What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?
nautil.us
nautil.us
The study presents three scenarios assuming different assumptions about the mass of plastic particles. In the worst case scenario, where I think the assumptions are bad, they estimate 5g of plastic per week. In the other two scenarios which used more complex but more realistic modelling they estimate 0.15 and 0.3g of plastic consumed per week so only a credit card sized amount per year.
In these scenarios (0.15g and 0.3g) about 90% they estimate comes from salt.
Scientists are not going to expend a lot of effort on the thankless work of peer review, taking time away from their own careers, purely out of professional integrity and the goodness of their hearts. And their competency to do so is uneven at best anyway. What happens when the people who wrote this paper review other people's data?
And it has a typo! ("Analys"[sic]). That doesn't really bode well for how much rigor the rest of paper had, either in its creation or review(s).
I'd say everyone should have to read Edward Tufte, but everyone has and it didn't much help. 90% of the Q&A at his seminars is people asking questions that are variants of "but I'm used to doing it the old bad way, so isn't that really just as good?"[1] It was mildly amusing watching Mr. Tufte grow increasingly exasperated realizing just how few of his students had learned anything from the experience. I imagine that was a big part of why he retired to become a sculptor.
[1] My personal pet peeve is the obsession designers appear to have with ensuring that there are no visible indications of which part of their design is meant to be clicked on.
Meh. Not worth the HN thread. It's like picking apart why someone wrote code in a suboptimal/messy way when in reality they just wanted to get something done under a constraint, and the author would totally agree if they were here to defend themselves.
Yet here are people saying the author can never be taken seriously because of it.
The charts themselves would be better expressed as a Sankey flow, perhaps.
for a few years now we have switched to rock salt completely at home. it's like 20-40% more expensive and we have to use a hammer/grinder every month or so but we are doing that.
by reducing say 90% of the microplastics, is that.. good?
historically this mine for example has been used to extract salt for generations........
Lustig is a great speaker, and I’ll admit that when I first watched that I was quite convinced.
His position, however, is still not representative of a consensus within the field, and for good reason. While sugar consumption is likely detrimental to one’s overall health. Simply cutting out sugar is not necessarily going to lead to better weight management outcomes.
While sugar consumption has increased over time, so have added fats and oils [0]. Which are much more calorically dense. It’s unlikely that any one food source is leading to the increases in obesity that we are seeing.
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82220/eib-166....
That said, it does beg the question: why, 12 years after that video was published, has the field not come to an agreement, if it is “pretty clearly” the truth?
One could come up with various explanations, including lobbying by big sugar, but it falls flat when you consider that the sugar industry is only a small fraction of the industrialized food industry, there’s plenty of lobbying and influence to go around.
At the end of the day, there are only a few things that are clear: junk food is bad, Americans eat too many calories, and could stand to eat more fruits and vegetables.
It’s quite clear that there isn’t a consensus on what the truth is, ergo the truth is out there on what causes obesity and it isn’t to be found within the current consensus.
However, do we take that to mean that sugar is the cause of obesity? I don’t see overwhelming evidence to that fact, so I personally don’t.
What we can take is that whatever the truth is, it is not “clear” nor obvious at this point.
> One could come up with various explanations, including lobbying by big sugar, but it falls flat when you consider that the sugar industry is only a small fraction of the industrialized food industry, there’s plenty of lobbying and influence to go around.
Are you saying that the sugar industry would be lobbying against larger industries with opposing goals? Or are you saying the sugar industry is just one of several industries who would like to use their money to push the blame around?
I am not well versed in the agricultural industry, but doesn't the majority of our mass produced sugar come from the corn industry which is absolutely massive and will obviously do anything it can to protect its sources of income (sugar, ethanol, alcohol, oil, etc.)?
My statement was to preempt the common argument that somehow the sugar industry is so powerful that it was and is able to divert all of our collective attention from it, when it is the real culprit.
The corn industry is a large industry, but so is the meat industry, dairy industry, processed food manufacturers, soy beans, etc. many of them, possibly even including corn, benefit from diverting attention away from their products towards sugar as the main villain. Even if sugar is a revenue source for corn, it pales in comparison for its main product: animal feed.
None of that is to say that I think any of the above industries I listed is “the culprit” I only list them to illustrate my point. Big sugar has lobbying power, but it is all too common that the simplest story gets repeated, “it’s all because of powerful lobbying group X”
So to doubt something is true just because "it's been 12 years and there's no consensus" is not necessarily a good rebuttal to something being true or not.
The Human Microbiome: A New Frontier in Health by Susan Lynch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCaTQzjX2rQ
What food you eat certainly influences conditions in your gut, which influences your gut microbiome. On the other hand, your gut microbiome is highly persistent and even efforts to diet may not have the direct impact you'd think it would. Also, other factors (like conditions at birth) have strong effects that are highly persistent.
If you're not familiar with this research you really owe it to yourself to learn about it.
In my personal anecdotal experience, my weight gain and loss correlates to my caloric intake. When I've explicitly calorie counted, foods with refined carbohydrates are typically what blows up my count. When I've done low carb high fat and protein diets, I've found it difficult to eat too much, to the point of coming up several hundred calories short per day.
Cutting down on calories necessarily means cutting down on fat, carbs, or both (technically protein as well, but protein doesn’t generally seem to be the issue.)
If you were to follow an explicitly low fat diet, it would be very difficult to eat junk food as well. Almost all junk foods are high in both fat and carbs at the same time.
You are right about refined carbs. Most public health organizations advise limiting one’s consumption of those.
I eat lots of carbs, always have... yet I don't seem to gain weight. I generally feel like, and am regarded by people who know me, as someone who "eats a ton" yet I have never struggled to lose weight.
The X food causes obesity theory is just too simple IMO, that or I have a tape worm or some kind of undiagnosed disorder that results in me maintaining a pretty consistent BMI despite eating whatever and whenever I want.
