Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

There are two macro population health trends that suggest we are somehow poisoning ourselves at a large scale. Most people do not relate the two, but I personally wouldn't be surprised if they have related causes.

The first is the Flynn effect, which was rising IQ levels decade over decade, which halted and then reserved for most Western nations around 1990s/2000s and is now declining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

The second is the dropping fertility/sperm counts/hormone issues/etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_infertility_crisis

I think microplastics along with forever chemicals/PFAS are two of the likely culprits and are probably fairly easy to deal with.

I wonder what else could be contributing?

View on HN

Also the metabolic syndrome/obesity epidemic. 40% of US adults have obesity. By 2030 about half of US adults will, and in 29 states more than half of adults will be obese.

We see obesity becoming increasingly normalized. People feel powerless to stop it and that we should just accept it.

It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us. That's part of it, but I wonder if microplastics or some kind of gut biome disruption is playing a role as well.

Obesity is caused in part by environmental toxins, probably to different extents in different people:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/19/environm...

https://www.webmd.com/obesity/what-to-know-obesogens

These so called "obesogens" just increase the propensity towards obesity and depending on exposure and your sensitivity to then, you can overcome them or not via exercise and dieting and other means.

>These so called "obesogens" just increase the propensity towards obesity and depending on exposure and your sensitivity to then, you can overcome them or not via exercise and dieting and other means.

If it's environmental pollutants, shouldn't lab or wild animals be getting fatter as well? Yet they're not: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...

The prevalence of sugar in so many foods can't help.

Personally I avoid "sugary" food and drinks like the plague. I also don't snack and do regular exercise and sometimes don't eat dinner. I'm at a healthy weight in my 40s. How many adults that are obese have a healthy relationship with food and do regular exercise / fast? Obese children I have sympathy for, I'm uncertain how I feel about obese adults. I don't know if their metabolism is ultra slow, or they are just not taking care of themselves. Its complicated...

What about obese adults that used to be obese children?

Regardless of the cause of the obesity epidemic, it should be addressed compassionately and efficaciously. What makes that difficult (at least in the US) is that the most efficacious treatments aren't aligned with how the healthcare system works. Maybe you won't blame being fat on diet and exercise, but there's almost certainly a diet and excercise plan that will make you lose weight.

First-line treatment should be, - Walk/jog 30 min, 3x per week. Pace for a mildly elevated heart rate. - Eliminate super sweet foods from regular diet. No more than 3x per week. This could be VERY hard for sugar-addicted folks, so start small and work up. - Fast occasionally. Intermittent is great, but longer is even better. - Take a multivitamin.

The end goal is to replace your sweet craving with a fat craving and be ok feeling hungry for periods of time.

> Obese children I have sympathy for, I'm uncertain how I feel about obese adults

Why would you not have sympathy for someone suffering? Even if it's theoretically their own doing most people don't want to be obese.

Sugar was common in foods for many generations.

High fructose corn syrup is relatively new.

So are many sugar substitutes.

Obesity is caused by eating too much. If you don’t eat then you won’t gain weight, there is no subverting the laws of thermodynamics.

It sounds callous but if you go to Africa or visit a prisoner of war camp you won’t find many fat people and so blaming chemicals in America for so many fat people doesn’t make much sense to me.

The tunnel-vision on this subject is truly astounding. I can't think of any subject that is treated in the same way.

Say that someone was failing at university because they have no motivation. And they have no motivation because they have depression. Then a vocal minority would always butt in with the following truism:

- Failing university courses is caused by not studying enough. There is no subverting the fact that you need to study the material in order to not fail the course.

This is of course a completely useless advice/truism.

Now say that someone overeats because they have depression. Or because of some pathology caused by microplastics. Or let's just say that there is a possibility that a different environment (no microplastics) would lead to them not overeating. Do you still want to derail this conversation with irrelevant “thermodynamics” truisms?

As someone who struggled with depression at university, I'd say that's the only useful advice.

"I am failing because I am not studying enough."

Granted, I could introspect on what was preventing me from studying, leverage additional college resources, align to my learning styles, etc.

But until I accepted the above as an honest objective truth, and a path to change, I wasn't able to be successful.

As someone who had the same: it's not useful advice. At all. In the slightest.

How about we stop trying to come up with any reason but the objective one for the cause of the problem?

'The mistake here lies in the assumption that it is possible to describe an object completely (we won't go so far as to say "explain") without making any reference to its relation to its environment (whether this relation be one of indifference, selective relevance and capacity for stimulation, of disconnection, or of closure). In order to avoid these problems, which arise from the point of departure taken, both subjectivist and objectivist theories of knowledge have to be replaced by the system/environment distinction, which then makes the distinction subject/object irrelevant.'

― Luhmann, Niklas (1990), The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality that Remains Unknown. In: Krohn W., Küppers G. & Nowotny H. (eds.) Selforganization. Portrait of a scientific revolution. Kluwer, Dordrecht: pp. 64–85, p. 66

I'd say more, but frankly, I'm only on hackernews rn because I can't bloody sleep and doing more than copy pasting would wake me up too much

This certainly just made me more confused.

