8 ms·

Plastic might be making us obese

194 points by 04rob 4y ago

swamp40 4y ago
There is a Nobel Prize waiting for whoever figures this out. I am glad scientists are finally taking it seriously. Statistically, something is most definitely out of whack.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
I have a fri3nd that has an over active thyroid and she's very fit. she had a six pack when she was younger. she didn't really work out. so makes me think hormones are a big part of it too.
- cestith 4y ago
  Plastics and many other things happen to mess with hormones.
baremetal 4y ago
There is an old saying "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself" I take that to heart. Including what I put in my body. I have little to no faith in modern food. And so I grow my own. I know where it came from and what went into it. And yes, I have had my soil tested. Rely on modern food at your own peril. You are what you eat, as they say.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
https://archive.ph/rmlCA https://archive.ph/rmlCA
- TacoToni 4y ago
  thank you
moneywoes 4y ago
Seems impossible to avoid I guess?
- odyssey7 4y ago
  Especially if there is no cure for inherited damage already done. A solution would include medical therapies in addition to avoidance.
Havoc 4y ago
Well that plus the cheeseburger
- mylons 4y ago
  which part of a cheese burger is bad for you?
  - suoduandao2 4y ago
    The bun probably causes inflammation/leaky gut for a lot more people than area aware it does. Modern wheat is a weird organism.
    - steve_adams_86 4y ago
      What’s weird about it? Is emmer or kamut much better? What about red fife, a strain of wheat from ~170 years ago?
      - suoduandao2 4y ago
        The hybrid varieties bred in the late 50's have about 50x the amount of gluten as previous strains of wheat did.
        steve_adams_86 4y ago
        Fascinating. I was curious because I eat the three I mentioned kind of like rice (along with barley and oats). I’m behind on this science. A 50x increase in gluten sounds crazy, but I don’t know how much gluten is known to be bad. For example, I sometimes eat things with wheat gluten powder as a primary ingredient. It doesn’t seem to cause harm, but maybe I’m missing something. I certainly don’t think of it as a health food (nothing so heavily processed is), but is it actually harmful?
        suoduandao2 4y ago
elil17 4y ago
A very long series of essays about this: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p... The authors take the view that obesogens account for 100% or nearly 100% of the rise in obesity, which is definitely a controversial view. However, they do an awesome job giving an overview of the arguments for obesogens.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  I find this to be a pretty lame analysis. > People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. This seems closely related to observations like the French Paradox — the French eat a lot of fatty cheese and butter, so why aren’t they fatter and sicker? Lard doesn’t make you fat. If anything it fills you up so you eat less and gain less weight. A lot more of the prior generations were also laborers which this acknowledges but really underplays. The section on why hunter gatherers aren’t obese is answered by the fact that they are hunting and gathering.
  - ianai 4y ago
    Those diets also didn't have added sugars and salts to everything. It's serious work requiring reading all the nutrition labels to get groceries sans questionable additives in the US.
    - minton 4y ago
      I found the Yuka app makes this much easier. Just scan the UPC and it’ll show you a x/100 score. I use it for nearly everything. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yuka-food-cosmetic-scanner/id1092799236 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yuka-food-cosmetic-scanner/id1...
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
CJefferson 4y ago
I've recently started taking 'liraglutide', which is an appetite suppressant. I haven't been taking it that long, but so far it's amazing -- I eat a balanced meal with an approriate amount of calories in it, and then I am full, and don't want to eat any more. Sometimes I snack and eat a biscuit, but then I don't feel any need to eat a second biscuit. I'm not saying this is a long-term solution for me, or people in general, but what it has shown me is some people (me included) have managed to mess up their digestive systems badly enough it is incredibly hard to eat healthily -- I previously lost 8 stone (50 kg), but I was hungry every minute of every day, no matter what I tried. Once I had a bad patch I ended up putting all the weight back on.
- sithadmin 4y ago
  'an appetite suppressant' is really underselling liraglutide. It also corrects insulin resistance, which accounts for some degree of it's effectiveness as a weight loss aid beyond it's effects on slowing the GI tract. GLP-1 agonists are truly an amazing class of drugs. It's absolutely absurd that they're generally not covered by insurance for non-diabetics, even when they yield such obvious benefits for obese people.
  - omginternets 4y ago
    >It also corrects insulin resistance Is liraglutide doing that directly, or is it mediated by people eating less sugar?
    - sithadmin 4y ago
      Directly. It stimulates insulin release from the pacreas.
      - omginternets 4y ago
        Eesh… that doesn’t seem great. How does this not cause further habituation?
kragen 4y ago
My guess is that obesogens are to blame, but that they're in food, not plastics. This is because people on weirdo diets (vegans, carnivore, ultra low fat) all lose weight and keep it off, even when they are using the same amount of plastic as everyone else. The common denominator is that they stopped eating industrially manufactured food. I am no expert in the area, just wondering what the hell is going on.
- themitigating 4y ago
  "Weirdo" diets? Why make such an insulating simplistic judgment when discussing diets?
  - kragen 4y ago
    You're reading a value judgment into my wording that isn't there, probably because you need to be more of a weirdo.
- acuozzo 4y ago
  An omitted possible third factor here is that of selection bias. Perhaps those drawn to so-called "weirdo diets" are also those more likely to maintain their weight loss.
  - kragen 4y ago
    It's possible!
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Blaming plastic seems incredibly strange to me, given that plastics are practically universally present in American life but obesity itself is not universal.
  - pseudalopex 4y ago
    Did anyone say plastic is the only factor?
kerrsclyde 4y ago
I thought this article was going to cite plastic as being the container of choice for most of the ultra processed junk that supermarkets are selling and we shouldn't be eating.
mellavora 4y ago
So something else I wonder. Over the last 50-90 years we've selectively bred our entire food chain to prioritize rapid growth, then pack it full of growth hormones to accelerate this. My dad decided to raise chickens back in the 80's. The broiler hens grew so fast that they broke their legs, and this was when fed on our kitchen waste (i.e. no growth hormones). I do wonder how much of this spills over into human obesity; if everything you eat comes from a plant or animal which is hyperoptimizing for unhealthy growth rates, what does that do to the human body? And if you are looking for a biological mechanism, it might be related to epigenetics. Not saying it is so, but am saying that a biological link is not a-priori impossible.
- johnatwork 4y ago
  I've been wondering about this too. I'm not well versed in the domain to say one thing or another so I will wait to form a concrete opinion before I hear from an expert in the field. I am very curious though like you, if there's a relation between the two.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  > And if you are looking for a biological mechanism, it might be related to epigenetics Very unlikely as afaik everything non parasitic gets broken down by our saliva and stomach acids.
  - jjallen 4y ago
    That's not my understanding, at least in animals. Those who ate younger plants and/or animals lived longer. Sorry can't find a citation right now.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
      I had put some thought on this and my hunch was that consuming younger plants and/or animals means fewer "forever chemicals" getting accumulated in the body. However, that doesn't disprove the hypothesis that DNA can survive the digestive tract. If this [1] is to be believed, it very much does so. The question is, can epigenetic information / ie folds, survive? [1] https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/does-dna-food-survive-digestion https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/does-d...
vallassy 4y ago
Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar? Over my last few years of reading, I've convinced myself that sugar is the main culprit in massive obesity in Western countries, especially the US (i.e. high fructose corn syrup). Sugar is in everything (like plastic, I suppose). Look at the ingredients of what you buy and you'll be surprised where it turns up. Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky, even bog standard bread. It seems like sugar is the elephant in the room that the mainstream doesn't want to talk about.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I've tracked my diet pretty regularly over the last several years. The one constant in every weight-gain cycle for me is a sugary treat after a meal. This is true even when I've otherwise kept my caloric intake constant.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Blood sugar spikes do strange things to our hunger response. If your blood sugar is too high the body may produce an emergency response to keep blood sugar down and it may overshoot which makes you hungry much sooner.
- loopdoend 4y ago
