry all the time. I think there was a study back in February for it which gave something like a 15% weight loss after a year, *on average*.
  - EMM_386 5y ago
    One such study is here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183
- LQexplanation 5y ago
  Metformin and myo-inositol solved this issue for me. Only after solving issues with pre-diabetes I was able to start losing weight without constant hunger.
readonthegoapp 5y ago
I thought we already figured out at least part of the problem or the main problem Sugar Yutkin Lufkin Etc Book: Pure, White, and Deadly
- brazzy 5y ago
  The article cites evidence showing that this is simply not true.
  - readonthegoapp 5y ago
    bold statement. i wonder why you're so completely convinced? is it that the author is The Smahtest Guy To Evah Live? or....i mean, s/he has a long list of Nobel Prizes in Physiology? or maybe just some long history of unbelievably incredibly insightful comments/writing/literature/research on this or any other topic? i figure i've read and listened to at least dozens but probably hundreds of articles, books, youtubes, etc. over the past few years, and i'm not convinced i have the answer, but one blog post citing one tribe and you're all in? seems strange to me. i suspect a plurality of folks would say that there are multiple contributing factors to obesity, something like: - sugar (in particular, highly processed sugar in all its forms/delivery mechanisms), - highly processed foods generally (don't send 'full' signals to the brain, lack of fiber, etc.), - modern lifestyle/quick eating/lack of exercise, cheap sugary/processed/fatty foods, etc. ...but to rule out sugar....bold.
    - brazzy 5y ago
      Read. The. Fucking. Article. Then argue against the factual evidence it cites, not against some silly strawman.
- EMM_386 5y ago
  The article covers this, and sugar is not the root cause: > A Tanzanian hunter-gatherer society called the Hadza get about 15 percent of their calories from honey. Combined with all the sugar they get from eating fruit, they end up eating about the same amount of sugar as Americans do. Despite this, the Hadza do not exhibit obesity.
Pyramus 5y ago
This series of blog posts is a fascinating read into conjectured factors behind the obesity epidemic. I wish the author had continued their rigor in reasoning throughout the two blog posts. Step by step the author is lured into proving a single factor explains the rise in obesity. That maybe a futile attempt from the outset. To make an example, the author notes, correctly and to the point, > "Calories are involved in the math but it’s not as simple as “weight gain = calories in – calories out”." but then moves on to claim that "X provides evidence against CICO" when in fact the article cites numerous examples where an increase/decrease in calories results in a (short-term) increase/decrease in body weight. So what the author really meant was "X provides evidence against CICO as the single factor". I'm not an expert in nutrition science but it seems very unlikely that a single factor (sugar! trans-fats! exercise! genetics!) will explain a real-world, highly non-linear phenomenon. I personally find the paragraphs where the interactions of factors are discussed the weakest and least convincing. That is not to say the article is excellent and hammers home two very important points: Firstly the idea of the lipostat and as a result a short and a long-term time scale ('system') for body weight gain/loss. Secondly that factors relevant on one time scale may not be relevant to the other time scale. And of course that there is still a lot we simply don't understand (yet).
- sdenton4 5y ago
  The short term overeating studies produce what we might call highly nonlinear results, which also undermines CICO (which is a linear equation). It's pretty obvious the body has other ways to dump exceeds calories than turning them into fat stores. Those studies, and the obvious tendency of diets to fail in the long term, are strong support for some kind of lipostat system, to my mind. Others have mentioned gut biomes... My uneducated guess is plastics or some other chemical that was introduced into industrial use in the 20th century. The cross species effect (lab and zoo animals getting father on the same controlled diets) is also a really big clue that were dealing with a molecule. And, as with lead poisoning from gasoline, perhaps a hard to pinpoint one due to prevalence.
- msteffen 5y ago
  My interpretation was: "what is responsible for the inflection point that occurred in 1980?" Perhaps it's still not a single factor (which, I agree, would make a lot of sense) but IIUC that does raise the question of why there seems to be a single inflection point.
joseluis 5y ago
Insulin is the big elephant in the room that's barely talked about. Everybody should watch this lecture https://youtu.be/RuOvn4UqznU https://youtu.be/RuOvn4UqznU
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Could you do more to motivate us to watch the nearly 1.5 hour video than "insulin"? Who is this guy and what's the thesis? Summary?
  - joseluis 5y ago
    Ok, I didn't realize it might be necessary, since the speaker is so good and engaging since the first minute but I'll try. He basically exposes the underlying physiological mechanisms of fasting and nutrition. And puts it in context of our biological evolution and current first-world diseases. Explains the enormous power fasting has for healing the physiology, regulating insulin levels, even reverting insulin resistance, how when you stop eating for a day the body activates the expression of certain genes in every cell for producing all the antioxidants known to man, promote autofagie of dead cells, producing growth hormones, start growing bone marrow cells, stem cells... How insulin is a key piece in that mechanism, how in western societies are junkies of processed food, specially sugar, carbohidrates and, and how by eating too often and too much we keep our insulin leves always high, which impedes our body to begin that innate process of self-healing we have, and we instead just saturate the body with things it doesn't really need and don't give it the opportunity to get rid of them, deriving in preventable diseases. He speaks about 24h, 36h, 3day and 7 day fasting... How it affects multiple things, including response to chemoterapy, diabetes, dementia... He has a previous talk called "The bittersweet truth" where he dives more deeply on how exactly fructose basically poisons the body and talks more about insulin, fructose, nutritional myths... Just one fascinating fact after another, supported by data, studies and clinical experience. He tryes to relate the facts in order to give you a very powerful big picture.
    - a0-prw 5y ago
      I use fasting to control my weight and have done so for more than 10 years. There are other benefits than weight (fat) loss. Also noone is trying to sell you anything except maybe get you to click on a few yt videos ;)
faichai 5y ago
The lipostat theory is quite interesting. This is pure conjecture, but its already known that plastics can impact estrogen levels, I wonder if plastics also have some, yet unknown, impact on metabolism that is upsetting lipostatic homeostasis. Estrogen, cortisol and testosterone all operate in a delicate, interrelated balance, so it's not too big a leap.
- Pyramus 5y ago
  I don't think you have to go all the way to plastics and chemicals (not saying that they aren't potentially playing their part). Take a simple model with a combination of all the factors the author discusses (type of diet, sugar, trans-fats, caloric intake, processed foods, exercise, genetics etc), allow interaction between the factors, and have the lipostat as the dependent variable. I.e. several factors together will, over time, upregulate the lipostat. A relatively simple model that evades the authors objections, yet might fit the data.
- BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
  Also the increase in thyroid disease, especially among women, may be related.
- derbOac 5y ago
  For some reason when I read the lipostat section I was reminded of decreases in average body temperature trends over time -- probably because of the temperature analogies. I've sometimes wondered if microbiome factors are in play, and by extension, things like antibiotic use (maybe there are some studies about antibiotic exposure and weight gain?). I've usually thought of it in terms of microbiome -> gut -> digestion though, and the lipostat section made me wonder if it's more like microbiome -> "immune response" -> caloric expenditure.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    Where can I read more about this?
    - 5y ago
helloworld11 5y ago
The obesity epidemic, as the author describes it, isn't a good thing, and for us to have BMI tendencies similar to those of late 19th century Americans would probably be better (excepting of course their other major health problems from that time) but in relative terms, I'd consider today's obesity problems in most of the population much better than the near starvation that most of humanity lived in during the vast majority of history, even up to the early 20th century. For all but our most very recent ancestors, periods of chronic hunger was just a missed crop or bad harvesting season away and mass starvation was only slightly more distant. Famines were common in most of the world and often killed many millions per year, almost every year during millennia, of all ages, including children and infants. Obesity-caused deaths are still deaths but at least they tend far more towards killing later in life and are much more in the hands of any given individual to avoid, as opposed to starving because your whole region no longer has enough food to keep you living regardless of your dietary choices. Generations of people prior to all but the last century or so of history would be amazed, and possibly even envious at how abuntantly and cheaply most of the population can feed itself today, even to the point of chronic obesity.
mads 5y ago
There is something I dont understand about this. Is it really true that carb consumption has gone down? My own anecdotal experience is that people are drinking way more sodas and eating way more candy than they used to (in 70/80'ies my childhood). Like where I live now every other street corner has those "mix-your-own candy bag" shops, where you pay by the 100g. There must be someone buying that stuff, since they keep popping up.
