261–270 of 341 posts
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How does your theory explains > and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets ?
How does a lab animal with a controlled diet get obese? Thermodynamics suddenly not a thing?
This article conflates particles of any size, and often does not even mention sizes, e.g., '28 particles' in a serving of beer? That is imprecise (doesn't mention size) and wrong: probably way to little, as nano particles are used in filtering (clarifying) beer. The articles also doesn't really tell me how to avoid all that plastic. If 40 percent of human diet contains plastic, then there's hope, so which 60 percent…
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What’s worrying about this is that we’re about 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for, and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets. It would be fascinating if this was all correlated with a common environmental contaminant, and the increasing use of various plastics could line up well.
Highly unlikely. The obesity epidemic is very well explained by diet and lifestyle choices, and regional variations in average body mass correlate with these explanatory variable pretty well.
Even our pets are getting fat.
Previous experiments both natural and manmade indicate that homeostasis prevents long term weight gain in situations of high caloric availability.
The conclusion of the paper was that something was introduced into the environment in the 70s that is disrupting humans’ and nearby mammals’ homeostasis mechanisms.
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Highly unlikely. The obesity epidemic is very well explained by diet and lifestyle choices, and regional variations in average body mass correlate with these explanatory variable pretty well.
This is largely debunked by a paper posted on HN a while back I can’t seem to find right now. Even our pets are getting fat. Previous experiments both natural and manmade indicate that homeostasis prevents long term weight gain in situations of high caloric availability. The conclusion of the paper was that something was introduced into the environment in the 70s that is disrupting humans’ and nearby mammals’ homeost…
Now me, age 42, has eaten an untold amount of everyone else's garbage and can now literally no longer avoid eating the chewed-up-and-spit-out refuse of our bad choices that now cannot be reversed.
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What’s worrying about this is that we’re about 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for, and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets. It would be fascinating if this was all correlated with a common environmental contaminant, and the increasing use of various plastics could line up well.
You may find this exposition interesting: http://achemicalhunger.com/
That being said, the real question is: if somebody stopped eating, would their body die instead of using their fat for energy? There could definitely be cases where that happens (likely caused by modern tech / science), but given things like this happen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast
It’s likely just a willpower/intellect issue once cico is handled. How long can you keep it up, are you able to make effective modifications, etc until you reach your goal weight.
I’d wager that it’s much more likely society lacks willpower & intelligence (when presented with excess resources) instead of we introduced something that makes our bodies unable to lose weight.
Anecdotally, as a former obese person and with many family members who have dealt with/are dealing with obesity cico + willpower was always the answer. It’s very likely the willpower needed to lose weight is something a large portion of the population fundamentally can’t achieve without cultural enforcement.
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Alternatively, whats a highly rated budget air purifier that handles VOCs too ?
I haven't done a ton of research into VOCs, but my understanding is that most purifiers targeting them use activated charcoal filters? Those filters are pretty cheap, you can tape them to a Corsi-Rosenthal Box without adding much cost at all. If there's something more complicated going on then maybe that wouldn't be effective, but in general air filtration is just a combination of how much air your filter is moving a…
You can't absorb things without absorbant mass. The black plastic sponge has hardly any mass at all, period.
I however do not have a good solution. I've DIY'd my own filter with charcoal pellets, but I've been unable to test it, and I'm somewhat unhappy with the design anyway.
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How does your theory explains > and is also affecting lab animals fed controlled diets ?
How does a lab animal with a controlled diet get obese? Thermodynamics suddenly not a thing?
you aren't a blast calorimeter, the food you eat obviously is not reduced to actual ash, so it's certainly possible that there are changes in either the inflow of calories that your body is able to actually absorb or that something in the food is changing the rate at which you burn it. There are also various diseases and syndromes that could affect either of those processes.
"calories in, calories out" is the only useful advice you can really give to people trying to lose weight, but that is not a scientifically rigorous position as far as the sum total of hormonal and microbiome processes involved in digestion and metabolism. Again, the food you eat is not reduced to ash, and there can definitely be changes in the processes involved.
And indeed that is what the facts show - lab animals being fed controlled diets are now getting fat, as are feral animal colonies, so it doesn't make sense to make reductive and antagonistic remarks like "thermodynamics suddenly not a thing!?". The scientific process has showed you that your hypothesis is wrong, and it's now your duty to re-examine your hypothesis and account for the discrepancy. Maybe it's the study, maybe not.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201...
But to be similarly reductive - "what, do you think feral cats are suddenly spending too much time at their desk job?"
Feral cats aren't getting sugar in their diets, they haven't reduced their activity levels, and any increase in food supply should result in an increase in feral cats until the population can no longer be sustained, the predator-prey population cycle is as immutable as thermodynamics. Why are they getting fat, if calories in = calories out? Thermodynamics still works, right? So what's your alternative explanation? Maybe it's... not quite that simple?
The most worrying potential answer is that we've created a variety of endocrine disruptors and those have permeated our environments. They get picked up by scavengers like mice and birds from our food and its packaging, they get picked up by cats who eat the mice and birds, etc. Potentially, they could end up even in things like fertilizer or pesticides that get turned into animal feed and fed to lab animals.
This is also potentially backed by other effects, such as the continuing decrease in the age of menarche. Nobody really knows whether it's tied to changing patterns of exercise/weight, or whether those are comorbid effects from exposure to endocrine disruptors/pseudo-hormones. It is definitely decreasing in societies where not everybody is working a desk job and eating 3000 calories a day but people would be exposed to the chemicals endemic to modern society.
Things like bisphenol compounds in receipts that we handle daily worry me greatly. 100 years ago people still had desk jobs, but they weren't handling thermopaper receipts and then throwing them in the trash where rats get them in the dumpster/etc. They weren't getting all their food in plastics and BPA-lined cans (or whatever the new compound they've moved onto since then). Food wasn't packaged in wrappers lined with BPA, they used wax paper. Etc etc.
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Obviously you [0] didn't read the article, but that is not their conclusion. There seems to be some kind of unfortunate "shame brigade" out on the Internet that comes out of the woodwork to overrun any conversation around obesity that even hints that there might be reasons for the obesity epidemic other than individual people's poor choices. The lab rats whose rate of obesity has increased over the last 30 years, des…
> This kind of comment should be ignored by anyone who values truth over consensus. I hope you're talking about your own comment, because consensus is truth, for all practical purposes. What's really toxic is taking a fringe theory and pretending it has equivalence and/or equal weight with scientific consensus, when it doesn't have even 1% of the rigor and reproducible evidence behind it. That kind of attitude is abs…
Oof, you are definitely right about this. Very few people are able to distinguish truth where it deviates from consensus, and basically no one can do it in domains where they lack expertise.
That said, there is no scientific consensus about the causes of the obesity epidemic, so I'm not sure what criticism you're directing at me, exactly -- though I deduce from your tone that I triggered you in some way.
I'm not putting forth any fringe theory about the causes of the obesity epidemic; the link I posted examines common explanations for the epidemic and tries to figure out whether they're valid, and if not, what other causes there might be. They don't claim anything definitive, in the end, because it would take actual studies to prove any real connection. They're pretty clear about what they can and can't claim.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean:
> it doesn't have even 1% of the rigor and reproducible evidence behind it. That kind of attitude is absolutely glorifying ignorance and is utterly toxic to actual progress.