  Sugar and seed oils (vegetable oils). Practically impossible to avoid especially in "food deserts".
  - arbitrage 4y ago
    - imchillyb 4y ago
      So avoid "food deserts". It's not difficult. -arbitrage > Food Desert: Urban area in which it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food. Yeah, just move somewhere else! Lol. This is the kind of half-baked bullshit answer I expect from reddit not from Ycomb. Troll somewhere else dude.
dataflow 4y ago
If we assume everyone agreed tomorrow that the cause is 100% plastics, what can we actually do about this? What would our lives look like if we were to address this?
- Taikonerd 4y ago
  Probably not "ban all plastics." That's not practical. But we could do more research into what compounds specifically are harmful, and then find substitutes for them.
notaboredguy 4y ago
It's just calories in and calories out.
londons_explore 4y ago
I doubt that obesity is caused by "hundreds" of chemical pollutants... I suspect it to be more like a handful that cause the most effect. Since obesity causes millions of deaths annually, solving this warrants a covid-scale response. It should therefore be easy enough to direct a few billion dollars of funding into hundreds of avenues of research to find which those handful of pollutants are, what the main sources of them are, how to remove them, and how the effects of damage already done might be reversed. I imagine that with a covid-scale response, we could guarantee that nothing new would contain any of the offending chemicals within a year, and perhaps within 5 years we could have replaced every piece of tupperware/insulation foam/whatever already manufactured goods contain it.
mylons 4y ago
is it possible to be in a caloric deficit and still gain weight if this is true? or is a caloric deficit + weight loss just a thermodynamics problem
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect it's a modifier at the edges; if X calories you gain Y weight per day, this can make that Y+(some percentage). All these "we found the cause of obesity" dance around the problem.
- wyre 4y ago
  Appetite and metabolism is much more complicated than a thermodynamics problem. A calorie deficit implies knowledge of metabolic rate which can be highly variable. While calories in can be trivially counted, calories out needs to be calculated and cannot assume a significant level of accuracy. Regardless, the problem with solving the obesity epidemic isn’t that people can’t lose weight, but is keeping weight off after reaching a goal weight.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  Sometimes it's a little more complicated than just calories in vs calories out. See Cushing syndrome. We are aware of hormone imbalances which promote excess fat build up, often at the expense of muscle mass. It's possible plastics could be effecting hormones in a similar way.
- wtetzner 4y ago
  > is it possible to be in a caloric deficit and still gain weight if this is true? No, that would defy the laws of thermodynamics. However, it is possible to consume more calories than you burn and lose weight, because there are complexities around how your body decides to store fat, signals to burn fat, etc. Even if it was simply a thermodynamics problem (which I don't think it is), there are also issues with appetite. Sure, you can count calories for the rest of your life, but doing that is not only difficult to measure correctly, but very difficult to maintain if you still feel hungry all the time. I think one of the reasons a ketogenic diet works for a lot of people is that after a period of adaptation, you stop getting hungry every 4 hours.
davidn20 4y ago
Yes, plastic MIGHT be making us obese. But, we definitely know high caloric intake and sedentary lifestyle makes us obese. I don't understand why obesity is such a mystery. People are creatures of path of the least resistance. Developed countries have highly dense caloric food and people are inactive most of the day due to cars and office jobs.
- sp332 4y ago
  "Developed countries" don't have 40% of high school students clinically obese. Only the US does.
  - davidn20 4y ago
    Yes, it's bad in the US, but obesity is rising worldwide. Obesity, in general, correlates with GDP per capital.
    - sp332 4y ago
      Then why are poorer people more obese? Edit: still talking about the USA here.
      - davidn20 4y ago
        Poorer people are more obese is only true in richer countries or in countries where the poor doesn’t have to starve. As for why poor people are more obese in well-off countries. Again, it’s the path of least resistance. Poor people are generally less educated and less likely to think long term. It's easier to eat junk food than to put in the time and effort to make a well balance meal. Btw, I'm not blaming the poor, being poor is hard. I grew up under the poverty line. Overcoming poverty is a huge task and more should be done.
      - OJFord 4y ago
        Availability of cheap crap is much higher in more developed/high GDP countries I suppose. In extremis, if you only eat what you can grow, rear, and trade for, then you're not eating breakfast ~cereal~ sugar, ready meals, crisps, etc. It's a bit tangential, but this is similar to how such a lifestyle isn't even cheaper - it's not the only shopping those people can afford - most of my meals probably cost less, because I take an interest in cooking and eating (i.e. I'm buying vegetables not ready meals) but that doesn't mean there's always (or even that often really, especially amortised over all uses) an out-of-reach expensive ingredient.
fortran77 4y ago
I'm very skeptical. I think there are some things that may make us "feel hungrier" but there's nothing changing our metabolism. If we are to believe this, it would mean that "plastic" is making our bodies so much more efficient that there's extra energy that's being stored as fat. I like to keep my weight exactly at 155# (as a 5'10 59 year old man). Once a year, I "bulk" and go up to 160 while doing more strenuous weight training. The math always works exactly -- for every 3000 extra k/cal I eat, I go up a pound. When it's time to "cut" back to 155#, for every 3000 k/cal deficit I drop a pound. 15 years ago, I got fat. I stopped paying attention to what I was eating. Got my weight up to 205#. I lost it by strictly counting calories. The math worked perfectly. I went to 1200 k/cal and lost 2 pounds a week. Exactly. Every week. Eating no more calories than your body needs works for everyone. You cannot create matter out of thin air, no matter what fat people will tell you. The Obese and Overweight cost society greatly. The fact that they're consuming more than they need, use more fuel to move around, and get sick and require more medical care costs us trillions. It's time they stopped pointing their fingers at "plastics" and started obeying the laws of thermodynamics.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  > but there's nothing changing our metabolism. Why would you be so confident when we know for a fact that hormone imbalances can absolutely impact our metabolism. Including signaling to your body to produce and store more fat than it normally would. Cortisol the hormone produced in stress responses is shown to do exactly that. Using yourself as an anecdote isn't useful in anyway.
  - fortran77 4y ago
    Matter isn't created out of thin air.
    - wtetzner 4y ago
      > I'm very skeptical. I think there are some things that may make us "feel hungrier" but there's nothing changing our metabolism. > If we are to believe this, it would mean that "plastic" is making our bodies so much more efficient that there's extra energy that's being stored as fat. I think it's likely the opposite, e.g. there's something (not necessarily plastic) throwing off hormones, so the body ends up storing more of the calories as fat than it would if it was healthy. It's not at all clear (to me, at least) that a healthy human body would continue to store fat indefinitely, regardless of how many calories were being consumed.
oliwarner 4y ago
Maybe? It's easier to believe that 100 years of massively increasing calorie density and engineering chemical perfection in terms of hitting the body's pleasure markers might have had a larger effect. That and our move to sedentary, thinking jobs. Or prolonging the day with evening entertainment, so eating later. And services that make the worst food arrive on your doorstep in 30 minutes. There are so many things above "plastics" we should blame first. But I'm sure blaming someone else is far more appetising than looking at our own lack of self control.
mfer 4y ago
Our food chain has a lot to do with obesity. There are many studies on this stuff. We eat 5 times as much meat on average as people did 100 years go. Animal based products are a major source of fat. People used to eat more fruits and vegetables. The fat type has shifted with more fat (which has higher calorie per gram amounts than carbs or protein) and fat moving from polyunsaturated fats to saturated fats (which causes lots of medical problems). In there is the growth hormone. Kids "mature" physically at younger ages now than they used to. Kids to stop stop dairy or a lot of mean may physically mature at the older slower pace. Eating less fruits, vegetables, and whole grains means less fiber. Most people (in the US anyway) are deficient in fiber. Fiber traps certain fats and cholesterols so they aren't absorbed. So, we absorb more fats. Then there are processed foods. So much about our diets have changed in the last 100 years. A lot is known and we even know how to eat to be really healthy. It's just not widely known by the general public.
- MockObject 4y ago
