8 ms·

I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and ex

I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar. I'm sure the researchers wouldn't dispute the benefits of exercise. But if there really is a safe, effective way to improve the metabolism and make it easier to keep off fat, why exactly is that a bad thing? (Naturally the research is far too early on to know that, but hypothetically speaking.) Of course you should continue to exercise and stay healthy in other ways, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also look for other ways to make it easier for people to get to, or remain at, a healthy weight.

ChuckMcM 12y ago
There are few topics that create as much controversial conversation. The well known ones are religion and politics, the third is 'diet/exercise.' Always a lot of energy.
- andywood 12y ago
  Or in summary: 1. Our ways > your ways. 2. Nuh uh. 3. (Optional) Wanna fight about it? Iterate! (HN version of #2: "Hyperlinks to statistically rigorous peer reviewed studies or GTFO")
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Eh, I'd put "I saw a documentary on netflix that said..." into the "Nuh uh" category more than the "stats or GTFO" category.
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  Especially around here. Health-related posts bring out the same well-informed, scientifically literate opinions from the HN crowd that I'd expect when reading posts about C++ programming on webmd.com. I really wish users could downvote stories.
- the_cat_kittles 12y ago
  I think its a variation of "bikeshedding"- everyone eats and gets some form of exercise, so everyone feels entitled to an opinion.
ryanobjc 12y ago
You probably inherently understand that obesity is widely considered a moral disease. Therefore, the only solution to a moral failing is trial by fire. So, by recasting obesity as something OTHER than a moral failing, well you are removing the very thing that lets a portion of society feel superior to others. And you can't do that.
- meric 12y ago
  Technically removing the consequences of gluttony is likely to increase demand for food products and therefore increase its price, reducing available food supply and increasing world hunger. Food supply can be temporarily boosted by farming the land more intensively, but in the long run will also be detrimental to food production. Until our food production can be dramatically increased with minimal effect on the environment, I'm against it.
  - Steuard 12y ago
    You're doubling down on the "obesity is a moral disease" stance here ("gluttony" is explicitly a moral judgement). I've come to suspect that it really isn't as simple as "lack of self-control": too many people I know have gained significant weight due to medications or medical conditions, or despite sincere and sustained efforts to bring their weight under control. (I'm also quite intrigued by claims that even broad populations of lab animals in the US have gained weight over the same period that the US population has, despite their carefully managed diets and activity levels.) Once something is this common, it just stops being reasonable to blame the individuals rather than broader factors. (In much the same way, if half of my students fail an exam, I'm pretty sure that's not entirely their fault: I clearly screwed something up in the teaching or the testing.)
    - swombat 12y ago
      Obesity is absolutely a moral disease, in the sense that you don't get fat without eating yourself fat, as well as a disease of our society, in terms of our society producing foods that encourage people to eat themselves fat. Broader factors certainly share the blame, but so do individuals. It is possible for almost anyone to be thin in today's society, in the same way that it was possible for almost anyone to get fat a few hundred years ago (given access to plentiful enough food). Saying "it's not just down to the individuals" is fair and true. Saying "it's not down to the individuals at all, how dare you imply that it might be" is obviously wrong-headed.
jeltz 12y ago
To me it is because this just traps you into constantly using the drug instead of adapting to the fact that you have gotten older and should eat less.
- function_seven 12y ago
  But what exactly about that situation makes it worse? Let's assume for a moment that a therapy exists that is funtionally identical to proper diet. It seems that each person could choose to weigh the costs of the drug vs. the increased enjoyment of eating whatever, or vs. the decreased time spent at a gym. The way things work today, you're right. People "should eat less". It used to be that if you didn't want children, then you shouldn't have sex. Thankfully we have a wide variety of options that allow us to decouple sex from reproduction. I don't see why we shouldn't also have options to decouple eating from getting fat.
  - jeltz 12y ago
    But it is not identical to a proper diet. You still need to keep one despite this medicine, it is just a slightly larger diet.
- arasmussen 12y ago
  "you have gotten older and should eat less" isn't a fact, it's an assumption baked into society's mind based on how aging has worked in the past. This breakthrough could break that assumption. In that case, some people (adopters) will internalize that and some people won't.
- baddox 12y ago
  I would much rather use a drug than eat less for the rest of my life.
sergers 12y ago
Should watch the documentary fed up. Covers a number interesting stats that show increase in sugar and other cost cutting products growth is growing with obesity. I have lost over 100lbs in 2 years once weighing near 300 from hard work exercising, risky metabolism boosters stacks with ephedrine (not banned in Canada), interval training constantly monitoring my heart rate during workouts especially cause of ephedrine and changing my diet. I have kept it off for 3 years without having really exercising in the past 3 years by lowering carb and sugar intake and removed all fast food. Still eat out and don't watch any calorie or fat content Exercise alone won't help. Exercise in western/ euro coultures didn't gain popularity till mid 1900s. Obesity rate has exploded since then. More people are going to the gym and exercising yet even more population is even fatter...
zackmorris 12y ago