It’s not looking for a reason besides the objective one, it’s trying to find the reasons behind the objective one.

Many commenters like to slight of hand their possibly objective comments about calories as making their comments about moral or will-power failings just as objective, when it’s not a transitive property.

Probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasitransitive_relation

;)

Your argument is that forcing people to go without food causes them to lose weight, which is impossible to deny. You argument says nothing about what causes people to gain weight, however.

Just look up 'hormonal weight gain' to see that it isn't just about eating less. Then look at research into the influence of chemicals/micro plastics on those hormones.

Yes, all calories have to go in through the mouth. How those calories are processed, however, is influenced by a great many factors.

I visited the US a few years ago and I was shocked how much calories were packed in random foods. Some desserts/cakes alone were above 1000kcal. Basically in the US I had to be very careful and calorie counting and I got the impression if you eat randomly you'll end up with a very high calorie intake (typically above 3000 per day), whereas this is usually less true in Europe (but it's getting less true every year) and you might end up just a bit overweight instead of obese by eating randomly.

>How those calories are processed, however, is influenced by a great many factors.

I feel compelled to assume that we can't possibly be extracting every calorie from certain types of food. Caloriometers work differently from human digestive systems.

That's correct, but we're pretty efficient - from 75 to 99%. This is typically around 90% except for fiber, which is marked down in calorie labels already. It also depends on what exactly you're doing with the energy, if you're in a calorie surplus then protein to tryglyceride metabolism is less efficient than, say, dietary fat to tryglyceride, but this can just be neglected.

But yeah, human digestion is pretty efficient. Muscles are far less efficient though, around 30%, which is a neat fact.

The comment started with "Obesity is caused by eating too much." At the core, this is very much the objective truth. If it so happens that someone processes cake or calories differently than others, they need to eat less cake and take in less calories.

The pervasive obsession with avoiding this truth is concerning and has had a detrimental effect on society. How many of us know someone who passed away from COVID due to this kind of unhealthiness? Primary Care Physicians and health professionals out there need to step it up and be truthful with people.

I can acknowledge the extreme cases where this may not be possible, but 9/10 times we can take ownership of our lives whatever the situation, clean our diets and get out there and exercise.

In an environment awash with cheap calories, some people get obese and some don't. That's something worth investigating. (I personally think it's more about natural mental variation than subtle chemical poisoning, but that's probably just my bias talking).

Also the big elephant in the room is most people are hardly active. Your body is designed to forage for miles a day. Who even bothers simulating that? We walk to the fridge and from grocery store to parked car at most. Its so much easier to maintain good health if you are active.

I wonder how much better it would be if we had developed more for walking than for cars.

It doesnt matter how we developed. My city developed for walking first. I can and do walk to places like 10 mins to the grocery store. The problem is for most people, if they have an easier choice than physically moving they take it. So they would rather drive two minutes than walk 10. Its also evident whenever I see an escalator. The escalator will be full of able bodied people while the stairs along side it that take as long to get up as standing still on the escalator are empty, because people chose the option that involves the least effort every chance they get. Never mind getting a little bit of leg exercise on the stairs. At work I routinely see healthy people take the elevator 1 floor instead of the stairwell right next to the elevator.

We have to be taught the value of exercise and being physically active because most people don’t default to that.

True in the technical sense, but it doesn’t address the mystery that in the 40s, 50s, 60s people in rich countries had access to plenty of food, ate lots of calories, and yet obesity was very rare.

That’s no mystery. The amount of calories the average person expends has decreased as we’ve become more sedentary.

In the 40s, 50s, and 60s most people did manual labor and even office jobs were not as sedentary since you couldn’t just sit at a computer.

Here’s another simple overlooked example, grocery shopping, before the rise of superstores you’d go into town and visit 4 different stores. The butcher, the hardware store, the grocer, the pharmacist etc. now it’s all in one big store all next to each other.

Here’s another example lawn mowing. Back then most people had manual lawnmowers.

Here’s another example the moving of goods. Go look up a picture of the manual labor involved in being a stevedore back then versus now and that’ll give you an idea of how much less physical exertion is needed these days even in jobs that are still considered manual labor.

Overall I think solely blaming plastic for obesity is an oversimplification and assuredly wrong, although it could have some affect there are a lot of other things going on.

Declines in fertility and IQ are most likely due to obesity so it’s a big issue.

To add onto this it seems there’s a causation of low iq with obesity but not vice versa.

I also just had this thought about declining levels of fertility in humans. If it’s being caused by external factors like plastic or any pollution we’d expect to see similar effects in all other mammals especially ones close to human populations.

I wasn’t able to find any studies backing this up with just a cursory search, but it is likely the easiest way to add or detract from the plastic hypothesis.

I do know that not all but most studies comparing fertility between decades found that when controlling for obesity the differences were not statistically significant between time periods.

Nicotine suppresses appetite.

Trite, but accurate. I gained 50 lbs within 6 months after I quit smoking, when I had been skinny for decades prior. There is no doubt in my mind that the (justifiable) demonization of smoking in recent decades contributed to the obesity crisis.

