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After reading the series "A Chemical Hunger" by the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, I'm pretty convinced that chemical contamination is a global-warming level threat

by elil17 4y ago

After reading the series "A Chemical Hunger" by the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, I'm pretty convinced that chemical contamination is a global-warming level threat to humanity. The authors talk about the evidence that chemicals released into the environment by human activity (such as PFAS) are causing obesity, and they present compelling evidence that this is plausible. They are also working on research to confirm this hypothesis. But regardless of whether obesity is caused primarily by environmental contamination, chemical contamination is a huge risk for a few reasons: -Once in the environment, chemical contaminants can react in unforeseen ways, creating new chemicals that we will have no idea how to monitor for. -Health data prior to industrialization is not good and is confounded by poor medical practices, so we may think we've "solved" chemical contamination when in fact we haven't (e.g. maybe heart disease would go away if it weren't for some chemical that we started using in 1910 but we can't tell because everyone was dying of dysentery). -The solution, in some most cases, may mean giving up significant technological advances, especially polymers and heavy metals extracted from the ground. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

mensetmanusman 4y ago
When my mother moved in and we went on daily walks, she lost a pound a week for a year. Her entirely sedentary lifestyle (and that of most Americans I know) is a major factor for her obesity. Standing is now considered exercise it has gotten so bad. But people will blame anything instead of taking action, so…
- hansword 4y ago
  Just because a sedentary lifestyle is bad for your health, doesn't mean smoking is harmless. Do you know anything about these chemical? If so, please share. If not, well, ....
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Smoking is an interesting example, Japan smokes a lot more and has less obesity and seems to have higher general health…
    - anon_d 4y ago
      Smoking decreases appetite. A lot of people who quit smoking gain significant weight.
    - elil17 4y ago
      Japan has 18% smokers vs. 12.5% in the US. They have a five year longer life expectancy but they also have universal healthcare, so it's not really a fair comparison. Plus, Japan has good air quality and robust elder care. On top of that, they may have chemical factors (such as no lithium mines) that differentiate them from other developed countries.
- xxpor 4y ago
  What if the chemicals aren't making you fat directly, but messing with your neurotransmitters and sapping your motivation? Doesn't seem completely out of the realm of possibility.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    That would be an interesting study. I wonder if one could find an ethical human study that could parse out a molecule and its effect on demotivation compared to the effect of media, sunlight exposure, obesity, etc.
    - elil17 4y ago
      The bloggers are working on designing such a study. The good news is that weight loss studies almost all show small effect sizes so if remove a chemical exposure factor is the solution you would expect the results to be pretty obvious. I mean, if getting rid of PFAS "prevents obesity" but a McDonalds ad undoes the effect, then it was probably the McDonalds ad causing the obesity, not the PFAS. The bad news is that preventing chemical exposure is really hard to do.
  - elil17 4y ago
    This is what the series actually discusses as the most likely possibility. Essentially the idea is that PFAS or lithium could be making you hungry when you don't need to be. Hence the name "a chemical hunger."
- w-j-w 4y ago
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure daily walks (no heart rate elevation, not HIIT, no muscle being built, etc.) didn't contribute significantly to your mother's weight loss. Moving around is not a significant contributor to weight loss[1]. Diet is the most significant contributing factor to gaining or losing weight. Moving in with someone new, new environment, new dietary changes, etc. might've done significantly more. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/, from the abstract, "Based on the present literature, unless the overall volume of aerobic ET is very high, clinically significant weight loss is unlikely to occur. "
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Well, since I was there, I can say that her diet was mostly unchanged. I will add that the walks were around an hour to two to get 10k steps and over 4 miles. I challenge anyone to walk an extra ~25 miles a week with no diet change to see if they gain weight.
  - bretpiatt 4y ago
    Depending on fitness level (cardio, muscle strength, physical weight) walking can very much be strenuous exercise. Direct caloric burn, long term metabolism changes, etc. for a given activity vary based on the input fitness level of the person. Calories in is the easiest levee to pull for rapid change as exercising enough for major direct calorie burn is challenging at the beginning. The biggest short term exercise impact is from activities that increase muscle mass as muscle takes calories to maintain thus boosting metabolism.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    If you're sedentary, walking is going to boost your heartrate
