McMaster researchers may have found a way to restore metabolism to youth levels | Hacker News Reader

McMaster researchers may have found a way to restore metabolism to youth levels

cbc.ca

194 pointsRyanMcGreal121 comments

I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar. I'm sure the researchers wouldn't dispute the benefits of exercise. But if there really is a safe, effective way to improve the metabolism and make it easier to keep off fat, why exactly is that a bad thing? (Naturally the research is far too early on to know that, but hypothetically speaking.) Of course you should continue to exercise and stay healthy in other ways, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also look for other ways to make it easier for people to get to, or remain at, a healthy weight.

You probably inherently understand that obesity is widely considered a moral disease.

Therefore, the only solution to a moral failing is trial by fire.

So, by recasting obesity as something OTHER than a moral failing, well you are removing the very thing that lets a portion of society feel superior to others.

And you can't do that.

Technically removing the consequences of gluttony is likely to increase demand for food products and therefore increase its price, reducing available food supply and increasing world hunger. Food supply can be temporarily boosted by farming the land more intensively, but in the long run will also be detrimental to food production. Until our food production can be dramatically increased with minimal effect on the environment, I'm against it.

You're doubling down on the "obesity is a moral disease" stance here ("gluttony" is explicitly a moral judgement). I've come to suspect that it really isn't as simple as "lack of self-control": too many people I know have gained significant weight due to medications or medical conditions, or despite sincere and sustained efforts to bring their weight under control. (I'm also quite intrigued by claims that even broad populations of lab animals in the US have gained weight over the same period that the US population has, despite their carefully managed diets and activity levels.)

Once something is this common, it just stops being reasonable to blame the individuals rather than broader factors. (In much the same way, if half of my students fail an exam, I'm pretty sure that's not entirely their fault: I clearly screwed something up in the teaching or the testing.)

The broadest factor is US food politics. And that's far easier to fix than trying to cure cancer - end market manipulation that keep the costs of some goods artificially high and the others artificially low.

Somehow instead we've created a food economy where the absolute worst food for you, even though it's not very economical to grow, is far cheaper because of the disincentive to produce things like cheese and non-bovine livestock and the incentive to grow corn.

    "Once something is this common, it just stops being reasonable to blame the individuals rather than broader factors."

You are introducing one additional broad factor of world hunger through increase in food prices. And that is not something I would like to be morally responsible for.

I'm OK with people overeating - as long as they receive the consequences of doing so. They are adults who can make their own decisions with the trade-off between food consumption vs weight. Removing the consequences? That's where my moral judgement is - at all those people who think indulging our senses and removing consequences to those who do without thinking about the cost to everyone else - and not just the moral cost.

And, it looks like that includes you.

    ""gluttony" is explicitly a moral judgement"

'gluttony' is a word. Whether it's a moral judgement is in your mind. In it's most technical terms it means "over-consumption of food, drink, or wealth items to the point of extravagance or waste." It's like "goto". It's only bad if used with judgement - which I did not - only saying the utility of mankind would be greater if we do not artificially increase our metabolism to remove the consequence of overeating.

    " too many people I know have gained significant weight due to medications or medical conditions, or despite sincere and sustained efforts to bring their weight under control."

Then that is the medication's problem. Why is obesity a much smaller problem in other countries? Why are so many people taking anxiety medications, for example?

And that is closer to the core problems in society than solving obesity via medication - obesity is just a symptom and by removing the appearance of the symptom you never get to solve the core problem, and additionally, make the world worse off by introducing more unintended consequences further away from what is really wrong with society.

Your argument over 'gluttony' is silly. Without shared meanings behind words, we cannot communicate.

The common, shared, understanding of gluttony comes with moral failing. After all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins#Gluttony

Which states: "Derived from the Latin gluttire, meaning to gulp down or swallow, gluttony (Latin, gula) is the over-indulgence and over-consumption of anything to the point of waste."

Now, I highly doubt you have a different definition in mind. You are only backtracking now that people are heavily calling you out for it.

So why are you backtracking here? The rest of your comments indicate are really consistent with someone who is in fact judging people who are obese.

If you really aren't judging them, perhaps instead of arguing that 'gluttony' is a morally neutral word (it isn't), choose a different word? That's the nice thing about english, it has a lot of expressivity.

I had looked it up before I used it. It was a deliberate choice of a word. I'm not Christian and the use of the word "gluttony" was used to precisely mean the over-consumption of food. There is no backtracking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluttony

"Gluttony, derived from the Latin gluttire meaning to gulp down or swallow, means over-indulgence and over-consumption of food, drink, or wealth items to the point of extravagance or waste. In some Christian denominations, it is considered one of the seven deadly sins—a misplaced desire of food or its withholding from the needy."

My original comment states:

"Technically removing the consequences of gluttony is likely to increase demand for food products and therefore increase its price"

---

I am morally against removing the consequences of gluttony, because it will increase human suffering through hunger as an unintended consequence.

