Plastic might be making us obese
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Sugar is in everything (like plastic, I suppose). Look at the ingredients of what you buy and you'll be surprised where it turns up. Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky, even bog standard bread. It seems like sugar is the elephant in the room that the mainstream doesn't want to talk about.
Yes, we definitely have too much sugar in everything, but as an amateur baker I will defend sugar in bread. Sure, you don't need it in a baguette or a rustic boule, but it is indispensable for a nice, soft sandwich loaf. It's not there to make the bread sweeter. It makes the bread softer, it boosts the yeast for a nicer rise, and it keeps it from going stale as quickly.
Granted, I don't use a ton of it. My favorite sandwich bread recipe[0] is 8g of sugar to 500g flour, and with my long loaf pan I typically get 20-25 slices, so maximum 400mg a slice. Quite good compared to my favorite supermarket bread at 2g a slice.
Sure, "bog standard" bread could have less sugar, but some sugar is essential for this style of bread.
[0] https://www.nigella.com/recipes/old-fashioned-sandwich-loaf, omitting the butter and oil and using cultured buttermilk instead of spoiled milk or sour cream. I say "omitting the butter", but I do still butter the loaf pan. I just don't include any in the dough itself.
I fully agree. As a German I do want to point out that American style sandwich bread is a very specific style. Sugar goes into it much as it does into challah dough or brioche - but all these stradle the cake-bread boundary for me.
If you want sugar in your bread, you gotta suffer through the process of making pumpernickel like everyone else, gosh darn it! /j
This guy experiments with sugar levels and how it affects yeast.
Turns out the water absorbing properties of sugar also has a large effect in the other direction, so maybe it doesn't really help the yeast
But more importantly, in the times before the internet, you just couldn't reason like that. If your mother and grandmother and great-grandmother all start bread by dissolving yeast and a small amount of sugar in some water... well, you do it too. The cookbooks sometimes told you this if it wasn't too terribly old (old cookbooks expect you to know a lot, and directions get sparse).
There's a difference between the kind of bread you're making, and Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread is just an oversized marshmallow.
But that's packed with fat calories as well and fat has a much higher energy density as carbohydrates. As an European I'm very very astonished over the size of the food portions in fast food restaurants in the US. If this portion size is the same on the diner table than it's not only sugar but a lot of non necessary calories. I don't think it's entirely caused by sugar but by a big surplus of calories in day to day food (combined with too little physical activity)
Very few people will just eat a spoon of white sugar. Very few people will eat a stick of butter.
But almost everyone can binge on a box of cookies, where the main ingredients are butter and sugar (and flour I suppose.)
Anecdote: I had two long meetings at work last week, that crossed over the lunch hour, so they brought in lunch. Each was from a "fast casual" or "fast food" sandwich shop. There was like 1/2 inch slab of processed meat on each sandwich. I would typically put one thin slice of the same meat on a sandwich that I make for the lunch that I bring to work. I discreetly removed most of the meat and threw it away. I know some people who will take a delivered meal like that, cut it in half, and save the second half for the next day.
Another anecdote: There was an article about a town in Texas that was losing its last restaurant, and the author wondered how people would eat.
Of course to maintain a higher body weight, you need to eat more.
And not just in the country I live in, it's basically everywhere in grocery stores.
So sugar is not the only culprit.
So that is one difference.
But let's look at the other differences between W. Europe (this is the Europe I am thinking of at least).
1.There are ZERO local national restaurant chains in this country. Zero Chipotles, zero In-n-outs. The only national food chains are McDonald's and Burger King.
2. There are zero drive-thru restaurants. Not even starbucks. So food is not as easy to get.
3. There are fewer restaurants in general.
4. When you do go out to a restaurant the portions are smaller. I haven't weighed two things, but my best estimate is about 1/3 less. For instance, where I live, the local burrito "chain" of two locations, the burritos are about one-third smaller while the portion of chips that come with it is 60-70% smaller.
5. The food here costs more when going to a restaurant. There is no way to get a full meal for less than $10. A Mcdonald's combo meal is $15-$19. So food costs twice as much. Mcdonald's portions are not way smaller than the US, but every other restaurant's are. Because a meal is 50-100% more expensive and you get smaller portions, food is actually 3x the cost. This, obviously, has the effect of people eating less.
6. A greater percentage of people live and work in cities in Europe than the States [citation needed; would love to know the actual number]. So they probably burning 100-200 more calories a day because of this.
7. There are also zero billboards for any industry. So way less food advertising to go along with that.
These are the differences I think that make the biggest difference. There is simply less of an emphasis on food too.
But portion size, which is culture, and amount of physical activity are what I personally believe make the biggest difference.
I mentioned in another comment above that circa 2003-ish the NYT Sunday mag ran an opinion piece that proposed that gov subsidies of corn were contributing to the obesity crisis. Lower corn prices === lower price for HFCS === more HFCS in more products === more products at lower prices === more sweetener calories being consumed.
Our gut microbes aren't evolved for this type of diet.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
We know fructose is a problem. We know bisphenols and phthalates (endocrine disruptors found in plastics) are problems as well.
It's both.
If your blood sugar is too high the body may produce an emergency response to keep blood sugar down and it may overshoot which makes you hungry much sooner.
It depends on genetics and the amount and type of PUFA consumed. The Fatty Acid Destaurase genes will dictate how bad short chain PUFA's (Seed oil's) are for a person. These people should stick to fatty fish.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00260...