In Australia, sugar consumption dropped 23% (and other sweeteners dropped 16%) from 1980 to 2003, while obesity tripled. [1]
There is more to the picture.
[0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p...
Their conclusion is that you're helpless if your fat and that's just not true. The idea that this is not in your hands is ridiculous. If you are fat and you don't want to be fat you simply change your eating habits. This can be very difficult to do because you have formed these habits throughout your life but it isn't complicated and you should just do it anyway.
There seems to be some kind of unfortunate "shame brigade" out on the Internet that comes out of the woodwork to overrun any conversation around obesity that even hints that there might be reasons for the obesity epidemic other than individual people's poor choices.
The lab rats whose rate of obesity has increased over the last 30 years, despite consuming the exact same controlled diets, are certainly not "changing their eating habits" -- there must be more to the picture than merely eating habits.
This set of articles explores that. We don't have answers yet, but these folks make a strong argument that the question is worth asking.
[0] It's an unfortunate fact of scientific progress that ideologues have, in other fields, at other times, held back that scientific progress for decades through their inability to consider disconfirming evidence against a favored theory. This kind of comment should be ignored by anyone who values truth over consensus.
I hope you're talking about your own comment, because consensus is truth, for all practical purposes.
What's really toxic is taking a fringe theory and pretending it has equivalence and/or equal weight with scientific consensus, when it doesn't have even 1% of the rigor and reproducible evidence behind it. That kind of attitude is absolutely glorifying ignorance and is utterly toxic to actual progress.
Oof, you are definitely right about this. Very few people are able to distinguish truth where it deviates from consensus, and basically no one can do it in domains where they lack expertise.
That said, there is no scientific consensus about the causes of the obesity epidemic, so I'm not sure what criticism you're directing at me, exactly -- though I deduce from your tone that I triggered you in some way.
I'm not putting forth any fringe theory about the causes of the obesity epidemic; the link I posted examines common explanations for the epidemic and tries to figure out whether they're valid, and if not, what other causes there might be. They don't claim anything definitive, in the end, because it would take actual studies to prove any real connection. They're pretty clear about what they can and can't claim.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean:
> it doesn't have even 1% of the rigor and reproducible evidence behind it. That kind of attitude is absolutely glorifying ignorance and is utterly toxic to actual progress.
But when I think about other people's obesity, I am not allowed to think that, because I would be part of a shame brigade.
I wish the shame brigade had gotten to me years earlier.
Even if your obesity was helped along by plastic based endocrine disruptors or micro-biome based issues or weird viruses, you found a solution for you.
> Our suggestions are very prosaic: Be nice to yourself. Eat mostly what you want. Trust your instincts. > > Diet and exercise won’t cure obesity, but this is actually good news for diet and exercise. You don’t need to put the dream of losing weight on their shoulders, and you can focus on their actual benefits instead
I haven't read it all but I have read a lot and I have been doing this for a long time.
To give people an excuse that diet and exercise is not the answer, it's irresponsible.
Our world makes it incredibly difficult to be healthy. My opinion is simply that you should still try everything you can to be healthy. The problem as I see it is that people have no clue what to eat and what not to. Most people just eat what their parents ate and think nothing of it. We buy food at a grocerie store thinking this is food because it came from a grocerie store. Most stuff in a grocerie store will slowly kill you.
And about those lab rats. They are inbred clones. Maybe suitable for some lab work but the fact that they are getting fatter has to do with their awful genetics. And yes, there's obviously some variability there.
I've been thinking about what this blog series for the past days and they don't seem to understand that muscle gain and weight loss happens slowly over years. If you're fat and you don't want to be fat anymore you have a really difficult job a head of you.
To make up excuse to pretend and act as if reality isn't exactly this is disingenuous and it's going to lure people into false sense of security. Not good.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/obesity-children-linked-...
Also, the questions asked generally here "How can society as a whole have less obesity" is different from the one you are answering: "If I am obese, what can I do to improve my health."
I'm assuming you know we excrete unused chemical energy, so we aren't a closed system in which the CICO principal would be more deterministic.
That said, I think you're half right? SMTM's environmental contagion hypothesis is an explanation for population-level obesity rates, not individual cases of obesity. Anybody who cares sufficiently about their own obesity can change it through individual efforts. However, on a population level, "just change your habits", or even worse, shaming people who are obese, is a less effective strategy than "figure out what is causing their bodies to signal hunger and store fat in dysfunctional, self-harmful ways that they didn't used to anywhere on earth until the mid-1900s".
That being said, the real question is: if somebody stopped eating, would their body die instead of using their fat for energy? There could definitely be cases where that happens (likely caused by modern tech / science), but given things like this happen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast
It’s likely just a willpower/intellect issue once cico is handled. How long can you keep it up, are you able to make effective modifications, etc until you reach your goal weight.
I’d wager that it’s much more likely society lacks willpower & intelligence (when presented with excess resources) instead of we introduced something that makes our bodies unable to lose weight.
Anecdotally, as a former obese person and with many family members who have dealt with/are dealing with obesity cico + willpower was always the answer. It’s very likely the willpower needed to lose weight is something a large portion of the population fundamentally can’t achieve without cultural enforcement.
Your bank balance is a sum of money coming and and money going out, but what causes money coming in and what causes money going out are much more useful to anyone trying to earn wealth or avoid debt than the mere fact that your bank balance is their sum.
Like you, many people are convinced that the issue is "willpower / intellect". But this doesn't share a causal relationship with CICO! The willpower argument is like saying "oh yeah, to become rich, just earn more than you spend!" -- sure, that's true, and then someone says "ok, how do I do that?"; if your answer is "willpower!" I doubt they'll find that very satisfying.
Since I suspect you didn't read the post either, I'll excerpt two questions here:
(1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too?
