The Fat Drug
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
Second, antibiotics in feed are pretty much constant, while humans hardly ever take antibiotics. The article mentions children take antibiotics once a year on average, but the median must be very different from the mean. (I expect a few children take antibiotics very often, and most children take them very rarely.) In addition, if taking antibiotics once a year had the same increased growth rate effects as putting them in feed constantly, farmers would do that for the cost saving.
Overall, this article seems to pad out a hugely speculative idea to try to make it seem more plausible.
(I should know better than to get involved in a nutrition discussion on HN.)
[1] A random reference explaning how antibiotics improve meat quality by causing more protein and less fat: http://animalsmart.org/feeding-the-world/growth-promotant-us...
However, you're right. This is a poorly written and researched article, and uses a fair number of unsubstantiated "radical" discovery claims to make the article more exciting than it would have been had an actual scientist been tasked to write it. But it's the NY Times ... they've got an agenda too right? (i.e. make money off subscribers and advertisers)
So, yeah, in the article they mention which ones are used but to stretch that to "antibiotics" is a little too much.
"By the time most meat reaches our table, it contains little or no antibiotics. So we receive our greatest exposure in the pills we take, rather than the food we eat."
It is yet another piece of farmer folklore, like hail cannons and routine castration. They are believed to work, without any scientific basis.
The thing is, farmers believe so strongly in this myth, that even in places where antibiotics are banned as a feed additive, they bribe vets to prescribe their livestock antibiotics for a variety of fictitious ailments, so they can keep giving it.
[1] http://www.tufts.edu/med/apua/news/newsletter_33_3555326098....
> Trash, it turned out, could be transformed into meat.
> pumping them with food and antibiotics. And yes, this did make the pigs fatter
> particularly in female mice: They gained about twice as much body fat as the control-group mice
This article is infuriating sloppy, as it starts out talking about meat (muscle), and then slides into talking about fat, as if they were the same thing, and it's not clear at all that the author is talking about the same things, using the wrong words, or talking about things that can be connected at all.
I'm wondering whether body builders are already dosing themselves on antibiotics? It seems like someone would have tried that a while ago and then built a minor religion out of it had it worked. A quick google search suggests that body builders tend to think that antibiotics will reduce muscle gain due to inhibiting digestion through killing off bacteria.
How about some actual evidence? Not even a single peer reviewed study is mentioned. There are so many ways that this "idea" could be disproven with a simple study or even analysis of existing longitudinal studies. Or what about cross country comparisons, etc. And which of the dozens of popular antibiotics has this effect? Is it dosage relate? C'mon people at least do the minimal basic analysis before you suggest suggesting cause and effect.
This is exactly how all kinds of stupid ideas get into our heads. Not only do they waste our time but they can have real effects such as the continuing vaccine scare. Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare?
I agree. Some interesting points are made-- but it does all seem like a bit of handwaving.
>Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare?
Given the expanding prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria coupled with the shrinking pipeline of new antibiotic drugs, I think we should be at least a little worried. At this point, additional restraint in antibiotic use (especially agricultural) would be prudent.
One would hope so.
My money's on "neither harmful, nor especially useful" for the long term scientific consensus here... but I admittedly have a natural inclination towards positions that alienate both sides in any dispute.
Here's one discussion for poultry, though still digging for the economic analysis for swine and cattle: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804117/
I think the question the author raises is a good one. We don't have a very good handle on what bacteria live in our bodies, much less what they all do. If we are destroying certain bacteria with antibiotics inside us, what does that mean for our bodies? There appears to be a long observed correlation between ingesting antibiotics and weight gain.
News sites tend to be so "busy" and messy. I love the clean look of the mobile version. I really get what people mean by "mobile first design" now...
In particular, the NYT wants story 'themes' so that they will 'condition' their readers to accept that 'stories' in these themes can be realistic. Then the NYT can write silly stories in the themes, have their readers take the stories seriously, and, thus, have some special and especially effective ways to grab their readers by the heart, the gut, and below the belt.
One of the themes is the 'environment' and a morality play of evil humans destroying the environment. That story goes back to the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a rock to keep the sun moving across the sky. Old religions of nature worship were similar. It's a special case of good versus evil, of sin, transgression, retribution, and, maybe, redemption, likely via sacrifice. Kill a lamb. Give up cars and walk. Etc.