---

People can call me out on it, threaten me with all kinds of abuse, I will not take one inch back from my statement.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_...

Which level are you?

Are you perceiving me as judging those who are obese, and so is judging me for it?

Obesity is absolutely a moral disease, in the sense that you don't get fat without eating yourself fat, as well as a disease of our society, in terms of our society producing foods that encourage people to eat themselves fat.

Broader factors certainly share the blame, but so do individuals. It is possible for almost anyone to be thin in today's society, in the same way that it was possible for almost anyone to get fat a few hundred years ago (given access to plentiful enough food).

Saying "it's not just down to the individuals" is fair and true. Saying "it's not down to the individuals at all, how dare you imply that it might be" is obviously wrong-headed.

In general, I agree that there's always some responsibility on the individual. But in a lot of cases, I really don't think it's helpful to look at it that way.

I have a friend who was in great physical shape consistently for years. Then (going from memory on the details here) at some point she got on a new medication for migraines, and within a few months she'd gained a surprising number of pounds. Her eating and activity habits didn't change all that much along the way: the drugs just affected her metabolism somehow. Nothing she's tried since has gotten the weight off (and it's not feasible to drop the only medication that's been able to stop the searing pain).

So tell me: which part of that was a moral failure on her part? Because you've made it clear that if you saw her in the street, that's what you'd be thinking.

The case you mention is clearly exceptional. It does not explain the huge rise in obesity over the last few decades.

To clarify: when I say "obesity is a moral disease" I'm talking about obesity as a social trend, not a specific overweight person - those can have very good explanations... but the majority don't, imho.

So you think the population just got less moral recently? How about the fact that cheap food has less nutrition per calorie, and people have less money available in their food budget now. So they eat more calories because high-calorie food is what they can afford.

People are so eager to consume anything and everything they have little to no money left to spend on good food.

A lot of your statements are ignoring broad swaths of biology and neuro-psych research!

To talk about weight gain without digging in to the biochemical reasons why is ridiculous. To just chalk it up to "well the foods are bad, and hey don't eat them" is also just as ignorant as those poor people who are victims of the food industry.

And yes, I say victims, because I believe that the food that is typically produced, and labeled as healthy, is highly addictive. One of the things we are discovering is that much of what we eat affects our dopamine systems! Literally our food is addictive and has activation pathways similar to cocaine or heroin!

You have very little choice when struggling against your dopamine system. It's very powerful. Research in to 'will power' indicates its substantially less powerful than people think.

So, now you are saying people who are following advice, or forced by economic circumstances in to eating food that has been incredibly harmful (and carcinogenic!) are immoral. You are expecting everyone to be super-human, or you'll say they are literally bad people.

I refuse to take such a pessimistic view of humanity. People do what makes sense to them, and it is the responsibility of ALLEGED intelligent people like yourself to HELP them. Not sit on a high perch and laugh at them!

So, I finish this off by saying, not only is obesity a disease, and not a moral failing, that in fact YOU are the one with a moral failing!

Exactly. We can all agree that the environment that Humans live in is considerably different than it was 10K years ago. Expecting our bodies and minds to function well, within it, is asking for a lot.

I have no shame in taking medications and using technologies that help me sustain normality within an abnormal environment. Maybe someday we will also come up with a cure for 'moral judgement', as well.

Vaccination increases lifespan which leads to increased resource consumption, and the planet just can not afford it. So until we figure out how to transcend into beams of light I'm against it.

I actually find it surprising here given the large number of people here sympathetic to the transhuman/singularity/quantified-self/life-hacker type ideals.

Does it not occur to them that findings like this, combined with a good diet and exercise, are the most likely candidates for actually living longer and staying healthy further into your old age?

I don't care what lazy people will "get away with", I want these advances and to continue my healthy lifestyle.

What's healthy?

I switched my diet to substantially up my saturated fats, increased my red meat intake by 4x and ended up losing weight, improving my lipids, and blood pressure and a lot more.

Basically, what I'm saying is, by ignoring ALL the advice of medical professionals and the USDA/etc was I able to change my life and establish a new, sustainable (as in for me to keep doing it), diet.

So, tell me again about what good diet is?

Is that the question we're talking about? I was referring to the comments casting being overweight as moral failing and viewing this research as negative in some way. I found it quite silly and I have never been overweight or even had immediate family members with weight issues.

I've always gone with "Eat food (not food-like products), not too much, mostly plants." as a baseline for what a good diet is. Its likely not the best, and there are likely completely different diets that are as good or better, but we don't know what they are.

And I sacrifice a fair amount to get a lot of physical activity. And pay attention to what you eat, don't let habit or compulsion have too much control of your eating. Incidentally this is why most diets work at the beginning, starting to pay attention to what you eat has more benefit than anything else.

Macro-nutrient adjustment diets seem particularly untrustworthy to me - there are healthier cultures around the world with diets of all macro-nutrient balances, and the fact that the "good ones" change every ten years for diet fads looks exactly like what happens when people demand answers from science when it doesn't have them but has to give their best guess.