(2) Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure. Average weight gain is in fact super slow, on the order of a few pounds per year, for most obese individuals. That's the equivalent of overeating by ~7000 calories each year -- only 1% of typical annual consumption. It's hard to imagine that people don't have the willpower to reduce their food consumption by 20 calories per day. Losing weight by keeping up a caloric deficit requires a ton of willpower because your body super fights against starvation. But why would a lack of willpower be the reason people perpetually eat 1% too many calories? And why did they only start doing that 50 years ago?
CICO is not a useful causal explanation for the obesity epidemic. Obesity at the societal level is a more interesting problem than merely CICO, despite how many people think the reason is some variant of willpower.
> (1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too?
There are so many explanations for this outside of "some environmental factor causing everyone to get fat" that I don't think it needs explaining.
> Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure
The methods for estimating these are likely wildly off. At face value, this would be an incredibly difficult statistic to obtain accurately. Nearly impossible. I'd need access to more data than is available to trust such a tremendous claim. Trying to simplify complex data like this is borderline pseudoscience.
That being said, I'm not saying CICO is the casual explanation. I'm saying we have a large surplus of resources, and humans are designed to consume. Overcoming that drive is likely beyond many people.
You have no particular evidence of this either.
In other contexts where humans have had a large surplus of resources, there has not been an obesity epidemic.
Even if you could, our science is not advanced enough to control for all the confounds. You can’t point to “evidence” or “science” to prove your point because we are not advanced enough to accurately claim anything at the level you’re attempting to.
Research like you’re referencing is great for “this is interesting” and not “this is why the world works this way”.
You clearly didn’t read enough — the whole point of the piece I referenced is “this is interesting” and not “this is why the world works this way”.
Glad you finally agree that it’s great, though.
Do you not realise that this point alone jeopardizes your entire argument? If this effect is real, the rest of this discussion belongs straight in the trash.
So yes, very much needs explaining.
We are less active and we're eating more. Thus we got fat.
I did similar things where I probably had 10k steps a day in Europe because we walked everywhere all the time. We also ate a lot and often. So my weight didn't change. Heck, I thinks some people gained.
Even our pets are getting fat.
Previous experiments both natural and manmade indicate that homeostasis prevents long term weight gain in situations of high caloric availability.
The conclusion of the paper was that something was introduced into the environment in the 70s that is disrupting humans’ and nearby mammals’ homeostasis mechanisms.
It turns out, the simple explanations (people eat more & move less! too much sugar! etc.) are in fact insufficient.
[0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p...
The variation lies in different utilization rate, the burn rate, and all other variables, but within the limit of PHYSICS.
Not a scientist, nor a nutrition expert, so I'm not going to pretend to try and convince anyone.
If a person is eating 1000 calories per day regardless what what food, and is burning 2000 calories per day (CO), how is anyone going to gain weight this way?
Please, as I mentioned above, there are many variables, but not the core principle of CICO which is basic math. You cannot create calories out of thin air! It doesn't mean anyone can stick to strict diet with CICO calculation. It doesn't mean they always measure accurately. Don't mix up the failure in application with the principle. I watched many cooking videos in youtube. It doesn't mean that im gonna cook well; It doesn't mean that the recipe is bad
Personally, when I reduce CI, my body responds by decreasing CO: I don't think as clearly (problematic for being a functional adult), and I'm even colder than normal. With no reasonable way to accurately measure the change in CO, it's difficult to balance the equation.
tldr: what's simple and obvious with spherical cows in a vacuum is not so simple in the real world
Similarly, CICO is just an simple scientific fact to give you the idea what's happening physical world. Did anyone say CI and CO calculation is simple? Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air?
Tell me just one dieting method is simple, effective, helps everyone 100% to achieve the target weight again? As I mentioned in the above post, a good recipe doesn't make you a successful cook. You are not going to become Gordon Ramsay by watching his video alone
Yes, I have seen and heard plenty of people say CICO is simple and "all there is to it", often along with some "laws of physics" snip, as included in your previous comment.
> Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air?
That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.
Your problem is with the people who say it, not CICO itself. Once again, if you can't cook with a recipe from Gordon Ramsay, are you saying the recipe is bad? Btw I replied to above post when he said CICO is nonsense. Do you have a problem with his claim?
> That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.
Because I am countering his arguments? All am I saying CICO is simple physics, I am NOT saying CICO is simple weight reduction method. Can you tell the difference? If someone are saying the CICO nonsense, then isn't the logical conclusion is that you can defy physics and gain calorie from the thin air?
100%
Not all calories are equal.
Watch Robert Lustig's presentations on Sugar: the bitter truth. I think he explains what's happening quite well. Unfortunately it seems to "sciency" and most people aren't disciplined enough to stay with it and hear him out because they don't understand chemistry and physiology. :( https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+bitter+trut...
CICO is useful as an upper bound on calorie utilization, but unfortunately not relevant to the problem of obesity, which deals with the exact opposite end of the problem space.
CICO might be important if the problem was that people in first world nations were starving due to an insufficient supply of calories. But the obesity epidemic indicates that this is not the case. So CICO is relevant to the problem in the same way that a theoretical understanding of the gasoline-air reaction is relevant to understanding why my car's gas mileage has dropped recently.
If people, try to eat less their body gets unhappy -- it starts to burn less calories. Furthermore, it starts ramping up your hunger trying to convince you that you are starving. Over a year it typically wins.
> 2.1 Calories in calories out is a bad model
True. It's insufficient. But it's not nothing. The article later claims that calorie consumption has "only" risen by about 20%. I find this take to be ridiculous. 20% is a lot. If I eat 20% more, I'll put on weight.
Article also claims sugar consumption is down and carb consumption is down so therefore they can't be the cause. Yet in prior years we see an extremely strong correlation between carbs and sugar consumed per person and % obesity. Corn vs. actual sugar. Artificial zero calorie sweeteners. It all adds up.
We can even work it out: 1lb of human fat has ~4000 calories in it. If we assume that only 10% of those excess calories actually end up as fat thats still 70lbs of additional weight by the time you’re in your mid 20s.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+bitter+trut...