But not eating slows down your metabolism, and then you will eventually find yourself at a point where you are tired all the time because you are not consuming enough calories to have a high enough metabolism and energy level, and yet you are still slowly gaining weight because you are too tired to do anything to burn it off.

> not eating slows down your metabolism

Starvation mode is a myth. Well, kinda. You do enter "starvation mode" where your metabolism significantly slows down, but only if you're actually starving. Simply eating in a caloric deficit will not do anything to your metabolism.

The beginning of this article talks about that in great detail:

https://physiqonomics.com/eating-too-much/

I thought there have been studies finding that simply eating less doesn't necessarily work for some people because of metabolism. Maybe they have a thyroid issue too.

And that the amount you would have to limit yourself to with a completely sedentary life (like many people have) and still be in a caloric deficit is just not sustainable for people and would make you feel absolutely miserable and also unlikely to get enough vitamins and minerals and cause other health problems.

because let's be honest, telling people to eat less is not going to stop them from eating junk, just less junk.

"Just eating less" I don't think is really enough for most cases. You need to also be active and exercise along with, and even better, be eating the right balance of macros.

I would say you need to do maybe 2 of the 3 to lose or maintain weight, and doing all 3 will certainly allow you to lose weight. But doing just 1 is unlikely to see results.

> "Just eating less" I don't think is really enough for most cases. You need to also be active and exercise along with, and even better, be eating the right balance of macros.

To lose weight, you need to eat in a caloric deficit, that's it. Excercising just burns extra calories which allows you to eat more while staying in a deficit.

And macros / less junk food are, of course, important for health, but if we're speaking strictly about weight loss, no, it doesn't matter. FWIW, you can eat only a Big Mac and 3 Snickers bars every day, and you'll still lose weight, because that's about ~1800 kcal, which is a deficit for most people.

> the amount you would have to limit yourself to with a completely sedentary life (like many people have) and still be in a caloric deficit is just not sustainable for people and would make you feel absolutely miserable and also unlikely to get enough vitamins and minerals and cause other health problems.

That depends on what you eat really, there are a lot of foods that don't have a lot of calories while still being very nourishing, and many of them are just normal foods, not some special "fitness stuff"

---

The article I linked in my above comment is actually a great explanation of why "just eating less" is enough for most people, I highly recommend you read it if you haven't already.

Obesity is caused by eating too much of the wrong thing.

Which happens to be the cheap thing in industrialized mass produced Western food chains. Cheap in terms of dollars and personal time.

So obesity is really an economic problem.

We should come down like a ton of bricks on fast food and require they offer healthier options at low prices, subsidized by taxes on their unhealthier options.

Or more simply, you could not subsidize the cheap unhealthy options at source (eg corn subsidies).

But until very recently, I would absolutely have still chosen the unhealthy option. I'm not sure how much impact 20% on a bag of Doritos is really going to have.

Not sure you're going to shift US corn subsidies without changing the electoral system. ;)

To me, substitutability is key.

If you tax unhealthy food, but unhealthy food is the only option (from physical, financial, and time perspectives), people just pay more to eat unhealthy food.

If you tax unhealthy food, but also require healthier and low-cost options at the same establishment, then people begin to have options. I.e. do I want a $10 Big Mac or a $3 grilled chicken sandwich?

Even getting the Big Mac less often would be a net win.

And I call bullshit if McDonald's tries the "But it's impossible to run healthy food through our supply chain..." argument.

I'm saying I would have picked the unhealthy option. I know this, because I spent decades doing it when I certainly wasn't hurting for money. Maybe on a population level it would work, and I'm just atypical. Can we look at sin taxes on cigarettes and draw any conclusions?

Apparently the relationship between income and obesity is complex enough to vary by race and gender. Which is to say, not tightly coupled. (CDC studies)

Cigarettes are a great example of missing substitutability.

If you smoke, and the price of cigarettes increases, what options do you have?

My version of an anti-smoking campaign would have drastically boosted the price of cigarettes and used to tax to decrease the price of nicotine patches or gum.

If there aren't alternatives at the point of sale, there aren't alternatives.

> If there aren't alternatives at the point of sale, there aren't alternatives.

I agree. But most of my bad food choices are made in supermarkets. Next time you're at a checkout, look for the healthy trolleys and the unhealthy trolleys. Honestly, the difference is stark. (When I go on a health kick, I find it amazing how many aisles I just don't need to walk down. So much processed food).

On the tax point I'm going to try to argue you away from the concept of hypothecated tax, because I think it's almost always a bad idea. Money is fungible, and taxation all goes into a single pot. Tying tax and spending together is a rhetorical trick, meant to manipulate public opinion - whenever you see a politician doing that, there's a good chance they're trying to con you.

If we're going to put a sin tax on something, we should do it because it's the right thing to do. If we're going to fund a health programme, we should do it because it's the right thing to do. But these decisions are orthagonal. Tying them just unnecessarily binds government's hands wrt future policy changes. Worst-case, you end up funding obsolete health programmes, "because that's what the tax is for".