  > We eat 5 times as much meat on average as people did 100 years go. And yet there are a growing number looking shredded and boasting of their health on carnivore diets.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Your comment completely ignores the content of the article you are commenting upon. You concentrate on the "normal" nutrition stuff like fat, fiber and carbohydrates, without even asking why do people eat more than 100 years ago. The article talks about the fact that food now contains a lot of totally unnatural chemical substances that our ancestors never encountered and that such substances may throw off our sense of satiety and disrupt other mechanisms directly related to obesity. That is a serious problem. An apple or a piece of meat laced with various chemicals isn't the same as 100 years ago. It seems you choose to ignore this difference.
- reedjosh 4y ago
  We eat unnatural amounts of polyunsaturated oils today. You have it completely backward. The amount of vegetable based fats consumed 100 years ago was significantly less. It wasn't until chemical extraction was introduced that we could consume as much vegetable based fat as we do today. Saturated fat is actually more stable and by far healthier.
YeahNO 4y ago
Calories certainly aren't the only factor. If you feed animals the same exact diet and they have similar exercise habits and their excrement has the same caloric value, why does one get obese while the other doesn't? Genetics, epigenetics and gut biome likely all contribute to the problem. https://nautil.us/what-if-obesity-is-nobodys-fault-234639/ https://nautil.us/what-if-obesity-is-nobodys-fault-234639/
bradhe 4y ago
I was pretty sure it was the over eating but I'll happily blame plastic...
slowmovintarget 4y ago
Maybe now we can finally get the FDA to ban glyphosate (Round-Up) like they do in the EU. It is currently impossible to purchase oat cereal in the U.S. that doesn't have some level of glyphosate in it. Cheerios is loaded with it. So something sold as "heart healthy" is loaded with obesogens and will contribute to obesity.
garren 4y ago
> Nearly 1,000 obesogens with such effects have already been identified in studies with animals or humans. They include Bisphenol A, a chemical widely used in plastics, and the phthalates, plasticizing agents used in paints, medicine and cosmetics. Others include parabens used as preservatives in food and paper products, and chemicals called organotins used as fungicides. Other obesogens include pesticides and herbicides, including glyphosate, which a recent study found to be present in the urine of most Americans. It feels like modern, Western, society is like living in a big Petri dish. It’s one big experiment in which we’re swimming in chemicals that we later find out interact with us and each other in negative ways. We should have reigned in these kinds of “innovations” decades ago. Americans are now urinating carcinogenic pesticides, rainwater even in most remote regions in the would is undrinkable [0], and we’ve had strong evidence for a while that some of the constituent components of commonly used plastics disrupt biological processes in humans and other animals. In 50-100 years people will be looking back in horror at the kinds of self-inflicted suffering we’ve produced. And for what? Money? Convenience? [0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a40859859/rainwater-not-safe-to-drink/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a40859859/rainwater...
- DeadMouseFive 4y ago
  For what: the profit of capitalists.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    I don't think you need "capitalists", since socialists would be using the same toxins by fiat from a central committee. "For profit" is likely ok too.
- tsol 4y ago
  Lack of regulation.
Auracle 4y ago
I do a lot of high school senior photography. It's hard to talk about this without sounding crude as a guy but something that I've noticed that contrasts with when I graduated high school (2006) is just how many girls have huge breasts. I think there were 2 girls in my grade that were skinny and had what would be called "large" breasts. Most other skinny girls had the standard A or B cups. Now a very large portion have what must be D cups. I've tried to look up studies but I couldn't find any that controlled for weight. This was also the first year I had not one, but two, morbidly obese girls. One was so large I ran out of poses pretty much right away as she couldn't clasp her hands together behind her back, couldn't do the same near her waist in front, and she couldn't even sit down on the ground - only kneel. She told me she wanted to be a lawyer. I find it incredibly sad that you could be that large already at that age. I can only imagine how difficult it would make life.
- spicyusername 4y ago
  > just how many girls have huge breasts. One reason I've heard to explain this is a rise in the consumption of certain kinds of hormonal birth control.
- true_religion 4y ago
  So the funny thing is I was hearing the same thing ( that the average cup size had increase to C) back when I graduated high school in the late 90s. I think non anectodally, this trend is something that has been going on for a long time. If I remember correctly we blamed microplastics in the water minicking estrogen, and starting puberty earlier. What is the truth is probably unknown.
- cptcobalt 4y ago
  > I find it incredibly sad that you could be that large already at that age. I can only imagine how difficult it would make life. As someone about this size, but has also been relatively "fit" at this size (I used to be able to go on casual 10+ mile hikes on weekends, pre-pandemic), it's also our health system failing us. I've never had a doctor give me a better answer than "diet and exercise" to change things. I got to a level of fitness where I could go on 10 mile hikes, which is a hell of a lot more fit than a lot than many Americans, yet they'd still give me doom and gloom and uninterested answers. It's exhausting. America does not treat obesity well, and I feel like there's not good enough research going into it. I love to see reporting like—and hope there's more to come, in hopes that it changes both clinical mindsets and also how we think about obesity. It's more than what you eat.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
I am very skeptical the effect would be meaningful relative to diet/exercise. We have never been more seditary, and sugar has never been more a part of our diet. When my mother moved in and we started going on daily walks, she lost a pound a week for one year. When she injured her foot and stopped, with no diet change throughout the entire time, she gained it all back in a couple months. I would be surprised if people gained weight with no diet change and introduced mostly standing or walking throughout the day into their life.
- rockostrich 4y ago
- evancox100 4y ago
  The problem with “calories in - calories out = weight gained” is that even though it is of course true (thermodynamics), it explains nothing. If I asked you “Why do children grow bigger?”, and you said “because they eat more calories than they expend”, again you would be correct but have told me nothing. And if a child wasn’t growing like they should, you wouldn’t say “just keep feeding them more”, you would look for possible disruptions of their hormonal system. The reality is that the body is a finely tuned bio mechanical system with feedback loops that are capable of regulating your resting metabolic rate in order to target weight gain, loss, or stasis. The question is why are so many people’s regulation loops so out of whack?
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Everyone overeats and calories have never been cheaper. There is nothing that surprising going on. The human body was meant for fasting longer than our culture does and in experiencing occasional hunger.
  - evol262 4y ago
    They are eating too much, and their regulation of hunger impulses is out of whack. There are essentially zero studies which show subjects on a controlled diet under observation having more than a +/-5% different in metabolic efficiency. The burden of proof is, frankly, on those who are looking for anything except for overconsumption as the cause.
bgro 4y ago
I don't know the last time I could trust an article or even scientific paper about weight / diets / food effects. You'd think the vast amounts of scientific papers would be conclusive, but they're constantly contradicting each other or people uncover ulterior motives, like having shares in a questionable weight loss company. In some of these cases, the source material uses inappropriate sample sizes or has other similar problems, or references other studies that had problems like this. I bet if you type "X is the reason for obesity," you will find information for any noun. Here's a partial list of topics off the top of my head from the best of my ability that I believe have been blasted as the definitive one-and-only "root cause" of obesity: [Sugar, Aspartame, Plastic, Butter, Margarine, Carbs, Milk, Bread, Fruit, Nuts, Phones, The Internet, TV, Video Games, Your job in general, Canned Products, Gluten, Pollution, Global Warming, Cars, Cheese, Alcohol, No Exercise, Cardio-only exercise, Blue Light (from electronics in general)]
- oblio 4y ago
  It's sugar + sedentarity. It's always been sugar + sedentarity. At least for high levels of obesity, towards morbid obesity.
  - tdehnel 4y ago
    Close. Not just sugar, but calories of any kind + sedentary.
    - oblio 4y ago
      True, but from I remember, sugar is worse than just fat.
kccqzy 4y ago
If a factor can't explain why non-Hispanic Asians have much lower prevalence of obesity than any other race, I tend not to trust it. Are Asians simply using less plastic than other races? Look at the chart: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db288.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db288.pdf The chart is simply striking. We should all be investigating what are the Asians doing right that all of us should learn from.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  diet (not dieting, but their diet)
  - rr888 4y ago
    Dieting too, esp the women seem to have a huge amount of pressure to be skinny.
- kgilpin 4y ago