- ginko 5y ago
  >My own anecdotal experience is that people are drinking way more sodas and eating way more candy than they used to (in 70/80'ies my childhood). This doesn't seem to match the data: https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-are-drinking-less-soda-2016-3?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-are-drinking-less-...
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    Maybe “energy drinks” (Monster et al) aren’t counted as soda? There are also several other sugary non-soda drinks I now see in most convenience stores: sweet tea, Frappuccinos & other cold coffee drinks, slurpees, hot sugary coffee and cocoa, etc.
mysterypie 5y ago
> We should start seriously considering other paradigms. If diet and exercise are out as explanations for the epidemic, what could possibly explain it? And what could possibly explain all of the other bizarre trends that we have observed? > [Next Time: A CHEMICAL HUNGER] That's the part I really wanted to see. I've now bookmarked it so I can read the next instalment. I expect to hear some fascinating theories -- perhaps some modern equivalent of lead poisoning of ancient Rome.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
I was thinking it could be partially due to food getting cheaper in recent years, but the data doesn’t show a big decrease in total amount spent on food during the recent period of increased obesity. The big changes happened much earlier: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/your-grandparents-spent-more-of-their-money-on-food-than-you-do https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...
irthomasthomas 5y ago
It is not really a mystery any more. There was a heart disease epidemic in the mid 20th century (the rate doubling every decade). A scientist named Ansel Keys did an epidemiological study comparing rates of heart disease to fat intake in 6 different countries and found a strong correlation: countries that ate more fat had higher rates of heart disease. Therefore fat causes heart disease. This is the lipid hypothesis, which still drives nutrition advice and laws today. Ansal Keys joined the board of The American Heart Association which adopted the lipid hypothesis and started telling everyone to cut out fat and eat more carbohydrates (carbs are sugars strung together which are quickly chopped up and metabolised as sugar, what could go wrong? ;). Numerous clinical trials, involving tens of thousands of people, all failed to find a link between fat and heart disease (often actually finding the opposite). The government ignored these trials and supported Ansal Keys instead. The Mcgovern senate committee was tasked with creating a national nutritional policy in 1977, but when scientists told the commission that there was no evidence supporting the low fat/high carb diet and that more research was needed to confirm the hypothesis, they where told that the government does not have the luxury of waiting for scientific research [0] and in 1980 the USDA published the dietary pyramid that we still use today, recommending that people get the bulk of their calories from carbs. The single epidemiological study by Keys was all they had to go on at that time. Since then, there have been many more rigorous diet trials which failed to confirm the lipid hypothesis and actually show a strong link between carb consumption and obesity. So the scientists introduced an entirely new scientific method, now called teleoanalysis[1][2] to prop up the lipid hypothesis. No causative link between dietary fat and heart disease could be found in controlled trials. But, they did find an association between fat and cholesterol, and then they found an association between high cholesterol and heart disease. So now using teleonalysis we can say that fat is associated with high cholesterol and high cholesterol is associated with heart disease therefore fat causes heart disease. The American government officially supports the lipid hypothesis and promotes the high carb diet pyramid at all contact points. Schools, universities, government agencies all must promote the lipid hypothesis or be sacked or defunded; "The dietary dogma was a money-maker for segments of the food industry, a fund raiser for the Heart Association and busy work for thousands of fat chemists... To be a dissenter is to be unfunded because the peer-review system rewards conformity and excludes criticism"[3] Carbs have low nutritional content and most vitamins are fat soluble so by eating less fat you feel more hungry because your body needs those nutrients and you are forced to eat more. When you eat a lot of carbs, your liver gives you an insulin shot. Insulin tells your fat cells to absorb the carbs to bring the body back to balance. So your fat cells swell and then divide, making your body bigger, and a bigger body requires more food to sustain it. The result is that obesity and heart disease have increased about 10x since 1980 [4] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbFQc2kxm9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbFQc2kxm9c [1] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/teleoanalysis-misleading-term https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/teleoanalysis-... [2] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/65372/what-is-wrong-with-teleoanalysis-if-anything https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/65372/what-is-wron... [3] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CxKQ2Ak6_p4C&pg=PA144&lpg=PA144&dq=%22to+be+a+dissenter+is+to+be+unfunded%22&source=bl&ots=qQPGDk4Kzd&sig=ACfU3U0NhtI_Hr-9Ax66A0IzfMveTk_DZg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjm46-B0d3xAhX5QEEAHVhjDF8Q6AEwAXoECAUQAw#v=onepage&q=%22to%20be%20a%20dissenter%20is%20to%20be%20unfunded%22&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CxKQ2Ak6_p4C&pg=PA144&lp... [4] https://www.ahajournals.org/cms/asset/d4e7b1a9-3093-4507-984e-0e9228c380a4/1171fig06.jpeg https://www.ahajournals.org/cms/asset/d4e7b1a9-3093-4507-984...
Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
I know exactly why I'm fat. I consistently continue eating after already feeling full. Regardless of whether it's socially designated as a "health food" or "junk food". Most of the pleasure of eating and drinking comes from the first few bites and sips, after that the senses start dulling and diminishing returns start to set in, so it's really no big loss to stop when full. Certainly not worth getting indigestion over. A few weeks of disciplined eating seriously diminishes the urge to overeat, but all it takes to settle into old habits is a single slip-up. I think making food artificially unpalatable by cutting salt, fat, or whatever ingredient is currently being vilified is just unproductive. It will just make the experience frustrating and unsatisfying no matter how much or little you eat.
- Azrathud 5y ago
  Not sure if this is relevant but these things have helped me with suppressing appetite in order of commitment/severity: - Extra protein even a protein powder, egg - Complex carbs like beans - No added sugar - No processed food ... - Intranasal insulin (diy - i am not diabetic) - Adderall
- ajuc 5y ago
  Check this out - https://physiqonomics.com/fat-loss/ https://physiqonomics.com/fat-loss/ helped me a lot (I lost 23 kg since March).
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ This popped in my mind since everything seemed to go off the rails with an abrupt change in obesity in the mid 70s…
- magneticnorth 5y ago
  This is fascinating, thanks for sharing. Many (most?) of these plots have known, and different explanations - e.g. the wage stagnation at the top is due to public policy changes in the 70s; the rise in marriage age is probably due to birth control becoming prevalent in the 60s, but it is really interesting to see all the effects gathered in one place of the repercussions in the past 50+ years from all the societal and political changes that happened in the 60s and 70s.
swamp40 5y ago
The sad part is, there exists some tight-lipped 90+ year old former Philip Morris chemist, who moved over to General Foods and discovered/invented some chemical that inhibits satiety, just to increase their bottom line. And now every big food company uses it.
- yissp 5y ago
  Details? This sounds interesting.
- neonnoodle 5y ago
  Are you serious about this? Or just dark humor?
  - readonthegoapp 5y ago
    I'm assuming dark humor. But prob also true. Or, truthy. Think something like 'HFCS', or 'remove all the fiber', etc. If you put enough power/money/ideology behind something, people will believe it, or not question it, etc. Probably, they/we, won't even be able to 'see' it.
- runnerup 5y ago
  Enough people read all the ingredients on every food package that if there was a common theme like this, it would be common knowledge. I don't know of a singular ingredient in common among the category of foods which would be targeted for this enhancement. Charitably, perhaps you are thinking of the "ingredient" of complex food engineering, which is any concerted effort by food engineers/scientists to modify "cafeteria food" to be more addictive and harder to stop eating. This focuses more on ingredients, which is relatively common knowledge. But it does go into some history with interesting backstories from board rooms to flesh it out: "NYT: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food" - https://archive.is/DJ0fC https://archive.is/DJ0fC This one I find super fascinating. It focuses less on ingredients and more on the physical forces/sensations of the foods: sound, crunchiness, meltiness, airiness, and how those drive compulsion to grab another handful: "Food cravings engineered by industry" https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/food-cravings-engineered-by-industry-1.1395225 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/food-cravings-engineered-by-i...
EMM_386 5y ago