Omega 6 PUFAs are more inflammatory than long chain PUFA's.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7990530/
It just so happens that most seed oils contain tremendous amounts of Short Chain Omega 6 fatty acids.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI
Compare this to making butter - shake up some cream for a little bit to separate out the buttermilk.
The average American consumes around 125g of sugar per day [1, 2]. This is about 500 kcals. Multiple times that would mean most of your daily calories are coming from sugar, unless you are very physically active.
[1] https://www.sugar.org/diet/intake/
[2] https://www.thediabetescouncil.com/45-alarming-statistics-on...
I probably reliably have 2x the average for simple sugars
> with a healthy metabolism.
how are you measuring that you have 'healthy metabolism'.
There is Miracle Whip but that is a bit of a reach to call mayonnaise.
Years ago I dug through every bread in the aisle to find the one with the least amount of sugar. I went home with a weird-looking sourdough loaf, and I've been hooked ever since.
In CA, most grocery stores carry it, because it's a local style. In MA, I have to go to Trader Joes to get it at a good price.
Sugar is pretty bad for you, though.
Look at the chart: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db288.pdf The chart is simply striking. We should all be investigating what are the Asians doing right that all of us should learn from.
Considering that Japanese use an absolutely terrifying amount of plastic for food packaging and aren't landwhales, I'd say the theory from TFA's headline is bunk.
Less scientific, but a couple years ago I decided to transition to a more meat-lite diet and ended up turning to Asian cookbooks to make that happen. Veg entrees are just a novelty to western cuisines and everyone is stunlocked on meat substitutes instead of just doing well with the stuff that grows right out of the ground.
[1] https://www.farmanddairy.com/top-stories/a-brief-history-of-...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/28/ameri...
That is, fed subsidies for corn ultimately made high fructose corn syrup dirt cheap. That price point. made it more appealing to add sweetness to more food products. Or made sweet products (e.g., soda) cheaper.
Lower prices...higher consumption... Hello obesity as a cultural norm.
Asians have as much or more heart disease and type 2 diabetes as any other race which is the outcome that actually matters.
It seems to be a broader problem in medicine. A lot of ranges and typical levels on blood tests or other quantitative tests are calibrated to native populations. With more immigration and genetic mixing the levels don't make a lot of sense.
Does it really make sense that Western diets basically just ignore a whole kingdom of foods? Plants, Animals, Fungi. Those are the three. Why do we eat so few of the latter?
Not that this detracts from the rest of your point at all, but yogurt is fermented by bacteria. There are milk drinks that are fermented by SCOBY though, like kefir.
1- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-lab-rats-are-...
There was a 2010 study that did suggest lab animals were fatter than previous years. However, it was not statistically significant for rats. Only mice. It did not specify a causal factor.
The OP article does make this claim, though it does not cite a source. The only source for this claim that exists is the study I referenced, which you can read here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081766/#!po=35...
But this nonetheless bolsters your larger point, which is that we need to better appreciate how diseases manifest and evolve across different populations, with an eye toward shared but less obvious (i.e. less superficial) similarities and pathways. And studies--or at least their conclusions--which fail to do so should receive greater scrutiny than they currently do.
[1] Notably, East Asians tend to be more prone to intra-abdominal (visceral) fat, which more strongly correlates with type-2 diabetes than BMI. Plenty more East Asians are walking around with diagnosed metabolic syndrome than you would guess simply by how they look. So fat might still be directly involved, just not the obvious, subcutaneous fat which people of Caucasian and African ancestry put on faster and more evenly distributed across the body than some other populations.
Imagine if you looked only to food to explain why the Dutch are taller than the Vietnamese. At best you'd get a small part of the answer.
Isn't Dutch height supposed be due to natural selection (taller men have more children, who are in turn tall), better nutrition (such as more high-quality dairy/cheese), and better sleep (promoting growth)?
Nutrition may be an important part of the equation.
(in other words: "it's not the diet dummy", just like it's not the plastic)
I think it takes living in Europe and also living in rural America to really understand just how different we are across the Atlantic, so broad demographic differences like this aren't something we can neatly attribute to one cause, nor should we aim to.
Genetics would exactly fail this test.
When someone tells you otherwise, it’s a good sign they don’t understand statistics. (Scientists commonly don’t understand statistics, since it’d be harder to get papers published if they did.)
Strictly speaking it’s never true, because the environment could always contain a cure for your genetic disorder and your environment just happens to not have contained one so far in your life.
My dad decided to raise chickens back in the 80's. The broiler hens grew so fast that they broke their legs, and this was when fed on our kitchen waste (i.e. no growth hormones).
I do wonder how much of this spills over into human obesity; if everything you eat comes from a plant or animal which is hyperoptimizing for unhealthy growth rates, what does that do to the human body?
And if you are looking for a biological mechanism, it might be related to epigenetics. Not saying it is so, but am saying that a biological link is not a-priori impossible.
Very unlikely as afaik everything non parasitic gets broken down by our saliva and stomach acids.
Sorry can't find a citation right now.
However, that doesn't disprove the hypothesis that DNA can survive the digestive tract. If this [1] is to be believed, it very much does so. The question is, can epigenetic information / ie folds, survive?
[1] https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/does-d...
https://extension.msstate.edu/publications/publications/chic...
