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A Chemical Hunger – Part V: Livestock Antibiotics

cesaref 5y ago
So livestock antibiotic use is correlated with obesity? I'm reminded of: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- ben_w 5y ago
  It might be spurious or not — antibiotics are known to cause weight gain, but I don’t know even vaguely enough about chemistry or biology to know if the quantity of antibiotics in either the environment or the human food chain is high enough to have a noticeable impact.
  - Ueland 5y ago
    Antibiotics is basically chemotherapy but for bacteria, killing a lot of the good bacteria in your guts causes all kinds of havoc. I've only had to use it twice in my life, one time as an adult. I then forgot to also take probiotics at the same time, had stomac issues for weeks after the treatment.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Antibiotics are used in livestock for the specific purpose of causing weight gain in the livestock. The question is to what extent this causes weight gain in humans.
  - techbio 5y ago
    Having more meat at less cost, among other foods, seems to be a plainly plausible cause for gaining weight. Pollution, obesity, etc. are externalized costs of satiety.
gadders 5y ago
I thought anti-biotics in animals generate lean muscle mass? They would not get fed to them if they made animals fat. I guess you could argue that they work differently in humans. I could certainly see that for cows and their different digestion, but pigs being omnivores are more similar. I also think % body fat would be a better measure of obesity than BMI.
- xupybd 5y ago
  Fat tastes better than lean meat. I think it would be desirable to make livestock fat. Historical records indicate people like fat animals for food. Biblical texts refer to flattened animals as desirable.
  - benfrain 5y ago
    You mean ‘fattened’, not ‘flattened’, right? Unless those guys had a thing for steam roll-erred livestock :D
    - xupybd 5y ago
      Haha yeah that was a typo.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    Fat red meat is cheaper than lean red meat.
    - jmvoodoo 5y ago
      Maybe for ground meat, but beef for example is priced higher according to it's fat content. For example prime is higher in fat and in price than choice, and wagyu is prized for it's high fat content. The fattiest red meat, A5 wagyu, is upwards of $100/lb.
  - gadders 5y ago
    Up to a point. Producers have to meet a standard for supermarkets (at least in the UK). They get financially penalised if animals are too fat when slaughtered.
pjc50 5y ago
Will be banned in the EU next year: https://www.saveourantibiotics.org/media/1842/2022-changes-to-european-law-farm-antibiotics.pdf https://www.saveourantibiotics.org/media/1842/2022-changes-t... (aside, but I suspect the author is One Of Us; I clicked on https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/15/a-chemical-hunger-interlude-a-cico-killer-quest-ce-que-cest/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/15/a-chemical-hunger-i... because of the funny title, but it addresses an argument I see a lot on here and cites a HN comment!)
i_am_proteus 5y ago
I had never heard of slime mold time mold dot com until today, so I read back through the author's theories and I'm not convinced there's anything here. His initial premise, that the cause of obesity is a mystery, doesn't seem to be that well-researched. Most importantly, he does not really poke holes in the basic premise that the cause is linked to increased availability of food in general coupled with more people living sedentary lifestyles. He even mentions that average daily caloric intake has gone up c. 400 kcal since the turn of the 20th century. Which, for someone with a maintenance-level diet, would cause a 35-45 lb. annual weight gain. The antibiotic theory here doesn't seem to address the possibility of wealth and industrialization as a confounding variable. In fact, he doesn't seem to seriously address confounding variables anywhere in his analysis. I don't assert that antibiotics in the food supply should not be considered harmful, but his vague hand-waving in the direction of a culprit for some great unknown mystery seems thin at best. I'd love to hear some competing takes.
- irthomasthomas 5y ago
  I agree with you on the first point, however, the sedentary lifestyle hypothesis is also out. It's part of the same f Fat Lazy Slob theory that always blames the people for their lifestyle choices. What do they tell you to do build up an appetite? Exercise. Exercise makes you hungry, and if you try to cure that hunger with low nutrient carbs then you will end up obese and malnourished.
- simiones 5y ago
  > He even mentions that average daily caloric intake has gone up c. 400 kcal since the turn of the 20th century. Which, for someone with a maintenance-level diet, would cause a 35-45 lb. annual weight gain. That's one data point, but they also show that caloric intake has been decreasing since 2010 and yet obesity is still increasing. They also mention that the 400 Cal figure is based on consumption in the 1960s-70s vs today, but that there are reasons to believe that at the turn of the century consumption would have been higher than that. Also, observing that people are eating more just begs the question: why are they eating more today than they need, when they weren't dong this in the past? > Most importantly, he does not really poke holes in the basic premise that the cause is linked to increased availability of food in