12 ms·

What’s worrying about this is that we’re about 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for, a

What’s worrying about this is that we’re about 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for, and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets. It would be fascinating if this was all correlated with a common environmental contaminant, and the increasing use of various plastics could line up well.

logicchains 4y ago
It's got an incredibly simple explanation, if you look at a graph of average daily calorie intake by year.
Terry_Roll 4y ago
> 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for, I think you need to look at how the food has changed in this time. For example, here in the UK supermarkets dont want pigs with 1 1/2" of back fat so the farmer get the nutritionist to make up a diet low in vitamin B5 because it helps to shift the fat under the skin. Nett result, you have fatty organs and marbleized meat as the fat remains else where in the body. We can grow chickens in half the time it took to grow them in the 70's, chemicals in the environment remain in the body for years even lifetimes, pollution levels are at their highest in a generation, people dont exercise like they used to.
- jnwatson 4y ago
  Right but it happens to our pets too.
  - Terry_Roll 4y ago
    Food generally is not as nutritious as it was 50years ago, its going to affect alot of animals.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  > pollution levels are at their highest in a generation Try looking out the window in a 1970s city.
moistly 4y ago
And don’t forget that sperm counts have dropped a frightening amount, and that plastics leech hormone analogues.
tintedfireglass 4y ago
If it is related to plastics obesity should have been distributed evenly worldwide. But it is not. Even among developed countries it isn't evenly distributed.
- maeil 4y ago
  I'm often saddened to see how even on this kind of community where the level of discussion is relatively high given the openness of the platform, this kind of cross-country comparison is almost completely forgotten when it debunks so many, possibly even the majority, of arguments made on a host of topics including this one. It isn't helped by the fact that HN, given its roots and SV focus, is very Ameri-centric - ime e.g. Europeans are at least somewhat more likely to consider regional comparisons, though they're still underutilized. A 20-second search for "obesity rates by country" will show that plastics or other chemicals are very unlikely to play more than a minor role. It's so straightforward, yet there are dozens and dozens of comments above this one with not a single one bringing it up. In the end, CICO is correct. The question then becomes "why do certain countries have a higher CI" to which the answer is "culture", as with anything to do with human behaviour. But most are very unwilling to point at things about certain cultures that are very clearly negative, something that both mainstream Western political leanings have in common. One of them because they believe their culture is inherently Great (Again?) even if it's sending them to an early deathbed, the other because they believe (or at least outwardly adhere to the dogma) that cultures should not be compared in any kind of positive vs negative way unless it's one they see as a political opponent on the national scale.
ellopoppit 4y ago
It's pretty clear the epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease is largely caused by sugar https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
- zamfi 4y ago
  Sugar consumption peaked in 1997 [0] in the US. Obesity continues to rise. In Australia, sugar consumption dropped 23% (and other sweeteners dropped 16%) from 1980 to 2003, while obesity tripled. [1] There is more to the picture. [0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-part-ii-current-theories-of-obesity-are-inadequate/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257688/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257688/
- philjohn 4y ago
  And HFCS?
- wbsss4412 4y ago
  It’s not at all clear that the current epidemic is caused by sugar. Lustig is a great speaker, and I’ll admit that when I first watched that I was quite convinced. His position, however, is still not representative of a consensus within the field, and for good reason. While sugar consumption is likely detrimental to one’s overall health. Simply cutting out sugar is not necessarily going to lead to better weight management outcomes. While sugar consumption has increased over time, so have added fats and oils [0]. Which are much more calorically dense. It’s unlikely that any one food source is leading to the increases in obesity that we are seeing. [0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82220/eib-166.pdf?v=7240.9 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82220/eib-166....
  - uoaei 4y ago
    I learned a while back but don't have time to dig up sources now that eating simple carbs and fats together encourages your body to take the fast calories and store them as fat, moreso than eating simple carbs alone (fast energy, relatively clean-burning) or fats alone. These kinds of interactions are historically very important for explaining particular quirks of the effects of diets and I wouldn't be surprised at all if microplastics had some sort of catalytic effect, e.g. by being nucleation points for buildup of something (arterial plaque or whatever else).
zamfi 4y ago
You may find this exposition interesting: http://achemicalhunger.com/ http://achemicalhunger.com/
- rajin444 4y ago