"...tributyltin or TBT, a chemical used in wood preservatives, among other things. In experiments exposing mice to low and supposedly safe levels of TBT, Blumberg and his colleagues found significantly increased fat accumulation in the next three generations."
"Importantly, recent research demonstrates that obesogens act to harm individuals in ways that traditional tests of chemical toxicity can’t detect. In particular, consequences of chemical exposure may not appear during the lifetime of an exposed organism but can be passed down through so-called epigenetic mechanisms to offspring even several generations away. A typical example is tributyltin or TBT, a chemical used in wood preservatives, among other things. In experiments exposing mice to low and supposedly safe levels of TBT, Blumberg and his colleagues found significantly increased fat accumulation in the next three generations."
I'm not well versed in the domain to say one thing or another so I will wait to form a concrete opinion before I hear from an expert in the field. I am very curious though like you, if there's a relation between the two.
I haven't been taking it that long, but so far it's amazing -- I eat a balanced meal with an approriate amount of calories in it, and then I am full, and don't want to eat any more. Sometimes I snack and eat a biscuit, but then I don't feel any need to eat a second biscuit.
I'm not saying this is a long-term solution for me, or people in general, but what it has shown me is some people (me included) have managed to mess up their digestive systems badly enough it is incredibly hard to eat healthily -- I previously lost 8 stone (50 kg), but I was hungry every minute of every day, no matter what I tried. Once I had a bad patch I ended up putting all the weight back on.
GLP-1 agonists are truly an amazing class of drugs. It's absolutely absurd that they're generally not covered by insurance for non-diabetics, even when they yield such obvious benefits for obese people.
However, more and more at target populations i.e. obesity + diabetes/obesity related secondary condition or even at risk for diabetes i.e. ethnicity based.
Are being offered these treatments.
It really will be a new age for obese patients.
The first and exercise tactic is a lost battle, ideally we'd be bringing up a generation that can manage their weight but we've failed at that. This is a really good option.
Metformin is similarly excellent drug even in absence of diabetes.
I'd heard a bit about the testosterone, i.e. that you don't get the testosterone rise associated with successful management for diabetes. And perhaps Metformin short circuits that. Also that it might correlate with the life expectancy improvement and it does make sense since Metformin is also used for PCOS with wide ranging benefits not limited to insulin resistance but actually reducing androgenic effects of the condition.
Do you think you'll continue with Metformin? I've genuinely was close to starting on it some years back (despite having no (pre) diabetes.).
Is liraglutide doing that directly, or is it mediated by people eating less sugar?
https://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...
Edited to add: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/fo/d0fo0...
Obviously it’s the whole “is your blue my blue?” conundrum, but at least some of us that aren’t overweight could also eat all day too. Dieting for anyone is hard. It seems like once you go below what your body is used to you’re going for be super hungry.
As far as medical solutions go, something like naltrexone is probably a better fit for discouraging unhealthy food/beverage selection, especially (but not necessarily) when paired with bupropion. The combo dramatically blunts the positive neurochemical effects of eating artificially sweet/salty/fat foods + drinking alcohol (and nearly eliminates the perceptible benefits of alcohol as well - it's a very surreal experience).
$1000 for 3 pens.
The authors take the view that obesogens account for 100% or nearly 100% of the rise in obesity, which is definitely a controversial view. However, they do an awesome job giving an overview of the arguments for obesogens.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...
> People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. This seems closely related to observations like the French Paradox — the French eat a lot of fatty cheese and butter, so why aren’t they fatter and sicker?
Lard doesn’t make you fat. If anything it fills you up so you eat less and gain less weight. A lot more of the prior generations were also laborers which this acknowledges but really underplays.
The section on why hunter gatherers aren’t obese is answered by the fact that they are hunting and gathering.
Similarly, look at their article on obesity in different professions - it does not align with who does the most physical labor. Rather, certain professions with high levels of exposure to endocrine disruptions are the most obese on average.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/603894/burn-by-herm...
Basically measurements of calorie intake and burn rate indicate, that physical activity doesn't appreciably speed up metabolism.
You still should exercise to avoid chronic diseases, but you can't outrun a bad diet.
However, it is not really practical for most people to use exercises to burn calories. Rather diets are more important and more effective.
I cannot find their article on professions. I’d be very skeptical. In general being poor in America means a terrible diet is likely so that’s a huge part of the equation. It seems very unlikely that exposure to endocrine disrupters varies enough to explain the differences. People in poverty will have a huge variance in exposure but the obesity rates are high across the board.
Especially if you see something like… idk, factory workers being called high exposure having high obesity but lower obesity than something like a dmv clerk that’s totally sedentary but at worst median level exposure.
Some groups will get HUGELY more exposure to some chemicals. I’m not convinced at all they represent the fattest groups. Which is a strong counterpoint if one is trying to claim this is the strongest effect.
Also fwiw, the idea that healthcare support workers are supposed to represent the largest exposure to PFAS because they're handling garments is ridiculous. I doubt healthcare support workers are even in the top 10% of actual exposure levels.
A google search indicates that: a) a pound of honey (~1500 calories) would account for a little over half of a man's daily required calories (Google says 2500, but presumably an active hunter-gatherer required more), and b) the average (wild) beehive creates ~50 pounds of honey per year.
For a single man to satisfy half of his caloric intake with honey, he'd have to consume ~7.3 beehives per year. A tribe of 100 would consume the production of ~700 wild beehives each year!