Fascinating read. At first I was thinking things like the introduction of high fructose corn syrup, or microwave dinners, but that doesn't completely explain all of those data points. This is an interesting comment someone left ... it's one of the only ones that could potentially explain all of the results, outside of some outliers like the altitude effect. > With these premises it seems almost obvious to attribute the obesity pandemic to an external factor – for instance, virus or bacteria. My money is on gut bacteria being altered by some bacteria/virus, of which transmission is relatively hard (but it persists), which spread like wildfire in the last forty years and which thrives on cafeteria diets (which would explain its emergence in the second half of the 20th century).
- dobin 5y ago
  I've heard something of overuse of antibiotics destroying the gut microbes
- elliekelly 5y ago
  You might find Tim Specter’s “The Diet Myth” interesting. He’s a geneticist specializing in twin studies who sort of stumbled into the role of the microbiome in obesity. It’s been a while since I’ve read it but IIRC he points to pasteurizing as one of the contributors to America’s obesity compared to Europe.
ajuc 5y ago
> Kitavans didn’t even seem to gain weight in middle age. In fact, BMI was found to decrease with age. Many lived into their 80s or 90s, and Lindeberg even observed one man who he estimated to be 100 years old. None of the elderly Kitavans showed signs of dementia or memory loss. The Kitavans also had no incidence of diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, or cardiovascular disease, and were unfamiliar with the symptoms of these diseases. “The only cases of sudden death they could recall,” he reports, “were accidents such as drowning or falling from a coconut tree.” Maybe it's survivorship bias? Without modern medicine only healthiest people survive to adulthood so later they live long healthy lives. In modern society these people would be healthy too, but they would be a small percentage of the whole society. This would also explain why domesticated animals show similar problems. Because we keep them alive :/ And then since it's at least partially inheritable - the effect would compound with each generation. With unsettling implications.
briefcomment 5y ago
> "Something seems to have changed. But surprisingly, we don’t seem to have any idea what that thing was." We have ideas. Polyunsaturated fats (shortening, margarine, soybean oil, canola oil, even chicken fat) is a promising culprit. Consumption of those have skyrocketed in the last half of the 20th century [1]. Full study here [2]. It seems that polyunsaturated fats induce hibernation like symptoms, which could explain weight gain. This blog is a fascinating look at some of the literature [3]. Good summary post [4]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/figure/fig1/?report=objectonly https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/figure/... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/ [3] https://fireinabottle.net/every-fire-in-a-bottle-post-from-the-beginning/ https://fireinabottle.net/every-fire-in-a-bottle-post-from-t... [4] https://fireinabottle.net/are-you-in-deep-torpor-scd1-theory-of-obesity-summary-so-far-and-hamsters/ https://fireinabottle.net/are-you-in-deep-torpor-scd1-theory...
- jpitz 5y ago
  I thought polyunsaturated fats ( fish, soybean ) were fairly prevalent in Japanese diets? How does that square up with the lower prevalence of obesity there?
  - briefcomment 5y ago
    Eating isolated oils is decidedly different from eating whole foods, as there are compounds that counteract each other when taken as a whole. For example, fish have long chain fatty acids which counter some effects of the Omega oils. I think it's much easier to consume large portions of soybean oil if you're using it as an all purpose oil, than if you were just eating tofu, bean curd, natto, etc.
- tomerv 5y ago
  I feel that this was covered by the article (there's a second part) with the conclusion that this cannot be the main factor of the obesity epidemic. Margarine consumption was much higher in the 1970s than today, but obesity today is much higher.
deleted 5y ago
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heax 5y ago
I think the simple truth is we simply eat too much. Possible the worldwide most known modern food product is the Big Mac. Named Big Mac, not Best Mac, think about it. And it doesn't stop there, large pizzas, pizzas with a lot on top, XXL Schnitzels, All you can eat Chinese. A lot people make quantity a priority over quality, guess what happens :)
- frabjoused 5y ago
  This. There's so many ideas and theories on diets, but it seems the bottom line is, are you eating more than you're burning?
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  > we simply eat too much Hear, hear. I dropped ~70 pounds just by learning my portions. It took about 6 months, but now I can just look at a plate of food and separate out the amount that will fill me, before I even start to eat (the 2-fist rule is a good start). I can make 2-3 meals out of a typical restaurant dinner portion, or I can just order an appetizer as my meal if I'm not taking leftovers. I dropped another ~20 pounds by cutting out processed foods, preservatives, and chemicals. I likely won't eat something that I couldn't otherwise make a home using whole ingredients. Restrictive diets never worked for me. I eat whatever I want, whether it be loaded with carbs or fried. I just make sure to include plenty of fiber in my diet, only eat when hungry, and never over eat. It's the only diet that I've been able to sustain for more than a year (~5 years now, to be exact).
- elil17 5y ago
  The whole point of the article is that this is an inadequate explanation. First, the author points out that the increase in calorie consumption has been modest compared to the amount of weight gained. Second, why are we eating more? Moral failure and weak will are the popular explanations, but this fails to explain a variety of observations (Why now - haven’t humans always wanted to eat delicious food? Why do some hunter gatherer societies with surplus food not experience the same thing? Why are wild animals also effected?).
  - 5y ago
djmips 5y ago
I alarms went off when the author used a rather poor analogy and very little science to hand wave past the effectiveness of gastric bypass surgery.
syamilmj 5y ago
What about stress? Elevated cortisol level induces over-eating; moreover, increases craving for high-sugar, high-fat foods. The big change in human behavior in the last 2 decades is that now people consume more information that leads to depression, anxiety and stress.
- fredophile 5y ago
  The article also talks about changes in the weight of zoo and lab animals. Stress may be a factor in weight gain in humans but it wouldn't explain the animal data so I don't think it's the only, or primary, factor.
  - syamilmj 5y ago
    The article pointed out a paper on an increase of 1.4% overweight horses. It does not seem to have a meaningful relationship with the steep increase of overweight population in human (~24%).
dawnerd 5y ago
Since bing on Keto for a few months I've noticed a lot of the keto friendly processed foods are close enough to the real thing that it really makes me wonder why companies are not making their products lower carb to begin with. Obviously it costs more, but maybe at scale it doesn't. I suspect companies want higher carbs so people feel hungrier and eat more which in turns means they buy more. Take for instance this Nick's brand ice cream. It's 7 net carbs per pint and texture and flavor is pretty much identical to 'real' ice creams out there. Franz makes a wonderful 0 net carb bread (and hamburger and hotdog buns now which are honestly just as good as the regular cheap buns). Not saying companies need to strive to be 0 carb, that's crazy. If they just stopped putting 50g of sugar in everything that alone would go a long way. Ps: Allulose/Psicose is amazing.
- GordonS 5y ago
  > it really makes me wonder why companies are not making their products lower carb to begin with Cost has got to be one of the biggest factors, but I'd also say the overwhelming majority of people still have "fat is bad" firmly ingrained into them - it's going to take a very long time to diminish that. And of course, people like sweet things.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
> Combined with all the sugar they get from eating fruit, they end up eating about the same amount of sugar as Americans do. ... These are all unrefined sugars, of course Isn't it important to distinguish the type of sugar? I thought the 5-10% increase in proportion of sucrose to fructose was sufficient enough to result in significant difference between how types of sugar impact insulin response. E.g., the shift to more easily-metabolized fructose results in even more available calories to convert to fat than the 50/50 sucrose/fructose found in fruits. > even when statistically adjusting for variables like age, BMI, and physical activity. I find this hard to believe, that the statistics were adjusted correctly for physical activity. You can talk about !Kung, Maasi, and Inuits all day long, but these tribes are wildly active compared to the typical desk-jockey westerner. That can't be shrugged off so easily.
- code_duck 5y ago
  Is fructose considered easy to metabolize? It takes drastically longer to convert to glucose than other sugars, requires liver enzymes and can creates gastric upset in excess. It seems quite inefficient compared to carbohydrate sources like starch which are simply chains of glucose molecules that your body separates.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I think you have it backwards: fructose is a monosaccharide which is metabolized almost instantly, and sucrose is a disaccharide which requires additional energy to metabolize. Glucose is the end result, but glucose isn't what is added to industrial foods. So more effort is required to use sucrose than fructose, and I believe that is the source of the issue.
    - code_duck 5y ago
      I didn’t refer to sucrose. I said starches which are popular alternative carbohydrate sources to sugar. As far as sugars go, dextrose and maltose are much more easily digested than fructose.
fithisux 5y ago
Fantastic series of articles. I tend to believe that food has become some kind of additive drug that cheats the way homeostasis work in order to sustain spending. Can't wait to read all.

