7 ms·

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 th

by 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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - kaezon 4y ago
      Anecdotal really. I honestly probably overstated that. I've seen it fail people on it's own more often than not. I've generally seen folks succeed more often when they change WHEN and WHAT they eat. Not a scientist, nor a nutrition expert, so I'm not going to pretend to try and convince anyone.
      - gloryjulio 4y ago
        Can you define their failures as they burnt more than they eat and still gain weight? Did they checked strictly with the math? Are you 100% sure when they fail, they were eating less calorie in total than the amount they are burning!? If a person is eating 1000 calories per day regardless what what food, and is burning 2000 calories per day (CO), how is anyone going to gain weight this way? Please, as I mentioned above, there are many variables, but not the core principle of CICO which is basic math. You cannot create calories out of thin air! It doesn't mean anyone can stick to strict diet with CICO calculation. It doesn't mean they always measure accurately. Don't mix up the failure in application with the principle. I watched many cooking videos in youtube. It doesn't mean that im gonna cook well; It doesn't mean that the recipe is bad
    - Riseed 4y ago
      CICO is nonsense in the sense that it simplifies something to the point of being unhelpful. Similarly to if anyone claimed "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code. Personally, when I reduce CI, my body responds by decreasing CO: I don't think as clearly (problematic for being a functional adult), and I'm even colder than normal. With no reasonable way to accurately measure the change in CO, it's difficult to balance the equation. tldr: what's simple and obvious with spherical cows in a vacuum is not so simple in the real world
      - gloryjulio 4y ago
        That's such a typical straw-man argument. Firstly nobody with the right mind will say "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code. Knowing principle doesn't automatically helps you solve the problem. It's like saying I know programming but why aren't I a successful tech company billionaire? Knowing the principle gives your a solid start, it doesn't guarantee your eventual success Similarly, CICO is just an simple scientific fact to give you the idea what's happening physical world. Did anyone say CI and CO calculation is simple? Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air? Tell me just one dieting method is simple, effective, helps everyone 100% to achieve the target weight again? As I mentioned in the above post, a good recipe doesn't make you a successful cook. You are not going to become Gordon Ramsay by watching his video alone
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  I don't buy it. > 2.1 Calories in calories out is a bad model True. It's insufficient. But it's not nothing. The article later claims that calorie consumption has "only" risen by about 20%. I find this take to be ridiculous. 20% is a lot. If I eat 20% more, I'll put on weight. Article also claims sugar consumption is down and carb consumption is down so therefore they can't be the cause. Yet in prior years we see an extremely strong correlation between carbs and sugar consumed per person and % obesity. Corn vs. actual sugar. Artificial zero calorie sweeteners. It all adds up.
  - bb123 4y ago
    Exactly! That’s 400 calories a day for the average person. Combine that with less physical activity and you’ve just found the source of your problem. We can even work it out: 1lb of human fat has ~4000 calories in it. If we assume that only 10% of those excess calories actually end up as fat thats still 70lbs of additional weight by the time you’re in your mid 20s.
  - jrs235 4y ago
    Watch Robert Lustig's presentations on Sugar: the bitter truth. I think he explains what's happening quite well. Unfortunately it seems to "sciency" and most people aren't disciplined enough to stay with it and hear him out because they don't understand chemistry and physiology. :( https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+bitter+truth+lustig https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+bitter+trut...
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    I think the issue is that calories in calories out is very hard to measure outside of clinical settings. 1. Bulk food manufacturers can have a decent variance in the actual calories compared to the anticipated calories. Nutrition labels can be inaccurate by up to 20% when it comes to listing calories, according to the FDA, so that 400 calorie meal could be 320 or 480. If you're eating for 1600 calories a day and relying on pre-made foods, then you could be eating 1920 calories a day unintentionally. 