Because the issue is - in fact - the sugar, not the fat (https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/theres-no-sugar-coating-...).
This is obvious to anyone who used to be more active, and gained weight after they started sitting at a desk all day for work.
It compares in excessive detail some old and frankly hard to follow tables to the present day guideline of 2,500 calories and makes NO EFFORT to validate whether or not that's realistic.
It also tries to use pictures from baseball game showing thin people in the front row as evidence of... something. This is still what you see today. Rich people are significantly thinner on average in america. And even in obese heavy areas, you don't see a lot of obese people walking around. Because... they're not walking.
Here's an article citing an american average of 3,600 calories consumed per day, up a whopping 24% since 1961.
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-calorie-intake-last...
Here's another article citing CDC data suggesting a 22% rise in caloric consumption leading into the year 2000.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yuka-food-cosmetic-scanner/id1...
And a lot of that is portion size and "added eating" between meals. I'd love to work out just how many calories the various soda companies ship a year.
Conversely, an obese person, or particularly a formerly obese person that has recently dieted, has pretty extreme cravings and withdrawal symptoms, even if they're eating a complete and healthy diet. Something is going wrong with the complicated dance of insulin, ghrelin, leptin, and various others. Something is driving obese people to eat enormous amounts of food and still feel hungry. Poor sleep, chemical exposure, change in nutrient content of easily available foods, are all potential culprits. Something far more interesting is going on than "they're eating more calories".
It feels like modern, Western, society is like living in a big Petri dish. It’s one big experiment in which we’re swimming in chemicals that we later find out interact with us and each other in negative ways. We should have reigned in these kinds of “innovations” decades ago. Americans are now urinating carcinogenic pesticides, rainwater even in most remote regions in the would is undrinkable [0], and we’ve had strong evidence for a while that some of the constituent components of commonly used plastics disrupt biological processes in humans and other animals.
In 50-100 years people will be looking back in horror at the kinds of self-inflicted suffering we’ve produced. And for what? Money? Convenience?
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a40859859/rainwater...
Obesity is, for at least the most part, plainly not caused by too many/wrong pesticides on fruit and vegetables. It is caused by (far) too many things that are not fruits and vegetables.
And it’s not like everyone is obese.
There’s a large proportion of people who eat healthily, avoid processed food, keep their portion sizes regular and refrain from too much alcohol.
Unsurprisingly these people are in good shape despite probably being in close proximity to the plastics/chemicals described in the article.
This tends to confirm my own anecdata, which is that I'm not surrounded by overfat people after all. I do see morbid cases from time to time and in certain population centers. A mostly healthy population with a small number of extremely overfat cases is going to appear to have bad BMI stats on the whole.
To answer the question of "why are people obese" with "not eating enough fruits and vegetables" completely ignores that all the research that demonstrates that it's simply not true.
Why do obese people rapidly gain weight after losing it, even with diets that wouldn't cause normal weight people to gain any weight? Why do obese people seem to be simply more hungry than normal weight people.
There are myriad questions that your thesis doesn't and can't answer. It would also be trivial to prove this thesis true, yet obesity still tends to confound scientists, especially with childhood obesity, which did not even exist three generations ago.
Alternatively: too many plastic-packaged things; the plastic is not what's wrong with them.
Edit: still talking about the USA here.
Btw, I'm not blaming the poor, being poor is hard. I grew up under the poverty line. Overcoming poverty is a huge task and more should be done.
In extremis, if you only eat what you can grow, rear, and trade for, then you're not eating breakfast ~cereal~ sugar, ready meals, crisps, etc.
It's a bit tangential, but this is similar to how such a lifestyle isn't even cheaper - it's not the only shopping those people can afford - most of my meals probably cost less, because I take an interest in cooking and eating (i.e. I'm buying vegetables not ready meals) but that doesn't mean there's always (or even that often really, especially amortised over all uses) an out-of-reach expensive ingredient.
Or look at restaurant/fast food-- the healthier options are the 'premium' options. But if you've got a few buck and want to feed a whole family, a bunch of burgers is still reasonably priced for someone low income
Every single other thing in our body is complex and has chains and chains of reactions and impacts. Why is obesity the single one where the answer is “obvious”?
Anyway I agree that we should change how we design our cities, etc to deal with our sedentary lifestyle.
American cities are designed horribly. We are a nation of car dependency.
That and our move to sedentary, thinking jobs. Or prolonging the day with evening entertainment, so eating later. And services that make the worst food arrive on your doorstep in 30 minutes.
There are so many things above "plastics" we should blame first. But I'm sure blaming someone else is far more appetising than looking at our own lack of self control.
I am no expert in the area, just wondering what the hell is going on.
But blaming "plastic" is ridiculously general; it's not very far from blaming "matter", "energy", or "technology". To take one example, there's a fairly plausible causal link between halogenated flame retardants in polyurethane foam for furniture and feline hyperthyroidism. Polyurethane is a plastic (WP: "Polyurethane is a commodity plastic."), or, better, a large family of plastics, but even if the link turns out to be real and strong, it would not be very accurate to say "Plastic causes feline hyperthyroidism."
As for "incredibly strange", since most people have no idea what is causing the obesity pandemic despite many researchers looking, anyone who does figure it out will unavoidably have an incredibly strange idea. There's nothing wrong with an idea being incredibly strange; in this case it's a necessary precondition to being correct!
