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Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

An interesting series of articles that came up on HN a couple months ago makes the argument that both infertility and obesity arise from environmental contaminates (although not necessarily phthalates). Regardless of whether you agree with the arguments presented, I think it’s really interesting to see just how complex of a problem it is to figure out what’s going on.

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

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I don't particularly buy it. Again, sure, maybe it has a statistically significant effect, but it is undoubtedly dwarfed by people chugging sugary drinks and being more sedentary. A casual search suggests sugar consumption has increased 9 fold since the 1800s and 2 fold since the 1900s. The poor in particular are cornered into purchasing sugary foods due to weird economics around corn subsidies. And what do you know? They're the fattest by far.

If it were mostly environmental you'd see broader gains. variation. But in my little bubble in upper middle class Massachusetts, I don't know ANYONE who is obese. In other areas of the country it's hard to find anyone who isn't.

The linked site does suggest a reason Massachusetts would have less overweight people, based on their exposure to environmental contaminants.

Sure. But you'll find plenty of fat people in poorer areas of massachusetts.

Maize fructose has probably a bigger effect than cane sugar, because it also hit poor populations.

Well, if we control the epidemics of sedentarism and obesity doesn't follow, those complex causes may be worth investing on. But we have a very simple pair of problems (bad nutrition and sedentarism) that are able to explain more than all the obesity around without any need for a contributing cause.

(Anyway, the odds that there isn't any contributing cause on the tons of changes we made on the world are pretty small, and it's important to study those for individual health. It's just for societal health that there's no mystery to solve.)

The second article in the series cites a 25% increase in calories consumed during the period where obesity is rising, but then tries to wave that away as inconsequential.

It seems obvious that obesity is the result of the increased caloric intake with secondary effects from the increasingly sedentary lifestyles we all lead.

Environmental toxins might play a tertiary role, but it’s definitely the calories driving most of the obesity issue.

It does seem painfully simple that consuming more energy than you burn/excrete is going to turn you into a sink, and a lot of that surplus energy is going to be stored as fat. (And the opposite process applies when you consume less than you use.)

Is this an oversimplification, or is the average education/propaganda/understanding so confused, and so overwhelmed with different nutrition ideas that the wood is being missed for the trees?

I read that blog series and it makes a decent case that there is some environmental contaminant that matters (or a combination of several), but it can't be the whole story because things like gastric bypass definitely work. Also just from observing obese people eat it is clear that few of them eat in a way conducive to weight loss. Perhaps some environmental contaminant causes them to crave calorically dense, non-satiating foods, but that seems doubtful to me.

Edit: The other thing I noticed when reading the series was that the author had a habit of discounting anything that refuted his thesis (calling it a minor effect and so forth), while giving greater credibility to similarly weak evidence for his theory.

Incidents like this, small remote populations along the Amazon in Brazil rapidly becoming fat when given access to nestle food; make me think it's just the food (in practical terms).

https://wearemitu.com/wearemitu/things-that-matter/nestle-fl...

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