  Is it lower consumption of alcohol?
  - brabel 4y ago
    Food. Just see what they eat (and how much). It really is simple as that.
    - imeron 4y ago
      Don't forget that Japanese actively shame fat people! This is very much frown upon in Western societies but it works for them I guess.
      - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
        They don't feel even slightly bad about it. It's as prevalent as obesity isn't.
OJFord 4y ago
This is absurd. The authors should look at what some people (or perhaps they themselves, and that's the issue) have in their trolley (cart?) next time they're shopping (storing? ;)). Obesity is, for at least the most part, plainly not caused by too many/wrong pesticides on fruit and vegetables. It is caused by (far) too many things that are not fruits and vegetables.
- jonwinstanley 4y ago
  Agreed. And it’s not like everyone is obese. There’s a large proportion of people who eat healthily, avoid processed food, keep their portion sizes regular and refrain from too much alcohol. Unsurprisingly these people are in good shape despite probably being in close proximity to the plastics/chemicals described in the article.
  - Tao3300 4y ago
    I'm always really skeptical of claims about obesity for more than one person. Obesity is defined in terms of BMI, which is severely limited as a metric for health. An individual with more muscle mass and higher bone density is healthier than the alternative, but their BMI will be higher. Not all body mass is bad. This tends to confirm my own anecdata, which is that I'm not surrounded by overfat people after all. I do see morbid cases from time to time and in certain population centers. A mostly healthy population with a small number of extremely overfat cases is going to appear to have bad BMI stats on the whole.
- scoofy 4y ago
  This is an utterly naive assessment: To answer the question of "why are people obese" with "not eating enough fruits and vegetables" completely ignores that all the research that demonstrates that it's simply not true. Why do obese people rapidly gain weight after losing it, even with diets that wouldn't cause normal weight people to gain any weight? Why do obese people seem to be simply more hungry than normal weight people. There are myriad questions that your thesis doesn't and can't answer. It would also be trivial to prove this thesis true, yet obesity still tends to confound scientists, especially with childhood obesity, which did not even exist three generations ago.
tdehnel 4y ago
This has got to be the most idiotic, speculative comment section of the year. Literally not a single coherent explanation of how plastics might actually cause obesity, and a bunch of people going on about sugar and hormones.
- CountSessine 4y ago
  Diet is an HN magnet for bike-shedding and anecdotes.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  > Literally not a single coherent explanation of how plastics might actually cause obesity I don't think the onus for that is on the commentariat here. Rather it's on the Washington Post article to bridge these studies of mouse adipose tissue to human health outcomes. It doesn't do that very well, so you're going to see some decrying of potential alarmism and alternative explanations.
moistly 4y ago
Overlooked throughout this discussion, afaict, is an explanation as to why animals are also getting fatter. > The problem of obesity isn't confined to just humans. A new study finds increased rates of obesity in mammals ranging from feral rats and mice to domestic pets and laboratory primates. https://www.livescience.com/10277-obesity-rise-animals.html https://www.livescience.com/10277-obesity-rise-animals.html
- Melatonic 4y ago
  This is certainly an interesting one if true
- docandrew 4y ago
  I’d expect pets are getting fatter because we can afford more, better pet food and treats. I mean, it’s crazy how large the selection is. Feral rats, same thing - we have a lot more food waste than we used to. As far as laboratory animals under strict food controls, that’s a bit harder to explain, but maybe it’s a breeding/genetics thing? I dunno, some kind of sinister hidden chemical/obesegen/hormone disruptor just strikes me as a bit far-fetched.
hamiltonians 4y ago
maybe the bmi is also wrong. if your index is labelng half or more of ppl as diseased, maybe the index is broken. except for jockeys, meth addicts, and runners, most men are going to be aleast borerline overweight by 30. i dont know any thin people. maybe we need to make drugs legal..that will fix it. perhaps there is a good biological reason people weigh more, why fight nature.
- jscheel 4y ago
  BMI was not created to be a marker for health, it was created by a mathematician to calculate government food allocations. It blows my mind that we still use it.
bilsbie 4y ago
Why do they report these huge obesity rates but whenever I go out in public almost no one is overweight?
- 0xfeba 4y ago
  Rural America skews it.
- rory 4y ago
  Where do you live?
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Because the obese people are not walking around outside much. They're also generally poorer and likely far outside your social circle.
betwixthewires 4y ago
I have no doubt that many of these plethora of chemicals that are in our every day environment are endocrine disruptors or worse, most of us would be surprised just how significantly we have changed the chemistry of our environments over the last century. But I'm not convinced that they're the cause for obesity. Contributors, sure. The cause? Your body has to make fat out of something, with or without an endocrine disruptor. I've never met a fat person that doesn't drink soda every day. It's sugar and seed oil. That's what it comes down to. Most of what we eat is not food really, but the last mile in a marketing campaign, it barely even qualifies as a product. That combined with the rise in sedentary work and recreation is all you need to explain it.
rr888 4y ago
My pet theory on obesity is how varied and delicious food is these days. Literally my grandparents ate homemade porridge, cheese sandwiches, Potatoes/Carrots/Cabbage/BeefOrPork nearly every day of their lives. No wonder they didn't over eat. New generation has a huge number of yummy dishes to choose from.
- csours 4y ago
  This isn't just your pet theory, it has a name and significant support - The Cafeteria Diet https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/#:~:text=The%20Cafeteria%20(CAF)%20diet%20model,patterns%20better%20than%20other%20models https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/#:~:text=The%20Cafe....
DiabloD3 4y ago
I don't know why they're still grasping at straws. We know why we're fat, the science has already been concluded, and a dozen papers get published every year continuing to hammer nails in a coffin we already buried: diets low in salt and/or low in saturated fat and/or high in oxidized unsaturated fats and/or high in carbohydrates and otherwise devoid of nutrition case weight gain, and the Standard American Diet prides itself on being all four. Washington Post doesn't publish stories about those papers.
- pjdesno 4y ago
  "A significant rise in obesity incidence has even been noted in laboratory rodents and primates – animals raised under strictly controlled conditions of caloric intake and exercise. The only possible factors driving weight gain for these animals, researchers believe, would be subtle chemical changes in the nature of the foods they eat, or in the materials used to build their pens."
  - DiabloD3 4y ago
    Except science says look at the stress levels of such prison-like conditions. Lab animals usually have insufficient physical activity and insufficient "play" to keep the animals at sufficiently natural cortisol levels for that animal, and a lot of the science being generated from these animals is marred by lack of care when handling the animals. The vast majority of papers, no matter if they support a position I hold or not, are simply garbage. It is a continued waste of public and private resources to not consider maintaining the natural state of the animals and expect the science resulting from it to have any meaningful impact.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Yes, pretty much. The problem is some cherry picked studies from the 70s that are just plain misinformation. Atkins did a huge disservice to humanity.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
csours 4y ago
Hunger is incredibly hard to study because it is made up of many physiological sensations and psychological responses to those sensations, and none of those are readily comparable between individuals. So we don't really study hunger very much - there are some really good studies out there, but not very many. And we don't talk about managing hunger, we talk about managing calories and managing weight.
aantix 4y ago
"Thus, rigorously collected national data provide no support for higher energy consumption as a driver of the obesity epidemic since 2000. Strikingly, these data do not even support increasing energy consumption as a consequence of the obesity epidemic, i.e., that as people gain weight, they need to eat more. Rather, the data suggest that Americans have been eating relatively less, for their larger body sizes, over the last 2 decades." https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/115/6/1445/6572830?fbclid=IwAR1GlamuWwnp6xr0xP9vzCrb4MNdqOuFmnNF-o4oH3rsivjIuiU9oJYXBSc&login=false#:~:text=year%20after%20year.-,US%20Trends%20in%20Energy%20Intake,-The%20United%20States https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/115/6/1445/6572830?fbc...
ameminator 4y ago
$5 says it's the food and not the plastic that the food comes in.
nineteen999 4y ago
Well it might be. What might make us lose our obesity is regular exercise, building a reasonable amount of muscle mass, eating less food and better food, consuming less alchohol, spending less time sedentary in front of a computer screen, etc.