Also, the idea that food or a certain diet is simply healthy or not healthy is a childish simplification. Your body is complex, and the same food will have different consequences on different organs and systems in your body. What makes something a net negative or net positive depends on the current state of your body and how you weight different effects.

That's basically it, I have no strong opinions because there is no strong evidence.

So no, I can't tell you what a good diet is specifically, and anyone who says they can is a liar.

A good diet is highly subjective and individual. You should know this. My parents are strictly vegan and although they are in their mid 60s, they're physically more fit and active than most people 30 years younger.

It brings us one step closer to The Culture.

Cognitive dissonance and beliefs-as-attire are a nasty thing to fall victim to. Yes, diet and exercise are the most effective longevity interventions we can possibly take on an individual scale. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean every self-proclaimed "transhumanist" or whatever will actually take the most effective action for their own health and longevity when it conflicts with long-built-up bad habits.

I was watching "Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry, Marketing & the Creation of a Health Crisis" on LinkTV last night and they talked about how obesity is rising in 3-6 year olds. The point being that children in that age group are no less active today than in the past, so something else is causing obesity, type II diabetes and other problems.

The most likely culprit is processed food, where nutrients are not used in their natural form, but instead converted into something else. So using corn to make high fructose corn syrup, soy and cottonseed to make oil, or feeding animal protein to herbivores are a few examples of where the food supply is getting contaminated. For example, cottonseed oil is not only a relatively unhealthy oil, but it also contains one of the highest concentration of pesticides (because cotton was not traditionally a food crop).

Not to mention that plastics contain hormone-like chemicals like BPA, they use preservatives in things like canned food that don’t need them, and add animal byproducts like pork lard to foods like refried beans that don’t need them. So our immune systems are getting bombarded by substances we either have no evolutionary history with or simply don’t need to be eating in the quantities that we are. So that inhibits aspects of our immune systems and metabolism (triggering autoimmune disorders like allergies, asthma, arthritis and metabolic syndrome).

I could literally go on forever about this, so the gist of it is “it’s the food supply, stupid”. Yes, being more active helps a great deal, but without proper nutrition we’re looking at a modern form of the wasting diseases similar to the ones they used to get in the 1800s before they understood vitamins and minerals, except it’s masked by obesity. I think if we didn’t have the social stigmas around laziness and the political monkeying of the farm and retail lobbies, we would have recognized obesity as an epidemic the way we did with polio and done something about it decades ago. Nothing short of going back to the foods we ate before about 1980 is going to work for the vast majority of the population. And that’s going to start with campaigns to inform people about what’s in their food and reform the way we design cities so that food centers are near where people live.

TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it.

> The most likely culprit is processed food […]

Processed food alone does not seem to explain all data (though you do mention “plastics contain hormone-like chemicals”):

- Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades.

- Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented.

Source: http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.ht...

> TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it.

Some of this is cross generational. Children born to obese parents have a much higher likelihood of lifetime obesity. Wikipedia lone has a lot of good info on this.

TL;DR: Capitalism solves everything. /sarcasm.

Some day humanity will realize that the freedom to say and pursue a different opinion, is not the same as "competition".

The freedom to a diff opinion, and pursuing it, is good. Cooperation and sharing, is good. Competition, is bad. It focuses on "wining" and not on solutions and improvement.

PS: Yeah, I know, I live in a wrong, fucking, century :-(

Bah to your sarcastic pessimism. Doesn't help you, doesn't help the world.

Here, read this and upgrade your thinking on the subject of failings of capitalism and why they are so: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Could we please not pretend the failings of capitalism are entirely coordination problems and/or eldritch abominations? I mean, come on, your average capitalist society is actually very well-coordinated when it comes to the interests of big banks or agribusiness.

> The most likely culprit is processed food

Food doesn't jump into kids' mouths and eat itself. If there's a problem with what kids are eating then it's their parents who are to blame.

access to fresh food is more expensive now that the industry has gone more and more into processed foods.

People have to eat, and if you can't afford to get high-quality food, you're gonna buy low-quality food.

Only in terms of time, at least here in Europe. If you get noodles, flour, rice and in-season vegetables and fruit (and don't choose these for wants but for price, there are some ridiculous deals sometimes), plus some more expensive ingredients such as eggs and milk sparingly, it is very cheap. There's no way processed food can beat that.

See, you are assuming that noodles, flour, rice are healthy for you.

There is good evidence that in fact, it is not. Many of those things are inflammatory. Also, following advice they get from doctors, they are using more and more poly-unsaturated fats. Which as we are discovering are actually substantially LESS healthy for you than saturated fat!

And in terms of time, you are ignoring the only thing people have a fixed amount of. By ignoring that, you're ignoring a very important factor that causes people in to bad eating choices. Not that they even know what good vs bad are (as I hinted above, so-called 'healthy' food for you isn't!)

