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Comment by mellavora | Hacker News Reader

So something else I wonder. Over the last 50-90 years we've selectively bred our entire food chain to prioritize rapid growth, then pack it full of growth hormones to accelerate this.

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.

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Epigenetics is to do with how genes are activated and DNA is folded around his histones. I would be very surprised if DNA could survive digestion and influence human genetic expression/epigenetics. There may be other mechanisms I guess (and things like abnormal protein folding like prion diseases can influence other nearby proteins) but I think I’m grasping at straws.

Hormones are sometimes ingested and they have an impact.

That is certainly true, I was addressing the epigenetic side of things. In his thread he was referencing fast growing chickens fed scraps only

Amylase Trypsin Inhibitors might be playing a role as well. We have selected for this to be higher in crops since it leads to greater pest resistance.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4807301/

> And if you are looking for a biological mechanism, it might be related to epigenetics

Very unlikely as afaik everything non parasitic gets broken down by our saliva and stomach acids.

That's not my understanding, at least in animals. Those who ate younger plants and/or animals lived longer.

Sorry can't find a citation right now.

I had put some thought on this and my hunch was that consuming younger plants and/or animals means fewer "forever chemicals" getting accumulated in the body.

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...

Utter nonsense. Even if growth hormone made it into finished meat, and then if enough was bioavailable to have an effect on humans, growth hormone causes the development of muscle (meat) as well as fat. So you'd expect to see people being more muscular (and taller, with stronger bones).

For what it's worth, growth hormones are prohibited in poultry in the US.

https://extension.msstate.edu/publications/publications/chic...

This is truly shocking.

"...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."

Where is that quote from? I could not see it in the (interesting) linked article.

It's this paragraph in the article on the Washington Post:

"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've been wondering about this too.

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.

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