In this story it's the evil, and dumb and greedy, farmers 'messing around with powerful, dangerous, hostile forces of nature with consequences they can't possibly understand' and, thus, being a threat to all of us.
So, the NYT pumps this stuff out. They have some conditioned, devoted readers who lap up this swill.
It's not science, news, reporting, or investigative journalism. Instead it's just a nasty manipulation.
Here at HN we would be fools to take such swill at face value and argue against its logic and science. The NYT doesn't care a hoot about logic or science but just the NYT manipulation and, then, their ad revenue.
So, I reject that the article from tbe NYT was just an effort at rationalism and information. That hypothesis rejected, I look for another explanation -- the NYT is trying to jerk me around. Do I have solid proof? No, but doing some beautiful rationalism in the face of some low grade rationalism from the NYT begins to look like here at HN we are being manipulated and are being foolish.
On the specific issue of body weight, "normal" weight ranges for a given height were defined years ago on the basis of statistics on weight distributions in the general population. Oddly, current mortality and morbidity statistics tend to show that the persons with longest expected lifespans are not persons with "normal" weight as defined by body mass index but rather persons who are (slightly) "overweight." (This is however, most true for "overweight" persons who have good cardiovascular fitness.[2]) So if today's population in developed countries weighs more than populations a generation ago, the issue to look at is how many people have shifted from underweight to normal weight, how many from normal weight to overweight, and how many from overweight to obsesity. Obesity is definitely harmful to health. Moderate physical exercise, the kind I get by substituting walking or bicycling to do errands for driving, is surely good for pretty nearly everyone, independent of other lifestyle factors. But it has yet to be shown that antibiotic intake in the current amounts experienced by human beings in the developed world is harmful. There has been investigation in the last decade or so of the hypothesis that some antiobiotics may be protective against heart disease,[3] for instance, although maybe not all antibiotics have the same risk-benefit profile.
[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/195977021257786739/
Was not aware of that "slightly overweight" finding, good stuff.
Does that mean "overweight" is a misnomer? Or are people wrong when they conflate a normal weight with a healthy weight?
Wouldn't you call that simply "biotics"? Or maybe "pro-biotics"?
I think the most convincing clue that there is something nonobvious going on is that lab animals are also getting fatter, despite being on a standardized and controlled diet (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101124/full/news.2010.628.ht...).
Some is known to help people put on weight. Some is known to help people stay at a normal weight.
It's an interesting extra method to tackle obesity, because what society is trying so far doesn't seem to be working.
The problem is that in a culture where junk food is cheap and pushed 24/7, there is no tradition of healthy nutrition, and there is much unbalance work/life, such education is clearly impossible.
Second, and most important, I think you never lived in countries having different lifestyles, so that your idea on the subject is purely theoretical.
Nutrition research itself is not "wrong", but it's much more important to have a broader view and experience.
Nutritional "discoveries" have been coming and going for decades, and yet the situation didn't improve at all.
If you'll have a very simple walk around a city, and possibly in a supermarket, in a country where obesity is not epidemic, you will see immediately why the situation is such.
But of course, 90 % is diet. 10 % is hard work. And these numbers come from my hat.
Effort and discipline -- everybody knows those can get us anything, but the question is, how can we minimize effort and discipline and still get what we want?
I'm mean really... just read it out loud. :)
It might make them healthier and fitter and less likely to die but it doesn't help them lose weight.
:-/
Any chance you can link to some of the research that shows where the rest of the energy comes from?
I think the key insight is that the body is a complex, dynamic system. So the exercise required to burn 2500 calories will vary between individuals, and even for a single individual based on any number of factors. I won't profess to have all the answers here, but I don't think it's as simple as X calories per mile x Y miles = 2500 calories, where X comes from a table on the Internet. I think it's more of f(X) calories per mile, where f is a compound function that includes the composition & fluctuations of your gut biome and its effect on your metabolic rate. My foggy memories of the research are that in practice, solving f in the real world is quite difficult.
So while your calorie deficit theory works, in practice unless you're precisely measuring your compound (i.e. you plus your gut flora) metabolic rate in a lab, you don't actually have a way to know how many calories you're burning.
Your claim falls apart very quickly and very simply with basic math (and everybody can test this starting immediately):
Scenario: I'm a 225 pound, 6'2" male, basically healthy. 30 years old. I keep my diet constant at 2500 calories, and begin burning 750 calories per day through exercise. I will lose weight, and likely gain muscle (which will accelerate my body's natural caloric burn rate), and there's nothing that can prevent that from occurring in a healthy person.