How many people are going to go to McDonald and order to tofu instead of the burger exactly? What's more the problem isn't the mere choice of the burger its the choice of the double burger with bacon, super sizing it, adding fries and lets top it off which a chocolate shake.

For practical purposes you either need to eat modestly at McDonalds or more realistically not eat at McDonalds very much.

You can replace McDonalds with "eating out" because you don't need to go crazy with supersizing and milkshakes to eat past your calorie budget in a single meal.

When we eat out, we easily eat 1000+ calories. That's over half the daily calorie budget of a 5'5 woman. Yet it's just one of the meals people eat in a day.

People like to come up with a bunch of reasons for why we eat too much or why the food we eat is somehow making us fatter than it might otherwise but we gloss over how trivial it is to overeat caloric dense foods even if "obesogens" and microplastics never existed.

Which is why we can't fix or even effect in any meaningful way by making McD offer lighter fare. What ends up happening is we end up paying a bunch of assholes with masters degrees to administer the program. McDonald's pays a bunch of assholes with bachelors degrees to figure out how to maximize their gain. Before long they are touting their healthful options which take up about 6sq inches on their board on commercials so that people don't feel bad or unhealthy when they roll up to the drive through window even though they actually ordered the double quarter pounder and the ass expander 2000 shake.

Fast forward a little bit and their lobbyists have convinced government to further incentivize healthy options by paying Restaurants that implement absolutely meaningless standards that do nothing for anything and we are actually subsidizing giant asses whose milkshake brings all the obesity adjacent diseases to the yard.

If you actually want to disincentivize negative things you have to either actually forbid them or just make it more expensive. Incentives will always be gamed and end up as free giveways. See bullshit carbon credits.

Want people to eat fewer big macs? Tax them at 100% and watch most of the cheap fast food implode and cease to exist. Want those people not to starve watch in amazement at a virtue of UBI you can tax things out of existence that destroy people's health without starving people.

I'll just leave this here, it's a fascinating bit of citizen science:

http://achemicalhunger.com/

> It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us. That's part of it, but I wonder if microplastics or some kind of gut biome disruption is playing a role as well.

Based on what many people have in their shopping carts and the sugar water many people are constantly chugging, I see no reason to think anything other than excess calories is the cause. And lack of exercise as an exacerbating factor.

Excess calories are the proximate causes. The factor that causes excess calories are likely multifactorial such as car dependency, toxic advertising, and environmental toxins such as obesogens, and more, including unidentified factors.

Maybe fat as well ? Not the one in walnuts and linen seeds but the pork, diaries and coconut. Not an expert at all, just wondering in what extend we should avoid them comparing to sugar.

I was in the metabolic syndrome and obese group, and I have some thyroid problems (likely due to growing up near a uranium enrichment facility). I could diet and exercise and still gain weight that was largely visceral fat, and especially fat in my liver. I was in the beginning stages of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Under my doctor's supervision, I went on the keto diet. I eat high fat foods and meats, and I lost about 50 lbs in 2 months. My weight stabilized over the following months within a healthy range. Additionally, chronic pain, concentration, and energy levels all improved. Most of this is due to the weight loss, but not all of it. Sugar can cause inflammation in high quantities, and it can also cause an increase in blood pressure. Sugars are also metabolized by cancer cells while ketones are not, which would explain the rise in cancer rates as sugar consumption has increased across the planet. My liver function improved, cholesterol levels improved, blood sugar stabilized, and insulin resistance went down.

I personally believe that there is some kind of difference among humans in how we digest things that goes beyond the microbiome. Some people can eat high amounts of carbohydrates and sugars without negative consequences beyond tooth decay. Other people cannot eat any sugar without incurring weight gain and cognitive problems.

Fat by itself is very satiating, you'd struggle to rack up the calories eating purely fat unless you were really trying. However too much sugar without fibre will spike your blood sugar levels which triggers an insulin response, causing your body to effectively store any glucose in your bloodstream into muscle and fat cells[0]. The end result is you're hungry again and able to eat more calories. Combine that with a high fat diet and you have a recipe for obesity.

When I used to weight train, during my cuts (weight loss phases), I had much more success with a high fat/low carb diet than I ever did calorie counting (which naturally makes you avoid fat since they have a higher calorie density).

[0] Not an expert but this is my layman's understanding after reading lots of books on the subject.

These folks suspect lithium in our water causes obesity. They also support several citizen-science diet experiments:

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/

Big thing you would expect if it’s due to general plastic/pollution prevalence is obesity in pets/wild animals.

We see that. Pets and wild animals that live around humans are also increasingly obese.

From a quick search: https://www.livescience.com/10277-obesity-rise-animals.html

here is a study on the negative effects on aquatic life:

"In aquatic invertebrates, microplastics cause a decline in feeding behavior and fertility, slow down larval growth and development, increase oxygen consumption, and stimulate the production of reactive oxygen species. In fish, the microplastics may cause structural damage to the intestine, liver, gills, and brain, while affecting metabolic balance, behavior, and fertility; the degree of these harmful effects depends on the particle sizes and doses, as well as the exposure parameters"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9205308/

> It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us.