1. Bulk food manufacturers can have a decent variance in the actual calories compared to the anticipated calories. Nutrition labels can be inaccurate by up to 20% when it comes to listing calories, according to the FDA, so that 400 calorie meal could be 320 or 480. If you're eating for 1600 calories a day and relying on pre-made foods, then you could be eating 1920 calories a day unintentionally.
2. Not every body processes every calorie consumed. A simple example of this is the weight loss medicine Alli, which can prevent your body from absorbing fats. So even if you ate a 400 calorie cup of olive oil you may only absorb 360 calories of it.
3. Metabolism itself isn't a set standard. Unless you have had your metabolism tested to ensure that it is operating at the standard level, you may be naturally burning fewer calories than your height, weight, body fat, muscular density, and age would otherwise indicate.
A simple test for the last one is to take your temperature in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Standard is 98.6, but in metabolically impaired people, it can decrease by a few degrees. Colder body means fewer calories being burned. This happened to me, where at ready my body was burning 300 calories a day under my expected TDEE and to reverse it I had to eat more, put on weight, and exercise heavily with weight lifting heavy weights to build muscle to reverse it. My standard body temperature had dropped to 97.3 or less, and it's been months of undoing the weight loss that I had achieved to get it back to normal.
4. We are still learning about the various effects of microplastics and other man-made forever chemicals on the human body, but many of them are known endocrine and hormone disruptors so it is likely that future science will discover that these unavoidable chemicals may increase the likelihood of obesity by either interrupting the satiation mechanism or decreasing the body's ability to respond to insulin.
5. Once you become obese in the modern sense, you are now the proud owner of an oversized organ of fat cells that do not simply die when you lose weight. They will release their lipid stores, but the cells themselves remain, sometimes for life. When your normal organs are not signalling that they need nutrition immediately, these fat cells will preemptively consume any excess sugars and fats in your body to refill themselves. Being previously overweight dramatically increases the likelihood that you will become overweight again because of this, and the only potential solution is either having liposuction or using some other non-invasive technology that can literally directly destroy the fat cells, and either option is going to be expensive, time-consuming, and risky to some degree.
If environmental factors cause you to overeat, due to stress, maladaption, or due to exogenous chemical exposure and you become overweight because of it, there can be many, many reasons why you would then become more and more overweight afterwards.
Yes, at its basic level, it is calories in > calories out, but that overlooks external factors that can make consistently eating fewer calories than you burn a herculean effort that can very well never ever end.
I mean, he handwaves away the statistic that suggests the mean US citizen's calorie intake increased by nearly a quarter over the period that obesity rose simply by saying "that's not a jaw dropping increase". He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity! I'm actually less suspicious that calorie counts are an oversimplification after reading what he citates as evidence against them; you could make a pretty good case for diet being the sole cause of increased obesity in the US from the references he makes to argue it's unrelated!
(Nothing wrong with the "lipostat" hypothesis he proposes as the alternative per se, but moving the cause of obesity onto "changes in how many individuals' bodies identify satiation points and metabolise food intake" doesn't result in a hypothesis which is independent from how diet has changed, it just complicates the causation a bit)
I think the context here is that while 400 extra calories a day might seem like a lot, it's within the observed variability going back as far as we have measurements. Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960, and were no more obese then.
> He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity
Hmm, I think the point here is that there is more complexity than the "eat more, gain weight" hypothesis: there was wide variability in how much weight people gained when being overfed, and all of these people, when they stopped being overfed, lost the weight they'd gained effortlessly -- which is emphatically not the case for most obese folks today.
This implies something is different about being temporarily overfed (which makes weight loss trivial) and what's causing the obesity epidemic (which makes weight loss very challenging).
Also worth noting that the increased caloric intake also doesn't answer the question of what's causing people to eat more than they burn. (And again, there's not really any question that obese folks are eating more than they burn -- it's the only way to actually gain weight, after all -- the whole point of this line of inquiry is to figure out why.)
I'll cite what they say about this:
> From this study [0], for example, consider this sentence: "TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily. Obese individuals generally burn 3000+ kcal/day, and while not every modern person is obese, it does make the increase from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010 look relatively small.
That's his assertion, but all we've got is a link to a complex dataset on "food availability" and his word for it (and some probably-unjustified ancillary assumptions about calorie burning between the two eras being similar, of course). Extraordinary claims, I think, demand a higher standard of evidence.
> Hmm, I think the point here is that there is more complexity than the "eat more, gain weight" hypothesis: there was wide variability in how much weight people gained when being overfed, and all of these people, when they stopped being overfed, lost the weight they'd gained effortlessly -- which is emphatically not the case for most obese folks today.
Sure. But that's furiously demolishing a straw man that there's no variability in weight gain between individuals whilst dismissing the actual finding that it takes as little as 3 weeks to show a clear increase in weight from eating 1000 extra calories as incidental. And he's trying to use it to argue against the notion that average calorie intake data consistent with the obese ~40% of the US population eating ~1000 extra calories on a permanent basis could have caused the latter group to have gained weight!
> This implies something is different about being temporarily overfed (which makes weight loss trivial) and what's causing the obesity epidemic (which makes weight loss very challenging).
One obvious difference is that people overfeed for longer. This doesn't seem to be a gotcha for the basic assumption "people eat too much" and nor does the fact that eating "too much" is obviously likely to be caused by different factors in different people. But whilst "people eat too much" might have little explanatory power, its not nearly as dubious as the blog's assertion that "diet and exercise are out as explanations for the epidemic" despite them being both consistent with macro trends and a change in one undoubtedly entirely to blame for some individuals' weight changes
The confusing question is: why is everyone suddenly eating “too much” and seemingly unable to control it? Why does it now require willpower and dieting to not become obese? People in the 1960s had plenty of food access, plenty of cars, etc. etc., and did not have obesity rates in the 40%+ range. Their diets were not so different from today’s diets in terms of macronutrient composition, in fact they were probably worse: plenty of sugar, fat, etc., components that have since been demonized.