Weight loss is a total calorie equation. Exercise forces your body to consume calories at a higher rate, reducing the total left for the body to store. It's that simple.
Another extraordinarily easy proof for this: Michael Phelps. Phelps was famously consuming 10,000 daily calories, lots of it trashy carbs like pancakes. His exercise routine - swimming countless hours per day - is the sole reason he didn't balloon to a thousand pounds. So run this test: consume 10,000 calories per day, do zero exercise, watch your weight explode upwards by 50 pounds in about a month; begin exercising heavily, enough to burn the excess calories, watch as your weight 'magically' falls.
There's no one serious that questions calories in vs calories out, but there are lots of people who question whether it is the right place to start, because of things like measurement difficulty and the relative unlikeliness of adherence to a given diet/exercise regime.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this question. Epidemiologic studies tend to support the notion that in a practical setting (not an ideal laboratory), exercise is helpful for keeping weight off, but not really for losing weight.
So yeah, exercise is very important, but in the normal setting, it seems that exercise is counterbalanced by an increase in appetite, so it doesn't promote weight loss (but somehow does promote weight maintenance once weight is lost).
Lots of things that seem obvious turn out to be mot true or much weaker than people thought when put through a proper trial.
To answer your specific question: muscle weighs more than fat, so if a person reduces fat percentage but increases muscle percentage will they lose weight or not? They'll be fitter and healthier, but will they be lighter?
You unfortunately used the phrase in the literal meaning lose weight, while it is commonly used to indicate that someone is going to start reducing their fat percentage and improve the body shape. If the word phrase has a different meaning to you, fine, but whenever it was used in conversations I was involved in it had that definition, thus the confusion. You should have used the word mass and there would be no misunderstanding.
Exercise will definitely work, but it might not strictly lower your mass.
Read through this thread. Sometimes people spout utter nonsense about nutrition. While "exercise makes you lose weight" sounds reasonable I'm keen to see what the research says.
So far someone told me that I'm talking shit and a bunch of people downvoted the post that requested research, but no one has provided any links to any research.
If you want this kind of researches, you will find by yourself lots of researches that support one thesis, then lots of researches supporting the opposite.
I've stopped reading nutrition research, because it's essentially a jumble of conflicting, unfounded theories.
The smartest thing one can do, for this specific question, is this: go to a sports club, then ask to the people: when you stop practicing your sport, do you get fatter? And conversely, when you started, or in periods of intensive training, do you get leaner?
If you're really curious about the subject, do that, you will get the answer.
I've been practicing sports for 20+ years, so I know the answer, and the experience of any person who's been practicing sport intensively for decades, is worth way more than a platoon of armchair academic nutritionits can possibly theorize.
This should remind that research (at least, this type of research) should be grounded and not detached from reality.
Unless you can find another way to explain why his 10,000 to 12,000 calorie diet - that included pancakes and sugary energy drinks - didn't result in massive weight gain, as it would in a sedentary person.
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/08/13/the-michael-phelps-di...
http://nypost.com/2008/08/13/phelps-pig-secret-hes-boy-gorge...
Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.
Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.
Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.
As a fat guy who has run 15 or 20 races (including a triathlon) at this point and is training for another, my personal experience is that adding exercise doesn't help me lose weight.
Yes, yes, animal models != human results. But what about the experiments that were done on humans? The kids in Guatemala, or in Florida? The Navy sailors? I'm willing to bet they controlled for amount of food in those cases, and yet they all saw increased weight gain on antibiotics.
Net, that seems pretty indicative that it may not just be how much we're eating, and I think that's worth exploring further.
An overweight person can be eating caloric diet equal to a skinny person and not only not lose any fat, but also be painfully constantly hungry, and be technically starving themselves as their body leeches what it needs to run from their vital organs.
Meanwhile a fit person can be eating excess amounts of calories, but because they eat minimal carbs/sugars their body doesn't hold onto the extra calories they are eating (mostly eating fats, veg, meat) and they more easily lose body fat, and not only that but be constantly feeling full and never have hunger on their mind.
Obesity is an inflammatory disease. It's not as simple as the amount of food you eat irregardless of what you eat. What you eat is extremely important, and when you eat right portion size is less important because your body won't allow you to eat more than what you need.
Calories in calories out is incorrect. A person who accepts this as truth is setting themselves up for painful failure.