8 ms·

The Fat Drug

159 points by snewman 13y ago

spingsprong 13y ago
No, the amount we're eating is making us fat.
- odonnellryan 13y ago
  I think it's more lifestyle, which includes consumption, than it is just eating.
- guruz 13y ago
  And you're eating more because something tricks your body into not feeling full earlier. Be it sugar, your gut bacteria, drinking liquid calories, hormons, [...] Many reasons I'm sure.
  - bluedino 13y ago
    Small soft drinks are now 20oz, restaurants give you triple what a serving size should be for most meals, buffets reign supreme, and snacks and high-calorie drinks are part of our daily routines and culture.
    - vilhelm_s 13y ago
      But that could be an effect of people being hungrier, rather than the cause. I think the most convincing clue that there is something nonobvious going on is that lab animals are also getting fatter, despite being on a standardized and controlled diet (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101124/full/news.2010.628.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101124/full/news.2010.628.ht...).
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jimrandomh 13y ago
  Alas, I have but one downvote to give for this empty dismissal.
- DanBC 13y ago
  There is a remarkable variety of gut flora. Some is known to help people put on weight. Some is known to help people stay at a normal weight. It's an interesting extra method to tackle obesity, because what society is trying so far doesn't seem to be working.
  - pizza234 13y ago
    "Society" has not been really trying anything; when we'll see it educating people in having a healthier lifestyle, that is, eating less junk food and doing sports, then it's possible to state that something is being tried. The problem is that in a culture where junk food is cheap and pushed 24/7, there is no tradition of healthy nutrition, and there is much unbalance work/life, such education is clearly impossible.
    - DanBC 13y ago
      Do you have any research to show that exercise is effective in helping people lose weight?
      - pizza234 13y ago
        First of all, I've talked about healthier lifestyle; exercise is only half of it. Second, and most important, I think you never lived in countries having different lifestyles, so that your idea on the subject is purely theoretical. Nutrition research itself is not "wrong", but it's much more important to have a broader view and experience. Nutritional "discoveries" have been coming and going for decades, and yet the situation didn't improve at all. If you'll have a very simple walk around a city, and possibly in a supermarket, in a country where obesity is not epidemic, you will see immediately why the situation is such.
      - zxcdw 13y ago
        Building and maintaining muscle consumes lots of calories in the long run. But then again, it takes lots of time and hard work too, so there's that. And of course, to actually gain any considerable muscle you need to eat relatively clean, so there's that too. But of course, 90 % is diet. 10 % is hard work. And these numbers come from my hat. Effort and discipline -- everybody knows those can get us anything, but the question is, how can we minimize effort and discipline and still get what we want?
- rosser 13y ago
  Did you miss the bit where they used mice fed a calorie-rich diet as the control, and calorie-rich plus antibiotics as the experiment group? The latter got fatter. Yes, yes, animal models != human results. But what about the experiments that were done on humans? The kids in Guatemala, or in Florida? The Navy sailors? I'm willing to bet they controlled for amount of food in those cases, and yet they all saw increased weight gain on antibiotics. Net, that seems pretty indicative that it may not just be how much we're eating, and I think that's worth exploring further.
- Tohhou 13y ago
  ~ nope ~ An overweight person can be eating caloric diet equal to a skinny person and not only not lose any fat, but also be painfully constantly hungry, and be technically starving themselves as their body leeches what it needs to run from their vital organs. Meanwhile a fit person can be eating excess amounts of calories, but because they eat minimal carbs/sugars their body doesn't hold onto the extra calories they are eating (mostly eating fats, veg, meat) and they more easily lose body fat, and not only that but be constantly feeling full and never have hunger on their mind. Obesity is an inflammatory disease. It's not as simple as the amount of food you eat irregardless of what you eat. What you eat is extremely important, and when you eat right portion size is less important because your body won't allow you to eat more than what you need.