2. Not every body processes every calorie consumed. A simple example of this is the weight loss medicine Alli, which can prevent your body from absorbing fats. So even if you ate a 400 calorie cup of olive oil you may only absorb 360 calories of it. 3. Metabolism itself isn't a set standard. Unless you have had your metabolism tested to ensure that it is operating at the standard level, you may be naturally burning fewer calories than your height, weight, body fat, muscular density, and age would otherwise indicate. A simple test for the last one is to take your temperature in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Standard is 98.6, but in metabolically impaired people, it can decrease by a few degrees. Colder body means fewer calories being burned. This happened to me, where at ready my body was burning 300 calories a day under my expected TDEE and to reverse it I had to eat more, put on weight, and exercise heavily with weight lifting heavy weights to build muscle to reverse it. My standard body temperature had dropped to 97.3 or less, and it's been months of undoing the weight loss that I had achieved to get it back to normal. 4. We are still learning about the various effects of microplastics and other man-made forever chemicals on the human body, but many of them are known endocrine and hormone disruptors so it is likely that future science will discover that these unavoidable chemicals may increase the likelihood of obesity by either interrupting the satiation mechanism or decreasing the body's ability to respond to insulin. 5. Once you become obese in the modern sense, you are now the proud owner of an oversized organ of fat cells that do not simply die when you lose weight. They will release their lipid stores, but the cells themselves remain, sometimes for life. When your normal organs are not signalling that they need nutrition immediately, these fat cells will preemptively consume any excess sugars and fats in your body to refill themselves. Being previously overweight dramatically increases the likelihood that you will become overweight again because of this, and the only potential solution is either having liposuction or using some other non-invasive technology that can literally directly destroy the fat cells, and either option is going to be expensive, time-consuming, and risky to some degree. If environmental factors cause you to overeat, due to stress, maladaption, or due to exogenous chemical exposure and you become overweight because of it, there can be many, many reasons why you would then become more and more overweight afterwards. Yes, at its basic level, it is calories in > calories out, but that overlooks external factors that can make consistently eating fewer calories than you burn a herculean effort that can very well never ever end.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Obviously there are a large number of factors which affect the weight of a specific individual, and food intake and exercise are only two of them, but that blog's attempts to deny the causation behind the correlation looks far more highly motivated than anybody pointing out that trends in obesity mirror trends in diets and lifestyle changes. I mean, he handwaves away the statistic that suggests the mean US citizen's calorie intake increased by nearly a quarter over the period that obesity rose simply by saying "that's not a jaw dropping increase". He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity! I'm actually less suspicious that calorie counts are an oversimplification after reading what he citates as evidence against them; you could make a pretty good case for diet being the sole cause of increased obesity in the US from the references he makes to argue it's unrelated! (Nothing wrong with the "lipostat" hypothesis he proposes as the alternative per se, but moving the cause of obesity onto "changes in how many individuals' bodies identify satiation points and metabolise food intake" doesn't result in a hypothesis which is independent from how diet has changed, it just complicates the causation a bit)
  - zamfi 4y ago
    > mean US citizen's calorie intake increased by nearly a quarter over the period that obesity rose simply by saying "that's not a jaw dropping increase" I think the context here is that while 400 extra calories a day might seem like a lot, it's within the observed variability going back as far as we have measurements. Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960, and were no more obese then. > He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity Hmm, I think the point here is that there is more complexity than the "eat more, gain weight" hypothesis: there was wide variability in how much weight people gained when being overfed, and all of these people, when they stopped being overfed, lost the weight they'd gained effortlessly -- which is emphatically not the case for most obese folks today. This implies something is different about being temporarily overfed (which makes weight loss trivial) and what's causing the obesity epidemic (which makes weight loss very challenging). Also worth noting that the increased caloric intake also doesn't answer the question of what's causing people to eat more than they burn. (And again, there's not really any question that obese folks are eating more than they burn -- it's the only way to actually gain weight, after all -- the whole point of this line of inquiry is to figure out why.) I'll cite what they say about this: > From this study [0], for example, consider this sentence: "TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily. Obese individuals generally burn 3000+ kcal/day, and while not every modern person is obese, it does make the increase from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010 look relatively small. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2012172 https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2012172