Well sure, obesity is a result of a lot of factors, some genetic, but a lot of it is the food environment surrounding people. The lack of easy access to healthy foods or education on how to buy and prepare them, plus economic pressures all play into this.

>The lack of easy access to healthy foods or education on how to buy and prepare them, plus economic pressures all play into this.

This doesn't exist anywhere in the world. You either have easy access to healthy food or no access to food at all.

Healthy food is so much cheaper, more abundant and easier to source in all situations than processed junk.

The idea that people don't know how to eat healthy or can't afford to is a convenient lie.

> a lot of it is the food environment surrounding people

Yup. It is hard to pull all the factors apart because they contribute to each other. If you are obese, I understand it screws up your hormones which makes it easier to stay obese. Also if you have exposure to chemicals which cause you to have a tendency towards being obese you are more likely to seek out a bad food environment - e.g. crave McDonald's fries, etc.

So you sort of just need to work on each factor and over time, it will change. For many, we already have significantly accumulations of forever chemicals or microplastics so it may take a generation to truly fix.

This the one area the administration should go after instead of alcohol or whatever else they think they’re doing. By addressing obesity, making it uncool, taxing the living daylights out of sugary additives, etc they would save more lives than the lives combined in all their other feel-good, virtue signaling efforts[1]they sound nice and all but in thd end this effort would actually save a many more lives.

[1]gas stoves and ranges, overhead fans, etc. and of course when they released a trial balloon they accused people of conspiracy theory thinking -but here we are. Meanwhile sweeteners and fillers are everywhere.

Do you see an administration going after obesity the way they did tobacco? (negative ads, advertising bans, etc)

Unlike smoking, half the class is already fat. NGOs and media would frame it as a psychological harm to those children, fat-shaming, or who knows what else. It would be a political landmine.

Unfortunately, I don't. They seem to baby obesity, including the media where obese people like Lizzo and others are celebrated for being unapologetically fat. I understand bulimia is an issue too and we don't want kids especially to think they need to be waifs, but now this sentiment pendulum has swung way too far to the other side and they accommodate obesity in every which way. The only fat people the media seem okay to chastise are Trump and I think maybe Chris Christie & very few others?

No, this should be confronted as _the_ health threat of the next 20 - 30 years. It's more consequential than anything else, Health-wise, productivity-wise, medical costs, quality of life --All these shoppers in their electric 4-wheeled scooters. It's insane that this is not a declared crisis.

>It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us.

Cars?

The switch from leaded to unleaded gas would roughly coincide. Interesting!

Also the move from labor jobs to most everything ycombinator seeds.

the rise in obesity correlates to the rise of HFCS in food and also the "war on fats" in diets around the 80s

That's because of sugar. Watch the Sugar: The Bitter Truth video on youtube.

Alternative explanation (call me crazy) :-)

A US comedian once commented that when he went to Europe 20 years ago, he noticed that people only ate three meals a day.

What a concept!

I don't know about you, but loads of people around me eat only 2 meals a day and still struggle with being overweight. (Not obese tho).

The number of meals is a very small part of the entire diet and lifestyle matrix.

They may only eat 2 meals a day but they likely snack too. If you only eat 2 meals a day and do not eat between meals you are most likely going to be a normal weight.

You really shouldn't listen to comedians. They're only trying to make you laugh, not inform you. Yes even George Carlin.

I'm gonna need some more hard evidence before I believe that microplastics in the human body play a strong causative role in both infertility and changing IQ scores (and first you have to convince me of the import of IQ scores).

It's a classic "jacking off butterflies" response. That's a reference to the TV show Childrens Hospital, in which one of the doctors finds a cure for cancer and it's butterfly semen. One of the other characters says something along the lines of "We both know cancer is an amalgam of unique conditions, it should be impossible to find a single cure" but they brush it off and starting jacking off butterflies. That's how I feel whenever people try to reduce complex social phenomena to a single simplistic cause. "We both know it can't be just this one thing, but let's pretend it is because that's easier to solve."

Microplastics may be a significant cause of Male Infertility:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9134445/

The plastic brain: neurotoxicity of micro- and nanoplastics:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7282048/

Phalates in plastics reduce IQ significantly:

https://time.com/3625352/phthalates-iq-toxins/

I don't deny that there is more and more research every day about the negative impacts of microplastics on the human body. From my place of relative ignorance, it still seems that more sweeping claims like "Microplastics are responsible for the Flynn Effect and the male infertility crisis" are awfully bold. You throw obesity in there too, and doesn't it seem like folks are trying to pin all of society's ills on a single issue? It's like when people try to pathologize black people by arguing that all their social ills are actually just due to lead exposure. That has proven to be a very shaky argument, and one that has to plow through a lot of nuance and complex social phenomena to land on a materialist claim so simplistic that it's kind of infantilizing.

Plus, the obsessive focus on IQ reeks of bad social science.

> it still seems that more sweeping claims like "Microplastics are responsible for the Flynn Effect and the male infertility crisis" are awfully bold

You are making my original statements into a straw man argument. I didn't say they are fully responsible, but rather I think they are contributors.