  - dublinben 13y ago
    Eating at 75-80% of your TDEE will cause a person to lose weight. It's as simple as that. Only in an extreme case (very small, sedentary person) would that amount be lower than the 1200 Calorie starvation level.
    - nightski 13y ago
      The problem is determining TDEE which is impacted by quite a few factors. You can go and get "averages" or guesses from web sites but the truth is it seems to be quite variable.
    - Tohhou 13y ago
      And quite possibly starving themselves of nutrients which they need like I said. They might lose weight - muscle mass, but not body fat. Calories in calories out is incorrect. A person who accepts this as truth is setting themselves up for painful failure.
- philliphaydon 13y ago
  We should go back to cooking with lard. Animal fat is far better than Sugar.
anon4 13y ago
> anti-antibiotics Wouldn't you call that simply "biotics"? Or maybe "pro-biotics"?
- windsurfer 13y ago
  An anti-antibiotic would work against antibiotics instead of promoting biotics. Perhaps it would have a similar effect in the end, but the means are different.
- amiramir 13y ago
  For your consideration: http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/pro-vs-anti-biotics.jpg http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/pro-vs-ant...
kens 13y ago
This article handwaves over a few key things. The first half of the article discusses how antibiotics in feed make animals grow bigger. However, the whole point of feed supplements is to give animals more muscle and less fat [1], since that's what customers pay for. So antibiotics in animals go the exact opposite direction from obesity in humans. Second, antibiotics in feed are pretty much constant, while humans hardly ever take antibiotics. The article mentions children take antibiotics once a year on average, but the median must be very different from the mean. (I expect a few children take antibiotics very often, and most children take them very rarely.) In addition, if taking antibiotics once a year had the same increased growth rate effects as putting them in feed constantly, farmers would do that for the cost saving. Overall, this article seems to pad out a hugely speculative idea to try to make it seem more plausible. (I should know better than to get involved in a nutrition discussion on HN.) [1] A random reference explaning how antibiotics improve meat quality by causing more protein and less fat: http://animalsmart.org/feeding-the-world/growth-promotant-use-in-animal-production http://animalsmart.org/feeding-the-world/growth-promotant-us...
- secstate 13y ago
  Your random reference is funded by the ASAS which has every reason to promote industry practices that keep costs down: https://www.asas.org/membership-services/member-information/corporate-sustaining-members https://www.asas.org/membership-services/member-information/... However, you're right. This is a poorly written and researched article, and uses a fair number of unsubstantiated "radical" discovery claims to make the article more exciting than it would have been had an actual scientist been tasked to write it. But it's the NY Times ... they've got an agenda too right? (i.e. make money off subscribers and advertisers)
- tmoertel 13y ago
  The take-away, however, is that the commonly understood models for relating microorganisms to health, such as the ones that guide doctors' decisions and health policy, do not predict that antibiotics would cause animals to grow more muscle and less fat -- or have any similar effect -- and are therefore likely to be incomplete or wrong in important ways. Most plausible amendments to the models that would cause them to predict the effects we observe in farm animals would also cause them to predict that antibiotics given to humans could have similarly complex and large effects.
tokenadult 13y ago