Still, as I said, I suspect it's not a plastic, but one or more food additives. There have been promising preliminary results from fecal transplants for obesity treatment that suggest that the intestinal microbiome is a significant factor (see de Groot, Frissen, de Clerq, and Nieuwdorp 2017). So my attention is particularly drawn to things that affect the intestinal microbiome. Unfortunately, everything you eat affects it.
Some of my own incredibly strange ideas, which probably are not correct, are:
· Titanium dioxide nanoparticles: these are commonly used as a white food coloring (E171), and there's some evidence they migrate to the pancreas and stay there, where conceivably they cause damage in ways that larger titanium dioxide particles do not.
· Propionate salts: these are commonly used as fungicides, for example, in bread and on peaches. Many bacteria produce them as a fungicide, including human gut commensals, but it wouldn't be surprising if adding them in effective quantities changed the ecological equilibrium in the intestinal microbiome. These are GRAS (E280, E281, E282, E283) and an experiment apparently showed behavioral difference in children fed calcium propionate (Dengate and Rubin 2002). (Many propionate esters are also used as artificial flavorings, but in much smaller quantities, and I don't think those flavorings are effective fungicides.)
· Xanthan gum (E415), a slime produced by the broccoli black rot bacterium, commonly used as an emulsifier or thickener in salad dressings, egg substitutes, and oil-well drilling mud. Representing a significant source of energy that most gut commensal bacteria cannot digest, it has been shown to produce changes in the human intestinal microbiome.
· Widely used artificial sweeteners of various kinds (E950, E951, E954, E955); there have been studies suggesting that, although these do not provide a significant number of calories, they may still provoke significant changes in the human intestinal microbiome. This might also be true of things like steviol (E960) or cyclamate (E952) but those clearly aren't in wide enough use to cause the obesity pandemic by themselves.
· High-fructose corn syrup has been suggested by many people, but in my view it is an unlikely candidate, because sucrase turns sucrose into high-fructose corn syrup in the human small intestine.
· Livestock is commonly dosed with significant amounts of hormones and antibiotics in order to promote rapid weight gain, because meat is sold by weight. Some of these hormones and antibiotics are present in the resulting meat. It wouldn't be very surprising if, under some circumstances, they also produced weight gain in the humans who eat it. (But, as I said above, people on fad carnivore diets tend to lose weight.)
But most likely it'll be something nobody has even suspected previously.
Perhaps those drawn to so-called "weirdo diets" are also those more likely to maintain their weight loss.
Literally not a single coherent explanation of how plastics might actually cause obesity, and a bunch of people going on about sugar and hormones.
I don't think the onus for that is on the commentariat here. Rather it's on the Washington Post article to bridge these studies of mouse adipose tissue to human health outcomes. It doesn't do that very well, so you're going to see some decrying of potential alarmism and alternative explanations.
> The problem of obesity isn't confined to just humans. A new study finds increased rates of obesity in mammals ranging from feral rats and mice to domestic pets and laboratory primates.
As far as laboratory animals under strict food controls, that’s a bit harder to explain, but maybe it’s a breeding/genetics thing? I dunno, some kind of sinister hidden chemical/obesegen/hormone disruptor just strikes me as a bit far-fetched.
We have never been more seditary, and sugar has never been more a part of our diet.
When my mother moved in and we started going on daily walks, she lost a pound a week for one year. When she injured her foot and stopped, with no diet change throughout the entire time, she gained it all back in a couple months.
I would be surprised if people gained weight with no diet change and introduced mostly standing or walking throughout the day into their life.
The reality is that the body is a finely tuned bio mechanical system with feedback loops that are capable of regulating your resting metabolic rate in order to target weight gain, loss, or stasis. The question is why are so many people’s regulation loops so out of whack?
There are essentially zero studies which show subjects on a controlled diet under observation having more than a +/-5% different in metabolic efficiency. The burden of proof is, frankly, on those who are looking for anything except for overconsumption as the cause.
The human body was meant for fasting longer than our culture does and in experiencing occasional hunger.
Since obesity causes millions of deaths annually, solving this warrants a covid-scale response. It should therefore be easy enough to direct a few billion dollars of funding into hundreds of avenues of research to find which those handful of pollutants are, what the main sources of them are, how to remove them, and how the effects of damage already done might be reversed.
I imagine that with a covid-scale response, we could guarantee that nothing new would contain any of the offending chemicals within a year, and perhaps within 5 years we could have replaced every piece of tupperware/insulation foam/whatever already manufactured goods contain it.
If we are to believe this, it would mean that "plastic" is making our bodies so much more efficient that there's extra energy that's being stored as fat.
I like to keep my weight exactly at 155# (as a 5'10 59 year old man).
Once a year, I "bulk" and go up to 160 while doing more strenuous weight training. The math always works exactly -- for every 3000 extra k/cal I eat, I go up a pound. When it's time to "cut" back to 155#, for every 3000 k/cal deficit I drop a pound.
15 years ago, I got fat. I stopped paying attention to what I was eating. Got my weight up to 205#. I lost it by strictly counting calories. The math worked perfectly. I went to 1200 k/cal and lost 2 pounds a week. Exactly. Every week.
Eating no more calories than your body needs works for everyone. You cannot create matter out of thin air, no matter what fat people will tell you.