general coupled with more people living sedentary lifestyles. Except that people are exercising on average more today than in 2010 or 1990, and more than office workers in 1950, and still obesity is going up. Similarly for availability of food. Also, none of your observations address the bizarre correlation between obesity and altitude for example. > The antibiotic theory here doesn't seem to address the possibility of wealth and industrialization as a confounding variable. In fact, he doesn't seem to seriously address confounding variables anywhere in his analysis. Industrialization and wealth are not direct causes of obesity - people don't eat money or factories. If people in countries A and B are eating the same amount and composition on average, but country A is wealthy and industrial and country B is poor and rural, and country A has higher average BMI than country B, then you should exactly start looking at some environmental causes for the difference. Edit to add: > Which, for someone with a maintenance-level diet, would cause a 35-45 lb. annual weight gain. This is nonsense - there is no way to predict weight gain based on calorie intake - variance between people is too huge on this metric - individual BMR alone varies between 1000 kcal/day up to 2500 kcal/day.
irthomasthomas 5y ago
I think this author is not being very scientific. E.g. in part 2 he dismisses carbs as a cause of obesity, and he begins by citing a trial involving 16 people. "A study from 2003 examined low-fat diets in 16 overweight people. Naturally, this low-fat diet was high in carbohydrates. When patients started the low-fat diet and were told to eat as much as they wanted, they actually ate 291 calories less per day." I think it is important to note that obesity skyrockets from 1980 on. The exact year the USDA began mandating a high carb diet. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a4d5666bff20053c65b7ff2/1520620090133-5DLTOEX0RMQNJY2OR5FC/Rise+in+US+Overwight+Obsetity+Coincides+with+DGA.png?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a4d5666bff200... I recommend listening to Garry Taub instead. He is a physicist. Nutrition scientists are literally not allowed to deviate from the official dietary fat causes obesity/lipid hypothesis. So it requires outsiders to get at the truth here. Why We Get Fat: https://youtu.be/qKuDamgGkZQ https://youtu.be/qKuDamgGkZQ Big Fat Fiasco: https://youtu.be/exi7O1li_wA https://youtu.be/exi7O1li_wA Big Fat Nutrition Policy: https://youtu.be/hzQAHITIUhg https://youtu.be/hzQAHITIUhg Edit: Carbs are sugar strung together. They are quickly chopped up and metabolized, raising your blood sugar level. To maintain homeostasis the liver responds with a squirt of Insulin. Insulin signals to your fat cells to start storing the excess sugar, which would otherwise poison you by hyperglycemia. In a normal high fat/ low carb diet, you feel full after eating, and your blood sugar returns to normal. At this point your fat cells can release those sugars back to the blood stream (to prevent hypOglycemia). But with a low fat diet your body doesn't get enough vitamins and minerals (most of which are fat soluble and removed, or made indigestiable without fat) so you stay hungry. You are forced to eat more of this high sugar food, which keeps your blood sugar high and prevents your fat cells from completing the second part of the fat/glucose cycle. So your fat cells swell and divide, making you bigger, and the bigger you are, the more nutrients your body demands. The obesity epidemic began in 1980 when the USDA began dictating a high carb diet. There are dozens of trials involving 10s of thousands of people going back 70 years that show a clear trend of carbs causing obesity in the West. I say West because it also clear that there is a genetic component involved in the carbs/fat cycle or insuline response. Which may explain why one isolated community can consume a lot of carbs from root veg and stay lean.
- simiones 5y ago
jeltz 5y ago
How does his theory explain why the UK has the most overweight people in Europe but still relatively low antibiotics use? And, yes, Swedes and Norwegians (who are from countries which banned antibiotics use a long time ago) are lean for Europeans but internationally we are still pretty fat. I am all for banning casual antibiotics use in animals (which my country has done a long time ago) but I do not buy this theory since it does not match the evidence very well. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/antibiotic-use-in-livestock-in-europe https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/antibiotic-use-in-livesto...
- captainmuon 5y ago
  Could different water treatment be an issue? Maybe the chemicals don't get filtered out as well in the UK as in other countries. In the end, antibiotics surely are part of the obesity pandemic. We give them to animals to fatten them, after all. But I see not reason why it has to be monocausal. There are a lot of chemicals that look problematic (to an interested lay person like me), for example phthalates, xenohormones, or even artificial sweeteners and seed oils. It's going to take a lot of work to investigate them all.
  - jeltz 5y ago
    If it was water treatment wouldn't we expect to see more obese people in the cities which are further downriver and where there is more pollution in general? What we actually observe is that citydwellers have less issues with obesity. No, these might be minor factors but there are obviously factors which matter more than pollution and antibiotics.