  Even they admit that in the end CICO is correct. You cannot escape physics. That being said, the real question is: if somebody stopped eating, would their body die instead of using their fat for energy? There could definitely be cases where that happens (likely caused by modern tech / science), but given things like this happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast It’s likely just a willpower/intellect issue once cico is handled. How long can you keep it up, are you able to make effective modifications, etc until you reach your goal weight. I’d wager that it’s much more likely society lacks willpower & intelligence (when presented with excess resources) instead of we introduced something that makes our bodies unable to lose weight. Anecdotally, as a former obese person and with many family members who have dealt with/are dealing with obesity cico + willpower was always the answer. It’s very likely the willpower needed to lose weight is something a large portion of the population fundamentally can’t achieve without cultural enforcement.
  - zamfi 4y ago
    Sure, CICO definitely applies, but so what? The first derivative of stored calories doesn't tell you anything interesting about causes. Your bank balance is a sum of money coming and and money going out, but what causes money coming in and what causes money going out are much more useful to anyone trying to earn wealth or avoid debt than the mere fact that your bank balance is their sum. Like you, many people are convinced that the issue is "willpower / intellect". But this doesn't share a causal relationship with CICO! The willpower argument is like saying "oh yeah, to become rich, just earn more than you spend!" -- sure, that's true, and then someone says "ok, how do I do that?"; if your answer is "willpower!" I doubt they'll find that very satisfying. Since I suspect you didn't read the post either, I'll excerpt two questions here: (1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too? (2) Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure. Average weight gain is in fact super slow, on the order of a few pounds per year, for most obese individuals. That's the equivalent of overeating by ~7000 calories each year -- only 1% of typical annual consumption. It's hard to imagine that people don't have the willpower to reduce their food consumption by 20 calories per day. Losing weight by keeping up a caloric deficit requires a ton of willpower because your body super fights against starvation. But why would a lack of willpower be the reason people perpetually eat 1% too many calories? And why did they only start doing that 50 years ago? CICO is not a useful causal explanation for the obesity epidemic. Obesity at the societal level is a more interesting problem than merely CICO, despite how many people think the reason is some variant of willpower.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
Highly unlikely. The obesity epidemic is very well explained by diet and lifestyle choices, and regional variations in average body mass correlate with these explanatory variable pretty well.
- mitchdoogle 4y ago
  So people just started making different choices the last fifty years?
  - appletrotter 4y ago
    Yes! People eat differently now than in the 70s!
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      It's a feedback loop.
  - throwawayboise 4y ago
    Yes. People and jobs are more sedentary. Kids sit in front of screens instead of riding bikes to the park and playing ball or just running around. Fat in prepared foods has been reduced, replaced with corn syrup. Portion sizes for food and drink at restaurants have probably close to doubled since the 1970s. We are less active and we're eating more. Thus we got fat.
    - higgsbozo 4y ago
      Exactly. Fats were deemed the enemy #1 and the problem with corn syrup has relatively only recently been brought to public's attention. A friend of mine from Europe spent the summer in Florida riding bike all day long under a swelling sun, selling encyclopedias. He should have lost weight, but he came back with puffy cheeks and belly. I blame corn syrup for that :)
      - meowzero 4y ago
bb123 4y ago
I don’t think it’s unexplained at all. People just don’t like the explanation. People simply eat too much and don’t move enough. The secondary reasons behind that are many but again pretty easy to see (more desk jobs, cheap high calorie foods, automobile ownership etc)
- tartoran 4y ago
  That but also junk food and the industry pushing it.
- IanDrake 4y ago
- zamfi 4y ago
  Most folks who respond like this are not looking for reasons to believe they might be wrong, but just in case you are, please take a look at A Chemical Hunger [0], which explores these questions in some depth. It turns out, the simple explanations (people eat more & move less! too much sugar! etc.) are in fact insufficient. [0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-part-ii-current-theories-of-obesity-are-inadequate/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p...
  - kaezon 4y ago
    Thank you for this citation! I've at least heard that CICO was nonsense, but the author has done a fantastic job researching the subject, breaking down common approaches to weight loss, and studies which have examined them.
    - gloryjulio 4y ago
      How is CICO nonsense...? Unless you are breaking the law of thermodynamics, there is no way you could gain more from what you eat. The best you can do is utilize 100% of the calorie intake. It's physically impossible to gain weight if you are burning for example 150% of the total calories intake! The fuel has to come from somewhere. The variation lies in different utilization rate, the burn rate, and all other variables, but within the limit of PHYSICS.

logicchains 4y ago

It's got an incredibly simple explanation, if you look at a graph of average daily calorie intake by year.