The article explores hypotheses about what antibiotics might be doing to human health. A quotation from one of the expert sources sums up the conclusion: "'It’s still too early to draw definitive conclusions,' Dr. Cho said. 'And antibiotics remain a valuable resource that physicians use to fight infections.'" A couple years ago, a participant here shared a data chart from Scientific American that appears to no longer be at the original source but which has been mirrored[1] at the website of the journal Nature. The data chart points out that all-cause mortality has been steadily decreasing at all ages during my lifetime throughout the developed world. This is roughly the time span covered by the interesting article kindly submitted here. If human intake of antibiotics (which, after all, in many cases are "natural" substances emitted by fungi to guard against being destroyed by bacteria) has increased, as surely must be the case, it doesn't seem to be hurting us much. On the specific issue of body weight, "normal" weight ranges for a given height were defined years ago on the basis of statistics on weight distributions in the general population. Oddly, current mortality and morbidity statistics tend to show that the persons with longest expected lifespans are not persons with "normal" weight as defined by body mass index but rather persons who are (slightly) "overweight." (This is however, most true for "overweight" persons who have good cardiovascular fitness.[2]) So if today's population in developed countries weighs more than populations a generation ago, the issue to look at is how many people have shifted from underweight to normal weight, how many from normal weight to overweight, and how many from overweight to obsesity. Obesity is definitely harmful to health. Moderate physical exercise, the kind I get by substituting walking or bicycling to do errands for driving, is surely good for pretty nearly everyone, independent of other lifestyle factors. But it has yet to be shown that antibiotic intake in the current amounts experienced by human beings in the developed world is harmful. There has been investigation in the last decade or so of the hypothesis that some antiobiotics may be protective against heart disease,[3] for instance, although maybe not all antibiotics have the same risk-benefit profile. [1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box... http://www.pinterest.com/pin/195977021257786739/ http://www.pinterest.com/pin/195977021257786739/ [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20118386 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20118386 [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387430/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387430/
crazygringo 13y ago
> drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat > Trash, it turned out, could be transformed into meat. > pumping them with food and antibiotics. And yes, this did make the pigs fatter > particularly in female mice: They gained about twice as much body fat as the control-group mice This article is infuriating sloppy, as it starts out talking about meat (muscle), and then slides into talking about fat, as if they were the same thing, and it's not clear at all that the author is talking about the same things, using the wrong words, or talking about things that can be connected at all.
- tgb 13y ago
  Agreed but the mice study also included a higher fat diet as well as antibiotics. Presumably farm animals are not being fed donuts and so that explains the implicit difference between the two situations adequately. Nonetheless, I agree that the distinction should be made more clear. I'm wondering whether body builders are already dosing themselves on antibiotics? It seems like someone would have tried that a while ago and then built a minor religion out of it had it worked. A quick google search suggests that body builders tend to think that antibiotics will reduce muscle gain due to inhibiting digestion through killing off bacteria.
brownbat 13y ago
I thought recent research was struggling to reproduce the same growth promotion effects in low dose antibiotics... My money's on "neither harmful, nor especially useful" for the long term scientific consensus here... but I admittedly have a natural inclination towards positions that alienate both sides in any dispute. Here's one discussion for poultry, though still digging for the economic analysis for swine and cattle: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804117/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804117/
spikels 13y ago
This is almost certainly bullshit. The poor quality of information in even the best newspapers is astounding! And it seems to almost always be at it's worst when it comes to medical issues. How about some actual evidence? Not even a single peer reviewed study is mentioned. There are so many ways that this "idea" could be disproven with a simple study or even analysis of existing longitudinal studies. Or what about cross country comparisons, etc. And which of the dozens of popular antibiotics has this effect? Is it dosage relate? C'mon people at least do the minimal basic analysis before you suggest suggesting cause and effect. This is exactly how all kinds of stupid ideas get into our heads. Not only do they waste our time but they can have real effects such as the continuing vaccine scare. Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare?