Well, you can also get lentils, whole-grain bread/noodles/rice/flour, chickpeas and other things as cheap staples (if one leaves the meat out as in my example it's not even optional), but I guess that's not what you mean? What would be your suggestion as staple?

There's a problem with nutrition research in that it changes recommendations every once in a while. The only constant seems to be 'Eat food, mix it up - naturally colourful things are good, don't eat too much of it', so I'm going with that for now.

Concerning time.. it's maybe more of a knowledge and organisation thing, which takes time to aquire. Unless you want really fancy food like sushi.

http://crappypictures.com/grocery-stores-before-after-kidsil...

There are few topics that create as much controversial conversation. The well known ones are religion and politics, the third is 'diet/exercise.' Always a lot of energy.

Especially around here. Health-related posts bring out the same well-informed, scientifically literate opinions from the HN crowd that I'd expect when reading posts about C++ programming on webmd.com.

I really wish users could downvote stories.

I think its a variation of "bikeshedding"- everyone eats and gets some form of exercise, so everyone feels entitled to an opinion.

Or in summary:

1. Our ways > your ways.

2. Nuh uh.

3. (Optional) Wanna fight about it?

Iterate!

(HN version of #2: "Hyperlinks to statistically rigorous peer reviewed studies or GTFO")

Eh, I'd put "I saw a documentary on netflix that said..." into the "Nuh uh" category more than the "stats or GTFO" category.

Should watch the documentary fed up.

Covers a number interesting stats that show increase in sugar and other cost cutting products growth is growing with obesity.

I have lost over 100lbs in 2 years once weighing near 300 from hard work exercising, risky metabolism boosters stacks with ephedrine (not banned in Canada), interval training constantly monitoring my heart rate during workouts especially cause of ephedrine and changing my diet.

I have kept it off for 3 years without having really exercising in the past 3 years by lowering carb and sugar intake and removed all fast food. Still eat out and don't watch any calorie or fat content

Exercise alone won't help. Exercise in western/ euro coultures didn't gain popularity till mid 1900s. Obesity rate has exploded since then. More people are going to the gym and exercising yet even more population is even fatter...

There were at least some studies that linked faster metabolism to shorter lifespans.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3100751/

Higher Energy Expenditure in Humans Predicts Natural Mortality

I personally am trying to somewhat keep my metabolism slower by eating less often, and less in general, plus intermittent fasting. But of course everything is still open for debate.

I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar.

The problem is, from a libertarian/rugged individualism point of view, failure to lose weight is a simple failure of self control. Calories out have to be greater than calories in, after all. Also, I'm willing to bet more than a few people here have heard the fatlogic of "it's my genetics" or "it's the drugs I'm on". While there are some conditions and drugs that can contribute to weight gain, it's not nearly as common as most people using the excuse would like to think, and it usually doesn't work that way (most drugs that "cause" weight gain do it by intensifying hunger signals, not modifying metabolism, which is fairly difficult to do to any great degree via drugs - otherwise this article wouldn't be noteworthy!).

In the end, this most likely won't help the majority of the obese, who do have a medical condition (try being obese for any amount of time and tell me it's not having a negative impact on your joints, at a minimum; there is no good health above or below certain sizes). If anything, this will just make the problem worse by enabling people to consume even more food, and probably end up putting on more weight, especially since it seems that most causes of obesity are psychological (unconscious eating, eating past satiety, bad food choices, etc). Also, if some of the comments here are to be believed, this drug will just treat the symptom of obesity and not the cause (eg, processed food, BPA, etc).

I do think this research could have great applications into life extension, or helping people feel younger, but my money is on this drug not having any noticeable effect on the obese population.

I think it's because people like to moralise.

Well I was going to deride the article because they're bragging about a medical finding that still only works in mice models. These often don't carry over into human beings.

But other than that, always nice to see progress made against wasting diseases and aging.

To me it is because this just traps you into constantly using the drug instead of adapting to the fact that you have gotten older and should eat less.

But what exactly about that situation makes it worse? Let's assume for a moment that a therapy exists that is funtionally identical to proper diet. It seems that each person could choose to weigh the costs of the drug vs. the increased enjoyment of eating whatever, or vs. the decreased time spent at a gym.

The way things work today, you're right. People "should eat less". It used to be that if you didn't want children, then you shouldn't have sex. Thankfully we have a wide variety of options that allow us to decouple sex from reproduction. I don't see why we shouldn't also have options to decouple eating from getting fat.

But it is not identical to a proper diet. You still need to keep one despite this medicine, it is just a slightly larger diet.

"you have gotten older and should eat less" isn't a fact, it's an assumption baked into society's mind based on how aging has worked in the past. This breakthrough could break that assumption. In that case, some people (adopters) will internalize that and some people won't.

I would much rather use a drug than eat less for the rest of my life.

Based on the findings of this article, the OTC EGCG should "restore metabolism to youth levels."