The Obese and Overweight cost society greatly. The fact that they're consuming more than they need, use more fuel to move around, and get sick and require more medical care costs us trillions. It's time they stopped pointing their fingers at "plastics" and started obeying the laws of thermodynamics.
Why would you be so confident when we know for a fact that hormone imbalances can absolutely impact our metabolism. Including signaling to your body to produce and store more fat than it normally would. Cortisol the hormone produced in stress responses is shown to do exactly that. Using yourself as an anecdote isn't useful in anyway.
To put it in clearer terms, you could take two people of identical sex, height and weight and feed them the exact same diet with the exact same exercise routine and still have one pack on more body fat due to hormonal issues impacting how they metabolize food. Telling the person who's gaining fat to just eat less isn't helpful or healthy. They need to address the condition causing the additional body fat accumulation and it's not excess calories.
To be perfectly clear, I'm not suggesting that this is the case with microplastics. I don't think we have the research to determine that yet. I'm merely disputing the inane "just eat less bro" nonsense that tends to crop up in these threads.
> If we are to believe this, it would mean that "plastic" is making our bodies so much more efficient that there's extra energy that's being stored as fat.
I think it's likely the opposite, e.g. there's something (not necessarily plastic) throwing off hormones, so the body ends up storing more of the calories as fat than it would if it was healthy. It's not at all clear (to me, at least) that a healthy human body would continue to store fat indefinitely, regardless of how many calories were being consumed.
So something sold as "heart healthy" is loaded with obesogens and will contribute to obesity.
You'd think the vast amounts of scientific papers would be conclusive, but they're constantly contradicting each other or people uncover ulterior motives, like having shares in a questionable weight loss company.
In some of these cases, the source material uses inappropriate sample sizes or has other similar problems, or references other studies that had problems like this.
I bet if you type "X is the reason for obesity," you will find information for any noun.
Here's a partial list of topics off the top of my head from the best of my ability that I believe have been blasted as the definitive one-and-only "root cause" of obesity: [Sugar, Aspartame, Plastic, Butter, Margarine, Carbs, Milk, Bread, Fruit, Nuts, Phones, The Internet, TV, Video Games, Your job in general, Canned Products, Gluten, Pollution, Global Warming, Cars, Cheese, Alcohol, No Exercise, Cardio-only exercise, Blue Light (from electronics in general)]
We eat 5 times as much meat on average as people did 100 years go. Animal based products are a major source of fat. People used to eat more fruits and vegetables. The fat type has shifted with more fat (which has higher calorie per gram amounts than carbs or protein) and fat moving from polyunsaturated fats to saturated fats (which causes lots of medical problems).
In there is the growth hormone. Kids "mature" physically at younger ages now than they used to. Kids to stop stop dairy or a lot of mean may physically mature at the older slower pace.
Eating less fruits, vegetables, and whole grains means less fiber. Most people (in the US anyway) are deficient in fiber. Fiber traps certain fats and cholesterols so they aren't absorbed. So, we absorb more fats.
Then there are processed foods.
So much about our diets have changed in the last 100 years. A lot is known and we even know how to eat to be really healthy. It's just not widely known by the general public.
You concentrate on the "normal" nutrition stuff like fat, fiber and carbohydrates, without even asking why do people eat more than 100 years ago.
The article talks about the fact that food now contains a lot of totally unnatural chemical substances that our ancestors never encountered and that such substances may throw off our sense of satiety and disrupt other mechanisms directly related to obesity.
That is a serious problem. An apple or a piece of meat laced with various chemicals isn't the same as 100 years ago. It seems you choose to ignore this difference.
The amount of vegetable based fats consumed 100 years ago was significantly less. It wasn't until chemical extraction was introduced that we could consume as much vegetable based fat as we do today.
Saturated fat is actually more stable and by far healthier.
The unnaturally high consumption of PUFA is not for all kinds of PUFA, but mainly for linoleic acid and related fatty acids (a.k.a. omega-6 acids).
The consumption of the other main kind of PUFA, omega-3 acids, is frequently lower than before, as those are abundant mainly in some animal organs (which are more seldom consumed now) and in fish.
In small quantities linoleic acid is an essential nutrient for humans, but in large quantities it must be converted into other fatty acids, because it is not a normal component of human fat, and that can be a burden for the liver.
https://thebigfatsurprise.com/
Looks like the NHS is behind the times.
In the US they've removed statements like the one you linked to. It's becoming scientific consensus that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease.
And yet there are a growing number looking shredded and boasting of their health on carnivore diets.
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/115/6/1445/6572830?fbc...
What might make us lose our obesity is regular exercise, building a reasonable amount of muscle mass, eating less food and better food, consuming less alchohol, spending less time sedentary in front of a computer screen, etc.
A calorie deficit implies knowledge of metabolic rate which can be highly variable. While calories in can be trivially counted, calories out needs to be calculated and cannot assume a significant level of accuracy.
Regardless, the problem with solving the obesity epidemic isn’t that people can’t lose weight, but is keeping weight off after reaching a goal weight.
Say that a body is in a caloric balance, and at the same time in a strange state in which it is storing N calories as fat, while releasing N calories from breakdown of lean tissue: a lean-to-fat conversion is going on, so to speak. That body will be losing mass, because a calorie of lean tissue represents much more mass than a calorie of fat storage.