  - windowsrookie 4y ago
    Weight loss is simply calories in - calories out. If she walked an hour a day and ate the same amount, she was burning around ~300 extra calories a day. Pretty sure her daily walks did contribute significantly to her weight loss.
- elil17 4y ago
  While a sedentary lifestyle causing obesity may be true on an individual basis (and exercise is really really good for you regardless of your weight), it fails to explain why people who do manual labor tend to be as fat or fatter than people who have office jobs and why sedentary people of the past were not that fat compared to people today. There are a lot of reasons detailed in the series about why personal choice cannot adequately explain how it is we are getting fatter as a society. I think there are many good arguments for a non-chemical cause, like more and more appetizing highly processed foods. But to say "people will blame anything instead of taking action" makes no sense. We have had decades of action trying to get people to eat healthy and exercise. It hasn't done anything. We have to accept that just telling people to lose weight doesn't work and start pursuing other options. And there are so many good options! In Spain, for example, "staple foods" such as vegetables, meat, and bread are taxed at a lower rate while highly processed foods are taxed at the normal rate. In most developed countries, universal healthcare helps people prevent and manage the worst diseases associated with obesity such as heart disease and diabetes. And yes, we should investigate alternate explanations outside of the exercise/diet nexus such as chemical contamination! It may not be the reason but it is a testable hypothesis that would be "big if true."
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  People hate exercise so much they prefer expensive diets. If you don't burn the calories you eat, no matter how few they may be, you will never lose weight.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    That’s why I don’t call it exercise anymore. Literally, it’s walking while reading your email on the phone. Find a beautiful spot in nature, take advantage of local rivers and beaches… Lack of vitamin D due to low levels of sunlight exposure is very harmful…
colechristensen 4y ago
There is a whole lot of mild panic going on. Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after. If your purpose in life is to maximize the number of days you live, I guess you do you, but it doesn’t seem like a very high quality life to me. We take risks, we accept them, there’s middle ground between ignoring risks and obsessing over them. The toll from worrying about things can be much worse than the things you’re trying to avoid. You know what causes obesity? Availability of food. You didn’t evolve in an environment where calories are essentially free so your motivations and feedback behaviors aren’t tuned to make good decisions when it comes to food. Sure there are probably secondary effects from all sorts of things, but it comes down to food not being scarce like it evolved to expect. Paying attention to environmental risks makes sense, but only to a certain extent. You’re probably still going to live a long life, and the secret to a good one probably isn’t going to be found in avoiding the next scary chemical of the day.
- cromka 4y ago
  > Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after. This comes off as a very ignorant take. The problem is not "if" we're going to die and "how", but "how soon" and with "how much suffering", along with "how much effort/money does it increasingly require to stay healthy".
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. The level of arrogance or just compelete lack of understanding is mind boggling here. If I get cancer and that cancer kills me, that cancer will not kill anyone else. If I die because of some man-made chemical, the source that I got that chemical from is still there and will affect others as well. Not all sources of death are the same. Some are much more nasty. Man-made things like PFAS chemicals have been known to be nasty for a long time by their makers. Those makers have chosen to hide it. Any attempt at "we're all going to die" in order to lessen the guilt of these companies is just shameful on all who spread it, and you should be ashamed.
- 4y ago
ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
If the chemical contamination hypothesis were true, one would expect obesity to correlate with/lag industrial activity/contamination. I'm not sure that this is true. Obesity in Europe didn't start going up until the early 2000s, when Europe was transitioning to a more service-based economy. In Korea it has become a problem in the last 5 years (again, as the country deindustrializes), and in China it seems to be mostly a problem of the wealthy rather than a problem of the poor factory worker (and the factory worker is presumably exposed to more industrial contaminants). That said, I have not yet read the SMTM piece, or looked at SMTM's data.