So livestock antibiotic use is correlated with obesity? I'm reminded of: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

ben_w 5y ago
It might be spurious or not — antibiotics are known to cause weight gain, but I don’t know even vaguely enough about chemistry or biology to know if the quantity of antibiotics in either the environment or the human food chain is high enough to have a noticeable impact.
- Ueland 5y ago
  Antibiotics is basically chemotherapy but for bacteria, killing a lot of the good bacteria in your guts causes all kinds of havoc. I've only had to use it twice in my life, one time as an adult. I then forgot to also take probiotics at the same time, had stomac issues for weeks after the treatment.
pjc50 5y ago
Antibiotics are used in livestock for the specific purpose of causing weight gain in the livestock. The question is to what extent this causes weight gain in humans.
- techbio 5y ago
  Having more meat at less cost, among other foods, seems to be a plainly plausible cause for gaining weight. Pollution, obesity, etc. are externalized costs of satiety.

gadders 5y ago

I thought anti-biotics in animals generate lean muscle mass? They would not get fed to them if they made animals fat. I guess you could argue that they work differently in humans. I could certainly see that for cows and their different digestion, but pigs being omnivores are more similar. I also think % body fat would be a better measure of obesity than BMI.

xupybd 5y ago
Fat tastes better than lean meat. I think it would be desirable to make livestock fat. Historical records indicate people like fat animals for food. Biblical texts refer to flattened animals as desirable.
- benfrain 5y ago
  You mean ‘fattened’, not ‘flattened’, right? Unless those guys had a thing for steam roll-erred livestock :D
  - xupybd 5y ago
    Haha yeah that was a typo.
- ajuc 5y ago
  Fat red meat is cheaper than lean red meat.
  - jmvoodoo 5y ago
    Maybe for ground meat, but beef for example is priced higher according to it's fat content. For example prime is higher in fat and in price than choice, and wagyu is prized for it's high fat content. The fattiest red meat, A5 wagyu, is upwards of $100/lb.
- gadders 5y ago
  Up to a point. Producers have to meet a standard for supermarkets (at least in the UK). They get financially penalised if animals are too fat when slaughtered.

pjc50 5y ago

Will be banned in the EU next year: https://www.saveourantibiotics.org/media/1842/2022-changes-to-european-law-farm-antibiotics.pdf https://www.saveourantibiotics.org/media/1842/2022-changes-t... (aside, but I suspect the author is One Of Us; I clicked on https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/15/a-chemical-hunger-interlude-a-cico-killer-quest-ce-que-cest/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/15/a-chemical-hunger-i... because of the funny title, but it addresses an argument I see a lot on here and cites a HN comment!)

i_am_proteus 5y ago

I had never heard of slime mold time mold dot com until today, so I read back through the author's theories and I'm not convinced there's anything here. His initial premise, that the cause of obesity is a mystery, doesn't seem to be that well-researched. Most importantly, he does not really poke holes in the basic premise that the cause is linked to increased availability of food in general coupled with more people living sedentary lifestyles. He even mentions that average daily caloric intake has gone up c. 400 kcal since the turn of the 20th century. Which, for someone with a maintenance-level diet, would cause a 35-45 lb. annual weight gain. The antibiotic theory here doesn't seem to address the possibility of wealth and industrialization as a confounding variable. In fact, he doesn't seem to seriously address confounding variables anywhere in his analysis. I don't assert that antibiotics in the food supply should not be considered harmful, but his vague hand-waving in the direction of a culprit for some great unknown mystery seems thin at best. I'd love to hear some competing takes.

irthomasthomas 5y ago
I agree with you on the first point, however, the sedentary lifestyle hypothesis is also out. It's part of the same f Fat Lazy Slob theory that always blames the people for their lifestyle choices. What do they tell you to do build up an appetite? Exercise. Exercise makes you hungry, and if you try to cure that hunger with low nutrient carbs then you will end up obese and malnourished.
simiones 5y ago
> He even mentions that average daily caloric intake has gone up c. 400 kcal since the turn of the 20th century. Which, for someone with a maintenance-level diet, would cause a 35-45 lb. annual weight gain. That's one data point, but they also show that caloric intake has been decreasing since 2010 and yet obesity is still increasing. They also mention that the 400 Cal figure is based on consumption in the 1960s-70s vs today, but that there are reasons to believe that at the turn of the century consumption would have been higher than that. Also, observing that people are eating more just begs the question: why are they eating more today than they need, when they weren't dong this in the past? > Most importantly, he does not really poke holes in the basic premise that the cause is linked to increased availability of food in general coupled with more people living sedentary lifestyles. Except that people are exercising on average more today than in 2010 or 1990, and more than office workers in 1950, and still obesity is going up. Similarly for availability of food. Also, none of your observations address the bizarre correlation between obesity and altitude for example. > The antibiotic theory here doesn't seem to address the possibility of wealth and industrialization as a confounding variable. In fact, he doesn't seem to seriously address confounding variables anywhere in his analysis. Industrialization and wealth are not direct causes of obesity - people don't eat money or factories. If people in countries A and B are eating the same amount and composition on average, but country A is wealthy and industrial and country B is poor and rural, and country A has higher average BMI than country B, then you should exactly start looking at some environmental causes for the difference. Edit to add: > Which, for someone with a maintenance-level diet, would cause a 35-45 lb. annual weight gain. This is nonsense - there is no way to predict weight gain based on calorie intake - variance between people is too huge on this metric - individual BMR alone varies between 1000 kcal/day up to 2500 kcal/day.