137 points by apsec112 5y ago

InquilineKea 5y ago

Also loo up hypothalamic microinflammation by Cai

RappingBoomer 5y ago

i like this idea--explains everything

petemir 5y ago

And the 2nd. part: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/author/slimemoldtimemold/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/author/slimemoldtimemold/

amelius 5y ago
> A popular theory of obesity is that it’s simply a question of calories in versus calories out (CICO). > (...) I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model. It is popular on HN too, as evidenced by the replies I got here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27777157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27777157
- imtringued 5y ago
  It's popular because it's thermodynamics but it completely ignores that our body doesn't know how to count calories. It only knows how to count macro nutrients and how full your stomach is and palatable food is engineered to avoid the feeling of satiation.
  - tomxor 5y ago
    So much this. Simple self experiment: If you are super hungry, try compare: 1. Eat a bowl of plain steamed rice (in hot water can make it go down easier) - you will very very quickly become satiated and stay that way, probably on less than a small bowl. 2. Eat cake, croissants, stuff that is sweet but not too sweet that you can keep eating it... initially you will stop, but then you will feel hungry again and keep going back for more - you can just keep eating on this stuff, even though the energy density is way higher. The other difference is the speed at which the energy is released, the rice will keep you going through the day, your body gradually extracting energy from it... the cake and stuff get's absorbed almost instantly and so your body has nothing to do but make fat with it - the only way your getting that energy back is through ketosis, which wont happen so long as you keep eating cake. It makes a lot of sense when you start to think about how things have been modified from their natural state, even orange juice is kinda bad in this sense - you can drink a glass of orange juice pretty easily, but there is no way you will be able to eat the number of oranges it took to make it in a single day.
    - getlawgdon 5y ago
      Not explanatory. White rice has a high GI and brown rice still has a moderately high GI.
pedrocr 5y ago
>It’s true that people eat more calories today than they did in the 1960s and 70s, but the diﬀerence is quite small. Sources have a surprisingly hard time agreeing on just how much more we eat than our grandparents did, but all of them agree that it’s not much. Pew says calorie intake in the US increased from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010. The USDA Economic Research Service estimates that calorie intake in the US increased from 2,016 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,390 calories per day in 2014. Neither of these are jaw-dropping increases. A 20% increase in food intake seems huge. The data I could find on weight over the same period puts people at only 15% heavier, so this seems to be underselling the difference.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Increased calorie intake and conversion to fat is the problem but why do humans increase their calorie intake and decide to convert their calories into fat? What button are they pressing that says "I want to be fat!".
  - PicassoCTs 5y ago
    Funny Wild speculation time: In ancient times, when the times got rough, there was always a pre-crisis-phase, aka you witnessed something traumatic, but were not yet impacted by it yourself. Stressing yourself out and triggering that "horror"-phase (movies/ evening news) makes your body go into the "binge" for reserves during crisis mode. Testable Hypothesis: End of the World screaming makes you fat, Continuous bored calm and mental safety feelings make you thin.
    - taneq 5y ago
      Should be able to see a significant uptick in BMI across the population between 2019 and now if this is the case...
      - PicassoCTs 5y ago
        A correlation between BMI and media consumption would be rather blatantly obvious i guess.
RobertoG 5y ago
That was an interesting read. I just left this comment in the site (maybe it would interest somebody here too): "Have somebody checked a correlation between breast feeding vs. infant formula in early infancy and hungry feelings in adulthood (or weight as a proxy of that)? It’s just an random idea, but it seems to me that the timeline of increasing obesity and increasing of use of infant formula could be correlated."
- eukaryote 5y ago
  It is an interesting idea, but Australia has a breast feeding rate of around 90% and a large obesity problem

imtringued 5y ago

I remember some HN threads about impossible burger and other imitation meat. There were comments about how food engineering can produce food that tastes even better than regular meat. That was shocking to me. We already have hyper palatable processed food and they want it to be even worse?

gambiting 5y ago
I think there are different goals here which aren't necessarily overlapping. I would support making plant-based meat subtitutes that are so frikking delicious that people want to eat them instead of meat. Not because I'm vegetarian(I'm not) but because it simply makes sense from the point of view of ecological impact of animal farming. The modern western diets where people eat meat 3 times a day are crazy(in my opinion) - we just don't need that much meat. So from that point of view, yeah, it would be great if at least some people switched to plant based substitutes instead. Now obviously the problem is that we possibly have the science to make these substitutes so delicious, people will overeat them and in the process make themselves worse than had they just had meat. That is also a concern, absoluteley.
pif 5y ago
The root problem is that current technology doesn't help us: processed food can only be either palatable or calorie poor. The person who will invent low-calorie bread and cheese, she'll be the Messiah :-)

guerrilla 5y ago

I don't know about this, there's a lot of factors listed individually here but not in comnination. It could be something like "eats lots of sugar and doesn't move", like are those honey and starch eaters as sedentary as us? Then again, it woildn't totally surprise me if it were something like indoor lighting or something. Edit: The second article accounts for some combinatiins but not to my satisfaction. Also: > The USDA Economic Research Service estimates that calorie intake in the US increased from 2,016 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,390 calories per day in 2014. Neither of these are jaw-dropping increases. That does seem like a jaw-dropping increase if sustained over time and other varianles are held constant. So, huh? I have another idea though since it talks about lipostat theory: Isn't it known that cortisol exposure causes weight gain? What if it's simply that our life is morr stressful despite being objectively less chaloenging in some sense. This could be due to anything from less cardio to a bad news diet.