Using a decarboxylase or AADC[0] inhibitor like EGCG[1] found in green tea extract limits peripheral serotonin metabolism, especially if you're supplementing with serotonin precursors like tryptophan or 5-HTP to avoid heart-valve issues.[2]

See Examine.com's note in the 5-HTP article[3] and the associated citation.[4] 800mg of EGCG 2 hours prior to supplementation demonstrated decarboxylase inhibition.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromatic_L-amino_acid_decarboxy...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000MYW2ZA/

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15781732

[3] http://examine.com/supplements/5-HTP/#summary5-1

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11374875

Publication: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3766....

This article and the researchers grossly overstate potential benefits of this research. While adults have "brown fat" there isn't a lot, certainly not enough to make up for the level of overconsumption by obese people.

It isn't appropriate to jump to conclusions about how this would work in humans based on rat experiments since rats have a much larger amount of brown fat than humans.

TL;DR: Interesting research with irresponsible and most likely incorrect assumptions about how it applies to humans.

> They're calling it a possible solution to obesity and a preventative measure for diabetes, one that turns up the body's metabolic rate without the negative side effects of increasing the heart rate or blood pressure.

I think "possible solution" is too strong. According to the CDC, as of 2012 "more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese" so it logically follows that simply restoring the metabolic rate of adults to their teenage rates probably won't help a sizable portion of the population.

Also, while it's promising that this doesn't increase heart rate or blood pressure, weight is just one factor in overall health. There are a lot of adults who are of a healthy weight but still aren't very healthy. For instance, a healthy weight doesn't mean that an individual has good cardiovascular health or functional strength. It's a shame that so much emphasis is placed on weight when it's really only a part of the equation and arguably not even the most important.

It's kind of silly how we keep looking for a pill for appearance (weight) when it's not hard to notice that people who focus on cardiovascular conditioning and functional strength usually have the healthiest looking bodies. Weight and body composition follow from healthy lifestyle; health does not follow from weight.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/obesity/facts.htm

> I think "possible solution" is too strong. According to the CDC, as of 2012 "more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese" so it logically follows that simply restoring the metabolic rate of adults to their teenage rates probably won't help a sizable portion of the population.

I think the message here is slightly different; it's not talking about 'setting it back to what your metabolism was like as a teenager', but rather 'setting a healthy person's metabolism back to what a healthy teenager's would be'.

It's entirely possible that the reason for the childhood obesity epidemic is an underdeveloped biology pumped full of these metabolism-destroying foods (accelerating the production of serotonin, etc.), resulting in a ruined metabolism far earlier than would be normal.

In other words, the diet that would cause obesity after 20 years starting at age 15 might cause obesity after 10 years starting at 5.

Again, you're focusing too much on weight. "Healthy" does not mean "not overweight."

There are tons of people, including young people, who can't do 5 minutes of moderately intense walking without becoming excessively winded. There are lots of people who can't do more than a pushup or two, and many can't even do a single pushup. And so on and so forth. A good percentage of these people are not overweight.

Many of the problems that become particularly troublesome as people age are related more to cardiovascular health and functional strength than they are to weight alone. If we create a magic pill that prevents or delays the onset of excessive weight gain from poor diet and lack of exercise, it's not going to produce "healthy" people and it won't address many of the quality of life issues that arise from unhealthy lifestyles.

In some ways, weight gain is a good thing. For young people who otherwise feel okay, it is sometimes the only visible symptom of a destructive lifestyle. And I say that as someone who lost nearly a third of my body weight by radically changing my lifestyle in my 20s.

Also, while it's promising that this doesn't increase heart rate or blood pressure, weight is just one factor in overall health.

True, but it's a very telling factor. Past a certain upper threshold, weight will have adverse impacts on a person's health, eg joint issues at a minimum. It's fairly easy and logical to look at a skinnier person (above a certain lower bound) and predict they will have fewer medical issues than a fat person. Of course, this is judging by certain proportions, hence why the BMI was invented (and before anyone goes off on the inaccuracy of BMI, just realize that unless body fat percentage is below a certain threshold (eg high-level athletes), BMI is a fairly accurate predictor of health).

So, I thought serotonin was basically the "happiness" hormone. Wouldn't inhibiting serotonin have side-effects like making them feel depressed or at least less happy? Can any biologists comment?

EDIT: as a replier mentioned, it's discussed in the article.

The article discusses this:

Steinberg also noted that the serotonin found in the brain is not linked to what's happening in the digestive tract serotonin. He said it's strictly reflective of "periphery serotonin," and that the serotonin found in the brain, some five per cent of total serotonin in the body, does not interact. The two pools of the same hormone are separated by what's called a blood brain barrier, and do not mix.

It leaves the question of the link between depression, serotonin levels and obesity up in the air, something Steinberg says he can't answer just yet.

So my understanding is, "probably not, but they can't be entirely sure yet."

That's pop-neuro-psych gibberish marketing talk--molecules aren't moods any more than motor oil is velocity. Also, synaptic serotonin is in a different compartment. But I was pondering about the link between SSRIs and weight gain.

"But I was pondering about the link between SSRIs and weight gain."