Karawebnetwork 4y ago
How does your theory explains > and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets ?
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  How does a lab animal with a controlled diet get obese? Thermodynamics suddenly not a thing?
  - Karawebnetwork 4y ago
    A lot of variables can make an animal or person obese. Hypothyroidism for example will cause weight increase even with a limited diet. Cushing's syndrome is another that comes to mind. Growth hormone deficiency can also cause increased body fat. The list goes on.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    an increase in the effectiveness of absorbing calories, or something in the food affecting their metabolic rate. you aren't a blast calorimeter, the food you eat obviously is not reduced to actual ash, so it's certainly possible that there are changes in either the inflow of calories that your body is able to actually absorb or that something in the food is changing the rate at which you burn it. There are also various diseases and syndromes that could affect either of those processes. "calories in, calories out" is the only useful advice you can really give to people trying to lose weight, but that is not a scientifically rigorous position as far as the sum total of hormonal and microbiome processes involved in digestion and metabolism. Again, the food you eat is not reduced to ash, and there can definitely be changes in the processes involved. And indeed that is what the facts show - lab animals being fed controlled diets are now getting fat, as are feral animal colonies, so it doesn't make sense to make reductive and antagonistic remarks like "thermodynamics suddenly not a thing!?". The scientific process has showed you that your hypothesis is wrong, and it's now your duty to re-examine your hypothesis and account for the discrepancy. Maybe it's the study, maybe not. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2010.1890 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201... But to be similarly reductive - "what, do you think feral cats are suddenly spending too much time at their desk job?" Feral cats aren't getting sugar in their diets, they haven't reduced their activity levels, and any increase in food supply should result in an increase in feral cats until the population can no longer be sustained, the predator-prey population cycle is as immutable as thermodynamics. Why are they getting fat, if calories in = calories out? Thermodynamics still works, right? So what's your alternative explanation? Maybe it's... not quite that simple? The most worrying potential answer is that we've created a variety of endocrine disruptors and those have permeated our environments. They get picked up by scavengers like mice and birds from our food and its packaging, they get picked up by cats who eat the mice and birds, etc. Potentially, they could end up even in things like fertilizer or pesticides that get turned into animal feed and fed to lab animals. This is also potentially backed by other effects, such as the continuing decrease in the age of menarche. Nobody really knows whether it's tied to changing patterns of exercise/weight, or whether those are comorbid effects from exposure to endocrine disruptors/pseudo-hormones. It is definitely decreasing in societies where not everybody is working a desk job and eating 3000 calories a day but people would be exposed to the chemicals endemic to modern society. Things like bisphenol compounds in receipts that we handle daily worry me greatly. 100 years ago people still had desk jobs, but they weren't handling thermopaper receipts and then throwing them in the trash where rats get them in the dumpster/etc. They weren't getting all their food in plastics and BPA-lined cans (or whatever the new compound they've moved onto since then). Food wasn't packaged in wrappers lined with BPA, they used wax paper. Etc etc.
FuriouslyAdrift 4y ago
There's the beginnings of research that artificial flavorings are short-circuiting our satiation response, too. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8479585/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8479585/
autoexec 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. It wasn't sourced, but if the claim that animals on controlled diets have also gotten fatter over recent decades it would mean that there is something more going on here. While weight gain is nearly always an issue of excess calories that doesn't explain why it's suddenly a huge and worsening problem seen all over the planet. An explanation for that is certain to be far more nuanced and will likely involve a large host of factors (your "secondary reasons" for example). At the scale and timeline we're talking about here "People simply eat too much and don’t move enough." is about as useless an explanation as saying "Don't eat so much fatty!" is a solution.
supercheetah 4y ago
Yeah, and it's all due to us having evolved in a world where famines were a constant threat, but now that's not an issue for many (although it's still a problem for many others.)