I even asked in my original post what else could be contributing:

> I think microplastics along with forever chemicals/PFAS are two of the likely culprits and are probably fairly easy to deal with. > > I wonder what else could be contributing?

Lead does reduce IQ and increase crime. Here is a meta-analysis that tries to tease out how much lead was responsible for crime and homicide:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016604622...

Banning lead gasoline was the right thing regardless. It was causing harm. It is hard at the time to know exactly how much.

You then wrote:

> You throw obesity in there too, and doesn't it seem like folks are trying to pin all of society's ills on a single issue?

I do think we are poisoning ourselves in probably a few different ways -- we have made so many novel chemicals without significant safety testing that a good chunk of them are probably harmful and can also likely build up over time. If we can continue to deal with these harmful chemicals that have clear links to negative health outcomes, we will be better off as a society.

The trick is to keep studying them and then act on those studies to mitigate the harms of those chemicals.

The world is complex and there is usually not a singular cause of everything. But that doesn't mean we should just throw our arms up and say, oh no, I can not do anything it is all just too complex or overwhelming. No, instead you just have to do, as Anna says in Frozen II, "the next right thing:"

https://youtu.be/kFkClV2gM-s?t=118

I think we agree more than we disagree. I believe we need to seriously study the effect of microplastics on the human body. I believe the federal government should follow California's example (at a minimum) and take a heavier hand in regulating PFAs and testing water for microplastics. Microplastics are causing a number of negative health effects, some of which are known, many of which are unknown. I don't think we should throw our hands up and give up, not at all.

And yet the study you shared about lead actually proves my point. The meta-analysis showed that the impact of lead on crime is overstated in the literature. And I know a number of sociologists/criminologists, and (though this is anecdotal) they take the lead hypothesis far less seriously than this meta-analysis does. Partially that's due to the fact that this was written by economists, the natural enemy of sociologists. But I digress.

My argument is that simple "scientific" answers to complex social problems get overstated, while the messy stuff gets overlooked. It's a cognitive bias that especially affects the kinds of people on this website, because it substitutes complex social scientific problems with "simple" chemical cause and effects. It doesn't means we we shouldn't address the very real public health crisis. But remember, Rome wasn't built in a day, and it wasn't destroyed by lead pipes. That's a myth.

Your default position should actually be caution considering how the introduction of foreign elements to the human body, especially one that enters the bloodstream, generally causes some kind of illness. See steroids, chemotherapy, heck even the antibiotics that we are prescribed to take sometimes. Why should microplastics get a pass by default in your worldview?

And don’t you think there’s disproportion in your asking for a total and convincing argument to believe otherwise, while also claiming that the basis of your doubt is some scene from a TV series that performs bathroom humor?

And how do you feel about leaded gasoline?

I don't go a day where I don't drink at least two glasses.

> The first is the Flynn effect, which was rising IQ levels decade over decade, which halted and then reserved for most Western nations around 1990s/2000s and then started to reverse a bit:

Same point in time where people started to get cell phones and be always connected to the internet.

Underrated comment. When I was growing up I would often read books and do math problems for fun because there was not much else to do. Now I am constantly on the internet watching things and using my brain very little.

I'd like to offer a single datapoint(mine) on this too, I'm going to university soon and in the last few years, the fact that the internet exists has allowed me to solve interesting math problems that I would've never learnt in school

I was solving crosswords.

    probably fairly easy to deal with.

[citation needed]

My suggestion, which isn't rocket science:

Ban plastic food containers for any type of long-term storage or anything that gets heated up (and different plastics have different microplastic shedding profiles, so ban the worst first) and also ban PFAS in anything that gets close to food. It will increase costs, but the alternative is we poison ourselves, so it is sort of needed. Phase it in so that industries have time to adapt.

Plastic food containers aren't even close to being the largest source of microplastics.

Synthetic fibres in clothing (like that cotton-poly blend shirt you're most likely wearing) and motor vehicle tyres are some of the bigger sources. These both also release particles directly into the atmosphere allowing them to get absolutely everywhere, unlike plastic in landfills that probably has a harder time escaping into the wider environment.

> Plastic food containers aren't even close to being the largest source of microplastics.

Can you give me some citations? I know that microwaving plastic containers is about the worst thing you can do with regards to microplastics, because it releases tons of them right into your food:

https://www.wired.com/story/for-the-love-of-god-stop-microwa...

Both that headline and article are cringeworthy. You can’t extrapolate a bunch of flawed experiments like that to anything real.

This is a hot area of research but that means it’s a hotbed of flawed and sensationalist research. Dunking embryonic cells in a bath of ridiculous concentrations of nanoplastic chemicals and watching them die is cute and a tired, stupid trick. If you put any of your cells in your favorite drinking water they’re going to lyse. It doesn’t prove shit.

For synthetic fibres : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4426466/

For tyre particulate : https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/101707/9/Tyr...

i would love a citation related to the polyblend tshirt. I absolutely love them but if its poisoning me more significantly than microwaving food in plastic containers, i will gladly return to hemp

Here : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4426466/

Ooof. back to hemp it is. edit: thank you, sincerely, for this.