- bequanna 13y ago
  >How about some actual evidence? Not even a single peer reviewed study is mentioned. I agree. Some interesting points are made-- but it does all seem like a bit of handwaving. >Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare? Given the expanding prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria coupled with the shrinking pipeline of new antibiotic drugs, I think we should be at least a little worried. At this point, additional restraint in antibiotic use (especially agricultural) would be prudent.
- markdown 13y ago
  > Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare? One would hope so.
ef47d35620c1 13y ago
Coke, that used to come in 6 ounce bottles, now comes in 24 and 32 ounce bottles. And rather than one once a week as a treat, we can have one or two each day. That's at least part of the problem.
- bequanna 13y ago
  If you are referring to causes of obesity, caloric excess is certainly part of the problem. I think the author is attempting to make the point that 'it's complicated'. I think the question the author raises is a good one. We don't have a very good handle on what bacteria live in our bodies, much less what they all do. If we are destroying certain bacteria with antibiotics inside us, what does that mean for our bodies? There appears to be a long observed correlation between ingesting antibiotics and weight gain.
lukasm 13y ago
God I love the mobile version of nytimes. Please always post these.
- fractalsea 13y ago
  This is so true. News sites tend to be so "busy" and messy. I love the clean look of the mobile version. I really get what people mean by "mobile first design" now...
graycat 13y ago
The discussion here is terrific. With high irony, this discussion misses the larger point: The NYt is part of old media. As for all old media, they are in the ad business. As has long been common in old media, the purpose of a 'story' is to grab the readers by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears. In particular, the NYT wants story 'themes' so that they will 'condition' their readers to accept that 'stories' in these themes can be realistic. Then the NYT can write silly stories in the themes, have their readers take the stories seriously, and, thus, have some special and especially effective ways to grab their readers by the heart, the gut, and below the belt. One of the themes is the 'environment' and a morality play of evil humans destroying the environment. That story goes back to the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a rock to keep the sun moving across the sky. Old religions of nature worship were similar. It's a special case of good versus evil, of sin, transgression, retribution, and, maybe, redemption, likely via sacrifice. Kill a lamb. Give up cars and walk. Etc. In this story it's the evil, and dumb and greedy, farmers 'messing around with powerful, dangerous, hostile forces of nature with consequences they can't possibly understand' and, thus, being a threat to all of us. So, the NYT pumps this stuff out. They have some conditioned, devoted readers who lap up this swill. It's not science, news, reporting, or investigative journalism. Instead it's just a nasty manipulation. Here at HN we would be fools to take such swill at face value and argue against its logic and science. The NYT doesn't care a hoot about logic or science but just the NYT manipulation and, then, their ad revenue.
- tgb 13y ago
  What article were you reading? The entire point of this was to connect the fact that antibiotics enable unusual animal growth to the possibility that antibiotics were enabling the unusual human growth that has been occurring these past few decades. This is a reasonably hypothesis that I, at least, had never considered but in retrospect seems like something that obviously should be investigated further. There is nothing moralistic about this. Sure, the article mentions in passing about drug-resistant strains but this was not about painting farmers as greedy dumb and evil. If this is a click-bait link it's one that feeds on our self-image issues and on passing the blame to others and things like that, not on some morality play environmentalism. You can find that in other articles if you want.