by bb123 4y ago

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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kaezon 4y ago
    Anecdotal really. I honestly probably overstated that. I've seen it fail people on it's own more often than not. I've generally seen folks succeed more often when they change WHEN and WHAT they eat. Not a scientist, nor a nutrition expert, so I'm not going to pretend to try and convince anyone.
    - gloryjulio 4y ago
      Can you define their failures as they burnt more than they eat and still gain weight? Did they checked strictly with the math? Are you 100% sure when they fail, they were eating less calorie in total than the amount they are burning!? If a person is eating 1000 calories per day regardless what what food, and is burning 2000 calories per day (CO), how is anyone going to gain weight this way? Please, as I mentioned above, there are many variables, but not the core principle of CICO which is basic math. You cannot create calories out of thin air! It doesn't mean anyone can stick to strict diet with CICO calculation. It doesn't mean they always measure accurately. Don't mix up the failure in application with the principle. I watched many cooking videos in youtube. It doesn't mean that im gonna cook well; It doesn't mean that the recipe is bad
  - Riseed 4y ago
    CICO is nonsense in the sense that it simplifies something to the point of being unhelpful. Similarly to if anyone claimed "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code. Personally, when I reduce CI, my body responds by decreasing CO: I don't think as clearly (problematic for being a functional adult), and I'm even colder than normal. With no reasonable way to accurately measure the change in CO, it's difficult to balance the equation. tldr: what's simple and obvious with spherical cows in a vacuum is not so simple in the real world
    - gloryjulio 4y ago
      That's such a typical straw-man argument. Firstly nobody with the right mind will say "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code. Knowing principle doesn't automatically helps you solve the problem. It's like saying I know programming but why aren't I a successful tech company billionaire? Knowing the principle gives your a solid start, it doesn't guarantee your eventual success Similarly, CICO is just an simple scientific fact to give you the idea what's happening physical world. Did anyone say CI and CO calculation is simple? Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air? Tell me just one dieting method is simple, effective, helps everyone 100% to achieve the target weight again? As I mentioned in the above post, a good recipe doesn't make you a successful cook. You are not going to become Gordon Ramsay by watching his video alone
spywaregorilla 4y ago
I don't buy it. > 2.1 Calories in calories out is a bad model True. It's insufficient. But it's not nothing. The article later claims that calorie consumption has "only" risen by about 20%. I find this take to be ridiculous. 20% is a lot. If I eat 20% more, I'll put on weight. Article also claims sugar consumption is down and carb consumption is down so therefore they can't be the cause. Yet in prior years we see an extremely strong correlation between carbs and sugar consumed per person and % obesity. Corn vs. actual sugar. Artificial zero calorie sweeteners. It all adds up.
- bb123 4y ago
  Exactly! That’s 400 calories a day for the average person. Combine that with less physical activity and you’ve just found the source of your problem. We can even work it out: 1lb of human fat has ~4000 calories in it. If we assume that only 10% of those excess calories actually end up as fat thats still 70lbs of additional weight by the time you’re in your mid 20s.
- jrs235 4y ago
  Watch Robert Lustig's presentations on Sugar: the bitter truth. I think he explains what's happening quite well. Unfortunately it seems to "sciency" and most people aren't disciplined enough to stay with it and hear him out because they don't understand chemistry and physiology. :( https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+bitter+truth+lustig https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+bitter+trut...
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  I think the issue is that calories in calories out is very hard to measure outside of clinical settings. 1. Bulk food manufacturers can have a decent variance in the actual calories compared to the anticipated calories. Nutrition labels can be inaccurate by up to 20% when it comes to listing calories, according to the FDA, so that 400 calorie meal could be 320 or 480. If you're eating for 1600 calories a day and relying on pre-made foods, then you could be eating 1920 calories a day unintentionally. 