garganzol 5y ago

It's not just calories. It's how fast those calories get into bloodstream as a glucose. "Fast" carbohydrates are extremally efficient in this regard; you can eat a ton before hunger leaves you. And this is a big gotcha as we constantly overeat being fooled by our mind and carbohydrates with high glycemic index. So, it is not just calories: it's the amount and speed of insulin response to those calories.

andylei 5y ago
This is covered in the second part of the article: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-part-ii-current-theories-of-obesity-are-inadequate/#:~:text=Low-Glycemic%20Diet https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p...

jinpa_zangpo 5y ago

People are getting fat because they are consuming more calories. And they are consuming more calories because processed foods are engineered to make you overeat them. To lose weight, stop eating processed foods and learn to cook simple foods from scratch, minimizing the use of sugar, salt, and oil, three common appetite stimulants.

nradov 5y ago
For most people there's no particular need to minimize salt and oil in order to avoid getting fat. However certain oils, especially vegetable oils, tend to have other bad health effects.
Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
>And they are consuming more calories because processed foods are engineered to make you overeat them. I've heard this being claimed a lot, and have therefore often thought about it while eating fast- and other processed foods, picking around in it trying to discover the big conspiracy, but I can't seem to find any substantial differences with what I make at home from raw ingredients. The engineering seems to be geared more towards reproducibility of all the dishes over a large network of franchises around the world. It's still the same ingredients, they're just less tolerant of substitutions and deviations from the specs. Maybe it's really a matter of fast food being compared to food cooked by unskilled home cooks who just happen to be suffering from a socially induced panic about some arbitrary ingredient, and therefore tends to produce a result that's just plain unpalatable compared to something made by a professional or a seasoned home cook. No cook with any amount of self respect will make intentionally unpalatable food, and the French paradox clearly demonstrates that it's not necessary for food to be unpalatable to avoid obesity.

MrPatan 5y ago

Saying "Calories In Calories Out" is what makes you fat is as interesting as saying "Money In Money Out" is what makes you poor. It's tautologically true but doesn't help anybody.

amelius 5y ago
It's basically differentiating the original equation wrt the only quantity you can say something about, which effectively throws out all the things you know nothing about and which you can then "conveniently" ignore.
jwdunne 5y ago
It also assumes that the human body is a machine with singular inputs and singular outputs, as though it’s a pure function. But it’s more complicated than that. Especially when you bring homeostasis into it, where the body will adjust calorific expenditure downwards in response to sustained reduced calorific intake, as just a single example. But there’s lots of things going on that influence the calories coming in, the calories stored and the calories expended. It’s unfair to reduce it down so far. It leads to fat shaming by people whom have never struggled with their weight who justify their cruelty by parroting “calories in calories out”. Even worse, some of those will do silly experiments where they put on weight really really fast and then lose it just as fast, totally ignoring the fact that their body has been in the original state for a long time.
- DJBunnies 5y ago
  It’s not cruel, it’s science. If it’s not working it’s not being done correctly. I struggled when I was younger.
  - jwdunne 5y ago
    Not sure if science ever justifies the cruelty of fat shaming mate?
    - gadders 5y ago

pif 5y ago

> Mystery 8: Diets Don’t Work As an obese person who tried several times to follow medical advise, this does not surprise me, not at all! Every diet is about calories and sport, which cannot hurt. But every diet completely misses the elephant in the room: hunger! Any medical procedure is only worth pursuing if it gives you a higher quality of life in the long term. A constant hunger cannot compensate for any weight loss.

treeman79 5y ago
The Satiety Index is for measuring how satisfied you are with various food. Enter the humble potato. https://scottabelfitness.com/potato-and-the-satiety-index/ https://scottabelfitness.com/potato-and-the-satiety-index/ I did a sweet potato diet for a month a couple of years ago for medical reasons. I was never hungry.
garganzol 5y ago
Constant hunger is a hallmark sign of insulin resistance. The good thing is you can actually measure it in HOMA-IR test.
Ueland 5y ago
> But every diet completely misses the elephant in the room: hunger! And this is why a new drug just approved in the US for obesity is hailed as a game changed, NovoNordisk's semaglutide. (Wegovy) The "only" thing it does is mange the hunger levels in your body so you dont feel hungry all the time. I think there was a study back in February for it which gave something like a 15% weight loss after a year, *on average*.
- EMM_386 5y ago
  One such study is here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032183
LQexplanation 5y ago
Metformin and myo-inositol solved this issue for me. Only after solving issues with pre-diabetes I was able to start losing weight without constant hunger.

readonthegoapp 5y ago

I thought we already figured out at least part of the problem or the main problem Sugar Yutkin Lufkin Etc Book: Pure, White, and Deadly

brazzy 5y ago
The article cites evidence showing that this is simply not true.
- readonthegoapp 5y ago
  bold statement. i wonder why you're so completely convinced? is it that the author is The Smahtest Guy To Evah Live? or....i mean, s/he has a long list of Nobel Prizes in Physiology? or maybe just some long history of unbelievably incredibly insightful comments/writing/literature/research on this or any other topic? i figure i've read and listened to at least dozens but probably hundreds of articles, books, youtubes, etc. over the past few years, and i'm not convinced i have the answer, but one blog post citing one tribe and you're all in? seems strange to me. i suspect a plurality of folks would say that there are multiple contributing factors to obesity, something like: - sugar (in particular, highly processed sugar in all its forms/delivery mechanisms), - highly processed foods generally (don't send 'full' signals to the brain, lack of fiber, etc.), - modern lifestyle/quick eating/lack of exercise, cheap sugary/processed/fatty foods, etc. ...but to rule out sugar....bold.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    Read. The. Fucking. Article. Then argue against the factual evidence it cites, not against some silly strawman.
EMM_386 5y ago
The article covers this, and sugar is not the root cause: > A Tanzanian hunter-gatherer society called the Hadza get about 15 percent of their calories from honey. Combined with all the sugar they get from eating fruit, they end up eating about the same amount of sugar as Americans do. Despite this, the Hadza do not exhibit obesity.