194 points by 04rob 4y ago

There is a Nobel Prize waiting for whoever figures this out. I am glad scientists are finally taking it seriously. Statistically, something is most definitely out of whack.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

I have a fri3nd that has an over active thyroid and she's very fit. she had a six pack when she was younger. she didn't really work out. so makes me think hormones are a big part of it too.

cestith 4y ago
Plastics and many other things happen to mess with hormones.

baremetal 4y ago

There is an old saying "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself" I take that to heart. Including what I put in my body. I have little to no faith in modern food. And so I grow my own. I know where it came from and what went into it. And yes, I have had my soil tested. Rely on modern food at your own peril. You are what you eat, as they say.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

https://archive.ph/rmlCA https://archive.ph/rmlCA

TacoToni 4y ago
thank you

moneywoes 4y ago

Seems impossible to avoid I guess?

odyssey7 4y ago
Especially if there is no cure for inherited damage already done. A solution would include medical therapies in addition to avoidance.

Havoc 4y ago

Well that plus the cheeseburger

mylons 4y ago
which part of a cheese burger is bad for you?
- suoduandao2 4y ago
  The bun probably causes inflammation/leaky gut for a lot more people than area aware it does. Modern wheat is a weird organism.
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    What’s weird about it? Is emmer or kamut much better? What about red fife, a strain of wheat from ~170 years ago?
    - suoduandao2 4y ago
      The hybrid varieties bred in the late 50's have about 50x the amount of gluten as previous strains of wheat did.
      - steve_adams_86 4y ago
        Fascinating. I was curious because I eat the three I mentioned kind of like rice (along with barley and oats). I’m behind on this science. A 50x increase in gluten sounds crazy, but I don’t know how much gluten is known to be bad. For example, I sometimes eat things with wheat gluten powder as a primary ingredient. It doesn’t seem to cause harm, but maybe I’m missing something. I certainly don’t think of it as a health food (nothing so heavily processed is), but is it actually harmful?
        suoduandao2 4y ago

elil17 4y ago

A very long series of essays about this: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p... The authors take the view that obesogens account for 100% or nearly 100% of the rise in obesity, which is definitely a controversial view. However, they do an awesome job giving an overview of the arguments for obesogens.

oneoff786 4y ago
I find this to be a pretty lame analysis. > People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. This seems closely related to observations like the French Paradox — the French eat a lot of fatty cheese and butter, so why aren’t they fatter and sicker? Lard doesn’t make you fat. If anything it fills you up so you eat less and gain less weight. A lot more of the prior generations were also laborers which this acknowledges but really underplays. The section on why hunter gatherers aren’t obese is answered by the fact that they are hunting and gathering.
- ianai 4y ago
  Those diets also didn't have added sugars and salts to everything. It's serious work requiring reading all the nutrition labels to get groceries sans questionable additives in the US.
  - minton 4y ago
    I found the Yuka app makes this much easier. Just scan the UPC and it’ll show you a x/100 score. I use it for nearly everything. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yuka-food-cosmetic-scanner/id1092799236 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yuka-food-cosmetic-scanner/id1...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

CJefferson 4y ago

I've recently started taking 'liraglutide', which is an appetite suppressant. I haven't been taking it that long, but so far it's amazing -- I eat a balanced meal with an approriate amount of calories in it, and then I am full, and don't want to eat any more. Sometimes I snack and eat a biscuit, but then I don't feel any need to eat a second biscuit. I'm not saying this is a long-term solution for me, or people in general, but what it has shown me is some people (me included) have managed to mess up their digestive systems badly enough it is incredibly hard to eat healthily -- I previously lost 8 stone (50 kg), but I was hungry every minute of every day, no matter what I tried. Once I had a bad patch I ended up putting all the weight back on.

sithadmin 4y ago
'an appetite suppressant' is really underselling liraglutide. It also corrects insulin resistance, which accounts for some degree of it's effectiveness as a weight loss aid beyond it's effects on slowing the GI tract. GLP-1 agonists are truly an amazing class of drugs. It's absolutely absurd that they're generally not covered by insurance for non-diabetics, even when they yield such obvious benefits for obese people.
- omginternets 4y ago
  >It also corrects insulin resistance Is liraglutide doing that directly, or is it mediated by people eating less sugar?
  - sithadmin 4y ago
    Directly. It stimulates insulin release from the pacreas.
    - omginternets 4y ago
      Eesh… that doesn’t seem great. How does this not cause further habituation?

kragen 4y ago

My guess is that obesogens are to blame, but that they're in food, not plastics. This is because people on weirdo diets (vegans, carnivore, ultra low fat) all lose weight and keep it off, even when they are using the same amount of plastic as everyone else. The common denominator is that they stopped eating industrially manufactured food. I am no expert in the area, just wondering what the hell is going on.

themitigating 4y ago
"Weirdo" diets? Why make such an insulating simplistic judgment when discussing diets?
- kragen 4y ago
  You're reading a value judgment into my wording that isn't there, probably because you need to be more of a weirdo.
acuozzo 4y ago
An omitted possible third factor here is that of selection bias. Perhaps those drawn to so-called "weirdo diets" are also those more likely to maintain their weight loss.
- kragen 4y ago
  It's possible!
zdragnar 4y ago
Blaming plastic seems incredibly strange to me, given that plastics are practically universally present in American life but obesity itself is not universal.
- pseudalopex 4y ago
  Did anyone say plastic is the only factor?

kerrsclyde 4y ago

I thought this article was going to cite plastic as being the container of choice for most of the ultra processed junk that supermarkets are selling and we shouldn't be eating.

mellavora 4y ago

So something else I wonder. Over the last 50-90 years we've selectively bred our entire food chain to prioritize rapid growth, then pack it full of growth hormones to accelerate this. My dad decided to raise chickens back in the 80's. The broiler hens grew so fast that they broke their legs, and this was when fed on our kitchen waste (i.e. no growth hormones). I do wonder how much of this spills over into human obesity; if everything you eat comes from a plant or animal which is hyperoptimizing for unhealthy growth rates, what does that do to the human body? And if you are looking for a biological mechanism, it might be related to epigenetics. Not saying it is so, but am saying that a biological link is not a-priori impossible.

johnatwork 4y ago
I've been wondering about this too. I'm not well versed in the domain to say one thing or another so I will wait to form a concrete opinion before I hear from an expert in the field. I am very curious though like you, if there's a relation between the two.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
> And if you are looking for a biological mechanism, it might be related to epigenetics Very unlikely as afaik everything non parasitic gets broken down by our saliva and stomach acids.
- jjallen 4y ago
  That's not my understanding, at least in animals. Those who ate younger plants and/or animals lived longer. Sorry can't find a citation right now.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    I had put some thought on this and my hunch was that consuming younger plants and/or animals means fewer "forever chemicals" getting accumulated in the body. However, that doesn't disprove the hypothesis that DNA can survive the digestive tract. If this [1] is to be believed, it very much does so. The question is, can epigenetic information / ie folds, survive? [1] https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/does-dna-food-survive-digestion https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/does-d...

vallassy 4y ago

Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar? Over my last few years of reading, I've convinced myself that sugar is the main culprit in massive obesity in Western countries, especially the US (i.e. high fructose corn syrup). Sugar is in everything (like plastic, I suppose). Look at the ingredients of what you buy and you'll be surprised where it turns up. Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky, even bog standard bread. It seems like sugar is the elephant in the room that the mainstream doesn't want to talk about.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
I've tracked my diet pretty regularly over the last several years. The one constant in every weight-gain cycle for me is a sugary treat after a meal. This is true even when I've otherwise kept my caloric intake constant.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Blood sugar spikes do strange things to our hunger response. If your blood sugar is too high the body may produce an emergency response to keep blood sugar down and it may overshoot which makes you hungry much sooner.
loopdoend 4y ago
Sugar and seed oils (vegetable oils). Practically impossible to avoid especially in "food deserts".
- arbitrage 4y ago
  - imchillyb 4y ago
    So avoid "food deserts". It's not difficult. -arbitrage > Food Desert: Urban area in which it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food. Yeah, just move somewhere else! Lol. This is the kind of half-baked bullshit answer I expect from reddit not from Ycomb. Troll somewhere else dude.

dataflow 4y ago

If we assume everyone agreed tomorrow that the cause is 100% plastics, what can we actually do about this? What would our lives look like if we were to address this?