2. Not every body processes every calorie consumed. A simple example of this is the weight loss medicine Alli, which can prevent your body from absorbing fats. So even if you ate a 400 calorie cup of olive oil you may only absorb 360 calories of it. 3. Metabolism itself isn't a set standard. Unless you have had your metabolism tested to ensure that it is operating at the standard level, you may be naturally burning fewer calories than your height, weight, body fat, muscular density, and age would otherwise indicate. A simple test for the last one is to take your temperature in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Standard is 98.6, but in metabolically impaired people, it can decrease by a few degrees. Colder body means fewer calories being burned. This happened to me, where at ready my body was burning 300 calories a day under my expected TDEE and to reverse it I had to eat more, put on weight, and exercise heavily with weight lifting heavy weights to build muscle to reverse it. My standard body temperature had dropped to 97.3 or less, and it's been months of undoing the weight loss that I had achieved to get it back to normal. 4. We are still learning about the various effects of microplastics and other man-made forever chemicals on the human body, but many of them are known endocrine and hormone disruptors so it is likely that future science will discover that these unavoidable chemicals may increase the likelihood of obesity by either interrupting the satiation mechanism or decreasing the body's ability to respond to insulin. 5. Once you become obese in the modern sense, you are now the proud owner of an oversized organ of fat cells that do not simply die when you lose weight. They will release their lipid stores, but the cells themselves remain, sometimes for life. When your normal organs are not signalling that they need nutrition immediately, these fat cells will preemptively consume any excess sugars and fats in your body to refill themselves. Being previously overweight dramatically increases the likelihood that you will become overweight again because of this, and the only potential solution is either having liposuction or using some other non-invasive technology that can literally directly destroy the fat cells, and either option is going to be expensive, time-consuming, and risky to some degree. If environmental factors cause you to overeat, due to stress, maladaption, or due to exogenous chemical exposure and you become overweight because of it, there can be many, many reasons why you would then become more and more overweight afterwards. Yes, at its basic level, it is calories in > calories out, but that overlooks external factors that can make consistently eating fewer calories than you burn a herculean effort that can very well never ever end.
notahacker 4y ago
Obviously there are a large number of factors which affect the weight of a specific individual, and food intake and exercise are only two of them, but that blog's attempts to deny the causation behind the correlation looks far more highly motivated than anybody pointing out that trends in obesity mirror trends in diets and lifestyle changes. I mean, he handwaves away the statistic that suggests the mean US citizen's calorie intake increased by nearly a quarter over the period that obesity rose simply by saying "that's not a jaw dropping increase". He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity! I'm actually less suspicious that calorie counts are an oversimplification after reading what he citates as evidence against them; you could make a pretty good case for diet being the sole cause of increased obesity in the US from the references he makes to argue it's unrelated! (Nothing wrong with the "lipostat" hypothesis he proposes as the alternative per se, but moving the cause of obesity onto "changes in how many individuals' bodies identify satiation points and metabolise food intake" doesn't result in a hypothesis which is independent from how diet has changed, it just complicates the causation a bit)
- zamfi 4y ago
  > mean US citizen's calorie intake increased by nearly a quarter over the period that obesity rose simply by saying "that's not a jaw dropping increase" I think the context here is that while 400 extra calories a day might seem like a lot, it's within the observed variability going back as far as we have measurements. Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960, and were no more obese then. > He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity Hmm, I think the point here is that there is more complexity than the "eat more, gain weight" hypothesis: there was wide variability in how much weight people gained when being overfed, and all of these people, when they stopped being overfed, lost the weight they'd gained effortlessly -- which is emphatically not the case for most obese folks today. This implies something is different about being temporarily overfed (which makes weight loss trivial) and what's causing the obesity epidemic (which makes weight loss very challenging). Also worth noting that the increased caloric intake also doesn't answer the question of what's causing people to eat more than they burn. (And again, there's not really any question that obese folks are eating more than they burn -- it's the only way to actually gain weight, after all -- the whole point of this line of inquiry is to figure out why.) I'll cite what they say about this: > From this study [0], for example, consider this sentence: "TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily. Obese individuals generally burn 3000+ kcal/day, and while not every modern person is obese, it does make the increase from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010 look relatively small. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2012172 https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2012172