I think bhouston is talking more about poisoniing one’s own body with microplastics, whereas you’re talking about polluting the environment.

I'd guess he knows that. But we do live in the environment, and if they go into the environment they go into the food chain, no?

The boat has been towed out of the environment!

It's almost as if it was the adoption of the microwave oven that signaled the roller coaster was beginning to race downhill.

God, I wish I could go back to non-plastic packaging. Natural peanut butter I can still find in glass, as I can for my jelly. But mayonnaise, ketchup and countless other items are in plastic-only containers.

Things like the microwave lowered the friction point for making food and snacks so I'm sure it is part of it. I honestly think people forget how much more friction was involved to have a bite to eat even just 20 years ago, and even more so 40 years ago.

Plastic food packaging is crazy to me, but also lowers the cost of food because of transportation. I would love to see a situation where you buy food in glass bottles and take thise cleaned glass bottles back to the store for resuse, for example. On plastic, on strategy for healthy eating is to be as strict as you can about buying food packaged in plastic. This is getting harder, but it forces you to get the majority of your food from the produce and butcher. Of course, one lived in places (like DC) where such a strategy might seem less possible.

I don't know about ketchup, but mayonnaise turned out to be far easier to make at home than I anticipated.

Mine always turns out runny and fails to congeal. Any tips?

What's wrong with microwave ovens? I find mine very handy and I never ever put plastic in it.

You might not but more microwave meals come in plastic trays, as do most other microwave foods. I use mine mainly to reheat leftovers, which are in glass of ceramic but that doesn't appear to be the majority use case judging from what I see at the houses of friends and family. Plastic and the microwave seem to be madly in love with each other.

> But mayonnaise, ketchup and countless other items are in plastic-only containers.

One idea is to stop consuming these, given they are not food and are not nutritious in the first place.

Your body (and mind) will thank you.

This is probably mostly the right answer to the obesity problem. Most condiments and packaged "food" is garbage food. If argue that a majority of products in a typical grocery store don't need to be there.

That’s hardly the only source. And the plastics are already in the ecosystem and circulating for a very long time even if we banned all plastics today - which we won’t and instead every year we produce and use more

> That’s hardly the only source.

Sure, everything is multi factor. Saying things are complex is a way to ensure there is no action taken ever.

> And the plastics are already in the ecosystem and circulating for a very long time even if we banned all plastics today - which we won’t and instead every year we produce and use more

Sure, but the sooner we act, once we know for sure this is a significant contributor, the sooner we stop making the problem worse.

I want my children to be able to have children, don't you?

Does it matter though? By banning plastics, we would increase awareness and move one step closer to solve this.

I think that with the advances in refrigeration, materials, logistics, we can safely go back to having bulk food for a lot of our needs. Also reusable glass containers instead of plastic bottles (e.g. for milk, oil, etc.)

> It will increase costs, but the alternative is we poison ourselves, so it is sort of needed

I hate to be that guy, but it's easy to say costs increase is a lesser problem when you are not in the lower end of the economic spectrum. What would happen to people who barely survive today? Corporations won't decrease their profit, gained by using cheap plastic, for the greater good.

Considering the alternatives are metal and glass, I'd assume that the cost difference would be exponential, especially if the most common alternative is banned and transport will be much heavier.

Banning DDT was also incredibly inconvenient for farmers as DDT worked amazingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring

Human ingenuity knows no bounds and it will be a market opportunity for new entrants and innovators.

IIRC, cost-benefit analysis (even in terms of health and other human indicators) suggests we probably should have kept at least some uses of DDT, as a lot of people have died of malaria because we didn't.

I wonder if that factors in the health and ecological effects of atrazine, neonicotinoids, glyphosate, and other substances. Many of their effects are the same as the effects of the other substances being discussed ITT.

You can add wax-coated cardstock (milk containers) and wax-coated bags (breakfast cereals) and just plain cardboard (quick oats).

Well then there are two straightforward questions:

- are the overall costs of plastics (namely pollution and its environmental and health effects) higher than the costs of banning plastics? Seems like a clear yes.

- what are the redistributive effects? Seems like: consumers are net winners (lower health effects, some or all financial costs of switching away from plastics are passed down to consumers through higher prices); some firms are losers (mainly those who produced plastics or used a lot of them) and some are winners (newcomers, producers of no plastics solutions, transporters).

Glass isn't really that expensive. It was cheap enough to be commonly used 100 years and it is only cheaper and easier to produce and transport today than it was then.

If the Flynn Effect is caused by more complex environments, it's possible we've just maxed out the improvements to be had from turning up the gain on that. Maybe this is just as smart as we get because of hard biological limits.

Is there no existing population that has been minimally affected by these 2 factors ?

A controlled study is impossible to do, but the correlations and trend lines should show up when comparing across different population wide exposures to PFAs and microplastics.

That's another reason I think it is important to keep granular data of localized IQ, fertility, and trends in reproductive choice. People are worried about what it will reveal. We should instead be worried about what we're missing.

Sure, there are plenty of such populations. The first one that comes to mind is the Kogi, who live in a sky island 4000 meters above northern Colombia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kogi_people

But none of those populations can actually be used for testing, because you would need to collect relevant data on them starting 50 years ago, and we don't have any time machines.