Pyramus 5y ago

This series of blog posts is a fascinating read into conjectured factors behind the obesity epidemic. I wish the author had continued their rigor in reasoning throughout the two blog posts. Step by step the author is lured into proving a single factor explains the rise in obesity. That maybe a futile attempt from the outset. To make an example, the author notes, correctly and to the point, > "Calories are involved in the math but it’s not as simple as “weight gain = calories in – calories out”." but then moves on to claim that "X provides evidence against CICO" when in fact the article cites numerous examples where an increase/decrease in calories results in a (short-term) increase/decrease in body weight. So what the author really meant was "X provides evidence against CICO as the single factor". I'm not an expert in nutrition science but it seems very unlikely that a single factor (sugar! trans-fats! exercise! genetics!) will explain a real-world, highly non-linear phenomenon. I personally find the paragraphs where the interactions of factors are discussed the weakest and least convincing. That is not to say the article is excellent and hammers home two very important points: Firstly the idea of the lipostat and as a result a short and a long-term time scale ('system') for body weight gain/loss. Secondly that factors relevant on one time scale may not be relevant to the other time scale. And of course that there is still a lot we simply don't understand (yet).

sdenton4 5y ago
The short term overeating studies produce what we might call highly nonlinear results, which also undermines CICO (which is a linear equation). It's pretty obvious the body has other ways to dump exceeds calories than turning them into fat stores. Those studies, and the obvious tendency of diets to fail in the long term, are strong support for some kind of lipostat system, to my mind. Others have mentioned gut biomes... My uneducated guess is plastics or some other chemical that was introduced into industrial use in the 20th century. The cross species effect (lab and zoo animals getting father on the same controlled diets) is also a really big clue that were dealing with a molecule. And, as with lead poisoning from gasoline, perhaps a hard to pinpoint one due to prevalence.
msteffen 5y ago
My interpretation was: "what is responsible for the inflection point that occurred in 1980?" Perhaps it's still not a single factor (which, I agree, would make a lot of sense) but IIUC that does raise the question of why there seems to be a single inflection point.

joseluis 5y ago

Insulin is the big elephant in the room that's barely talked about. Everybody should watch this lecture https://youtu.be/RuOvn4UqznU https://youtu.be/RuOvn4UqznU

guerrilla 5y ago
Could you do more to motivate us to watch the nearly 1.5 hour video than "insulin"? Who is this guy and what's the thesis? Summary?
- joseluis 5y ago
  Ok, I didn't realize it might be necessary, since the speaker is so good and engaging since the first minute but I'll try. He basically exposes the underlying physiological mechanisms of fasting and nutrition. And puts it in context of our biological evolution and current first-world diseases. Explains the enormous power fasting has for healing the physiology, regulating insulin levels, even reverting insulin resistance, how when you stop eating for a day the body activates the expression of certain genes in every cell for producing all the antioxidants known to man, promote autofagie of dead cells, producing growth hormones, start growing bone marrow cells, stem cells... How insulin is a key piece in that mechanism, how in western societies are junkies of processed food, specially sugar, carbohidrates and, and how by eating too often and too much we keep our insulin leves always high, which impedes our body to begin that innate process of self-healing we have, and we instead just saturate the body with things it doesn't really need and don't give it the opportunity to get rid of them, deriving in preventable diseases. He speaks about 24h, 36h, 3day and 7 day fasting... How it affects multiple things, including response to chemoterapy, diabetes, dementia... He has a previous talk called "The bittersweet truth" where he dives more deeply on how exactly fructose basically poisons the body and talks more about insulin, fructose, nutritional myths... Just one fascinating fact after another, supported by data, studies and clinical experience. He tryes to relate the facts in order to give you a very powerful big picture.
  - a0-prw 5y ago
    I use fasting to control my weight and have done so for more than 10 years. There are other benefits than weight (fat) loss. Also noone is trying to sell you anything except maybe get you to click on a few yt videos ;)

faichai 5y ago

The lipostat theory is quite interesting. This is pure conjecture, but its already known that plastics can impact estrogen levels, I wonder if plastics also have some, yet unknown, impact on metabolism that is upsetting lipostatic homeostasis. Estrogen, cortisol and testosterone all operate in a delicate, interrelated balance, so it's not too big a leap.

Pyramus 5y ago
I don't think you have to go all the way to plastics and chemicals (not saying that they aren't potentially playing their part). Take a simple model with a combination of all the factors the author discusses (type of diet, sugar, trans-fats, caloric intake, processed foods, exercise, genetics etc), allow interaction between the factors, and have the lipostat as the dependent variable. I.e. several factors together will, over time, upregulate the lipostat. A relatively simple model that evades the authors objections, yet might fit the data.
BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
Also the increase in thyroid disease, especially among women, may be related.
derbOac 5y ago
For some reason when I read the lipostat section I was reminded of decreases in average body temperature trends over time -- probably because of the temperature analogies. I've sometimes wondered if microbiome factors are in play, and by extension, things like antibiotic use (maybe there are some studies about antibiotic exposure and weight gain?). I've usually thought of it in terms of microbiome -> gut -> digestion though, and the lipostat section made me wonder if it's more like microbiome -> "immune response" -> caloric expenditure.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Where can I read more about this?
  - 5y ago

helloworld11 5y ago

The obesity epidemic, as the author describes it, isn't a good thing, and for us to have BMI tendencies similar to those of late 19th century Americans would probably be better (excepting of course their other major health problems from that time) but in relative terms, I'd consider today's obesity problems in most of the population much better than the near starvation that most of humanity lived in during the vast majority of history, even up to the early 20th century. For all but our most very recent ancestors, periods of chronic hunger was just a missed crop or bad harvesting season away and mass starvation was only slightly more distant. Famines were common in most of the world and often killed many millions per year, almost every year during millennia, of all ages, including children and infants. Obesity-caused deaths are still deaths but at least they tend far more towards killing later in life and are much more in the hands of any given individual to avoid, as opposed to starving because your whole region no longer has enough food to keep you living regardless of your dietary choices. Generations of people prior to all but the last century or so of history would be amazed, and possibly even envious at how abuntantly and cheaply most of the population can feed itself today, even to the point of chronic obesity.

mads 5y ago

There is something I dont understand about this. Is it really true that carb consumption has gone down? My own anecdotal experience is that people are drinking way more sodas and eating way more candy than they used to (in 70/80'ies my childhood). Like where I live now every other street corner has those "mix-your-own candy bag" shops, where you pay by the 100g. There must be someone buying that stuff, since they keep popping up.

ginko 5y ago
>My own anecdotal experience is that people are drinking way more sodas and eating way more candy than they used to (in 70/80'ies my childhood). This doesn't seem to match the data: https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-are-drinking-less-soda-2016-3?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-are-drinking-less-...
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Maybe “energy drinks” (Monster et al) aren’t counted as soda? There are also several other sugary non-soda drinks I now see in most convenience stores: sweet tea, Frappuccinos & other cold coffee drinks, slurpees, hot sugary coffee and cocoa, etc.

mysterypie 5y ago

> We should start seriously considering other paradigms. If diet and exercise are out as explanations for the epidemic, what could possibly explain it? And what could possibly explain all of the other bizarre trends that we have observed? > [Next Time: A CHEMICAL HUNGER] That's the part I really wanted to see. I've now bookmarked it so I can read the next instalment. I expect to hear some fascinating theories -- perhaps some modern equivalent of lead poisoning of ancient Rome.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

I was thinking it could be partially due to food getting cheaper in recent years, but the data doesn’t show a big decrease in total amount spent on food during the recent period of increased obesity. The big changes happened much earlier: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/your-grandparents-spent-more-of-their-money-on-food-than-you-do https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...