Taikonerd 4y ago
Probably not "ban all plastics." That's not practical. But we could do more research into what compounds specifically are harmful, and then find substitutes for them.

notaboredguy 4y ago

It's just calories in and calories out.

londons_explore 4y ago

I doubt that obesity is caused by "hundreds" of chemical pollutants... I suspect it to be more like a handful that cause the most effect. Since obesity causes millions of deaths annually, solving this warrants a covid-scale response. It should therefore be easy enough to direct a few billion dollars of funding into hundreds of avenues of research to find which those handful of pollutants are, what the main sources of them are, how to remove them, and how the effects of damage already done might be reversed. I imagine that with a covid-scale response, we could guarantee that nothing new would contain any of the offending chemicals within a year, and perhaps within 5 years we could have replaced every piece of tupperware/insulation foam/whatever already manufactured goods contain it.

mylons 4y ago

is it possible to be in a caloric deficit and still gain weight if this is true? or is a caloric deficit + weight loss just a thermodynamics problem

bombcar 4y ago
I suspect it's a modifier at the edges; if X calories you gain Y weight per day, this can make that Y+(some percentage). All these "we found the cause of obesity" dance around the problem.
wyre 4y ago
Appetite and metabolism is much more complicated than a thermodynamics problem. A calorie deficit implies knowledge of metabolic rate which can be highly variable. While calories in can be trivially counted, calories out needs to be calculated and cannot assume a significant level of accuracy. Regardless, the problem with solving the obesity epidemic isn’t that people can’t lose weight, but is keeping weight off after reaching a goal weight.
tstrimple 4y ago
Sometimes it's a little more complicated than just calories in vs calories out. See Cushing syndrome. We are aware of hormone imbalances which promote excess fat build up, often at the expense of muscle mass. It's possible plastics could be effecting hormones in a similar way.
wtetzner 4y ago
> is it possible to be in a caloric deficit and still gain weight if this is true? No, that would defy the laws of thermodynamics. However, it is possible to consume more calories than you burn and lose weight, because there are complexities around how your body decides to store fat, signals to burn fat, etc. Even if it was simply a thermodynamics problem (which I don't think it is), there are also issues with appetite. Sure, you can count calories for the rest of your life, but doing that is not only difficult to measure correctly, but very difficult to maintain if you still feel hungry all the time. I think one of the reasons a ketogenic diet works for a lot of people is that after a period of adaptation, you stop getting hungry every 4 hours.

davidn20 4y ago

Yes, plastic MIGHT be making us obese. But, we definitely know high caloric intake and sedentary lifestyle makes us obese. I don't understand why obesity is such a mystery. People are creatures of path of the least resistance. Developed countries have highly dense caloric food and people are inactive most of the day due to cars and office jobs.

sp332 4y ago
"Developed countries" don't have 40% of high school students clinically obese. Only the US does.
- davidn20 4y ago
  Yes, it's bad in the US, but obesity is rising worldwide. Obesity, in general, correlates with GDP per capital.
  - sp332 4y ago
    Then why are poorer people more obese? Edit: still talking about the USA here.
    - davidn20 4y ago
      Poorer people are more obese is only true in richer countries or in countries where the poor doesn’t have to starve. As for why poor people are more obese in well-off countries. Again, it’s the path of least resistance. Poor people are generally less educated and less likely to think long term. It's easier to eat junk food than to put in the time and effort to make a well balance meal. Btw, I'm not blaming the poor, being poor is hard. I grew up under the poverty line. Overcoming poverty is a huge task and more should be done.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      Availability of cheap crap is much higher in more developed/high GDP countries I suppose. In extremis, if you only eat what you can grow, rear, and trade for, then you're not eating breakfast ~cereal~ sugar, ready meals, crisps, etc. It's a bit tangential, but this is similar to how such a lifestyle isn't even cheaper - it's not the only shopping those people can afford - most of my meals probably cost less, because I take an interest in cooking and eating (i.e. I'm buying vegetables not ready meals) but that doesn't mean there's always (or even that often really, especially amortised over all uses) an out-of-reach expensive ingredient.

fortran77 4y ago

I'm very skeptical. I think there are some things that may make us "feel hungrier" but there's nothing changing our metabolism. If we are to believe this, it would mean that "plastic" is making our bodies so much more efficient that there's extra energy that's being stored as fat. I like to keep my weight exactly at 155# (as a 5'10 59 year old man). Once a year, I "bulk" and go up to 160 while doing more strenuous weight training. The math always works exactly -- for every 3000 extra k/cal I eat, I go up a pound. When it's time to "cut" back to 155#, for every 3000 k/cal deficit I drop a pound. 15 years ago, I got fat. I stopped paying attention to what I was eating. Got my weight up to 205#. I lost it by strictly counting calories. The math worked perfectly. I went to 1200 k/cal and lost 2 pounds a week. Exactly. Every week. Eating no more calories than your body needs works for everyone. You cannot create matter out of thin air, no matter what fat people will tell you. The Obese and Overweight cost society greatly. The fact that they're consuming more than they need, use more fuel to move around, and get sick and require more medical care costs us trillions. It's time they stopped pointing their fingers at "plastics" and started obeying the laws of thermodynamics.

tstrimple 4y ago
> but there's nothing changing our metabolism. Why would you be so confident when we know for a fact that hormone imbalances can absolutely impact our metabolism. Including signaling to your body to produce and store more fat than it normally would. Cortisol the hormone produced in stress responses is shown to do exactly that. Using yourself as an anecdote isn't useful in anyway.
- fortran77 4y ago
  Matter isn't created out of thin air.
  - wtetzner 4y ago
    > I'm very skeptical. I think there are some things that may make us "feel hungrier" but there's nothing changing our metabolism. > If we are to believe this, it would mean that "plastic" is making our bodies so much more efficient that there's extra energy that's being stored as fat. I think it's likely the opposite, e.g. there's something (not necessarily plastic) throwing off hormones, so the body ends up storing more of the calories as fat than it would if it was healthy. It's not at all clear (to me, at least) that a healthy human body would continue to store fat indefinitely, regardless of how many calories were being consumed.

oliwarner 4y ago

Maybe? It's easier to believe that 100 years of massively increasing calorie density and engineering chemical perfection in terms of hitting the body's pleasure markers might have had a larger effect. That and our move to sedentary, thinking jobs. Or prolonging the day with evening entertainment, so eating later. And services that make the worst food arrive on your doorstep in 30 minutes. There are so many things above "plastics" we should blame first. But I'm sure blaming someone else is far more appetising than looking at our own lack of self control.

mfer 4y ago

Our food chain has a lot to do with obesity. There are many studies on this stuff. We eat 5 times as much meat on average as people did 100 years go. Animal based products are a major source of fat. People used to eat more fruits and vegetables. The fat type has shifted with more fat (which has higher calorie per gram amounts than carbs or protein) and fat moving from polyunsaturated fats to saturated fats (which causes lots of medical problems). In there is the growth hormone. Kids "mature" physically at younger ages now than they used to. Kids to stop stop dairy or a lot of mean may physically mature at the older slower pace. Eating less fruits, vegetables, and whole grains means less fiber. Most people (in the US anyway) are deficient in fiber. Fiber traps certain fats and cholesterols so they aren't absorbed. So, we absorb more fats. Then there are processed foods. So much about our diets have changed in the last 100 years. A lot is known and we even know how to eat to be really healthy. It's just not widely known by the general public.