Indeed, there may be some connection there. But frustratingly, we don't really know what the connection is, or if it has multiple factors--and if so, how those factors relate to one another. To date (to the best of my knowledge), reports of weight gain from people taking SSRIs have been anecdotal. There is a large enough sample size to draw a clear connection; the weight gain isn't imaginary. (It occurs in about 25% of SSRI users, and the risk for weight gain increases over the duration of SSRI usage.) But there haven't been controlled, clinical studies of of the effect. Do SSRIs affect metabolism in some way? Possibly. Do they affect appetite instead, or in addition to, metabolism? Possibly. Do they affect gut microflora? Possibly. Could be any of these things; could be all of these things; could be something we haven't even hypothesized yet. There is a relationship; we don't yet know the directionality of cause and effect, or the factors involved, or their individual significance in the causal web.

These new results are fascinating, and they give further impetus for further study.

But brain chemistry is inextricably linked to human moods. That's why we prescribe people psychoactive drugs. And why people take them recreationally.

Ask anyone who has ever been on Paxil (a common SSRI) if they've had any weight gain. It's nicknamed "Packs-on" for a reason.

Your first sentence contains an amazing turn of phrase. Thank you.

> and was previously thought to only exist in rodents, hibernating animals and children

That's patently not true. It's been known that brown fat exists in small amounts in adults for quite a long time.

Higher metabolism without changing food habbits, wouldn't this be awesome for fastfood?

People still getting fat, but they buy more from now on?

Blocking Serotonin in Gut Reverses Osteoporosis in Mice http://www.medpagetoday.com/Endocrinology/Osteoporosis/18346

So refined carbs are bad due to high glycemic index, too much fat is bad due to seratonin release, is a generally optimal diet then just lean meat and vegetables? We are running out of things to eat...

It seems it is the carbohydrates that cause the seratonin release[1], not the fat.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8697046

Lean meat and vegetables seems like a pretty good diet to me! When I'm actually following that, I do need to add some fat, otherwise I'm feeling hungry all the time. Add a bit of fat (olive oil or butter, generally for me) and things are golden. Eggs work too!

lean meat and vegetables (and nuts and fruits) have been the foundation of the human diet for thousands of years.

Am I wrong, or does this contradict all the recent research about fat actually not causing obesity. http://www.businessinsider.com/experts-eat-more-fat-2014-10

I was very surprised about fat blaming in this article too. Its common knowledge* that high amounts of hydrocarbons in the died decrease metabolism. When you eat food that is easy to burn your body switches to that and stops trying to burn stored fat.

*not 'grandmas wisdom', but something you can test on yourself with Ketogenic diet in 1-2 months.

I think the word you were looking for was "carbohydrates", not "hydrocarbons". They're not the same thing.

yep, wrong language, in mine those two sound almost the same :/

I think it was Grandma's wisdom - or at least common knowledge.

As I've commented before, from a Tolstoy novel:

    eschew[ed] farinaceous and sweet dishes..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4441869

This research could be funded by the low-fat industry!

I have a strange feeling that paleo etc folks already know this for years.

Sorry to be off-topic, but I was drawn to the story because of the McMaster reference and I bet some other Hamiltonians probably will be to. Would love to connect with any HN folks in Hamilton!

Ditto. Email me@devlinzed.com if you want to hang out or work on something. I work at factor[e] on Locke.

small world. I'm a few hundred feet away on Chatham St.

Same here, like a moth to a flame.

I'm hoping to move up closer to y'all sometime early next year. Pretty radical to see so many people from the hammer on HN.

'nother hamiltonian here. Hoping to start working at platform 302 a couple days a week, soon. emailable at jordan@jordandavis.ca

Honk.

Recent alumni here! I'm working in Toronto now but when I saw the Hammer mentioned on a post I just had to say something!

Count me in, too.

Mcmaster computer engineering student here.

Checking in from Platform 302.

'04 comp sci grad here. Love the hammer!!

Sure, email is in my profile

IT'S CALLED COCAINE AND IT'S AWESOME

Seems like we are trying to engineer a solution that is fundamentally a behavioral issue rather than mechanical. I do realize though that assuming we can reign in consumption socially is a non-starter at the same time though I think enabling high levels of consumption is the opposite of what we should be doing.

That said, anything we can do to reverse aging I am all for, I just hope our consumption patterns can become less extreme.

It's often not behavior changes that turn healthy 20 year olds into obese 50 year olds -- it's that behaviors stay the same while the body changes.

If we can find a way to bring some of those perks of youth into older age, I think it's great.

This is very true, I'm a creature of habit. When I go to restaurants I always order the same thing, at home I eat the same things. Each week I rotate the same few options. To me it's very satisfying (my wife hates it, she ventures out more often)

Right around age 25 or so despite nothing changing in my life other than my age, I started to gain weight. Very slowly, but it was adding up.

After doing some calorie counting I lost about 30lbs over 8 months, and returned to my original weight. Though since then I've been struggling to find the right number to increase to. The suggested number of 2000 seems to be too high.