The Fat Drug

159 points by snewman 13y ago

spingsprong 13y ago

No, the amount we're eating is making us fat.

odonnellryan 13y ago
I think it's more lifestyle, which includes consumption, than it is just eating.
guruz 13y ago
And you're eating more because something tricks your body into not feeling full earlier. Be it sugar, your gut bacteria, drinking liquid calories, hormons, [...] Many reasons I'm sure.
- bluedino 13y ago
  Small soft drinks are now 20oz, restaurants give you triple what a serving size should be for most meals, buffets reign supreme, and snacks and high-calorie drinks are part of our daily routines and culture.
  - vilhelm_s 13y ago
    But that could be an effect of people being hungrier, rather than the cause. I think the most convincing clue that there is something nonobvious going on is that lab animals are also getting fatter, despite being on a standardized and controlled diet (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101124/full/news.2010.628.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101124/full/news.2010.628.ht...).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jimrandomh 13y ago
Alas, I have but one downvote to give for this empty dismissal.
DanBC 13y ago
There is a remarkable variety of gut flora. Some is known to help people put on weight. Some is known to help people stay at a normal weight. It's an interesting extra method to tackle obesity, because what society is trying so far doesn't seem to be working.
- pizza234 13y ago
  "Society" has not been really trying anything; when we'll see it educating people in having a healthier lifestyle, that is, eating less junk food and doing sports, then it's possible to state that something is being tried. The problem is that in a culture where junk food is cheap and pushed 24/7, there is no tradition of healthy nutrition, and there is much unbalance work/life, such education is clearly impossible.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Do you have any research to show that exercise is effective in helping people lose weight?
    - pizza234 13y ago
      First of all, I've talked about healthier lifestyle; exercise is only half of it. Second, and most important, I think you never lived in countries having different lifestyles, so that your idea on the subject is purely theoretical. Nutrition research itself is not "wrong", but it's much more important to have a broader view and experience. Nutritional "discoveries" have been coming and going for decades, and yet the situation didn't improve at all. If you'll have a very simple walk around a city, and possibly in a supermarket, in a country where obesity is not epidemic, you will see immediately why the situation is such.
    - zxcdw 13y ago
      Building and maintaining muscle consumes lots of calories in the long run. But then again, it takes lots of time and hard work too, so there's that. And of course, to actually gain any considerable muscle you need to eat relatively clean, so there's that too. But of course, 90 % is diet. 10 % is hard work. And these numbers come from my hat. Effort and discipline -- everybody knows those can get us anything, but the question is, how can we minimize effort and discipline and still get what we want?
rosser 13y ago
Did you miss the bit where they used mice fed a calorie-rich diet as the control, and calorie-rich plus antibiotics as the experiment group? The latter got fatter. Yes, yes, animal models != human results. But what about the experiments that were done on humans? The kids in Guatemala, or in Florida? The Navy sailors? I'm willing to bet they controlled for amount of food in those cases, and yet they all saw increased weight gain on antibiotics. Net, that seems pretty indicative that it may not just be how much we're eating, and I think that's worth exploring further.
Tohhou 13y ago
~ nope ~ An overweight person can be eating caloric diet equal to a skinny person and not only not lose any fat, but also be painfully constantly hungry, and be technically starving themselves as their body leeches what it needs to run from their vital organs. Meanwhile a fit person can be eating excess amounts of calories, but because they eat minimal carbs/sugars their body doesn't hold onto the extra calories they are eating (mostly eating fats, veg, meat) and they more easily lose body fat, and not only that but be constantly feeling full and never have hunger on their mind. Obesity is an inflammatory disease. It's not as simple as the amount of food you eat irregardless of what you eat. What you eat is extremely important, and when you eat right portion size is less important because your body won't allow you to eat more than what you need.
- dublinben 13y ago
  Eating at 75-80% of your TDEE will cause a person to lose weight. It's as simple as that. Only in an extreme case (very small, sedentary person) would that amount be lower than the 1200 Calorie starvation level.
  - nightski 13y ago
    The problem is determining TDEE which is impacted by quite a few factors. You can go and get "averages" or guesses from web sites but the truth is it seems to be quite variable.
  - Tohhou 13y ago
    And quite possibly starving themselves of nutrients which they need like I said. They might lose weight - muscle mass, but not body fat. Calories in calories out is incorrect. A person who accepts this as truth is setting themselves up for painful failure.
philliphaydon 13y ago
We should go back to cooking with lard. Animal fat is far better than Sugar.

anon4 13y ago

> anti-antibiotics Wouldn't you call that simply "biotics"? Or maybe "pro-biotics"?

windsurfer 13y ago
An anti-antibiotic would work against antibiotics instead of promoting biotics. Perhaps it would have a similar effect in the end, but the means are different.
amiramir 13y ago
For your consideration: http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/pro-vs-anti-biotics.jpg http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/pro-vs-ant...

kens 13y ago

This article handwaves over a few key things. The first half of the article discusses how antibiotics in feed make animals grow bigger. However, the whole point of feed supplements is to give animals more muscle and less fat [1], since that's what customers pay for. So antibiotics in animals go the exact opposite direction from obesity in humans. Second, antibiotics in feed are pretty much constant, while humans hardly ever take antibiotics. The article mentions children take antibiotics once a year on average, but the median must be very different from the mean. (I expect a few children take antibiotics very often, and most children take them very rarely.) In addition, if taking antibiotics once a year had the same increased growth rate effects as putting them in feed constantly, farmers would do that for the cost saving. Overall, this article seems to pad out a hugely speculative idea to try to make it seem more plausible. (I should know better than to get involved in a nutrition discussion on HN.) [1] A random reference explaning how antibiotics improve meat quality by causing more protein and less fat: http://animalsmart.org/feeding-the-world/growth-promotant-use-in-animal-production http://animalsmart.org/feeding-the-world/growth-promotant-us...