Why are so many people eating “too much” now?
> People in the 1960s had plenty of food access, plenty of cars, etc. etc., and did not have obesity rates in the 40%+ range.
I don't think they had comparable level of physical movement. They had more of it just by existing. Take office worker - today I come to work and sit on chair until I go to toilet or home. Communication is done via keyboard, documents are in computer. Compared to my parents in 80-90ties - when they wanted to talk to people, they would stand up and go physically to another office. If they wanted documents, they would stand up and search for it. People did used walking to stores and public transport more too. In 1960, 1980 kids walked to school and that includes 6 years old. They played unsupervised outside for hours. Again, expectation today is that they are driven. The 6 years old playing outside is outrage, so they dont do it (plus indoor tablet is more fun to them subjectively).
None of that is huge amount of movement. But I think these frequent low effort movements counts and adds up. And, just turning wheel on 1960 car requires more strength then on current one. A lot of housework (both the one done by women and men) requires less effort then people in 1960 needed - cleaning cooking too. Everything is physically easier.
I have car, but used public transport to get to work. I made around 8000 steps every day just by existing. When covid hit and I was at home, the amount of steps went down drastically - could be just few hundred.
TL;DR If adding a couple miles per day of walking would resolve the obesity epidemic, it'd already be resolved across a huge swath of the population. But all evidence is that the marginal weight-loss benefit of walking tails off rapidly, unless it's paired with a restricted-calorie diet (which is exactly the point: our 1960s parents/grandparents didn't need that.)
They also did A LOT more manual labor back then. Heavy construction projects (roads, dams etc.) were still performed by thousands of people literally swinging a pick-axe 10 hours a day, slowly chipping away at the hill that stood in the way. That must have required couple thousand of extra kcal per day. Meanwhile, in 1960, a lot of most energy-consuming work was already performed by machines.
> and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets
?
you aren't a blast calorimeter, the food you eat obviously is not reduced to actual ash, so it's certainly possible that there are changes in either the inflow of calories that your body is able to actually absorb or that something in the food is changing the rate at which you burn it. There are also various diseases and syndromes that could affect either of those processes.
"calories in, calories out" is the only useful advice you can really give to people trying to lose weight, but that is not a scientifically rigorous position as far as the sum total of hormonal and microbiome processes involved in digestion and metabolism. Again, the food you eat is not reduced to ash, and there can definitely be changes in the processes involved.
And indeed that is what the facts show - lab animals being fed controlled diets are now getting fat, as are feral animal colonies, so it doesn't make sense to make reductive and antagonistic remarks like "thermodynamics suddenly not a thing!?". The scientific process has showed you that your hypothesis is wrong, and it's now your duty to re-examine your hypothesis and account for the discrepancy. Maybe it's the study, maybe not.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201...
But to be similarly reductive - "what, do you think feral cats are suddenly spending too much time at their desk job?"
Feral cats aren't getting sugar in their diets, they haven't reduced their activity levels, and any increase in food supply should result in an increase in feral cats until the population can no longer be sustained, the predator-prey population cycle is as immutable as thermodynamics. Why are they getting fat, if calories in = calories out? Thermodynamics still works, right? So what's your alternative explanation? Maybe it's... not quite that simple?
The most worrying potential answer is that we've created a variety of endocrine disruptors and those have permeated our environments. They get picked up by scavengers like mice and birds from our food and its packaging, they get picked up by cats who eat the mice and birds, etc. Potentially, they could end up even in things like fertilizer or pesticides that get turned into animal feed and fed to lab animals.
This is also potentially backed by other effects, such as the continuing decrease in the age of menarche. Nobody really knows whether it's tied to changing patterns of exercise/weight, or whether those are comorbid effects from exposure to endocrine disruptors/pseudo-hormones. It is definitely decreasing in societies where not everybody is working a desk job and eating 3000 calories a day but people would be exposed to the chemicals endemic to modern society.
Things like bisphenol compounds in receipts that we handle daily worry me greatly. 100 years ago people still had desk jobs, but they weren't handling thermopaper receipts and then throwing them in the trash where rats get them in the dumpster/etc. They weren't getting all their food in plastics and BPA-lined cans (or whatever the new compound they've moved onto since then). Food wasn't packaged in wrappers lined with BPA, they used wax paper. Etc etc.
What does "now" refer to here? I imagine in the case of the human population's growing obesity, the "now" means contemporary western diet. If this weren't lab rats, I guess I would assume you mean street rats eating trash produced from contemporary western diet is leading them to get fat. But these are lab animals and the diet is "controlled".
It wasn't sourced, but if the claim that animals on controlled diets have also gotten fatter over recent decades it would mean that there is something more going on here.
While weight gain is nearly always an issue of excess calories that doesn't explain why it's suddenly a huge and worsening problem seen all over the planet. An explanation for that is certain to be far more nuanced and will likely involve a large host of factors (your "secondary reasons" for example).
At the scale and timeline we're talking about here "People simply eat too much and don’t move enough." is about as useless an explanation as saying "Don't eat so much fatty!" is a solution.
I think you need to look at how the food has changed in this time. For example, here in the UK supermarkets dont want pigs with 1 1/2" of back fat so the farmer get the nutritionist to make up a diet low in vitamin B5 because it helps to shift the fat under the skin. Nett result, you have fatty organs and marbleized meat as the fat remains else where in the body. We can grow chickens in half the time it took to grow them in the 70's, chemicals in the environment remain in the body for years even lifetimes, pollution levels are at their highest in a generation, people dont exercise like they used to.
Try looking out the window in a 1970s city.