irthomasthomas 5y ago

I think this author is not being very scientific. E.g. in part 2 he dismisses carbs as a cause of obesity, and he begins by citing a trial involving 16 people. "A study from 2003 examined low-fat diets in 16 overweight people. Naturally, this low-fat diet was high in carbohydrates. When patients started the low-fat diet and were told to eat as much as they wanted, they actually ate 291 calories less per day." I think it is important to note that obesity skyrockets from 1980 on. The exact year the USDA began mandating a high carb diet. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a4d5666bff20053c65b7ff2/1520620090133-5DLTOEX0RMQNJY2OR5FC/Rise+in+US+Overwight+Obsetity+Coincides+with+DGA.png?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a4d5666bff200... I recommend listening to Garry Taub instead. He is a physicist. Nutrition scientists are literally not allowed to deviate from the official dietary fat causes obesity/lipid hypothesis. So it requires outsiders to get at the truth here. Why We Get Fat: https://youtu.be/qKuDamgGkZQ https://youtu.be/qKuDamgGkZQ Big Fat Fiasco: https://youtu.be/exi7O1li_wA https://youtu.be/exi7O1li_wA Big Fat Nutrition Policy: https://youtu.be/hzQAHITIUhg https://youtu.be/hzQAHITIUhg Edit: Carbs are sugar strung together. They are quickly chopped up and metabolized, raising your blood sugar level. To maintain homeostasis the liver responds with a squirt of Insulin. Insulin signals to your fat cells to start storing the excess sugar, which would otherwise poison you by hyperglycemia. In a normal high fat/ low carb diet, you feel full after eating, and your blood sugar returns to normal. At this point your fat cells can release those sugars back to the blood stream (to prevent hypOglycemia). But with a low fat diet your body doesn't get enough vitamins and minerals (most of which are fat soluble and removed, or made indigestiable without fat) so you stay hungry. You are forced to eat more of this high sugar food, which keeps your blood sugar high and prevents your fat cells from completing the second part of the fat/glucose cycle. So your fat cells swell and divide, making you bigger, and the bigger you are, the more nutrients your body demands. The obesity epidemic began in 1980 when the USDA began dictating a high carb diet. There are dozens of trials involving 10s of thousands of people going back 70 years that show a clear trend of carbs causing obesity in the West. I say West because it also clear that there is a genetic component involved in the carbs/fat cycle or insuline response. Which may explain why one isolated community can consume a lot of carbs from root veg and stay lean.

simiones 5y ago

jeltz 5y ago

How does his theory explain why the UK has the most overweight people in Europe but still relatively low antibiotics use? And, yes, Swedes and Norwegians (who are from countries which banned antibiotics use a long time ago) are lean for Europeans but internationally we are still pretty fat. I am all for banning casual antibiotics use in animals (which my country has done a long time ago) but I do not buy this theory since it does not match the evidence very well. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/antibiotic-use-in-livestock-in-europe https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/antibiotic-use-in-livesto...

captainmuon 5y ago
Could different water treatment be an issue? Maybe the chemicals don't get filtered out as well in the UK as in other countries. In the end, antibiotics surely are part of the obesity pandemic. We give them to animals to fatten them, after all. But I see not reason why it has to be monocausal. There are a lot of chemicals that look problematic (to an interested lay person like me), for example phthalates, xenohormones, or even artificial sweeteners and seed oils. It's going to take a lot of work to investigate them all.
- jeltz 5y ago
  If it was water treatment wouldn't we expect to see more obese people in the cities which are further downriver and where there is more pollution in general? What we actually observe is that citydwellers have less issues with obesity. No, these might be minor factors but there are obviously factors which matter more than pollution and antibiotics.