MockObject 4y ago
> We eat 5 times as much meat on average as people did 100 years go. And yet there are a growing number looking shredded and boasting of their health on carnivore diets.
inglor_cz 4y ago
Your comment completely ignores the content of the article you are commenting upon. You concentrate on the "normal" nutrition stuff like fat, fiber and carbohydrates, without even asking why do people eat more than 100 years ago. The article talks about the fact that food now contains a lot of totally unnatural chemical substances that our ancestors never encountered and that such substances may throw off our sense of satiety and disrupt other mechanisms directly related to obesity. That is a serious problem. An apple or a piece of meat laced with various chemicals isn't the same as 100 years ago. It seems you choose to ignore this difference.
reedjosh 4y ago
We eat unnatural amounts of polyunsaturated oils today. You have it completely backward. The amount of vegetable based fats consumed 100 years ago was significantly less. It wasn't until chemical extraction was introduced that we could consume as much vegetable based fat as we do today. Saturated fat is actually more stable and by far healthier.

YeahNO 4y ago

Calories certainly aren't the only factor. If you feed animals the same exact diet and they have similar exercise habits and their excrement has the same caloric value, why does one get obese while the other doesn't? Genetics, epigenetics and gut biome likely all contribute to the problem. https://nautil.us/what-if-obesity-is-nobodys-fault-234639/ https://nautil.us/what-if-obesity-is-nobodys-fault-234639/

bradhe 4y ago

I was pretty sure it was the over eating but I'll happily blame plastic...

slowmovintarget 4y ago

Maybe now we can finally get the FDA to ban glyphosate (Round-Up) like they do in the EU. It is currently impossible to purchase oat cereal in the U.S. that doesn't have some level of glyphosate in it. Cheerios is loaded with it. So something sold as "heart healthy" is loaded with obesogens and will contribute to obesity.

garren 4y ago

> Nearly 1,000 obesogens with such effects have already been identified in studies with animals or humans. They include Bisphenol A, a chemical widely used in plastics, and the phthalates, plasticizing agents used in paints, medicine and cosmetics. Others include parabens used as preservatives in food and paper products, and chemicals called organotins used as fungicides. Other obesogens include pesticides and herbicides, including glyphosate, which a recent study found to be present in the urine of most Americans. It feels like modern, Western, society is like living in a big Petri dish. It’s one big experiment in which we’re swimming in chemicals that we later find out interact with us and each other in negative ways. We should have reigned in these kinds of “innovations” decades ago. Americans are now urinating carcinogenic pesticides, rainwater even in most remote regions in the would is undrinkable [0], and we’ve had strong evidence for a while that some of the constituent components of commonly used plastics disrupt biological processes in humans and other animals. In 50-100 years people will be looking back in horror at the kinds of self-inflicted suffering we’ve produced. And for what? Money? Convenience? [0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a40859859/rainwater-not-safe-to-drink/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a40859859/rainwater...

DeadMouseFive 4y ago
For what: the profit of capitalists.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  I don't think you need "capitalists", since socialists would be using the same toxins by fiat from a central committee. "For profit" is likely ok too.
tsol 4y ago
Lack of regulation.

Auracle 4y ago

I do a lot of high school senior photography. It's hard to talk about this without sounding crude as a guy but something that I've noticed that contrasts with when I graduated high school (2006) is just how many girls have huge breasts. I think there were 2 girls in my grade that were skinny and had what would be called "large" breasts. Most other skinny girls had the standard A or B cups. Now a very large portion have what must be D cups. I've tried to look up studies but I couldn't find any that controlled for weight. This was also the first year I had not one, but two, morbidly obese girls. One was so large I ran out of poses pretty much right away as she couldn't clasp her hands together behind her back, couldn't do the same near her waist in front, and she couldn't even sit down on the ground - only kneel. She told me she wanted to be a lawyer. I find it incredibly sad that you could be that large already at that age. I can only imagine how difficult it would make life.

spicyusername 4y ago
> just how many girls have huge breasts. One reason I've heard to explain this is a rise in the consumption of certain kinds of hormonal birth control.
true_religion 4y ago
So the funny thing is I was hearing the same thing ( that the average cup size had increase to C) back when I graduated high school in the late 90s. I think non anectodally, this trend is something that has been going on for a long time. If I remember correctly we blamed microplastics in the water minicking estrogen, and starting puberty earlier. What is the truth is probably unknown.
cptcobalt 4y ago
> I find it incredibly sad that you could be that large already at that age. I can only imagine how difficult it would make life. As someone about this size, but has also been relatively "fit" at this size (I used to be able to go on casual 10+ mile hikes on weekends, pre-pandemic), it's also our health system failing us. I've never had a doctor give me a better answer than "diet and exercise" to change things. I got to a level of fitness where I could go on 10 mile hikes, which is a hell of a lot more fit than a lot than many Americans, yet they'd still give me doom and gloom and uninterested answers. It's exhausting. America does not treat obesity well, and I feel like there's not good enough research going into it. I love to see reporting like—and hope there's more to come, in hopes that it changes both clinical mindsets and also how we think about obesity. It's more than what you eat.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

I am very skeptical the effect would be meaningful relative to diet/exercise. We have never been more seditary, and sugar has never been more a part of our diet. When my mother moved in and we started going on daily walks, she lost a pound a week for one year. When she injured her foot and stopped, with no diet change throughout the entire time, she gained it all back in a couple months. I would be surprised if people gained weight with no diet change and introduced mostly standing or walking throughout the day into their life.

rockostrich 4y ago
evancox100 4y ago
The problem with “calories in - calories out = weight gained” is that even though it is of course true (thermodynamics), it explains nothing. If I asked you “Why do children grow bigger?”, and you said “because they eat more calories than they expend”, again you would be correct but have told me nothing. And if a child wasn’t growing like they should, you wouldn’t say “just keep feeding them more”, you would look for possible disruptions of their hormonal system. The reality is that the body is a finely tuned bio mechanical system with feedback loops that are capable of regulating your resting metabolic rate in order to target weight gain, loss, or stasis. The question is why are so many people’s regulation loops so out of whack?
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Everyone overeats and calories have never been cheaper. There is nothing that surprising going on. The human body was meant for fasting longer than our culture does and in experiencing occasional hunger.
- evol262 4y ago
  They are eating too much, and their regulation of hunger impulses is out of whack. There are essentially zero studies which show subjects on a controlled diet under observation having more than a +/-5% different in metabolic efficiency. The burden of proof is, frankly, on those who are looking for anything except for overconsumption as the cause.

bgro 4y ago

I don't know the last time I could trust an article or even scientific paper about weight / diets / food effects. You'd think the vast amounts of scientific papers would be conclusive, but they're constantly contradicting each other or people uncover ulterior motives, like having shares in a questionable weight loss company. In some of these cases, the source material uses inappropriate sample sizes or has other similar problems, or references other studies that had problems like this. I bet if you type "X is the reason for obesity," you will find information for any noun. Here's a partial list of topics off the top of my head from the best of my ability that I believe have been blasted as the definitive one-and-only "root cause" of obesity: [Sugar, Aspartame, Plastic, Butter, Margarine, Carbs, Milk, Bread, Fruit, Nuts, Phones, The Internet, TV, Video Games, Your job in general, Canned Products, Gluten, Pollution, Global Warming, Cars, Cheese, Alcohol, No Exercise, Cardio-only exercise, Blue Light (from electronics in general)]

oblio 4y ago
It's sugar + sedentarity. It's always been sugar + sedentarity. At least for high levels of obesity, towards morbid obesity.
- tdehnel 4y ago
  Close. Not just sugar, but calories of any kind + sedentary.
  - oblio 4y ago
    True, but from I remember, sugar is worse than just fat.

kccqzy 4y ago

If a factor can't explain why non-Hispanic Asians have much lower prevalence of obesity than any other race, I tend not to trust it. Are Asians simply using less plastic than other races? Look at the chart: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db288.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db288.pdf The chart is simply striking. We should all be investigating what are the Asians doing right that all of us should learn from.

insane_dreamer 4y ago
diet (not dieting, but their diet)
- rr888 4y ago
  Dieting too, esp the women seem to have a huge amount of pressure to be skinny.
kgilpin 4y ago
Is it lower consumption of alcohol?
- brabel 4y ago
  Food. Just see what they eat (and how much). It really is simple as that.
  - imeron 4y ago
    Don't forget that Japanese actively shame fat people! This is very much frown upon in Western societies but it works for them I guess.
    - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
      They don't feel even slightly bad about it. It's as prevalent as obesity isn't.

