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Comment by crowbahr | Hacker News Reader

From the study:

> One additional note on this study — the research team has not yet isolated which chemicals in the oil are responsible for the changes they found in the hypothalamus. But they have ruled out two candidates. It is not linoleic acid, since the modified oil also produced genetic disruptions; nor is it stigmasterol, a cholesterol-like chemical found naturally in soybean oil.

1. We're not mammals that experience torpor. That doesn't even remotely apply to us.

2. The study explicitly states this isn't lineolic acid.

3. The site you linked is a snake oils salesman who has a vested interest in you buying their products and living the lifestyle they espouse.

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There are some interesting coincidences that make me think that the torpor hypothesis might be worth exploring:

- Basal metabolic rates in present-day Americans are substantially lower than they were in the past (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nqBxKGn... -- Yes, the link is from the aforementioned blog, but you can check the citations).

- Mean body temperatures today are lower than in the past (https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/1/22/21075218/no...).

- 13.2% of Americans have taken an SSRI in the past 30 days (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm). To be clear, depression and torpor are different conditions, but it seems reasonable that a torpid-like state might include depression-like symptoms, and that those might be treatable with SSRIs.

- Obesity has absolutely exploded in the past 40 years, and none of the prevailing hypotheses have much explanatory power (https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...).

Obesity is the consequence of growth seeking in the food production and distribution industry.

Market pressures ended up selecting a diet made of poisonous food that lies to your tastebuds and satiety center.

Can’t all these things also be explained by our increasingly sedentary lifestyle?

Almost certainly.

Modern “western” people spend a tremendous amount of time sitting - either in an office or a car - and are almost totally sedentary.

In fact, so sedentary that the mere act of walking is considered “exercise”.

Frankly, I’m surprised the mental and physical outcomes aren’t even worse.

They will be in the coming decades as the population ages. The direct and indirect effects of sitting all day long are going to be incredibly costly to the society, and the only reasonable policy would be to combat our car addiction by any means necessary – and this is even distegarding all the other disastrous externalities of widespread personal car use!

I kind of wonder how much of a role climate control has to play as well. Surely must have a role alongside straightforward inactivity.. until pretty recently, people would burn a lot of calories just regulating body temperature indoors. People with outdoor jobs/lifestyles obviously still do.

I see three problems with that explanation.

First, I'm not sure there's a strong case that our lifestyles today are any more sedentary than in, say, the 1970s (when obesity rates were around 12% rather than 30%). We had cars, transit, elevators, escalators, school buses, television, keyboards, etc. in the 1970s, while at the same time "going to the gym" was just not something that average people did on a regular basis. Even going jogging was mildly eccentric.

Second, this is looking at resting metabolic rates, not overall calorie expenditure, although there is probably some association between RMR and physical activity.

Which brings me to the third point, which is that you're just shifting the burden of answering question of "why are we fat?" to "why are we sedentary?". If we are in fact increasingly sedentary, it could be that an outside factor is causing both low RMR and sedentary behavior. Anecdotally, I (as a comparatively skinny person) have a lot harder time sitting still than some of my friends and acquaintances that struggle with their weight. They might consider spending a day in bed as a great way to recharge, whereas it is something I would only do if I were pretty miserably ill.

I don't think any significant portion of the population is going to the gym regularly these days. There is definitely a fitness community, but most people just sit around and eat.

There‘s a pretty marked decline in the amount of walking and cycling done in society.

In 1969 48% of US kids walked to school; in 2011 it was 13%. http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...

Public transit is actually great for walking since you are walking to and from a stop.

People have become so unused to children walking around unsupervised that it has become grounds to call child protective services.

The amount of SAD probably would be worth exploring was well. That's some hibernation mimicking behavior.

>> We're not mammals that experience torpor. That doesn't even remotely apply to us.

Your first sentence is obviously true. Your second one is probably false, since the total removal of that seems unlikely compared to evolution simply disabling it. I have no evidence that part of it remains, nor do I see any evidence of total removal.

If there are effects of linolenic acid on mammalian torpor, then the second sentence is still true.

Life science is based on observational evidence, and since humans are some mammals who have never been observed to undergo torpor, effects observed inducing mammalian torpor do not apply to humans. They're not making a positive evolutionary statement about human torpor never existing, just that any observed effects from linolenic acid on mammalian torpor do not apply to humans the way the other person was implying it does.

For obesity, 2 is wrong, and the study does explicitly mention "the SO + CO diet caused more weight gain over the 16-week study than the other HFD"

Plenish just has less LA, not zero, and they were trying to rule it out from a few genetic expressions they were looking at, not obesity.

Obesity is always a case of calories in vs calories out. Were they controlling an exact caloric difference?

Also: This is on male mice, which experience topor, which means they can dial their metabolisms way back.

Human metabolism just doesn't work like that. Studies have consistently shown that metabolism is pretty constant across the gamut of humans based on muscle mass, activity, and weight.

> 1. We're not mammals that experience torpor. That doesn't even remotely apply to us.

We do not experience torpor naturally. That does not exclude that you can blast a human body with the right amount of hormones or substances that act like ones and artificially induce torpor in humans. NASA has been researching ways to do that for years now [1], given that even a small amount of saved resources per human on a months-long space trip saves a lot of resources in total, not to mention the potential of a reduced metabolic rate also protecting the traveling humans from cosmic radiation-induced damage.