secstate 13y ago
Your random reference is funded by the ASAS which has every reason to promote industry practices that keep costs down: https://www.asas.org/membership-services/member-information/corporate-sustaining-members https://www.asas.org/membership-services/member-information/... However, you're right. This is a poorly written and researched article, and uses a fair number of unsubstantiated "radical" discovery claims to make the article more exciting than it would have been had an actual scientist been tasked to write it. But it's the NY Times ... they've got an agenda too right? (i.e. make money off subscribers and advertisers)
tmoertel 13y ago
The take-away, however, is that the commonly understood models for relating microorganisms to health, such as the ones that guide doctors' decisions and health policy, do not predict that antibiotics would cause animals to grow more muscle and less fat -- or have any similar effect -- and are therefore likely to be incomplete or wrong in important ways. Most plausible amendments to the models that would cause them to predict the effects we observe in farm animals would also cause them to predict that antibiotics given to humans could have similarly complex and large effects.

tokenadult 13y ago

The article explores hypotheses about what antibiotics might be doing to human health. A quotation from one of the expert sources sums up the conclusion: "'It’s still too early to draw definitive conclusions,' Dr. Cho said. 'And antibiotics remain a valuable resource that physicians use to fight infections.'" A couple years ago, a participant here shared a data chart from Scientific American that appears to no longer be at the original source but which has been mirrored[1] at the website of the journal Nature. The data chart points out that all-cause mortality has been steadily decreasing at all ages during my lifetime throughout the developed world. This is roughly the time span covered by the interesting article kindly submitted here. If human intake of antibiotics (which, after all, in many cases are "natural" substances emitted by fungi to guard against being destroyed by bacteria) has increased, as surely must be the case, it doesn't seem to be hurting us much. On the specific issue of body weight, "normal" weight ranges for a given height were defined years ago on the basis of statistics on weight distributions in the general population. Oddly, current mortality and morbidity statistics tend to show that the persons with longest expected lifespans are not persons with "normal" weight as defined by body mass index but rather persons who are (slightly) "overweight." (This is however, most true for "overweight" persons who have good cardiovascular fitness.[2]) So if today's population in developed countries weighs more than populations a generation ago, the issue to look at is how many people have shifted from underweight to normal weight, how many from normal weight to overweight, and how many from overweight to obsesity. Obesity is definitely harmful to health. Moderate physical exercise, the kind I get by substituting walking or bicycling to do errands for driving, is surely good for pretty nearly everyone, independent of other lifestyle factors. But it has yet to be shown that antibiotic intake in the current amounts experienced by human beings in the developed world is harmful. There has been investigation in the last decade or so of the hypothesis that some antiobiotics may be protective against heart disease,[3] for instance, although maybe not all antibiotics have the same risk-benefit profile. [1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box... http://www.pinterest.com/pin/195977021257786739/ http://www.pinterest.com/pin/195977021257786739/ [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20118386 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20118386 [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387430/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387430/

crazygringo 13y ago

> drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat > Trash, it turned out, could be transformed into meat. > pumping them with food and antibiotics. And yes, this did make the pigs fatter > particularly in female mice: They gained about twice as much body fat as the control-group mice This article is infuriating sloppy, as it starts out talking about meat (muscle), and then slides into talking about fat, as if they were the same thing, and it's not clear at all that the author is talking about the same things, using the wrong words, or talking about things that can be connected at all.

tgb 13y ago
Agreed but the mice study also included a higher fat diet as well as antibiotics. Presumably farm animals are not being fed donuts and so that explains the implicit difference between the two situations adequately. Nonetheless, I agree that the distinction should be made more clear. I'm wondering whether body builders are already dosing themselves on antibiotics? It seems like someone would have tried that a while ago and then built a minor religion out of it had it worked. A quick google search suggests that body builders tend to think that antibiotics will reduce muscle gain due to inhibiting digestion through killing off bacteria.