If that same body then starts to release N + M calories from lean tissue, it will still be losing mass, while gaining fat.
The only question of how physiologically likely are these thermodynamically valid situations. We do know that people who experiment with "yo-yo dieting" can end up with worsened body compositions, but probably not due to gaining fat while dieting but rather (1) losing lean tissue while dieting, while losing some fat and (2) rebound weight gain while not dieting possibly exacerbated by a lowered metabolism due to less lean tissue.
Still, consider this thought experiment. A dieting person wears a backpack which is considered part of their body. Every day, a hundred grams of lard is added to the backpack, and this lard is counted as part of their caloric intake. The person diets and exercises in such a way that there is a caloric deficit. That person will be undeniably gaining fat in that backpack. It's thermodynamically possible for the body to be promoting fat storage in some area, regardless of what else is happening.
But if you have metabolic damage, you may have a lower metabolic rate than expected, meaning that the same 1200 calories a day that should cause you to lose a lb a week is actually just under maintenance calories.
Anecdotal, but this happened to me. I lost 100 lbs through diet and just got stuck. Couldn't lose any more to save my life. I ate 300-500 calories under my expected calorie expenditure every day.
Then, I got my metabolism tested and found that my BMR was at 300 calories a day under what it should have been, which meant that I was eating maintenance or overeating by 200 calories a day (and I was already feeling starving at that point!)
To cut another 300-500 calories out of my diet would have been untenable. I'm still trying to figure out what I can do.
Exercise more? Check. Do blood work and make sure everything is in order? Check. Vary my diet or try different diets? Check.
I think the only thing left is to try chemicals. Nothing else seems to either raise by base metabolism or decrease my intake needs.
The nice thing about increasing strength and muscle mass is that it’s going to burn calories for you 24/7, not just while you’re doing the activity.
I've been hitting the gym, doing mostly heavy lifting 2-3x a week and easing off on my calorie restriction. The weight is going back on fairly quickly but I'm also seeing good gains and progression in my strength & lifts.
For instance, when I started, one arm curl was at about 35 lbs, now 3 months later I'm curling 55, bench was 120, now it's 160 (but I'm not pushing hard on gaining bench) and squat machine has gone from 175 to 280.
No, that would defy the laws of thermodynamics. However, it is possible to consume more calories than you burn and lose weight, because there are complexities around how your body decides to store fat, signals to burn fat, etc.
Even if it was simply a thermodynamics problem (which I don't think it is), there are also issues with appetite. Sure, you can count calories for the rest of your life, but doing that is not only difficult to measure correctly, but very difficult to maintain if you still feel hungry all the time.
I think one of the reasons a ketogenic diet works for a lot of people is that after a period of adaptation, you stop getting hungry every 4 hours.
All these "we found the cause of obesity" dance around the problem.
So we don't really study hunger very much - there are some really good studies out there, but not very many.
And we don't talk about managing hunger, we talk about managing calories and managing weight.
I take that to heart. Including what I put in my body. I have little to no faith in modern food. And so I grow my own. I know where it came from and what went into it. And yes, I have had my soil tested.
Rely on modern food at your own peril. You are what you eat, as they say.
It's sugar and seed oil. That's what it comes down to. Most of what we eat is not food really, but the last mile in a marketing campaign, it barely even qualifies as a product. That combined with the rise in sedentary work and recreation is all you need to explain it.
But we could do more research into what compounds specifically are harmful, and then find substitutes for them.
Washington Post doesn't publish stories about those papers.
The vast majority of papers, no matter if they support a position I hold or not, are simply garbage. It is a continued waste of public and private resources to not consider maintaining the natural state of the animals and expect the science resulting from it to have any meaningful impact.
A solution would include medical therapies in addition to avoidance.
Now a very large portion have what must be D cups. I've tried to look up studies but I couldn't find any that controlled for weight.
This was also the first year I had not one, but two, morbidly obese girls. One was so large I ran out of poses pretty much right away as she couldn't clasp her hands together behind her back, couldn't do the same near her waist in front, and she couldn't even sit down on the ground - only kneel. She told me she wanted to be a lawyer. I find it incredibly sad that you could be that large already at that age. I can only imagine how difficult it would make life.
I think non anectodally, this trend is something that has been going on for a long time. If I remember correctly we blamed microplastics in the water minicking estrogen, and starting puberty earlier.
What is the truth is probably unknown.
One reason I've heard to explain this is a rise in the consumption of certain kinds of hormonal birth control.
As someone about this size, but has also been relatively "fit" at this size (I used to be able to go on casual 10+ mile hikes on weekends, pre-pandemic), it's also our health system failing us. I've never had a doctor give me a better answer than "diet and exercise" to change things. I got to a level of fitness where I could go on 10 mile hikes, which is a hell of a lot more fit than a lot than many Americans, yet they'd still give me doom and gloom and uninterested answers. It's exhausting.
America does not treat obesity well, and I feel like there's not good enough research going into it. I love to see reporting like—and hope there's more to come, in hopes that it changes both clinical mindsets and also how we think about obesity. It's more than what you eat.
I don’t mean this to be rude, but it sounds like you paid attention to just one half of the doctor’s advice?
2) Girls getting fatter likely triggers other changes as well. Given that the female body works very hard to shut down reproduction when fat is scarce, it may very well supercharge reproductive changes when fat is plentiful.
