A lot of health-related things took a turn for the worse in the 70s
Obesity was 13% in 1970. Now it’s 42%.
Obesity can increase cancer risk by 50% https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on-health/ho...
Obesity was 13% in 1970. Now it’s 42%.
Obesity can increase cancer risk by 50% https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on-health/ho...
This is definitely not peer-reviewed research so please don't take it too seriously, but I came away convinced that there is more going on here than "people suddenly started eating too much and being lazy in the 1970s": http://achemicalhunger.com/
There's so much we've learned over the past century, and yet it feels like know almost nothing when we try to dig into complicated life science topics.
Now that we know, with certainty, what a disastrous choice this was, it will take time to switch back. Most people are still convinced saturated fat is the bugaboo it has been painted as, and that sugar is A-OK, and government policy is still overwhelmingly directed that way.
What can be done with half the US maize crop (of what is left over after 1/3 has been diverted to make into alcohol to add to gasoline, enriching Archer Daniels Midland at taxpayer expense) when it is no longer enzymatically converted to sugar is an open question. Does the world want that much maize?
we are breathing, drinking, eating and staying in contact with cancerous substances 24/h day. I'm surprised the human body is so resilient and we don't have 80% of under 40s with cancer tbh
the fix is to: - stop burning fossil fuels - stop producing and releasing in the environment plastic and toxic waste - switch to a sustainable diet and ditch intensive farms using chemicals to boost production
the technology is here but it would require the innovation of many industries, and without governments pushing for it a profit driven industry obviously wouldn't never change
Then you have to add the mental and physical health that is going down the drain. Lonely and depressed people stuck in bad jobs that can't have a decent life. Suburban sprawl, car-centric urbanism, alienation and isolation of communities and such
Do we know what the population limit would be for us to sustainably support people?
Once the body hits a tipping point with excess white body fat, the fat becomes a sort of parasite which gets preferential treatment in consuming calories and nutritional resources out of the bloodstream, starving the organs while the body is bathing in an abundance of calories and nutrition.
If this turns out to be the whole story it is really quite insidious!
I don't know of a single-prong approach to solving this issue. Maybe wegovy will come down in price and help people break the cycle, maybe keto is the way to go, intermittent fasting may be helpful, finding saturated fats or supplementing with stearic acids and eliminating antioxidants to help promote fat oxidization... The list goes on for potential cures and we still haven't even begun work on solidifying the direct cause of the disease.
And yes, obesity is a disease. It's not just lazy people shoveling doritos in their faces and reaping their just rewards. The foods that we are provided are not balanced nutritionally and they have been designed by food scientists to not trigger the satiation mechanism so that we will consume more of them.
So yeah, when you eat processed foods your brain is tricked into thinking one more bite will satisfy, but the satisfaction never comes. Then you overindulge, getting lots of fast carbs and unsaturated fats, your body produces insulin, the calories get converted into white fat, the white fat grows, eventually becoming a parasite that eats your food first while you still haven't dealt with the initial issue, you become obese and since your white fat gets to eat first every time you eat you become more fat before your organs and muscles get the leftovers.
That's positively devilish, and right now the solution seems to be to intermittent fast so that your other organs get moved ahead in the nutritional priority list, to eat keto so that your body begins rapidly oxidizing fat, to limit vitamin C and other antioxidants until you get closer to your goal weight to limit your body fat's resistance to oxidization, and to supplement your diet with chemicals that help your body bypass the labyrinth of obesity you've found yourself in.
And despite all of that, we still don't know the full story.
https://fireinabottle.net/category/the-scd1-theory-of-obesit...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-sugar-and-fat...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
Also read that fat cells don't really get destroyed, just get deflated. It really does act like a parasite.
I know some of that may be due to the idea that you 'beat' obesity and so you get lax with yourself. At the same time, something is blatantly, horribly wrong with the food that is available when it causes obese people have to satiate their fat before their own organs are allowed to eat.
Not only that but our diets can cause someone who has literally cut pounds of deflated body fat cells out of their bodies to grow it back in a matter of years. That's insane, that's the kind of stuff that makes me think of Famine in Good Omens. In the book, Famine ran a food company that fed millions of people but the food had no nutritional quality, indistinguishable from "real" food but surgically designed to be entirely made of empty calories and grease and salt so that his victims could eat until their stomachs burst, grow fat and miserable and hate their own bodies and ultimately starve to death if their hearts didn't give out first.
People became far more mobile. Lots of diseases now seem to have some relation to viral exposure.