As for "how to induce torpor", well, we don't even know what exactly causes it in animals. We are just guessing - and we are at the same time also noticing that wide swaths of the population show up with a lot of health issues that used to be either rare or mostly spread on older people. Auto-immune diseases (allergies, diabetes, neurodermitis), precocious puberty, cancers of all kinds, obesity in young people, circulatory issues, Alzheimer's and other neuro-degenerative diseases, just to point out the most obvious and most-researched. And since there are only three major things that changed over the last hundred years from the previous default - our food, the introduction of heavy industry, plastics and pollution, and our way of living under modern capitalism (your ordinary medieval farmer did not work 40 hour weeks for the entire year for his whole life) - it is not surprising that correlations appear there. The key thing is to find out if the correlation also has a corresponding causation!

[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/content/torpor-inducing-transfer-habita...

For 1 i would suggest the read of this wonderfull blog https://fireinabottle.net/ https://twitter.com/fire_bottle

While he has a science background, he's definitely selling something. Drawing a straight line for evolutionary ancestors with a gene to modern humans and not showing that we have the same gene is a non-starter. Even if we have it, it could have changed in expression and function such that we are not capable of torpor.

We know from animal research that torpor/hibernation in non-human mammals creates a sleep deprived state. We know that there is no evidence of humans being able to enter a state of torpor. We know that humans have high sleep requirements for our brain function. It stands to reason that humans distant ancestors lost the ability to hibernate at some point and that it wouldn't work with our physiology.

Go try and eat only coconut oil for say, 2 weeks, you'll feel the difference.

The heck is this? Eat a pound of coconut butter a day?

Eat more than a few tablespoons of any edible oil in one sitting and you'll definitely feel a difference.

Edit: using only added coconut oil in cooking is, upon reflection, a more probable interpretation. Sorry.

I think the most charitable reading of their comment would be something like "replace other fats you use (butter, olive oil, etc) with coconut oil for two weeks".

Edit: you added your edit while I was writing my comment :)

MCT oil made from coconuts.

You can mix it in with things like coffee and shakes, easy way to get it.

>Coconut oil is the least fattening of all the oils. Pig farmers tried to use it to fatten their animals, but when it was added to the animal feed, coconut oil made the pigs lean [See Encycl. Brit. Book of the Year, 1946].

https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsaturated-oils.shtml

I would hope that there would be a better source than a 75 year old "summary of news book". If this is true there would surely be more recent and thorough scientific studies.

IIRC, that was more from the fact that coconut oil has zero linolenic acid, which is an essential metabolite. Coconut oil is still a huge calorie source for livestock, just that it's also mixed with soybean oil.

Basically, any combination of coconut oil in your diet that isn't 100% coconut oil will lead to calorie gain.

I’m on your “side” here, but this is a bad take.

Coconut oil is mainly comprised of saturated fatty acids. Its closer to butter, not the refined PUFA oils.

Consuming anything to excess is gonna mess up your system, water included.

https://www.news-medical.net/health/Oils-Rich-in-Linoleic-Ac...

Look, if we're going to make major life changes on the basis of this one study, you've missed the opportunity for an all-chocolate diet.

^ best post of the thread!

Yep, certainly the funniest.

Does it have to be dark chocolate?

When you've tried the all-meat diet and didn't like it, the all-chocolate diet seems like the logical next step.

I'm not going to criticize your all-chocolate diet, but its always sensible to take supplements in the form of embedded nuts, nougat, praline and perhaps fruit and mint flavoured confections.

*Cacao butter diet. Not the delightful as the candy bars but still just as possible.

You'd just throw out the cacao solids? Animal.

"You'll feel the difference."

What difference will I feel that couldn't be explained simply by my expectation that I would feel different?

You'll feel a difference because coconut has a high amount of MCT (medium chain triglycerides). MCT is often touted as a weightloss tool, I've seen plenty of posts talking about pigs not getting fat on MCT, or how it takes more calories to break it apart (which is bullshit) or it some how raises your body temp/metabolism.

The truth is that our stomach has a hard time digesting a sudden influx of MCT. Adding a large amount of MCT to a diet previously free of MCT will cause nausea. And that short term nausea is largely the cause of any "weightloss" seen by MCT. The studies that study MCT and show weightloss are all short term studies, and not the 6-12 month study you really need for weightloss.

In short, you'll feel a difference because coconut oil upsets your stomach. Not because it's a non-animal fat. Hell, we use sesame, peanut, canola, and olive oils all the time. Replace all your dietary fat with canola oil or olive oil and you'll not notice. Will probably have health benefits because of the reduction in saturated fats.

1. We have common genes going back to mammals who did experience torpor. 2. A study doesn't "own" their data and have exclusive right to interpret this data 3. Someone selling something that they think is beneficial to their customer, does not mean it is not beneficial. I would say most people who sell things honestly think their customers will benefit from their product.

tell me you've never worked in sales without telling me you've never worked in sales

Can we apply this argument to everything that's for sale? Seed oils are for sale too...

Yes, you absolutely should look to sources other than walnut oil salesmen for information regarding the benefits and drawbacks of walnut oil.

leave this meme on twitter, please

> We have common genes going back to mammals who did experience torpor.

We also have genes that are related to cows, have you tried subsisting on grass?

Your argument is farcical and entirely based on the preaching of a snake oil salesman, in a comments section based on a torpid male mouse study that specifically refutes the argument you're making.

Um, don't we have something like 30% of our DNA in common with actual grass, nevermind grass eaters?

my grandpa weren't no fescue!

He was alfalfa

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