by elil17 4y ago

mensetmanusman 4y ago

When my mother moved in and we went on daily walks, she lost a pound a week for a year. Her entirely sedentary lifestyle (and that of most Americans I know) is a major factor for her obesity. Standing is now considered exercise it has gotten so bad. But people will blame anything instead of taking action, so…

hansword 4y ago
Just because a sedentary lifestyle is bad for your health, doesn't mean smoking is harmless. Do you know anything about these chemical? If so, please share. If not, well, ....
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Smoking is an interesting example, Japan smokes a lot more and has less obesity and seems to have higher general health…
  - anon_d 4y ago
    Smoking decreases appetite. A lot of people who quit smoking gain significant weight.
  - elil17 4y ago
    Japan has 18% smokers vs. 12.5% in the US. They have a five year longer life expectancy but they also have universal healthcare, so it's not really a fair comparison. Plus, Japan has good air quality and robust elder care. On top of that, they may have chemical factors (such as no lithium mines) that differentiate them from other developed countries.
xxpor 4y ago
What if the chemicals aren't making you fat directly, but messing with your neurotransmitters and sapping your motivation? Doesn't seem completely out of the realm of possibility.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  That would be an interesting study. I wonder if one could find an ethical human study that could parse out a molecule and its effect on demotivation compared to the effect of media, sunlight exposure, obesity, etc.
  - elil17 4y ago
    The bloggers are working on designing such a study. The good news is that weight loss studies almost all show small effect sizes so if remove a chemical exposure factor is the solution you would expect the results to be pretty obvious. I mean, if getting rid of PFAS "prevents obesity" but a McDonalds ad undoes the effect, then it was probably the McDonalds ad causing the obesity, not the PFAS. The bad news is that preventing chemical exposure is really hard to do.
- elil17 4y ago
  This is what the series actually discusses as the most likely possibility. Essentially the idea is that PFAS or lithium could be making you hungry when you don't need to be. Hence the name "a chemical hunger."
w-j-w 4y ago
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I'm pretty sure daily walks (no heart rate elevation, not HIIT, no muscle being built, etc.) didn't contribute significantly to your mother's weight loss. Moving around is not a significant contributor to weight loss[1]. Diet is the most significant contributing factor to gaining or losing weight. Moving in with someone new, new environment, new dietary changes, etc. might've done significantly more. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/, from the abstract, "Based on the present literature, unless the overall volume of aerobic ET is very high, clinically significant weight loss is unlikely to occur. "
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Well, since I was there, I can say that her diet was mostly unchanged. I will add that the walks were around an hour to two to get 10k steps and over 4 miles. I challenge anyone to walk an extra ~25 miles a week with no diet change to see if they gain weight.
- bretpiatt 4y ago
  Depending on fitness level (cardio, muscle strength, physical weight) walking can very much be strenuous exercise. Direct caloric burn, long term metabolism changes, etc. for a given activity vary based on the input fitness level of the person. Calories in is the easiest levee to pull for rapid change as exercising enough for major direct calorie burn is challenging at the beginning. The biggest short term exercise impact is from activities that increase muscle mass as muscle takes calories to maintain thus boosting metabolism.
- TylerE 4y ago
  If you're sedentary, walking is going to boost your heartrate
- windowsrookie 4y ago
  Weight loss is simply calories in - calories out. If she walked an hour a day and ate the same amount, she was burning around ~300 extra calories a day. Pretty sure her daily walks did contribute significantly to her weight loss.
elil17 4y ago
While a sedentary lifestyle causing obesity may be true on an individual basis (and exercise is really really good for you regardless of your weight), it fails to explain why people who do manual labor tend to be as fat or fatter than people who have office jobs and why sedentary people of the past were not that fat compared to people today. There are a lot of reasons detailed in the series about why personal choice cannot adequately explain how it is we are getting fatter as a society. I think there are many good arguments for a non-chemical cause, like more and more appetizing highly processed foods. But to say "people will blame anything instead of taking action" makes no sense. We have had decades of action trying to get people to eat healthy and exercise. It hasn't done anything. We have to accept that just telling people to lose weight doesn't work and start pursuing other options. And there are so many good options! In Spain, for example, "staple foods" such as vegetables, meat, and bread are taxed at a lower rate while highly processed foods are taxed at the normal rate. In most developed countries, universal healthcare helps people prevent and manage the worst diseases associated with obesity such as heart disease and diabetes. And yes, we should investigate alternate explanations outside of the exercise/diet nexus such as chemical contamination! It may not be the reason but it is a testable hypothesis that would be "big if true."
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
People hate exercise so much they prefer expensive diets. If you don't burn the calories you eat, no matter how few they may be, you will never lose weight.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  That’s why I don’t call it exercise anymore. Literally, it’s walking while reading your email on the phone. Find a beautiful spot in nature, take advantage of local rivers and beaches… Lack of vitamin D due to low levels of sunlight exposure is very harmful…

colechristensen 4y ago

There is a whole lot of mild panic going on. Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after. If your purpose in life is to maximize the number of days you live, I guess you do you, but it doesn’t seem like a very high quality life to me. We take risks, we accept them, there’s middle ground between ignoring risks and obsessing over them. The toll from worrying about things can be much worse than the things you’re trying to avoid. You know what causes obesity? Availability of food. You didn’t evolve in an environment where calories are essentially free so your motivations and feedback behaviors aren’t tuned to make good decisions when it comes to food. Sure there are probably secondary effects from all sorts of things, but it comes down to food not being scarce like it evolved to expect. Paying attention to environmental risks makes sense, but only to a certain extent. You’re probably still going to live a long life, and the secret to a good one probably isn’t going to be found in avoiding the next scary chemical of the day.

cromka 4y ago
> Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after. This comes off as a very ignorant take. The problem is not "if" we're going to die and "how", but "how soon" and with "how much suffering", along with "how much effort/money does it increasingly require to stay healthy".
dylan604 4y ago
>Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. The level of arrogance or just compelete lack of understanding is mind boggling here. If I get cancer and that cancer kills me, that cancer will not kill anyone else. If I die because of some man-made chemical, the source that I got that chemical from is still there and will affect others as well. Not all sources of death are the same. Some are much more nasty. Man-made things like PFAS chemicals have been known to be nasty for a long time by their makers. Those makers have chosen to hide it. Any attempt at "we're all going to die" in order to lessen the guilt of these companies is just shameful on all who spread it, and you should be ashamed.
4y ago

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago

If the chemical contamination hypothesis were true, one would expect obesity to correlate with/lag industrial activity/contamination. I'm not sure that this is true. Obesity in Europe didn't start going up until the early 2000s, when Europe was transitioning to a more service-based economy. In Korea it has become a problem in the last 5 years (again, as the country deindustrializes), and in China it seems to be mostly a problem of the wealthy rather than a problem of the poor factory worker (and the factory worker is presumably exposed to more industrial contaminants). That said, I have not yet read the SMTM piece, or looked at SMTM's data.