Obesity: A Chemical Hunger (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Obesity: A Chemical Hunger (2021)

achemicalhunger.com

13 pointswalterbell6 comments

I want to believe it's more complex, but doesnt this quote tell the story?

>calorie intake in the US increased from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010

That suggests 9 days to gain a pound. After a year you gain ~40 pounds (or reach a new equilibrium).

Why would it be more complex than this? The author says that's not a "jaw‐dripping amount", but it 9 days to gain a pound seems significant to me.

The author also strawmans the Calories in, cals out argument, saying it exists to make (presumeably healthy people) feel smug. But isn't there also a simple biophysical logic to it?

Irrespective of the author's take on calories-in calories-out. The argument against it, or at least the simple version of it, that I've heard is the following.

1. Bomb calorimetry calorie measurements are not a good measurement of the net calories that your body gets out of the food.

2. Just because protein has 4 kCal/g and carbs have 4 kCal/g does not mean that they impact with your body in the same way (same idea when looking between different carbs, e.g. sugar vs complex starches).

3. Different people process and extract different amounts of energies and at different rates than others (e.g. lactose intolerance people, or anecdotally having the same food as another person and only one of you getting a food coma)

Too long didn't read? Instead imagine someone didn't want the United States to make lithium batteries and blames lithium in the water supply!

Not personally really good at reading things like this... Is their overall analysis good?

What they have done is an initial analysis of several candidates for a chemical cause for the obesity epidemic to try to figure out which might be worth doing further tests on. They use whatever publicly available data they can find along with some logic and some reasonable guesses. For a summary of their conclusions about what further tests would be interesting go to the last page. It does seem likely there is something in the water, but some further experiments would be needed to prove that. Overall the set of articles is a great example of how to find a scientific hypothesis to test.

I had a scan and the TL;DR - there's something in the water, working its way up the food chain and making people fat. They present a number of possible candidates e.g. PFAS, Lithium etc. It's an interesting read, I'm not an expert though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com