You're exactly right on that because I am transitioning from young guy to old guy and can see it happen.

That doesn't mean my old eating habits were sustainable though forever. I think we need to be able to reduce our consumption if we aren't growing anymore.

Fixing metabolic slowdown isn't going to end obesity or reduce the need for exercise, but it will level the playing field.

It's still going to require effort, for many people, to maintain a healthy weight and exercise enough. But it's hard enough to do that as it is; if you can turn off a defect that causes the body to pile on unneeded pounds of fat (that interfere with health, mood, and the ability to exercise) with age, then you should.

How is metabolic slowdown a defect? I don't see middle-aged people dropping dead around me, so clearly all that has happened is that their bodies are now more efficient. Great news!

And piling on fat making it harder to exercise? Sure, on the face of it that's true, but usually the one happens because theres a dire lack of the other.

It's not basal metabolic rate that makes people fat. It's either unhealthy cracings or low energy (and yes, I know that this sense of "energy" is psychological to some degree) levels.

It's not low BMR alone that's the problem and, of course, if you have a high BMR but cravings/appetite issues or lethargy, you're still likely to gain weight.

Behavior and biology are intimately linked.

Isn't the change in metabolism as you age mechanical?

The article discusses the change in metabolism as being (at least partly) as a result of fatty, awful North American diets; it's possible that the change is normal over time as a cumulative result of diet but that the North American diet accelerates the process.

That would also explain the childhood obesity epidemic; forcing our kids to run laps and play sports doesn't help if they have a fundamentally flawed diet that rapidly accelerates their serotonin production/accretion, especially if younger children are more prone to the process.

The metabolic change would also explain the various studies/experiments I've seen where people who became obese and then lost significant weight retained the same appetite as they had when they were obese.

You can argue that everything in the universe is mechanical, even electricity, if you look at a small enough scale.

> That said, anything we can do to reverse aging I am all for, I just hope our consumption patterns can become less extreme.

I disagree; aging and death are natural processes that could wreak havoc economically if significantly altered. Right now, the young have the ability to progress in the economy because older people eventually leave the workforce through retirement or death.

People need to be able to die naturally. If nobody died, and everyone had children, the population would simply grow with no prospect of stopping it. Though the more likely proposition would be that the wealthy who could afford the treatments would never die, and the rest of the population would. That's an even worse scenario in my opinion.

Feel free to die then. Don't condemn everyone else.

Are you going to complain because life expectancies have already gone up by decades?

"We need more resources because we cured death" is precisely the kind of problem we ought to have.

No need to be facetious, death need not be a condemnation, and there is value in awareness of consequence.

> there is value in awareness of consequence

Awareness of consequence is one thing, and it's fine to anticipate the next set of problems and discuss how to address them. But "we shouldn't fix this problem because it'll raise new ones" is an awful statement, compared to "let's fix this problem; bring on the next ones and we'll fix those too".

> death need not be a condemnation

If you oppose other people living longer or forever, you're saying you want them dead, sooner or later. Couching it in vague or indirect language makes it no less of a condemnation.

It's not like the eternal life police will one day show up at your door and condemn you to immortality.

You can always die whenever you want to. That's not the hard problem to solve.

Taking that hypothesis, do you suppose that the lengthening of the life expectancy of developed countries has had a negative impact on said countries? Or do you think about life prolongation is a good thing up to a point?

It's a good thing up to a point, but we're seeing the negative sides of it too. Namely, we as a society expend a lot of resources on prolonging our lives (in the form of health care costs). We're probably about as far as we can go on life expectancy using cheap/preventative methods like antibiotics and diet/lifestyle changes. So any additional growth in life expectancy will probably be exponentially more expensive (and again, likely only available to the most wealthy members of society).

If you look at Japan or the US, the increase in life expectancy has coincided with a drop in the birth rate - which leads to a situation where you have a lot of old people, but relatively fewer younger workers to support them than in the past. The effect has been stronger in Japan because their population growth has actually been negative for a while, but it's happened in the US and western Europe as well. The effects of this kind of "mix shifting" are subtle, but have a profound effect over a long period of time. Societal constructs that once worked when there was a high proportion of young workers break down when the balance is flipped (e.g. fewer people paying into social security, etc.)

So any additional growth in life expectancy will probably be exponentially more expensive

That's true exactly because we haven't addressed the root problem of aging. If everyone could be restored to the physical condition of a 25 year old, medical costs would fall tremendously. Which is one reason why "only the rich will be able to afford it" is unlikely; governments and insurance companies would probably profit by making anti-aging treatments free.

Likewise, this is only a problem because aging eventually results in the inability to be economically productive.

"If you look at Japan or the US, the increase in life expectancy has coincided with a drop in the birth rate"

I don't think one caused the other.

I don't either -- but together, they lead to a situation where there are relatively more old people than young people.