I was watching "Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry, Marketing & the Creation of a Health Crisis" on LinkTV last night and they talked about how obesity is rising in 3-6 year olds. The point being that children in that age group are no less active today than in the past, so something else is causing obesity, type II diabetes and other problems. The most likely culprit is processed food, where nutrients are not used in their natural form, but instead converted into something else. So using corn to make high fructose corn syrup, soy and cottonseed to make oil, or feeding animal protein to herbivores are a few examples of where the food supply is getting contaminated. For example, cottonseed oil is not only a relatively unhealthy oil, but it also contains one of the highest concentration of pesticides (because cotton was not traditionally a food crop). Not to mention that plastics contain hormone-like chemicals like BPA, they use preservatives in things like canned food that don’t need them, and add animal byproducts like pork lard to foods like refried beans that don’t need them. So our immune systems are getting bombarded by substances we either have no evolutionary history with or simply don’t need to be eating in the quantities that we are. So that inhibits aspects of our immune systems and metabolism (triggering autoimmune disorders like allergies, asthma, arthritis and metabolic syndrome). I could literally go on forever about this, so the gist of it is “it’s the food supply, stupid”. Yes, being more active helps a great deal, but without proper nutrition we’re looking at a modern form of the wasting diseases similar to the ones they used to get in the 1800s before they understood vitamins and minerals, except it’s masked by obesity. I think if we didn’t have the social stigmas around laziness and the political monkeying of the farm and retail lobbies, we would have recognized obesity as an epidemic the way we did with polio and done something about it decades ago. Nothing short of going back to the foods we ate before about 1980 is going to work for the vast majority of the population. And that’s going to start with campaigns to inform people about what’s in their food and reform the way we design cities so that food centers are near where people live. TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it.
- twobits 12y ago
  TL;DR: Capitalism solves everything. /sarcasm. Some day humanity will realize that the freedom to say and pursue a different opinion, is not the same as "competition". The freedom to a diff opinion, and pursuing it, is good. Cooperation and sharing, is good. Competition, is bad. It focuses on "wining" and not on solutions and improvement. PS: Yeah, I know, I live in a wrong, fucking, century :-(
freshhawk 12y ago
I actually find it surprising here given the large number of people here sympathetic to the transhuman/singularity/quantified-self/life-hacker type ideals. Does it not occur to them that findings like this, combined with a good diet and exercise, are the most likely candidates for actually living longer and staying healthy further into your old age? I don't care what lazy people will "get away with", I want these advances and to continue my healthy lifestyle.
- hessenwolf 12y ago
  It brings us one step closer to The Culture.
- ryanobjc 12y ago
  What's healthy? I switched my diet to substantially up my saturated fats, increased my red meat intake by 4x and ended up losing weight, improving my lipids, and blood pressure and a lot more. Basically, what I'm saying is, by ignoring ALL the advice of medical professionals and the USDA/etc was I able to change my life and establish a new, sustainable (as in for me to keep doing it), diet. So, tell me again about what good diet is?
  - freshhawk 12y ago
    Is that the question we're talking about? I was referring to the comments casting being overweight as moral failing and viewing this research as negative in some way. I found it quite silly and I have never been overweight or even had immediate family members with weight issues. I've always gone with "Eat food (not food-like products), not too much, mostly plants." as a baseline for what a good diet is. Its likely not the best, and there are likely completely different diets that are as good or better, but we don't know what they are. And I sacrifice a fair amount to get a lot of physical activity. And pay attention to what you eat, don't let habit or compulsion have too much control of your eating. Incidentally this is why most diets work at the beginning, starting to pay attention to what you eat has more benefit than anything else. Macro-nutrient adjustment diets seem particularly untrustworthy to me - there are healthier cultures around the world with diets of all macro-nutrient balances, and the fact that the "good ones" change every ten years for diet fads looks exactly like what happens when people demand answers from science when it doesn't have them but has to give their best guess. Also, the idea that food or a certain diet is simply healthy or not healthy is a childish simplification. Your body is complex, and the same food will have different consequences on different organs and systems in your body. What makes something a net negative or net positive depends on the current state of your body and how you weight different effects. That's basically it, I have no strong opinions because there is no strong evidence. So no, I can't tell you what a good diet is specifically, and anyone who says they can is a liar.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Well I was going to deride the article because they're bragging about a medical finding that still only works in mice models. These often don't carry over into human beings. But other than that, always nice to see progress made against wasting diseases and aging.
Evgeny 12y ago
There were at least some studies that linked faster metabolism to shorter lifespans. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3100751/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3100751/ Higher Energy Expenditure in Humans Predicts Natural Mortality I personally am trying to somewhat keep my metabolism slower by eating less often, and less in general, plus intermittent fasting. But of course everything is still open for debate.
jamesrcole 12y ago
I think it's because people like to moralise.
npsimons 12y ago
I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar. The problem is, from a libertarian/rugged individualism point of view, failure to lose weight is a simple failure of self control. Calories out have to be greater than calories in, after all. Also, I'm willing to bet more than a few people here have heard the fatlogic of "it's my genetics" or "it's the drugs I'm on". While there are some conditions and drugs that can contribute to weight gain, it's not nearly as common as most people using the excuse would like to think, and it usually doesn't work that way (most drugs that "cause" weight gain do it by intensifying hunger signals, not modifying metabolism, which is fairly difficult to do to any great degree via drugs - otherwise this article wouldn't be noteworthy!). In the end, this most likely won't help the majority of the obese, who do have a medical condition (try being obese for any amount of time and tell me it's not having a negative impact on your joints, at a minimum; there is no good health above or below certain sizes). If anything, this will just make the problem worse by enabling people to consume even more food, and probably end up putting on more weight, especially since it seems that most causes of obesity are psychological (unconscious eating, eating past satiety, bad food choices, etc). Also, if some of the comments here are to be believed, this drug will just treat the symptom of obesity and not the cause (eg, processed food, BPA, etc). I do think this research could have great applications into life extension, or helping people feel younger, but my money is on this drug not having any noticeable effect on the obese population.

