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.
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?
"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.
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.
― 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
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 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.
But yeah, human digestion is pretty efficient. Muscles are far less efficient though, around 30%, which is a neat fact.
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.
We have to be taught the value of exercise and being physically active because most people don’t default to that.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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"
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
For practical purposes you either need to eat modestly at McDonalds or more realistically not eat at McDonalds very much.
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.
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.