3) I think you heavily underestimate the number of girls who get breast implants. For a while, it seemed like every 16-year-old girl was getting them. You could notice a significant contrast when shifting between areas with different socioeconomics--blue-collar areas mysteriously had lots of girls with much smaller breasts than white-collar ones.
Citation definitely needed for this. Cosmetic surgery in the US is not covered by insurance and requires parental consent for patients under 18. While I do see more young women (and men) with "body modifications" like tattoos under 18, I strongly doubt we have a significant number of parents who are taking their teenage daughters in to get breast implants before they've even finished high school.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
For your other points, I'm talking about stick-skinny 17 year olds with very large breasts. Hormonal birth control could be part/all of the reason but it's not from weight gain anywhere other than their bust.
I tried to figure out why. Was it lifestyle? More manual labor? No, even office workers weren't obese. Running was viewed as some weird western habit. Few people went to the gym. Most just went for walks for exercise.
Was it diet? Maybe. But plenty of local foods weren't exactly healthy. Mostly processed carbs. Lots of salt. Plenty of deep fried foods.
Then after eating like a local for a while I realized it. Portion size. I'd say the average meal is maybe half the portion size you'd get in the US. I'd go out to eat at a restaurant and think "I'm not that hungry", then order something anyways. But it was never a lot of food. Very common for people to have a soup dish for lunch - maybe a few strips of meat, an egg, a handful of noodles and ton of vegetables. Add it all up and it's not many calories.
It looked to me like people weren't obese because they ate less. But that was the societal norm. Sure people would gorge themselves at special events like weddings or fancy dinners out. But most of the time they were eating meals of maybe 400-500 calories each.
The reason was that I could not become satiated when eating commercial bread, before eating huge quantities, which filled me up. It is much easier for me to not start eating something than to stop after beginning to eat, so I gave up completely on eating bread.
Nevertheless, I have started this year to make at home a bread every day when I wake up, which I eat at breakfast. Unlike commercial bread, this home-made bread satiates me completely without eating too much of it, and until late in the evening, when I usually have my 2nd daily meal.
This was unexpected and I am wondering about the cause. One possible reason is because this home-made bread is more protein-rich than commercial bread, because before baking I wash the dough for a few minutes, to remove a part of the starch.
There is also the possibility that it might matter that this is pure bread, made of flour and water without anything else added, unlike the commercial bread, which includes a huge list of additives. I believe that the additives may also have an influence because, as far as I remember, with the bread eaten when I was a child I did not have the same problem of lack of satiety like with the modern commercial bread.
Most people don’t do this and spend their lives wondering why they can’t control their weight.
Some quick culprits: sodas and juices (huge amount of calories), excess oil in food cooking (oil has a ton of calories), side dishes and snacks (chips, French fries, crackers, etc.).
On the satiety level, if you eat out a lot or processed foods, most have little fiber and aren’t that satiating (e.g. you can eat a whole bag of chips or thing of crackers and want more). Either more fiber or protein.
Really the main solution is to limit eating out if you live in America. I eat out once a day maximum. Otherwise you’ll most likely hit a caloric surplus.
I would suggest that the big change is the amount of activity that an average kid does. which seems to be conducive to the calories in/vs out. the cause of this is complex. But a lot of it relates to stranger danger. Parents don't let their kids out after school unattended (for various reasons) which means they are inside not burning off as many calories.
The other thing to remember is that food is now cheap. Its perfectly possible to be in the bottom 20% of the UK income bracket and still have enough cash to eat more calories than you need. (This is a good thing. People starving in the UK is unforgivable.)
Wouldn't this also intuitively be related to the fact that a calorie today is much, much "cheaper" (in terms of labor required to acquire the calorie for both the producer and the consumer) than a calorie was even 100 years ago due to advancements in agriculture and distribution?
Junk foods at high-availability, low cost, offering low-to-zero satiety per-calorie, and habit-forming addictive potential. The answer is pretty much in your sentence. Add to the fact, eating well on a budget requires you to prepare food at home. Lots of pressures funnel people to obesity. In the before-times (if you want to set your clock well before the obesity epidemic), two-income households weren't a thing for the most part and manufactured junk foods were a novelty on the market. People kept more active even at leisure, with tv being the novel and singular screen-based entertainment device that not everyone could afford at outset.
Imagine that the basis for the obesity pandemic may in fact lie in other, lack of proper digestive bacteria and yeast for example. I feel that pointing at obesity as just lazyness is just not constructive. I am not obese and have never suffered from it so this is not from a point of self defense. Just a thought.
From my point of view as an obese individual: It is the cheeseburgers. And the lack of excersize. And the long days working at a screen with few breaks.
Change is hard and bad habits are not easy to get rid of. Especially when you've spent a few decades getting used to them when you were young and unwise.
The large fries and enormous glass of corn syrup aren't welded to the burger, which has a perfectly fine nutritional profile for an entree.
They talk about lab animals with controlled diets and activity becoming fatter on average over the decades, and point to chemicals as the only possible culprit. I find that quite possible or even probable, but isn't it also possible the gut flora is evolving to be more efficient at processing modern food?
It’s the bun (full of corn syrup and carbs), a massive amount of sodium, the condiments (also corn syrup), a side of fries (mostly carbs), a soda (even more corn syrup). By the time you’ve finished a decently sized burger you’ve eaten enough sugar, sodium and carbs for the entire day.