brownbat 13y ago

I thought recent research was struggling to reproduce the same growth promotion effects in low dose antibiotics... My money's on "neither harmful, nor especially useful" for the long term scientific consensus here... but I admittedly have a natural inclination towards positions that alienate both sides in any dispute. Here's one discussion for poultry, though still digging for the economic analysis for swine and cattle: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804117/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804117/

spikels 13y ago

This is almost certainly bullshit. The poor quality of information in even the best newspapers is astounding! And it seems to almost always be at it's worst when it comes to medical issues. How about some actual evidence? Not even a single peer reviewed study is mentioned. There are so many ways that this "idea" could be disproven with a simple study or even analysis of existing longitudinal studies. Or what about cross country comparisons, etc. And which of the dozens of popular antibiotics has this effect? Is it dosage relate? C'mon people at least do the minimal basic analysis before you suggest suggesting cause and effect. This is exactly how all kinds of stupid ideas get into our heads. Not only do they waste our time but they can have real effects such as the continuing vaccine scare. Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare?

bequanna 13y ago
>How about some actual evidence? Not even a single peer reviewed study is mentioned. I agree. Some interesting points are made-- but it does all seem like a bit of handwaving. >Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare? Given the expanding prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria coupled with the shrinking pipeline of new antibiotic drugs, I think we should be at least a little worried. At this point, additional restraint in antibiotic use (especially agricultural) would be prudent.
markdown 13y ago
> Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare? One would hope so.

ef47d35620c1 13y ago

Coke, that used to come in 6 ounce bottles, now comes in 24 and 32 ounce bottles. And rather than one once a week as a treat, we can have one or two each day. That's at least part of the problem.

bequanna 13y ago
If you are referring to causes of obesity, caloric excess is certainly part of the problem. I think the author is attempting to make the point that 'it's complicated'. I think the question the author raises is a good one. We don't have a very good handle on what bacteria live in our bodies, much less what they all do. If we are destroying certain bacteria with antibiotics inside us, what does that mean for our bodies? There appears to be a long observed correlation between ingesting antibiotics and weight gain.

lukasm 13y ago

God I love the mobile version of nytimes. Please always post these.

fractalsea 13y ago
This is so true. News sites tend to be so "busy" and messy. I love the clean look of the mobile version. I really get what people mean by "mobile first design" now...

graycat 13y ago

The discussion here is terrific. With high irony, this discussion misses the larger point: The NYt is part of old media. As for all old media, they are in the ad business. As has long been common in old media, the purpose of a 'story' is to grab the readers by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears. In particular, the NYT wants story 'themes' so that they will 'condition' their readers to accept that 'stories' in these themes can be realistic. Then the NYT can write silly stories in the themes, have their readers take the stories seriously, and, thus, have some special and especially effective ways to grab their readers by the heart, the gut, and below the belt. One of the themes is the 'environment' and a morality play of evil humans destroying the environment. That story goes back to the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a rock to keep the sun moving across the sky. Old religions of nature worship were similar. It's a special case of good versus evil, of sin, transgression, retribution, and, maybe, redemption, likely via sacrifice. Kill a lamb. Give up cars and walk. Etc. In this story it's the evil, and dumb and greedy, farmers 'messing around with powerful, dangerous, hostile forces of nature with consequences they can't possibly understand' and, thus, being a threat to all of us. So, the NYT pumps this stuff out. They have some conditioned, devoted readers who lap up this swill. It's not science, news, reporting, or investigative journalism. Instead it's just a nasty manipulation. Here at HN we would be fools to take such swill at face value and argue against its logic and science. The NYT doesn't care a hoot about logic or science but just the NYT manipulation and, then, their ad revenue.

tgb 13y ago
What article were you reading? The entire point of this was to connect the fact that antibiotics enable unusual animal growth to the possibility that antibiotics were enabling the unusual human growth that has been occurring these past few decades. This is a reasonably hypothesis that I, at least, had never considered but in retrospect seems like something that obviously should be investigated further. There is nothing moralistic about this. Sure, the article mentions in passing about drug-resistant strains but this was not about painting farmers as greedy dumb and evil. If this is a click-bait link it's one that feeds on our self-image issues and on passing the blame to others and things like that, not on some morality play environmentalism. You can find that in other articles if you want.