I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar. I'm sure the researchers wouldn't dispute the benefits of exercise. But if there really is a safe, effective way to improve the metabolism and make it easier to keep off fat, why exactly is that a bad thing? (Naturally the research is far too early on to know that, but hypothetically speaking.) Of course you should continue to exercise and stay healthy in other ways, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also look for other ways to make it easier for people to get to, or remain at, a healthy weight.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

There are few topics that create as much controversial conversation. The well known ones are religion and politics, the third is 'diet/exercise.' Always a lot of energy.

andywood 12y ago
Or in summary: 1. Our ways > your ways. 2. Nuh uh. 3. (Optional) Wanna fight about it? Iterate! (HN version of #2: "Hyperlinks to statistically rigorous peer reviewed studies or GTFO")
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Eh, I'd put "I saw a documentary on netflix that said..." into the "Nuh uh" category more than the "stats or GTFO" category.
CamperBob2 12y ago
Especially around here. Health-related posts bring out the same well-informed, scientifically literate opinions from the HN crowd that I'd expect when reading posts about C++ programming on webmd.com. I really wish users could downvote stories.
the_cat_kittles 12y ago
I think its a variation of "bikeshedding"- everyone eats and gets some form of exercise, so everyone feels entitled to an opinion.

ryanobjc 12y ago

You probably inherently understand that obesity is widely considered a moral disease. Therefore, the only solution to a moral failing is trial by fire. So, by recasting obesity as something OTHER than a moral failing, well you are removing the very thing that lets a portion of society feel superior to others. And you can't do that.