irthomasthomas 5y ago

It is not really a mystery any more. There was a heart disease epidemic in the mid 20th century (the rate doubling every decade). A scientist named Ansel Keys did an epidemiological study comparing rates of heart disease to fat intake in 6 different countries and found a strong correlation: countries that ate more fat had higher rates of heart disease. Therefore fat causes heart disease. This is the lipid hypothesis, which still drives nutrition advice and laws today. Ansal Keys joined the board of The American Heart Association which adopted the lipid hypothesis and started telling everyone to cut out fat and eat more carbohydrates (carbs are sugars strung together which are quickly chopped up and metabolised as sugar, what could go wrong? ;). Numerous clinical trials, involving tens of thousands of people, all failed to find a link between fat and heart disease (often actually finding the opposite). The government ignored these trials and supported Ansal Keys instead. The Mcgovern senate committee was tasked with creating a national nutritional policy in 1977, but when scientists told the commission that there was no evidence supporting the low fat/high carb diet and that more research was needed to confirm the hypothesis, they where told that the government does not have the luxury of waiting for scientific research [0] and in 1980 the USDA published the dietary pyramid that we still use today, recommending that people get the bulk of their calories from carbs. The single epidemiological study by Keys was all they had to go on at that time. Since then, there have been many more rigorous diet trials which failed to confirm the lipid hypothesis and actually show a strong link between carb consumption and obesity. So the scientists introduced an entirely new scientific method, now called teleoanalysis[1][2] to prop up the lipid hypothesis. No causative link between dietary fat and heart disease could be found in controlled trials. But, they did find an association between fat and cholesterol, and then they found an association between high cholesterol and heart disease. So now using teleonalysis we can say that fat is associated with high cholesterol and high cholesterol is associated with heart disease therefore fat causes heart disease. The American government officially supports the lipid hypothesis and promotes the high carb diet pyramid at all contact points. Schools, universities, government agencies all must promote the lipid hypothesis or be sacked or defunded; "The dietary dogma was a money-maker for segments of the food industry, a fund raiser for the Heart Association and busy work for thousands of fat chemists... To be a dissenter is to be unfunded because the peer-review system rewards conformity and excludes criticism"[3] Carbs have low nutritional content and most vitamins are fat soluble so by eating less fat you feel more hungry because your body needs those nutrients and you are forced to eat more. When you eat a lot of carbs, your liver gives you an insulin shot. Insulin tells your fat cells to absorb the carbs to bring the body back to balance. So your fat cells swell and then divide, making your body bigger, and a bigger body requires more food to sustain it. The result is that obesity and heart disease have increased about 10x since 1980 [4] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbFQc2kxm9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbFQc2kxm9c [1] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/teleoanalysis-misleading-term https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/teleoanalysis-... [2] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/65372/what-is-wrong-with-teleoanalysis-if-anything https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/65372/what-is-wron... [3] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CxKQ2Ak6_p4C&pg=PA144&lpg=PA144&dq=%22to+be+a+dissenter+is+to+be+unfunded%22&source=bl&ots=qQPGDk4Kzd&sig=ACfU3U0NhtI_Hr-9Ax66A0IzfMveTk_DZg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjm46-B0d3xAhX5QEEAHVhjDF8Q6AEwAXoECAUQAw#v=onepage&q=%22to%20be%20a%20dissenter%20is%20to%20be%20unfunded%22&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CxKQ2Ak6_p4C&pg=PA144&lp... [4] https://www.ahajournals.org/cms/asset/d4e7b1a9-3093-4507-984e-0e9228c380a4/1171fig06.jpeg https://www.ahajournals.org/cms/asset/d4e7b1a9-3093-4507-984...

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago

I know exactly why I'm fat. I consistently continue eating after already feeling full. Regardless of whether it's socially designated as a "health food" or "junk food". Most of the pleasure of eating and drinking comes from the first few bites and sips, after that the senses start dulling and diminishing returns start to set in, so it's really no big loss to stop when full. Certainly not worth getting indigestion over. A few weeks of disciplined eating seriously diminishes the urge to overeat, but all it takes to settle into old habits is a single slip-up. I think making food artificially unpalatable by cutting salt, fat, or whatever ingredient is currently being vilified is just unproductive. It will just make the experience frustrating and unsatisfying no matter how much or little you eat.

Azrathud 5y ago
Not sure if this is relevant but these things have helped me with suppressing appetite in order of commitment/severity: - Extra protein even a protein powder, egg - Complex carbs like beans - No added sugar - No processed food ... - Intranasal insulin (diy - i am not diabetic) - Adderall
ajuc 5y ago
Check this out - https://physiqonomics.com/fat-loss/ https://physiqonomics.com/fat-loss/ helped me a lot (I lost 23 kg since March).

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ This popped in my mind since everything seemed to go off the rails with an abrupt change in obesity in the mid 70s…

magneticnorth 5y ago
This is fascinating, thanks for sharing. Many (most?) of these plots have known, and different explanations - e.g. the wage stagnation at the top is due to public policy changes in the 70s; the rise in marriage age is probably due to birth control becoming prevalent in the 60s, but it is really interesting to see all the effects gathered in one place of the repercussions in the past 50+ years from all the societal and political changes that happened in the 60s and 70s.

swamp40 5y ago

The sad part is, there exists some tight-lipped 90+ year old former Philip Morris chemist, who moved over to General Foods and discovered/invented some chemical that inhibits satiety, just to increase their bottom line. And now every big food company uses it.

yissp 5y ago
Details? This sounds interesting.
neonnoodle 5y ago
Are you serious about this? Or just dark humor?
- readonthegoapp 5y ago
  I'm assuming dark humor. But prob also true. Or, truthy. Think something like 'HFCS', or 'remove all the fiber', etc. If you put enough power/money/ideology behind something, people will believe it, or not question it, etc. Probably, they/we, won't even be able to 'see' it.
runnerup 5y ago
Enough people read all the ingredients on every food package that if there was a common theme like this, it would be common knowledge. I don't know of a singular ingredient in common among the category of foods which would be targeted for this enhancement. Charitably, perhaps you are thinking of the "ingredient" of complex food engineering, which is any concerted effort by food engineers/scientists to modify "cafeteria food" to be more addictive and harder to stop eating. This focuses more on ingredients, which is relatively common knowledge. But it does go into some history with interesting backstories from board rooms to flesh it out: "NYT: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food" - https://archive.is/DJ0fC https://archive.is/DJ0fC This one I find super fascinating. It focuses less on ingredients and more on the physical forces/sensations of the foods: sound, crunchiness, meltiness, airiness, and how those drive compulsion to grab another handful: "Food cravings engineered by industry" https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/food-cravings-engineered-by-industry-1.1395225 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/food-cravings-engineered-by-i...

EMM_386 5y ago

Fascinating read. At first I was thinking things like the introduction of high fructose corn syrup, or microwave dinners, but that doesn't completely explain all of those data points. This is an interesting comment someone left ... it's one of the only ones that could potentially explain all of the results, outside of some outliers like the altitude effect. > With these premises it seems almost obvious to attribute the obesity pandemic to an external factor – for instance, virus or bacteria. My money is on gut bacteria being altered by some bacteria/virus, of which transmission is relatively hard (but it persists), which spread like wildfire in the last forty years and which thrives on cafeteria diets (which would explain its emergence in the second half of the 20th century).

dobin 5y ago
I've heard something of overuse of antibiotics destroying the gut microbes
elliekelly 5y ago
You might find Tim Specter’s “The Diet Myth” interesting. He’s a geneticist specializing in twin studies who sort of stumbled into the role of the microbiome in obesity. It’s been a while since I’ve read it but IIRC he points to pasteurizing as one of the contributors to America’s obesity compared to Europe.