A 20-second search for "obesity rates by country" will show that plastics or other chemicals are very unlikely to play more than a minor role. It's so straightforward, yet there are dozens and dozens of comments above this one with not a single one bringing it up.
In the end, CICO is correct. The question then becomes "why do certain countries have a higher CI" to which the answer is "culture", as with anything to do with human behaviour. But most are very unwilling to point at things about certain cultures that are very clearly negative, something that both mainstream Western political leanings have in common. One of them because they believe their culture is inherently Great (Again?) even if it's sending them to an early deathbed, the other because they believe (or at least outwardly adhere to the dogma) that cultures should not be compared in any kind of positive vs negative way unless it's one they see as a political opponent on the national scale.
I know nothing about anything, but could salt be heat-treated to burn off plastic?
I tried to find this, but all I could see was that it would mostly come from bottled water, shellfish, and plastic packaged food.
The articles also doesn't really tell me how to avoid all that plastic. If 40 percent of human diet contains plastic, then there's hope, so which 60 percent do not contain plastic? This would be really helpful to check my own diet for surprises. E.g., I drink only craft beer and make my own ketchup, in order to avoid nano plastics -- but what elephant do I miss?
The problem is really serious, so articles about this should take more care to be helpful.
While it makes the problem larger from an individual perspective, the alternative of simply trying to avoid it in our own foods would mean that our available foods shrink over time as plastics continue to seep in to more and more places.
Which is kind of nonsense unless someone happens to be CEO of Molson Coors or something. It seems obvious that if you want to avoid ingesting plastic, the clearest path to that is to know what foods are less likely to contain plastic in the first place.
Probably the plastic that was in those tomatoes to start with.
I doubt there's a practical way to avoid it, it's probably fairly random depending on where the food is from. Especially if I recall right it's often found in the water supply which you then drink directly or is used to water plants which you then eat.
Here’s an article from Nature that specifically studied plastic uptake by plant roots.[1]
TFA: "Yet despite all the new knowledge about microplastics and the even tinier nanoplastics, smaller than a millimeter, that enter the human body through ingestion or inhalation"
Microplastics are apparently taken as being a mm or larger, and 'nanoplastics' are anything smaller than a mm which is still very large. The ones you are talking about would be very much smaller than those by another 3 orders of decimal magnitude.
> Our results provide evidence in support of submicrometre- and micrometre-sized polystyrene and polymethylmethacrylate particles penetrating the stele of both species using the crack-entry mode at sites of lateral root emergence.
I haven't personally gotten the equipment to do actual measurements yet, but I keep pet rats and they have pretty fragile respiratory systems, and anecdotally when I put together a Corsi Rosenthal Box[0] and stuck it next to their cage their allergies/sneezing pretty much entirely vanished.
I still need to get air quality measuring equipment and more objectively confirm that it's working, but the research I have read suggests that spending ~$100 to put together a DYI box with good MERV13 filters or higher will solidly outperform the majority of commercial consumer-grade air purifiers out there. And subjectively, I do notice a difference in air quality, although that could be a placebo effect.
Regular vacuuming will also help a lot with dust and micro-particles, but that's a lot more work than just plugging in a box fan.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsi%E2%80%93Rosenthal_Box
Those filters are pretty cheap, you can tape them to a Corsi-Rosenthal Box without adding much cost at all. If there's something more complicated going on then maybe that wouldn't be effective, but in general air filtration is just a combination of how much air your filter is moving and what the surface area of the filter is. In theory (I haven't confirmed) tying your own activated filters to a box fan will probably be pretty effective.
A big reason why the Corsi-Rosenthal Box works so well is because there's not a lot of innovation or complexity in how good purifiers work. You just want a lot of air to go through a good filter with a sizeable surface area, so it's hard to compete with a 20 inch fan tied to 4 good filters. But again, take that with a grain of salt, maybe VOC purifiers are doing something more complicated that I'm not aware of.
I will make one last pitch though that if you don't want to spend the hour putting together a full box or researching it, the most primitive filter you can build that will (as far as I can tell, again take my opinions on VOCs with a grain of salt) be decently competitive with commercial filters and will require less time to find the parts for and put together than you'll spend researching commercial purifiers is:
- 1 20 inch box fan (any brand) from any store
- A 20x20 MERV13 filter or equivalent (FPR 10 if you're buying from Home Depot), these will all be located right next to the commercial filters/purifiers in any store that sells them.
- An activated charcoal filter (optional if you care about odor or VOCs, aprox 20x20 but it's likely okay if you go a bit smaller). Will likely also be next to the purifiers/filters in any store.
- Duck tape or string in a pinch if you don't have tape.
Tape them all together (make sure that arrows on the side of the filter point in the same direction as the fan is blowing) and run the fan at speed 2 or 3; don't worry about building a fan shroud or perfectly aligning things.
----
That comes at the cost of:
- Extra noise
- General ugliness
But it will still perform pretty decently well and takes less time to set up than it will take to read the instruction manual for a commercial purifier. The noise from running the fan at full speed is a downside though, so I'm not knocking anyone who wants to go commercial for an out-of-the-box solution -- just saying that if what's putting you off is the time/building requirements, you can do a hacky version of this in 3-5 minutes that will get the job done for an average small apartment, and there's basically no way to mess it up as long as you don't tape the filter on backwards.
Again though, nothing against people who want to just order something, that's a totally reasonable ask. I just don't want people to get scared away thinking this has to be a full-fledged project, it's DIY but it doesn't have to involve any measurements or tools or any particular effort beyond slapping some duck tape around a single fan.
You can't absorb things without absorbant mass. The black plastic sponge has hardly any mass at all, period.
I however do not have a good solution. I've DIY'd my own filter with charcoal pellets, but I've been unable to test it, and I'm somewhat unhappy with the design anyway.
I don't doubt you at all that cheap filters work less well, but at the same time, what are the consumer-grade commercial purifiers that aren't using cheap charcoal filters? I don't think I've ever noticed an in-store purifier that took pellets, but maybe I missed something.