meric 12y ago
Technically removing the consequences of gluttony is likely to increase demand for food products and therefore increase its price, reducing available food supply and increasing world hunger. Food supply can be temporarily boosted by farming the land more intensively, but in the long run will also be detrimental to food production. Until our food production can be dramatically increased with minimal effect on the environment, I'm against it.
- Steuard 12y ago
  You're doubling down on the "obesity is a moral disease" stance here ("gluttony" is explicitly a moral judgement). I've come to suspect that it really isn't as simple as "lack of self-control": too many people I know have gained significant weight due to medications or medical conditions, or despite sincere and sustained efforts to bring their weight under control. (I'm also quite intrigued by claims that even broad populations of lab animals in the US have gained weight over the same period that the US population has, despite their carefully managed diets and activity levels.) Once something is this common, it just stops being reasonable to blame the individuals rather than broader factors. (In much the same way, if half of my students fail an exam, I'm pretty sure that's not entirely their fault: I clearly screwed something up in the teaching or the testing.)
  - swombat 12y ago
    Obesity is absolutely a moral disease, in the sense that you don't get fat without eating yourself fat, as well as a disease of our society, in terms of our society producing foods that encourage people to eat themselves fat. Broader factors certainly share the blame, but so do individuals. It is possible for almost anyone to be thin in today's society, in the same way that it was possible for almost anyone to get fat a few hundred years ago (given access to plentiful enough food). Saying "it's not just down to the individuals" is fair and true. Saying "it's not down to the individuals at all, how dare you imply that it might be" is obviously wrong-headed.

jeltz 12y ago

To me it is because this just traps you into constantly using the drug instead of adapting to the fact that you have gotten older and should eat less.

function_seven 12y ago
But what exactly about that situation makes it worse? Let's assume for a moment that a therapy exists that is funtionally identical to proper diet. It seems that each person could choose to weigh the costs of the drug vs. the increased enjoyment of eating whatever, or vs. the decreased time spent at a gym. The way things work today, you're right. People "should eat less". It used to be that if you didn't want children, then you shouldn't have sex. Thankfully we have a wide variety of options that allow us to decouple sex from reproduction. I don't see why we shouldn't also have options to decouple eating from getting fat.
- jeltz 12y ago
  But it is not identical to a proper diet. You still need to keep one despite this medicine, it is just a slightly larger diet.
arasmussen 12y ago
"you have gotten older and should eat less" isn't a fact, it's an assumption baked into society's mind based on how aging has worked in the past. This breakthrough could break that assumption. In that case, some people (adopters) will internalize that and some people won't.
baddox 12y ago
I would much rather use a drug than eat less for the rest of my life.

sergers 12y ago

Should watch the documentary fed up. Covers a number interesting stats that show increase in sugar and other cost cutting products growth is growing with obesity. I have lost over 100lbs in 2 years once weighing near 300 from hard work exercising, risky metabolism boosters stacks with ephedrine (not banned in Canada), interval training constantly monitoring my heart rate during workouts especially cause of ephedrine and changing my diet. I have kept it off for 3 years without having really exercising in the past 3 years by lowering carb and sugar intake and removed all fast food. Still eat out and don't watch any calorie or fat content Exercise alone won't help. Exercise in western/ euro coultures didn't gain popularity till mid 1900s. Obesity rate has exploded since then. More people are going to the gym and exercising yet even more population is even fatter...

zackmorris 12y ago

I was watching "Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry, Marketing & the Creation of a Health Crisis" on LinkTV last night and they talked about how obesity is rising in 3-6 year olds. The point being that children in that age group are no less active today than in the past, so something else is causing obesity, type II diabetes and other problems. The most likely culprit is processed food, where nutrients are not used in their natural form, but instead converted into something else. So using corn to make high fructose corn syrup, soy and cottonseed to make oil, or feeding animal protein to herbivores are a few examples of where the food supply is getting contaminated. For example, cottonseed oil is not only a relatively unhealthy oil, but it also contains one of the highest concentration of pesticides (because cotton was not traditionally a food crop). Not to mention that plastics contain hormone-like chemicals like BPA, they use preservatives in things like canned food that don’t need them, and add animal byproducts like pork lard to foods like refried beans that don’t need them. So our immune systems are getting bombarded by substances we either have no evolutionary history with or simply don’t need to be eating in the quantities that we are. So that inhibits aspects of our immune systems and metabolism (triggering autoimmune disorders like allergies, asthma, arthritis and metabolic syndrome). I could literally go on forever about this, so the gist of it is “it’s the food supply, stupid”. Yes, being more active helps a great deal, but without proper nutrition we’re looking at a modern form of the wasting diseases similar to the ones they used to get in the 1800s before they understood vitamins and minerals, except it’s masked by obesity. I think if we didn’t have the social stigmas around laziness and the political monkeying of the farm and retail lobbies, we would have recognized obesity as an epidemic the way we did with polio and done something about it decades ago. Nothing short of going back to the foods we ate before about 1980 is going to work for the vast majority of the population. And that’s going to start with campaigns to inform people about what’s in their food and reform the way we design cities so that food centers are near where people live. TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it.

