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Comment by oneoff786 | Hacker News Reader

I find this to be a pretty lame analysis.

> 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.

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I think saying that physical activity accounts for the differences in weight isn't supported by the evidence. I mean, surely if eating pure honey for half your calories but exercising a bunch led to good health outcomes and lower weight, we'd see people losing weight by exercising without dieting. We don't see that.

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.

There's an interesting book supporting this idea:

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.

You can outrun a bad diet IMHO. There's a point in which physical activity outrun the body's willingness to adjust basal metabolism.

However, it is not really practical for most people to use exercises to burn calories. Rather diets are more important and more effective.

Doing a tough 1 hour exercise is not the same as being on your feet all day. You may be able to offset doing nothing all day with a burst of effort. You may not. People who are moving constantly are very rarely fat.

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.

Why then, for example, are cleaning services workers, mechanics, and health workers all more obese than average? Those are jobs where you are much more active than an office worker. Those are all cases where someone gets exposed to chemicals (cleaning chemicals, lithium grease, and PFAS-based medical fabrics). In fact, healthcare support workers are more obese than healthcare technicians, even though technicians are more sedentary. Support workers are the ones changing PFAS-based curtains, garments, etc.

The number one most obese job is a truck driver. Your hypothesis is that chemicals cause obesity. You cite cleaning services workers as receiving substantially more chemicals due to their work than the average person. Why then, are truckers more obese? If this is the primary factor causing obesity, and these people are receiving substantially more exposure than everyone else, why aren't they substantially the fattest group?

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.

Volatile organic compounds from upholstery and plastics in the dashboard may explain it. Spending a lot of time in trucks is like living in a mobile plastic house.

It seems insane to me that someone would think the reason truckers, who spend all day every day sitting down and eating on the go foods, are fat because their dashboards have plastic in them.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10010...

Changes literally nothing. I have no doubt that most truckers would still be fat if they had a tank of the freshest, purest air piped directly into their lungs 24/7.

it's easier to explain it by more stress, less money, less ability to care for their health or eat healthily, etc etc.

It seems like you're projecting modern abundance backwards onto a period of relative scarcity. Hunter-gatherers could not possibly have satisfied half of their calories with honey.

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!

The series of articles I posted talks about a tribe where this is the case. Very fit people who get a ton of calories from honey.

> 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?

Because the issue is - in fact - the sugar, not the fat (https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/theres-no-sugar-coating-...).

The section on why hunter gatherers aren’t obese is answered by the fact that they are hunting and gathering.

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.

This refutes your claims https://fireinabottle.net/torpor-sloth-and-gluttony-part-1-a...

This article is pathetic.

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://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/04news/calorie.htm

Those diets also didn't have added sugars and salts to everything. It's serious work requiring reading all the nutrition labels to get groceries sans questionable additives in the US.

Thanks to corn subsidies, we have high fructose corn syrup in many foods you wouldn't expect to find it. Milk by-products are the same way. My wife recently developed lactose intolerance, so we've been finding milk products in tons of things you wouldn't have expected it. Instant ramen? The flavor mix includes milk solids. Cheap hot dogs? More milk solids. Flavored chips, even when not cheese flavored? They have lactose too. Many brands of chicken nuggets or fish sticks? Milk is everywhere! We subsidize some of these industries to the point of over production which leads to companies finding "clever" ways of utilizing that excess often to the detriment of the population at large.

Have you tried A2 or Raw milk? I’m sensitive and those changed things. I like A2 since I can get it at Target, and I have no problems with Raw milk. Consuming those before say cheese or ice cream or pizza helps massively.

French fries often have dairy in the coating. It's everywhere.

The rise of transnational food companies helped make this an almost ubiquitous global development in developed nations, the growth of obesity in our neighbor to the south Mexico over the last 40 years or so is a pretty good example.

I found the Yuka app makes this much easier. Just scan the UPC and it’ll show you a x/100 score. I use it for nearly everything.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yuka-food-cosmetic-scanner/id1...

Thank you! I’ve installed it and will try it out soon. Looks good.

It's calories in/calories out for the majority - sure there's edge cases where you an discuss more "efficient" bodies, etc, but I daresay our diets are way more caloric than they used to be.

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.

Calories in / calories out is not an interesting question. If you present a healthy person with 4000 calories of cake, they don't eat it. They may have some cake, but not all of it. Oftentimes, they simply can't eat it all without feeling sick and stopping. Healthy people constantly pass on adding extra calories to their diet, and it's not through willpower. Healthy people have different hormonal balances, different gut bacteria, different brain structures, etc. They simply cannot eat the same quantity of unhealthy food that an obese person can, and they do not have the constant level of background hunger cravings that obese people do. Changing a healthy person into an unhealthy one takes a while, but several months of being sedentary and eating low quality food generally seems to put someone on track for obesity and metabolic syndrome.

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".

Eh. I think people drastically underestimate the variance on calories absorbed (the effective amount in) and the calories used for general homeostasis and metabolism (the effective amount out) excluding exercise.

It does indeed have a large effect, the science is clear. Everything from gut bacteria to how often you eat meals can affect the % of caloric intake that gets converted into fat.

But the key thing is why are they more caloric. Is it that we are hungrier, is it that foods changed? These are questions that are testable if we start doing policy experiments.

what i find interesting is that most people don't realize that the majority of your calories out is actually breathed and peed out. it doesn't, eh, turn into heat or something silly like that, which is common wisdom.

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