Edit: it does make me curious if with a Corsi-Rosenthal box you could hang a non-enclosed/mesh bag/basket of charcoal pellets under the fan inside of the box and if that might produce better results than attaching charcoal filters to the sides. The obvious problem that springs to mind though is that this would make the design a lot more complicated and annoying to build. Might also result in charcoal dust spread around too, which might defeat the purpose of a purifier in the first place.
Unfortunately it seems like the air filtration market as a whole is incredibly prone to snake-oil claims.
As far as your idea goes, I'm not sure. And I don't have a great idea of how to test something like this. I've seen bags of activated charcoal marketed as something you can leave around for better air (sounds like bs).
Circulation-to-noise ratio is something that pretty much every fan manufacturer cares about; I'm a little bit skeptical that there's an innovation here that wouldn't be applied to consumer-grade fans in general; or that you wouldn't be able to find a good box fan outside of the entry-level Walmart offerings that doesn't offer the same quality for a cheaper price. The "vornado" fans seem to get recommended a lot in this area, but I don't know if they're actually moving more air or just directing it better.
Anecdotally I did look into a few fan options from purifiers that claimed to be silently moving the air, and was pretty disappointed with the specs on what I was seeing. The conclusion I drew was that increasing the size of the unit and the intake area was the best way to allow for reduced fan speed/noise/power-consumption.
But it is completely possible that there's something I missed; again I haven't done my own testing.
(Phenolics such as Bisphenol A - have hormonal effects causing direct cancer risk. And other effects too.)
For the interested https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol
Also note n2, variations of vinyl or pvc plastic makes strong use of bisphemols for flexibility, pvc is being used to replace ageing copper or lead piping across the world, it is also largely unexplored the degree to which there is legislation regarding the sourcing and chemical composition of said water pipes over most of the world (as in, if there is a new international hotel building being built in, let's say brazil, what type of water pipe will the construction company use? You honestly think they would use copper everywhere and pay a 5x premium on it, or just use some random pvc pipe embedded on the walls? And then, if it proves to be that the pvc had bisphemol X on it, how would you even fix it? Rip it all up? We are talking of literal concrete bricks. Or just hide it from the public? )
PVC for water pipes seems to be a relatively US-only thing as far as I can tell. I don't think it's legal in the EU, for example; plastic piping here is PE-HD.
2. Sell baby food with "probiotic bacteria guarding babies internally against plastic pollution".
3. Profit.
>Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering and College of Natural Sciences used a machine learning model to generate novel mutations to a natural enzyme called PETase that allows bacteria to degrade PET plastics. The model predicts which mutations in these enzymes would accomplish the goal of quickly depolymerizing post-consumer waste plastic at low temperatures.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31427011
Maybe one of the human gut bacteria could be modified to also produce this enzyme? Though presumably it would be outcompeted by the natural variant (assuming dissolving plastic confers it no advantage).
Also, I have to wonder if the monomers are more harmful than the plastic? Being smaller particles they might perhaps end up in the bloodstream?
Fantastic, now I can not only eat the food, but also the packaging!
Can we get one for cellulose too? Then we can eat pizza while it's still in the box.
For example, the linked article specifically targets polyethylene terephthalate which they say is a huge target because it accounts for 12% of all plastic waste.
People with PFAS in their blood tend to be overweight or underweight. The body eliminates PFAS very ver slowly. There was a recent study that showed that replacing a person's blood plasma was an effective way to remove PFAS. Keeping it out of the blood seems to be much harder.
If water is used during the processing of the salts it could be that as well.
In other words, the amount of "glass" entering your body because you drank a beer is probably irrelevant compared to e.g. Sahara dust (if you're in Europe) in the air around you.
I was surprised about the honey. Geezz.
Anyways, i've got about 35 fruit trees, and 90 berry bushes in the backyard and I plan to eat primarily from that as soon as they generate enough food..
do the fruit contain plastic?
I'm pretty sure I don't. I'm not a subscriber (I can't read the article), but I take it that these plastics are so small we can't see them...
How do I even test this claim? Do I get my microscope and look at salt? Cos I have.. and I don't see fibres or anything.
Plastic goods enable the world we live in. For example, it would be interesting to see a mouse, and keyboard, and monitor housing made out of bronze, or wood, or cast iron, but I bet they would be worse in pretty much every other way — heavier, harder to shape, and very expensive not only because of the cost of materials, but because they'd take so much more work to make.
When I look around at all the plastic stuff around me, I think that some of it is unnecessary, but much of it isn't. Some of the necessary stuff could be made out of other materials, but much of it couldn't. At least not very well, and not at a price many people could afford.
Better for us if we can figure out a way to effectively recycle plastic, and capture microplastic in the wild.
#2 on the list is everybody else. Once you start looking at what is made out of plastics you'll realise the modern world is completely dependant on it. The use of plastics on food and medical devices dramatically reduces bacterial contaminantes saving millions of people a year from sickness. It's used on structural components of all kinds of device to reduce weight, thereby decreasing energy usage. It is a very difficult problem to solve.
However I think it should be banned from any and all contact with foodstuffs.
Now me, age 42, has eaten an untold amount of everyone else's garbage and can now literally no longer avoid eating the chewed-up-and-spit-out refuse of our bad choices that now cannot be reversed.
I'd more interested in hearing what microdosing xenestrogens on a large scale does to our collective psychology. I think this is an extremely important but understudied effect. Much like birth control, which is known to influence decision making and behavior, and probably affects collective behaviors like vote outcomes and such.
I have a haunch that a number of modern western ills are influenced by or rooted in the psychological influence of BC hormones. We know [0] that fertile women have different preferences in men, different risk tolerance, and different social behavior (increased mate seeking)...imagine what dosing tens of millions of women does to a country's politics? Now imagine dosing the entire population with chemicals that mimic estrogen...