twobits 12y ago
TL;DR: Capitalism solves everything. /sarcasm. Some day humanity will realize that the freedom to say and pursue a different opinion, is not the same as "competition". The freedom to a diff opinion, and pursuing it, is good. Cooperation and sharing, is good. Competition, is bad. It focuses on "wining" and not on solutions and improvement. PS: Yeah, I know, I live in a wrong, fucking, century :-(

freshhawk 12y ago

I actually find it surprising here given the large number of people here sympathetic to the transhuman/singularity/quantified-self/life-hacker type ideals. Does it not occur to them that findings like this, combined with a good diet and exercise, are the most likely candidates for actually living longer and staying healthy further into your old age? I don't care what lazy people will "get away with", I want these advances and to continue my healthy lifestyle.

hessenwolf 12y ago
It brings us one step closer to The Culture.
ryanobjc 12y ago
What's healthy? I switched my diet to substantially up my saturated fats, increased my red meat intake by 4x and ended up losing weight, improving my lipids, and blood pressure and a lot more. Basically, what I'm saying is, by ignoring ALL the advice of medical professionals and the USDA/etc was I able to change my life and establish a new, sustainable (as in for me to keep doing it), diet. So, tell me again about what good diet is?
- freshhawk 12y ago
  Is that the question we're talking about? I was referring to the comments casting being overweight as moral failing and viewing this research as negative in some way. I found it quite silly and I have never been overweight or even had immediate family members with weight issues. I've always gone with "Eat food (not food-like products), not too much, mostly plants." as a baseline for what a good diet is. Its likely not the best, and there are likely completely different diets that are as good or better, but we don't know what they are. And I sacrifice a fair amount to get a lot of physical activity. And pay attention to what you eat, don't let habit or compulsion have too much control of your eating. Incidentally this is why most diets work at the beginning, starting to pay attention to what you eat has more benefit than anything else. Macro-nutrient adjustment diets seem particularly untrustworthy to me - there are healthier cultures around the world with diets of all macro-nutrient balances, and the fact that the "good ones" change every ten years for diet fads looks exactly like what happens when people demand answers from science when it doesn't have them but has to give their best guess. Also, the idea that food or a certain diet is simply healthy or not healthy is a childish simplification. Your body is complex, and the same food will have different consequences on different organs and systems in your body. What makes something a net negative or net positive depends on the current state of your body and how you weight different effects. That's basically it, I have no strong opinions because there is no strong evidence. So no, I can't tell you what a good diet is specifically, and anyone who says they can is a liar.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Well I was going to deride the article because they're bragging about a medical finding that still only works in mice models. These often don't carry over into human beings. But other than that, always nice to see progress made against wasting diseases and aging.

Evgeny 12y ago

There were at least some studies that linked faster metabolism to shorter lifespans. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3100751/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3100751/ Higher Energy Expenditure in Humans Predicts Natural Mortality I personally am trying to somewhat keep my metabolism slower by eating less often, and less in general, plus intermittent fasting. But of course everything is still open for debate.

jamesrcole 12y ago

I think it's because people like to moralise.

npsimons 12y ago

I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar. The problem is, from a libertarian/rugged individualism point of view, failure to lose weight is a simple failure of self control. Calories out have to be greater than calories in, after all. Also, I'm willing to bet more than a few people here have heard the fatlogic of "it's my genetics" or "it's the drugs I'm on". While there are some conditions and drugs that can contribute to weight gain, it's not nearly as common as most people using the excuse would like to think, and it usually doesn't work that way (most drugs that "cause" weight gain do it by intensifying hunger signals, not modifying metabolism, which is fairly difficult to do to any great degree via drugs - otherwise this article wouldn't be noteworthy!). In the end, this most likely won't help the majority of the obese, who do have a medical condition (try being obese for any amount of time and tell me it's not having a negative impact on your joints, at a minimum; there is no good health above or below certain sizes). If anything, this will just make the problem worse by enabling people to consume even more food, and probably end up putting on more weight, especially since it seems that most causes of obesity are psychological (unconscious eating, eating past satiety, bad food choices, etc). Also, if some of the comments here are to be believed, this drug will just treat the symptom of obesity and not the cause (eg, processed food, BPA, etc). I do think this research could have great applications into life extension, or helping people feel younger, but my money is on this drug not having any noticeable effect on the obese population.