Terry_Roll 4y ago

> 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for, I think you need to look at how the food has changed in this time. For example, here in the UK supermarkets dont want pigs with 1 1/2" of back fat so the farmer get the nutritionist to make up a diet low in vitamin B5 because it helps to shift the fat under the skin. Nett result, you have fatty organs and marbleized meat as the fat remains else where in the body. We can grow chickens in half the time it took to grow them in the 70's, chemicals in the environment remain in the body for years even lifetimes, pollution levels are at their highest in a generation, people dont exercise like they used to.

jnwatson 4y ago
Right but it happens to our pets too.
- Terry_Roll 4y ago
  Food generally is not as nutritious as it was 50years ago, its going to affect alot of animals.
formerly_proven 4y ago
> pollution levels are at their highest in a generation Try looking out the window in a 1970s city.

moistly 4y ago

And don’t forget that sperm counts have dropped a frightening amount, and that plastics leech hormone analogues.

tintedfireglass 4y ago

If it is related to plastics obesity should have been distributed evenly worldwide. But it is not. Even among developed countries it isn't evenly distributed.

maeil 4y ago
I'm often saddened to see how even on this kind of community where the level of discussion is relatively high given the openness of the platform, this kind of cross-country comparison is almost completely forgotten when it debunks so many, possibly even the majority, of arguments made on a host of topics including this one. It isn't helped by the fact that HN, given its roots and SV focus, is very Ameri-centric - ime e.g. Europeans are at least somewhat more likely to consider regional comparisons, though they're still underutilized. A 20-second search for "obesity rates by country" will show that plastics or other chemicals are very unlikely to play more than a minor role. It's so straightforward, yet there are dozens and dozens of comments above this one with not a single one bringing it up. In the end, CICO is correct. The question then becomes "why do certain countries have a higher CI" to which the answer is "culture", as with anything to do with human behaviour. But most are very unwilling to point at things about certain cultures that are very clearly negative, something that both mainstream Western political leanings have in common. One of them because they believe their culture is inherently Great (Again?) even if it's sending them to an early deathbed, the other because they believe (or at least outwardly adhere to the dogma) that cultures should not be compared in any kind of positive vs negative way unless it's one they see as a political opponent on the national scale.

ellopoppit 4y ago

It's pretty clear the epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease is largely caused by sugar https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM

zamfi 4y ago
Sugar consumption peaked in 1997 [0] in the US. Obesity continues to rise. In Australia, sugar consumption dropped 23% (and other sweeteners dropped 16%) from 1980 to 2003, while obesity tripled. [1] There is more to the picture. [0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-part-ii-current-theories-of-obesity-are-inadequate/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257688/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257688/
philjohn 4y ago
And HFCS?
wbsss4412 4y ago
It’s not at all clear that the current epidemic is caused by sugar. Lustig is a great speaker, and I’ll admit that when I first watched that I was quite convinced. His position, however, is still not representative of a consensus within the field, and for good reason. While sugar consumption is likely detrimental to one’s overall health. Simply cutting out sugar is not necessarily going to lead to better weight management outcomes. While sugar consumption has increased over time, so have added fats and oils [0]. Which are much more calorically dense. It’s unlikely that any one food source is leading to the increases in obesity that we are seeing. [0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82220/eib-166.pdf?v=7240.9 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82220/eib-166....
- uoaei 4y ago
  I learned a while back but don't have time to dig up sources now that eating simple carbs and fats together encourages your body to take the fast calories and store them as fat, moreso than eating simple carbs alone (fast energy, relatively clean-burning) or fats alone. These kinds of interactions are historically very important for explaining particular quirks of the effects of diets and I wouldn't be surprised at all if microplastics had some sort of catalytic effect, e.g. by being nucleation points for buildup of something (arterial plaque or whatever else).