0. https://magazine.tcu.edu/fall-2020/hormonal-birth-control-br...
Moreover, it is precisely because transgenderism is primarily a cultural (rather than biological) phenomenon, that rates between two otherwise identical populations are going to differ based on the culture's attitude toward transgenderism and the likelihood that a doctor is to diagnose someone with gender dysphoria.
That latter point is severely understudied because transgenderism is one of the wests many recent sacred cows which are beyond criticism. But overdiagnosis should be a much greater concern than it is. Especially since puberty blockers and hormones given to adolescent boys will undoubtedly exacerbate any feelings of dysphoria and I am astounded that no one is talking about the reinforcing effects of these "treatments".
But I digress. Point being comparing rates of transgenderism between first and third worlds is like comparing apples to oranges because transgenderism is a cultural phenomenon.
There's a huge amount of "forced feminization" pornography out there now, accessible by children at a very young age. As well as "lesbian" pornography designed for the male gaze. It's no wonder some males end up feeling they should be like the characters in the pornography they consume.
It's controversial to say this these days, but old school transwomen such as Anne Lawrence were very open about the sexually-charged nature of their dysphoria. (And she published extensively on this topic.)
On top of that, there are many trans-encouraging echo chambers in the form of online forums, subreddits, and Twitter - ready to help anyone even vaguely curious to "crack their egg", as they say.
Maybe environmental estrogens play some part in this rise, but I suspect it would only be a small piece of the larger puzzle.
We've gone too far with all of this acceptance stuff, because these modern acceptance movements brush off any criticism, however logical or valid, with accusations of bigotry. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then puberty blockers, affirmation treatment, and SRS are premium quality cement.
Edit: hilariously ironic that the wikipedia page for autogynophilia has been deleted from the english wiki, though there is a talk page discussing its restoration[0]...how uncomfortably dystopian. I can only hope that average people are catching onto the games played to justify this irrationality.
I've been noticing some funny looks at my mask wearing.
I usually walk with my mask on. I have done this way before Covid.
I used to wear it for allergies. My allergies just felt better when I wore a mask.
Tonight I could smell burn't tires on my walk. A older guy happened to be doing a burn out in his Tesla. Yea--I know, not the typical burnout guy. A few Japanese beers might have something to do with the stunt.
I left, and thought about why I like to wear a mask. We have so much pollution in the air, it just seems prudent? I'm not even that worried about Covid right now.
(I do believe we consume way to much plastic, and other chemicals (Dawn Dish soap has 13 chemicals. Why? It cleans well. I am not a great dishwasher though.)
So if you see a "jerk" wearing a mask on Sir Francis Drake look away. I know it bothers some folks.
Pathological and perverse, perhaps. But also totally cool and in agreement with the experts.
It's a window into our psychology. Anthropologists of the future will reap much research papers.
Um... "perverse"?
I have a lot less patience for these takes than I used to because at least early on in the pandemic people could convincingly claim that wearing a mask was "cool". There was at least truth to the idea that you would be shamed for not wearing a mask. But that's not the situation anymore -- GP wrote a comment about how they're getting a lot of weird looks in public for wearing a mask to help with pollution. If the response to that is, "what's up with this mask fad?", then I'm not sure you understand how fads or popularity work.
Anecdotally, even in a majority Democrat area the majority of people I see in just about every single social situation are not wearing masks, even in enclosed environments and at offices. The majority of retail workers I see don't wear masks. There are maybe 3-6 people total that I've seen in my entire church that wear a mask. And it's not exclusive to Republicans, most Democrats I know are not wearing masks -- to the point where people are far more likely to give funny looks or scowl at others for having one on.
As far as I can tell people wearing masks in public are pretty squarely the minority at this point, but the rhetoric against masking never really got updated since the early pandemic so people are still pretending like if they go to an average grocery store without a mask everyone there will judge them over it.
GP wears a mask to help with allergies and reduce road pollution -- this is pretty reasonable and would have been reasonable pre-pandemic. I don't understand why anyone would care about someone else making that decision in the first place, let alone why they would care so much that they'd call GP a pervert over it. :)
Ok. Well thanks for removing all doubt here at least.
Really? You genuinely can't think of anything in the entire history of humanity more perverse that someone could do than wear a mask? Have you spent much time on the Internet? And historically -- I mean, I'm just throwing out one idea off the top of my head, but how about public executions in the Colosseum for entertainment purposes?
This is pretty silly. :)
Even if you do somehow think that mask-wearers are all perversely deriving some pleasure from suffocating themselves and that they're walking around unable to breathe, there's still no way you genuinely believe that auto-erotic asphyxiation is the most perverse thing that society has ever invented.
Well, then I would recommend you to look more around you, very few to no animals intake air directly through their trachea, we evolved noses to both filter the small particulate with nose hairs, change the temperature of the air and later evolved the use of smell
So yeah, next time you go out I would recommend you to carefully review the faces of the beings you see around you and realize the existence and plurality of noses and "noseholes", and yes, noses themselves also inhibit oxygen flow vs "open trachea holes"
Lastly, you are welcome to give yourself a tracheotomy if you'd like too, just be careful, or maybe not
The Screaming Loonie doesn't waste any time but immediately dives into some world-class conspiracy theory - in this case, "Almost all the world's doctors, medical researchers and public health officials are in a century-long conspiracy to present a false theory, that masks help prevent infectious respiratory diseases."
I used to find this sad, but now the Screaming Loonies have killed a lot of people by hampering our response to COVID, and it's not sad or funny any more, it's enraging.
If we can jail people who call in prank bomb threats, we can should certainly jail the gloating and arrogant medical liars who have caused such carnage.
In a just world, medical liars would be given the same sort of sentence that we give today to
"While Devgon was wondering what was wrong, he started reading about the increasingly prominent theory that toxins in pesticides and plastics are throwing off men’s endocrine systems—and he started to wonder about his own testosterone levels."
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31435864