ajuc 5y ago

> Kitavans didn’t even seem to gain weight in middle age. In fact, BMI was found to decrease with age. Many lived into their 80s or 90s, and Lindeberg even observed one man who he estimated to be 100 years old. None of the elderly Kitavans showed signs of dementia or memory loss. The Kitavans also had no incidence of diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, or cardiovascular disease, and were unfamiliar with the symptoms of these diseases. “The only cases of sudden death they could recall,” he reports, “were accidents such as drowning or falling from a coconut tree.” Maybe it's survivorship bias? Without modern medicine only healthiest people survive to adulthood so later they live long healthy lives. In modern society these people would be healthy too, but they would be a small percentage of the whole society. This would also explain why domesticated animals show similar problems. Because we keep them alive :/ And then since it's at least partially inheritable - the effect would compound with each generation. With unsettling implications.

briefcomment 5y ago

> "Something seems to have changed. But surprisingly, we don’t seem to have any idea what that thing was." We have ideas. Polyunsaturated fats (shortening, margarine, soybean oil, canola oil, even chicken fat) is a promising culprit. Consumption of those have skyrocketed in the last half of the 20th century [1]. Full study here [2]. It seems that polyunsaturated fats induce hibernation like symptoms, which could explain weight gain. This blog is a fascinating look at some of the literature [3]. Good summary post [4]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/figure/fig1/?report=objectonly https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/figure/... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/ [3] https://fireinabottle.net/every-fire-in-a-bottle-post-from-the-beginning/ https://fireinabottle.net/every-fire-in-a-bottle-post-from-t... [4] https://fireinabottle.net/are-you-in-deep-torpor-scd1-theory-of-obesity-summary-so-far-and-hamsters/ https://fireinabottle.net/are-you-in-deep-torpor-scd1-theory...

jpitz 5y ago
I thought polyunsaturated fats ( fish, soybean ) were fairly prevalent in Japanese diets? How does that square up with the lower prevalence of obesity there?
- briefcomment 5y ago
  Eating isolated oils is decidedly different from eating whole foods, as there are compounds that counteract each other when taken as a whole. For example, fish have long chain fatty acids which counter some effects of the Omega oils. I think it's much easier to consume large portions of soybean oil if you're using it as an all purpose oil, than if you were just eating tofu, bean curd, natto, etc.
tomerv 5y ago
I feel that this was covered by the article (there's a second part) with the conclusion that this cannot be the main factor of the obesity epidemic. Margarine consumption was much higher in the 1970s than today, but obesity today is much higher.

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heax 5y ago

I think the simple truth is we simply eat too much. Possible the worldwide most known modern food product is the Big Mac. Named Big Mac, not Best Mac, think about it. And it doesn't stop there, large pizzas, pizzas with a lot on top, XXL Schnitzels, All you can eat Chinese. A lot people make quantity a priority over quality, guess what happens :)

frabjoused 5y ago
This. There's so many ideas and theories on diets, but it seems the bottom line is, are you eating more than you're burning?
stronglikedan 5y ago
> we simply eat too much Hear, hear. I dropped ~70 pounds just by learning my portions. It took about 6 months, but now I can just look at a plate of food and separate out the amount that will fill me, before I even start to eat (the 2-fist rule is a good start). I can make 2-3 meals out of a typical restaurant dinner portion, or I can just order an appetizer as my meal if I'm not taking leftovers. I dropped another ~20 pounds by cutting out processed foods, preservatives, and chemicals. I likely won't eat something that I couldn't otherwise make a home using whole ingredients. Restrictive diets never worked for me. I eat whatever I want, whether it be loaded with carbs or fried. I just make sure to include plenty of fiber in my diet, only eat when hungry, and never over eat. It's the only diet that I've been able to sustain for more than a year (~5 years now, to be exact).
elil17 5y ago
The whole point of the article is that this is an inadequate explanation. First, the author points out that the increase in calorie consumption has been modest compared to the amount of weight gained. Second, why are we eating more? Moral failure and weak will are the popular explanations, but this fails to explain a variety of observations (Why now - haven’t humans always wanted to eat delicious food? Why do some hunter gatherer societies with surplus food not experience the same thing? Why are wild animals also effected?).
- 5y ago

djmips 5y ago

I alarms went off when the author used a rather poor analogy and very little science to hand wave past the effectiveness of gastric bypass surgery.

syamilmj 5y ago

What about stress? Elevated cortisol level induces over-eating; moreover, increases craving for high-sugar, high-fat foods. The big change in human behavior in the last 2 decades is that now people consume more information that leads to depression, anxiety and stress.

fredophile 5y ago
The article also talks about changes in the weight of zoo and lab animals. Stress may be a factor in weight gain in humans but it wouldn't explain the animal data so I don't think it's the only, or primary, factor.
- syamilmj 5y ago
  The article pointed out a paper on an increase of 1.4% overweight horses. It does not seem to have a meaningful relationship with the steep increase of overweight population in human (~24%).

dawnerd 5y ago

Since bing on Keto for a few months I've noticed a lot of the keto friendly processed foods are close enough to the real thing that it really makes me wonder why companies are not making their products lower carb to begin with. Obviously it costs more, but maybe at scale it doesn't. I suspect companies want higher carbs so people feel hungrier and eat more which in turns means they buy more. Take for instance this Nick's brand ice cream. It's 7 net carbs per pint and texture and flavor is pretty much identical to 'real' ice creams out there. Franz makes a wonderful 0 net carb bread (and hamburger and hotdog buns now which are honestly just as good as the regular cheap buns). Not saying companies need to strive to be 0 carb, that's crazy. If they just stopped putting 50g of sugar in everything that alone would go a long way. Ps: Allulose/Psicose is amazing.

GordonS 5y ago
> it really makes me wonder why companies are not making their products lower carb to begin with Cost has got to be one of the biggest factors, but I'd also say the overwhelming majority of people still have "fat is bad" firmly ingrained into them - it's going to take a very long time to diminish that. And of course, people like sweet things.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

> Combined with all the sugar they get from eating fruit, they end up eating about the same amount of sugar as Americans do. ... These are all unrefined sugars, of course Isn't it important to distinguish the type of sugar? I thought the 5-10% increase in proportion of sucrose to fructose was sufficient enough to result in significant difference between how types of sugar impact insulin response. E.g., the shift to more easily-metabolized fructose results in even more available calories to convert to fat than the 50/50 sucrose/fructose found in fruits. > even when statistically adjusting for variables like age, BMI, and physical activity. I find this hard to believe, that the statistics were adjusted correctly for physical activity. You can talk about !Kung, Maasi, and Inuits all day long, but these tribes are wildly active compared to the typical desk-jockey westerner. That can't be shrugged off so easily.

code_duck 5y ago
Is fructose considered easy to metabolize? It takes drastically longer to convert to glucose than other sugars, requires liver enzymes and can creates gastric upset in excess. It seems quite inefficient compared to carbohydrate sources like starch which are simply chains of glucose molecules that your body separates.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I think you have it backwards: fructose is a monosaccharide which is metabolized almost instantly, and sucrose is a disaccharide which requires additional energy to metabolize. Glucose is the end result, but glucose isn't what is added to industrial foods. So more effort is required to use sucrose than fructose, and I believe that is the source of the issue.
  - code_duck 5y ago
    I didn’t refer to sucrose. I said starches which are popular alternative carbohydrate sources to sugar. As far as sugars go, dextrose and maltose are much more easily digested than fructose.

fithisux 5y ago

Fantastic series of articles. I tend to believe that food has become some kind of additive drug that cheats the way homeostasis work in order to sustain spending. Can't wait to read all.