>Namely, we as a society expend a lot of resources on prolonging our lives (in the form of health care costs). We're probably about as far as we can go on life expectancy using cheap/preventative methods like antibiotics and diet/lifestyle changes.

Quite the opposite in the US and Europe, actually: most health-care money is spent in the last few months of life, when disease is severe and medical care is intensive. Much of this could be avoided, to a benefit in both currency and quality-years-of-life, if we employed a lot more preventative and lifestyle-focused medical interventions rather than racing desperately to save someone with heart problems at 63 or a stroke at 88 that could have been prevented by jogging more at 24.

Japan is an examine of where this approach has been tried and succeeded, with the result that they have one of the longest expected lifespans in the world.

>Right now, the young have the ability to progress in the economy because older people eventually leave the workforce through retirement or death.

You're kidding, right? This is some kind of bad joke in which longevity is blamed for the shitty labor market faced by Millenials?

>Though the more likely proposition would be that the wealthy who could afford the treatments would never die, and the rest of the population would. That's an even worse scenario in my opinion.

Yes, that's why we should smash capitalism.

Type 1 (!) diabetic goes off insulin, "indicating restored insulin production"(!): http://www.ijcasereportsandimages.com/archive/provisional_ar...

Type 2 diabetics improve insulin resistance: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22673594

Or, you know, just put diabetes into remission and stop medication: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1325029/

Pro tip: You may not need drugs to treat diabetic cases. Diabetics, barring genetic mutations, may just be carbohydrate intolerant.

Or just take some brand new drug that fucks with your body's chemical status and disregard how your body responds to food.

The type 1 diabetic in your first linked article was very recently diagnosed before the start of the experiment and a sample size of one on a brand new diagnosis doesn't seem highly significant to me. The article had some fishy elements to it that made me want to research the authors more...

The researcher appears to have a rather huge monetary investment into the paleo-style diet/care, seeing as you can order clinical care for a large sum of money from his personal site (http://paleomedicina.com/ and http://paleomedicina.com/hu/rendelesek-es-klinikai-ellatas). You'll see he has services that range up to 10,000 euros/month in Hungary, which I imagine is quite a princely sum....

Forgive me if I am making a mistake as I was using google translate, but I would definitely take that article with a grain of salt....

Are you saying you don't believe he went off insulin, and that his data was fabricated?

You can also just look into the decades of research done on carbohydrates and diabetes http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899900714...

I'm saying one should be aware of what I think are undisclosed ulterior motives, especially the monetary one. Furthermore, its easy to draw a conclusion from a sample size of one. I could just as easily find a sample size of one for who this diet would not cure T1D and start "exposing the myth" about paleo diets, but it would be shitty science...

Also I am skeptical of Paleo diets in general because historical scientific research hasn't been very favorable to all the supposed benefits supports of paleo like to throw out. For one, there is evidence[0] that it isn't even what our ancestors ate, so the whole concept of the cause of rising diabetes being the fact we "aren't eating paleo like our ancestors" is total crap, imo.

[0]http://www.pnas.org/content/110/26/10513.abstract

What you just did is called the Paleo Strawman, its where people who don't understand the Paleo diet claim things such as "oh, its only about eating what was available in the Paleo and Neolithic eras", which has never been true.

What Paleo is, is a large scale research project to figure out why such a diet worked so well for humans, what parts worked, what parts didn't, and how we can scientifically engineer a better diet by reducing known toxins and chemicals that cause unwanted side effects in the body, and providing the correct amount of nutrition the body needs.

Paleo is no more "blindly eating the past" any more than pizza is a health food.

No, I said for example. There are other examples of counter claims to Paleo. I wasn't saying that research was the end all, but you can't say its a Paleo Strawman when there is a very large segment, even in "clinical research", that believe one of the strengths is because "its what our ancestors ate". I was simply providing a single point of counter claims, not making a full statement, so saying I was using a strawman is taking my entire statement out of context....

Not to mention, you say "such a diet worked so well", except we have no proof that the classical "paleo" diet very closely resembles our ancestors or even that (poorly) mimicking their diet would produce the same results in modern day and the research I linked is an academic counter claim to that very statement.

"Paleo" doesn't mean only eat the food that was available to our ancestors. It means look at our evolutionary biology to see what types of foods and nutrients might be good or bad for humans. Who cares about "paleo" - we care about the science behind nutrition. And one aspect of that science is excess carbohydrates in the diet may be bad for humans.

He's saying it's literally not data, it's literally datum. If you discovered you could "bring any web server offline by asking for any URL served by that webserver and adding ?killnow=pFNXjRUyc3DNRNRgJQnjL7V3NJdjnnVwS" would you bother publishing this fact after it 'worked' one single time on one single web server? Come on. There's no need to question that data, because it's not even data yet.

(This comment is just about "The type 1 diabetic in your first linked article was very recently diagnosed before the start of the experiment and a sample size of one on a brand new diagnosis doesn't seem highly significant to me." I either didnt't read the rest of the comment or it got edited, with the further background research.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com