Obesity itself is oestrogenic. It's the calories, stupid!

I used to think this, that the obesity thing was just a function of an increase in calorie consumption and a drop off in physical activity. I just can't take this view seriously anymore. When you look around today, there are body types that never existed prior to the 1970s - at least at any kind of scale. Comparing pictures of family gatherings from the 1950s through the 1970s, and then to the 1990s and beyond and there's such a stark, shocking difference. Two of my cousins had gastric bypass surgery (before they passed away), and there was never a real change in their diet or exercise (one was a cop, so it's not like he didn't get exercise). Something is poisoning us in America, and if there was one issue presidential candidates should be talking about that should be an easy bipartisan win it's health and fitness.

Whenever I tried "eating healthy" without calorie counting, I didn't lose weight. 6 weeks on keto to lose 200g was demoralizing.

Then I did calorie counting with MyFitnessPal and ate at a 500 cal deficit, and I lost weight. It works. But I pretty much had to stop eating out because I couldn't know the numbers on restaurant meals. I was basically eating raw food half the time, just to make it easier to calculate.

I'm surprised there's no government initiative to help people do calorie counting. Open up-to-date database, force restaurants to feed it nutritional info, etc.

It is the calories. We are simply eating many more calories than in the 1970s. Cheap, high calorie, highly processed food were not ubiquitous like they are today.

Being a cop is a very sedentary position in most of America. Unless you are a city cop out walking around you are probably in your car most of the day.

I'm not being clear, because there's some confusion in the replies to my comment here and elsewhere in the larger thread. I'm not denying that calorie counting helps most people lose weight. I did it to cut after a gain phase when I was training for certain events. Of course it works (for most people), and I agree with you that I wish more people did it.

What I am saying is that, for many and an increasing number of people, something is wrong - calorie surplus or not - with that they're ingesting. Even the physiology of being "fat" in the 1950s looked absolutely nothing like obesity does today. The "processed" part is the difference, though, so we certainly agree on that point.

> there was never a real change in their diet or exercise

Don’t you think that could have been the reason their health continued to fail?

At least it's not ostrogothgenic

it could always be worse

I wonder if the Flynn effect could be more about our cultural environment then our chemical environment.

In 1900 lots of people lived with low access to information or highly sensory stimulating environments. By 1950 there was a lot more stimulus and info. TV, comic books, color movies, rock & roll, fear of nuclear armageddon. By 2000 we're overloaded. Cable TV, computers, cheap and rapid long distance communication, fear of climate armageddon. Maybe the cognitive load has just become too much. Two beers might make you better at darts, but 20 won't.

>I wonder what else could be contributing?

The Wikipedia article on the Flynn effect mentions air pollution. Though this is a little surprising because in some parts of the West, air pollution has decreased since the introduction of acid rain controls in the 1980s, while the decline shows up generally after the 90s.

Solvent-extracted hydrogenated seed oils for one thing.

Canola is an industry term, not Latin plant name, but why would culture repressed by toxic ersatz foodstuffs and microplastics care to know about brassica seeds?

I was pretty disappointed to learn that hexane is still commonly used for solvent extraction of vegetable oil. Residual levels are generally < 50 ppb, but hexane metabolites can covalently bond to biomolecules [1] and take years to be removed [2]. There are tons of safer solvents to choose from.

1: https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdire...

2: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jns.12261

You need to add obesity to that.

Perhaps related to microplastics interfering with the endocrine system. https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/geh_newslett...

Which is ironic as to the fact that fatty products are normally encased in toxic plastics.

Alongside fruits and vegetables

I suspect those trends are more political rather than environmental.

EMFs.

The Flynn effect reversal has a pretty simple (but unpopular) explanation that has nothing to do with microplastics.

Could you please share this simple explanation for those of us who aren’t as smart as you?

I assume dysgenics (which you’d assume is happening if family size is inversely correlated with education and or income).

AFAIK there are some studies that show that dysgenics are at least not the only effect in play (e.g. this study https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1718793115). But I am far from an expert on the topic.

Amazing study you found there. I hadn't seen it before.

I'm pretty sure he is going to either say either immigrants or something related to Chad vs Incel.

But more concretely, there is evidence that conservatives out reproduce liberals in the US and in part it is related to the urban - country divide and that could also be related to both pollution, but also likely cost of living: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advant...

Something else it could be is that the internet is a great tool for learning and connecting, but it's also a great tool for turning your brain off and being passively entertained for hours on end. Even worse than that would be the concept of algorithmic thinking patterns being trained into people as they allow a social media site to "tell" them what to think about.

An example would be people who go onto Twixxer to find out what they are supposed to be mad about today. I understand that there are legitimate issues which need a spotlight put on them and social media can be a great tool for that. But it also thrives on that level of anger and energy, so there is a decent amount of less-than-dire issues being flogged just for engagement.

If enough people are just entertaining their brain away/being directed by an algorithm more often than not, I can see this moving the needle on general intelligence since "the brain is a muscle" and not using it means you can lose it over time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com