Karawebnetwork 4y ago

How does your theory explains > and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets ?

formerly_proven 4y ago
How does a lab animal with a controlled diet get obese? Thermodynamics suddenly not a thing?
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago
  A lot of variables can make an animal or person obese. Hypothyroidism for example will cause weight increase even with a limited diet. Cushing's syndrome is another that comes to mind. Growth hormone deficiency can also cause increased body fat. The list goes on.
- paulmd 4y ago
  an increase in the effectiveness of absorbing calories, or something in the food affecting their metabolic rate. you aren't a blast calorimeter, the food you eat obviously is not reduced to actual ash, so it's certainly possible that there are changes in either the inflow of calories that your body is able to actually absorb or that something in the food is changing the rate at which you burn it. There are also various diseases and syndromes that could affect either of those processes. "calories in, calories out" is the only useful advice you can really give to people trying to lose weight, but that is not a scientifically rigorous position as far as the sum total of hormonal and microbiome processes involved in digestion and metabolism. Again, the food you eat is not reduced to ash, and there can definitely be changes in the processes involved. And indeed that is what the facts show - lab animals being fed controlled diets are now getting fat, as are feral animal colonies, so it doesn't make sense to make reductive and antagonistic remarks like "thermodynamics suddenly not a thing!?". The scientific process has showed you that your hypothesis is wrong, and it's now your duty to re-examine your hypothesis and account for the discrepancy. Maybe it's the study, maybe not. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2010.1890 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201... But to be similarly reductive - "what, do you think feral cats are suddenly spending too much time at their desk job?" Feral cats aren't getting sugar in their diets, they haven't reduced their activity levels, and any increase in food supply should result in an increase in feral cats until the population can no longer be sustained, the predator-prey population cycle is as immutable as thermodynamics. Why are they getting fat, if calories in = calories out? Thermodynamics still works, right? So what's your alternative explanation? Maybe it's... not quite that simple? The most worrying potential answer is that we've created a variety of endocrine disruptors and those have permeated our environments. They get picked up by scavengers like mice and birds from our food and its packaging, they get picked up by cats who eat the mice and birds, etc. Potentially, they could end up even in things like fertilizer or pesticides that get turned into animal feed and fed to lab animals. This is also potentially backed by other effects, such as the continuing decrease in the age of menarche. Nobody really knows whether it's tied to changing patterns of exercise/weight, or whether those are comorbid effects from exposure to endocrine disruptors/pseudo-hormones. It is definitely decreasing in societies where not everybody is working a desk job and eating 3000 calories a day but people would be exposed to the chemicals endemic to modern society. Things like bisphenol compounds in receipts that we handle daily worry me greatly. 100 years ago people still had desk jobs, but they weren't handling thermopaper receipts and then throwing them in the trash where rats get them in the dumpster/etc. They weren't getting all their food in plastics and BPA-lined cans (or whatever the new compound they've moved onto since then). Food wasn't packaged in wrappers lined with BPA, they used wax paper. Etc etc.

FuriouslyAdrift 4y ago

There's the beginnings of research that artificial flavorings are short-circuiting our satiation response, too. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8479585/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8479585/

autoexec 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. It wasn't sourced, but if the claim that animals on controlled diets have also gotten fatter over recent decades it would mean that there is something more going on here. While weight gain is nearly always an issue of excess calories that doesn't explain why it's suddenly a huge and worsening problem seen all over the planet. An explanation for that is certain to be far more nuanced and will likely involve a large host of factors (your "secondary reasons" for example). At the scale and timeline we're talking about here "People simply eat too much and don’t move enough." is about as useless an explanation as saying "Don't eat so much fatty!" is a solution.

supercheetah 4y ago

Yeah, and it's all due to us having evolved in a world where famines were a constant threat, but now that's not an issue for many (although it's still a problem for many others.)