OJFord 4y ago

This is absurd. The authors should look at what some people (or perhaps they themselves, and that's the issue) have in their trolley (cart?) next time they're shopping (storing? ;)). Obesity is, for at least the most part, plainly not caused by too many/wrong pesticides on fruit and vegetables. It is caused by (far) too many things that are not fruits and vegetables.

jonwinstanley 4y ago
Agreed. And it’s not like everyone is obese. There’s a large proportion of people who eat healthily, avoid processed food, keep their portion sizes regular and refrain from too much alcohol. Unsurprisingly these people are in good shape despite probably being in close proximity to the plastics/chemicals described in the article.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  I'm always really skeptical of claims about obesity for more than one person. Obesity is defined in terms of BMI, which is severely limited as a metric for health. An individual with more muscle mass and higher bone density is healthier than the alternative, but their BMI will be higher. Not all body mass is bad. This tends to confirm my own anecdata, which is that I'm not surrounded by overfat people after all. I do see morbid cases from time to time and in certain population centers. A mostly healthy population with a small number of extremely overfat cases is going to appear to have bad BMI stats on the whole.
scoofy 4y ago
This is an utterly naive assessment: To answer the question of "why are people obese" with "not eating enough fruits and vegetables" completely ignores that all the research that demonstrates that it's simply not true. Why do obese people rapidly gain weight after losing it, even with diets that wouldn't cause normal weight people to gain any weight? Why do obese people seem to be simply more hungry than normal weight people. There are myriad questions that your thesis doesn't and can't answer. It would also be trivial to prove this thesis true, yet obesity still tends to confound scientists, especially with childhood obesity, which did not even exist three generations ago.

tdehnel 4y ago

This has got to be the most idiotic, speculative comment section of the year. Literally not a single coherent explanation of how plastics might actually cause obesity, and a bunch of people going on about sugar and hormones.

CountSessine 4y ago
Diet is an HN magnet for bike-shedding and anecdotes.
Tao3300 4y ago
> Literally not a single coherent explanation of how plastics might actually cause obesity I don't think the onus for that is on the commentariat here. Rather it's on the Washington Post article to bridge these studies of mouse adipose tissue to human health outcomes. It doesn't do that very well, so you're going to see some decrying of potential alarmism and alternative explanations.

moistly 4y ago

Overlooked throughout this discussion, afaict, is an explanation as to why animals are also getting fatter. > The problem of obesity isn't confined to just humans. A new study finds increased rates of obesity in mammals ranging from feral rats and mice to domestic pets and laboratory primates. https://www.livescience.com/10277-obesity-rise-animals.html https://www.livescience.com/10277-obesity-rise-animals.html

Melatonic 4y ago
This is certainly an interesting one if true
docandrew 4y ago
I’d expect pets are getting fatter because we can afford more, better pet food and treats. I mean, it’s crazy how large the selection is. Feral rats, same thing - we have a lot more food waste than we used to. As far as laboratory animals under strict food controls, that’s a bit harder to explain, but maybe it’s a breeding/genetics thing? I dunno, some kind of sinister hidden chemical/obesegen/hormone disruptor just strikes me as a bit far-fetched.

hamiltonians 4y ago

maybe the bmi is also wrong. if your index is labelng half or more of ppl as diseased, maybe the index is broken. except for jockeys, meth addicts, and runners, most men are going to be aleast borerline overweight by 30. i dont know any thin people. maybe we need to make drugs legal..that will fix it. perhaps there is a good biological reason people weigh more, why fight nature.

jscheel 4y ago
BMI was not created to be a marker for health, it was created by a mathematician to calculate government food allocations. It blows my mind that we still use it.

bilsbie 4y ago

Why do they report these huge obesity rates but whenever I go out in public almost no one is overweight?

0xfeba 4y ago
Rural America skews it.
rory 4y ago
Where do you live?
spywaregorilla 4y ago
Because the obese people are not walking around outside much. They're also generally poorer and likely far outside your social circle.

betwixthewires 4y ago

I have no doubt that many of these plethora of chemicals that are in our every day environment are endocrine disruptors or worse, most of us would be surprised just how significantly we have changed the chemistry of our environments over the last century. But I'm not convinced that they're the cause for obesity. Contributors, sure. The cause? Your body has to make fat out of something, with or without an endocrine disruptor. I've never met a fat person that doesn't drink soda every day. It's sugar and seed oil. That's what it comes down to. Most of what we eat is not food really, but the last mile in a marketing campaign, it barely even qualifies as a product. That combined with the rise in sedentary work and recreation is all you need to explain it.

rr888 4y ago

My pet theory on obesity is how varied and delicious food is these days. Literally my grandparents ate homemade porridge, cheese sandwiches, Potatoes/Carrots/Cabbage/BeefOrPork nearly every day of their lives. No wonder they didn't over eat. New generation has a huge number of yummy dishes to choose from.

csours 4y ago
This isn't just your pet theory, it has a name and significant support - The Cafeteria Diet https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/#:~:text=The%20Cafeteria%20(CAF)%20diet%20model,patterns%20better%20than%20other%20models https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/#:~:text=The%20Cafe....

DiabloD3 4y ago

I don't know why they're still grasping at straws. We know why we're fat, the science has already been concluded, and a dozen papers get published every year continuing to hammer nails in a coffin we already buried: diets low in salt and/or low in saturated fat and/or high in oxidized unsaturated fats and/or high in carbohydrates and otherwise devoid of nutrition case weight gain, and the Standard American Diet prides itself on being all four. Washington Post doesn't publish stories about those papers.

pjdesno 4y ago
"A significant rise in obesity incidence has even been noted in laboratory rodents and primates – animals raised under strictly controlled conditions of caloric intake and exercise. The only possible factors driving weight gain for these animals, researchers believe, would be subtle chemical changes in the nature of the foods they eat, or in the materials used to build their pens."
- DiabloD3 4y ago
  Except science says look at the stress levels of such prison-like conditions. Lab animals usually have insufficient physical activity and insufficient "play" to keep the animals at sufficiently natural cortisol levels for that animal, and a lot of the science being generated from these animals is marred by lack of care when handling the animals. The vast majority of papers, no matter if they support a position I hold or not, are simply garbage. It is a continued waste of public and private resources to not consider maintaining the natural state of the animals and expect the science resulting from it to have any meaningful impact.
imtringued 4y ago
Yes, pretty much. The problem is some cherry picked studies from the 70s that are just plain misinformation. Atkins did a huge disservice to humanity.

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csours 4y ago

Hunger is incredibly hard to study because it is made up of many physiological sensations and psychological responses to those sensations, and none of those are readily comparable between individuals. So we don't really study hunger very much - there are some really good studies out there, but not very many. And we don't talk about managing hunger, we talk about managing calories and managing weight.

aantix 4y ago

"Thus, rigorously collected national data provide no support for higher energy consumption as a driver of the obesity epidemic since 2000. Strikingly, these data do not even support increasing energy consumption as a consequence of the obesity epidemic, i.e., that as people gain weight, they need to eat more. Rather, the data suggest that Americans have been eating relatively less, for their larger body sizes, over the last 2 decades." https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/115/6/1445/6572830?fbclid=IwAR1GlamuWwnp6xr0xP9vzCrb4MNdqOuFmnNF-o4oH3rsivjIuiU9oJYXBSc&login=false#:~:text=year%20after%20year.-,US%20Trends%20in%20Energy%20Intake,-The%20United%20States https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/115/6/1445/6572830?fbc...

ameminator 4y ago

$5 says it's the food and not the plastic that the food comes in.

nineteen999 4y ago

Well it might be. What might make us lose our obesity is regular exercise, building a reasonable amount of muscle mass, eating less food and better food, consuming less alchohol, spending less time sedentary in front of a computer screen, etc.