zamfi 4y ago

You may find this exposition interesting: http://achemicalhunger.com/ http://achemicalhunger.com/

rajin444 4y ago
Even they admit that in the end CICO is correct. You cannot escape physics. That being said, the real question is: if somebody stopped eating, would their body die instead of using their fat for energy? There could definitely be cases where that happens (likely caused by modern tech / science), but given things like this happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast It’s likely just a willpower/intellect issue once cico is handled. How long can you keep it up, are you able to make effective modifications, etc until you reach your goal weight. I’d wager that it’s much more likely society lacks willpower & intelligence (when presented with excess resources) instead of we introduced something that makes our bodies unable to lose weight. Anecdotally, as a former obese person and with many family members who have dealt with/are dealing with obesity cico + willpower was always the answer. It’s very likely the willpower needed to lose weight is something a large portion of the population fundamentally can’t achieve without cultural enforcement.
- zamfi 4y ago
  Sure, CICO definitely applies, but so what? The first derivative of stored calories doesn't tell you anything interesting about causes. Your bank balance is a sum of money coming and and money going out, but what causes money coming in and what causes money going out are much more useful to anyone trying to earn wealth or avoid debt than the mere fact that your bank balance is their sum. Like you, many people are convinced that the issue is "willpower / intellect". But this doesn't share a causal relationship with CICO! The willpower argument is like saying "oh yeah, to become rich, just earn more than you spend!" -- sure, that's true, and then someone says "ok, how do I do that?"; if your answer is "willpower!" I doubt they'll find that very satisfying. Since I suspect you didn't read the post either, I'll excerpt two questions here: (1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too? (2) Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure. Average weight gain is in fact super slow, on the order of a few pounds per year, for most obese individuals. That's the equivalent of overeating by ~7000 calories each year -- only 1% of typical annual consumption. It's hard to imagine that people don't have the willpower to reduce their food consumption by 20 calories per day. Losing weight by keeping up a caloric deficit requires a ton of willpower because your body super fights against starvation. But why would a lack of willpower be the reason people perpetually eat 1% too many calories? And why did they only start doing that 50 years ago? CICO is not a useful causal explanation for the obesity epidemic. Obesity at the societal level is a more interesting problem than merely CICO, despite how many people think the reason is some variant of willpower.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

Highly unlikely. The obesity epidemic is very well explained by diet and lifestyle choices, and regional variations in average body mass correlate with these explanatory variable pretty well.

mitchdoogle 4y ago
So people just started making different choices the last fifty years?
- appletrotter 4y ago
  Yes! People eat differently now than in the 70s!
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    It's a feedback loop.
- throwawayboise 4y ago
  Yes. People and jobs are more sedentary. Kids sit in front of screens instead of riding bikes to the park and playing ball or just running around. Fat in prepared foods has been reduced, replaced with corn syrup. Portion sizes for food and drink at restaurants have probably close to doubled since the 1970s. We are less active and we're eating more. Thus we got fat.
  - higgsbozo 4y ago
    Exactly. Fats were deemed the enemy #1 and the problem with corn syrup has relatively only recently been brought to public's attention. A friend of mine from Europe spent the summer in Florida riding bike all day long under a swelling sun, selling encyclopedias. He should have lost weight, but he came back with puffy cheeks and belly. I blame corn syrup for that :)
    - meowzero 4y ago

bb123 4y ago

I don’t think it’s unexplained at all. People just don’t like the explanation. People simply eat too much and don’t move enough. The secondary reasons behind that are many but again pretty easy to see (more desk jobs, cheap high calorie foods, automobile ownership etc)

tartoran 4y ago
That but also junk food and the industry pushing it.
IanDrake 4y ago
zamfi 4y ago
Most folks who respond like this are not looking for reasons to believe they might be wrong, but just in case you are, please take a look at A Chemical Hunger [0], which explores these questions in some depth. It turns out, the simple explanations (people eat more & move less! too much sugar! etc.) are in fact insufficient. [0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-part-ii-current-theories-of-obesity-are-inadequate/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p...
- kaezon 4y ago
  Thank you for this citation! I've at least heard that CICO was nonsense, but the author has done a fantastic job researching the subject, breaking down common approaches to weight loss, and studies which have examined them.
  - gloryjulio 4y ago
    How is CICO nonsense...? Unless you are breaking the law of thermodynamics, there is no way you could gain more from what you eat. The best you can do is utilize 100% of the calorie intake. It's physically impossible to gain weight if you are burning for example 150% of the total calories intake! The fuel has to come from somewhere. The variation lies in different utilization rate, the burn rate, and all other variables, but within the limit of PHYSICS.