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What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

nautil.us

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Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#291

Post by rajin444 »

zamfi wrote: post #272
rajin444 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even they admit that in the end CICO is correct. You cannot escape physics. 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/intell…

Sure, CICO definitely applies, but so what? The first derivative of stored calories doesn't tell you anything interesting about causes . Your bank balance is a sum of money coming and and money going out, but what causes money coming in and what causes money going out are much more useful to anyone trying to earn wealth or avoid debt than the mere fact that your bank balance is their sum. Like you, many people are co…

I read enough.

> (1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too?

There are so many explanations for this outside of "some environmental factor causing everyone to get fat" that I don't think it needs explaining.

> Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure

The methods for estimating these are likely wildly off. At face value, this would be an incredibly difficult statistic to obtain accurately. Nearly impossible. I'd need access to more data than is available to trust such a tremendous claim. Trying to simplify complex data like this is borderline pseudoscience.

That being said, I'm not saying CICO is the casual explanation. I'm saying we have a large surplus of resources, and humans are designed to consume. Overcoming that drive is likely beyond many people.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#292

Post by austinjp »

trzy wrote: post #116
slim wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that pie chart to the left is not poor design choice. it demonstrates actual incompetency.

Why? The labels are given in absolute units but they are correct.

The pie totals 200%.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#293

Post by Riseed »

gloryjulio wrote: post #283
kaezon wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this citation! I've at least heard that CICO was nonsense, but the author has done a fantastic job researching the subject, breaking down common approaches to weight loss, and studies which have examined them.

How is CICO nonsense...? Unless you are breaking the law of thermodynamics, there is no way you could gain more from what you eat. The best you can do is utilize 100% of the calorie intake. It's physically impossible to gain weight if you are burning for example 150% of the total calories intake! The fuel has to come from somewhere. The variation lies in different utilization rate, the burn rate, and all other variab…

CICO is nonsense in the sense that it simplifies something to the point of being unhelpful. Similarly to if anyone claimed "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code.

Personally, when I reduce CI, my body responds by decreasing CO: I don't think as clearly (problematic for being a functional adult), and I'm even colder than normal. With no reasonable way to accurately measure the change in CO, it's difficult to balance the equation.

tldr: what's simple and obvious with spherical cows in a vacuum is not so simple in the real world

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#295

Post by lanstin »

john567 wrote: post #212
zamfi wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may find this exposition interesting: http://achemicalhunger.com/

This must be part of some disinformation effort to streer people away from the simple answer. Their conclusion is that you're helpless if your fat and that's just not true. The idea that this is not in your hands is ridiculous. If you are fat and you don't want to be fat you simply change your eating habits. This can be very difficult to do because you have formed these habits throughout your life but it isn't compli…

As an example of some contradictory data, there is a cold virus associated with much higher rates of obesity:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/obesity-children-linked-...

Also, the questions asked generally here "How can society as a whole have less obesity" is different from the one you are answering: "If I am obese, what can I do to improve my health."

I'm assuming you know we excrete unused chemical energy, so we aren't a closed system in which the CICO principal would be more deterministic.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#296

Post by zamfi »

notahacker wrote: post #279
zamfi wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most folks who respond like this are not looking for reasons to believe they might be wrong, but just in case you are, please take a look at A Chemical Hunger [0], which explores these questions in some depth. It turns out, the simple explanations (people eat more & move less! too much sugar! etc.) are in fact insufficient. [0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p...

Obviously there are a large number of factors which affect the weight of a specific individual, and food intake and exercise are only two of them, but that blog's attempts to deny the causation behind the correlation looks far more highly motivated than anybody pointing out that trends in obesity mirror trends in diets and lifestyle changes. I mean, he handwaves away the statistic that suggests the mean US citizen's…

> mean US citizen's calorie intake increased by nearly a quarter over the period that obesity rose simply by saying "that's not a jaw dropping increase"

I think the context here is that while 400 extra calories a day might seem like a lot, it's within the observed variability going back as far as we have measurements. Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960, and were no more obese then.

> He thinks a study in which people's food intake was increased by 50% showed a significant average weight gain in just three weeks undermines the argument that feeding a population an average 25% more per day for the rest of their lives could increase obesity

Hmm, I think the point here is that there is more complexity than the "eat more, gain weight" hypothesis: there was wide variability in how much weight people gained when being overfed, and all of these people, when they stopped being overfed, lost the weight they'd gained effortlessly -- which is emphatically not the case for most obese folks today.

This implies something is different about being temporarily overfed (which makes weight loss trivial) and what's causing the obesity epidemic (which makes weight loss very challenging).

Also worth noting that the increased caloric intake also doesn't answer the question of what's causing people to eat more than they burn. (And again, there's not really any question that obese folks are eating more than they burn -- it's the only way to actually gain weight, after all -- the whole point of this line of inquiry is to figure out why.)

I'll cite what they say about this:

> From this study [0], for example, consider this sentence: "TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily. Obese individuals generally burn 3000+ kcal/day, and while not every modern person is obese, it does make the increase from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010 look relatively small.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2012172

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#297

Post by zamfi »

rajin444 wrote: post #291
zamfi wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, CICO definitely applies, but so what? The first derivative of stored calories doesn't tell you anything interesting about causes . Your bank balance is a sum of money coming and and money going out, but what causes money coming in and what causes money going out are much more useful to anyone trying to earn wealth or avoid debt than the mere fact that your bank balance is their sum. Like you, many people are co…

I read enough. > (1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too? There are so many explanations for this outside of "some environmental factor causing everyone to get fat" that I don't think it needs explaining. > Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure The methods…

> I'm saying we have a large surplus of resources, and humans are designed to consume.

You have no particular evidence of this either.

In other contexts where humans have had a large surplus of resources, there has not been an obesity epidemic.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#298

Post by lanstin »

gilmore606 wrote: post #281
zamfi wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I was obese and I thought about my own obesity, I decided it was under my control and I changed my habits (this was hard!) and I lost 110lbs. There was no more to the picture than my eating habits. Perhaps I was a strange outlier; lucky for me. But when I think about other people's obesity, I am not allowed to think that, because I would be part of a shame brigade. I wish the shame brigade had gotten to me years…

The question "what can I do about this thing affecting me personally?" and the question "what can the group do about this thing that is affecting the group in large numbers?" are going to have quite different answers. I'm glad you've found a solution that works for you, but there's a good deal of data to support that telling this story to more people will not fix the group problem.

Even if your obesity was helped along by plastic based endocrine disruptors or micro-biome based issues or weird viruses, you found a solution for you.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#299

Post by ClumsyPilot »

rajin444 wrote: post #291
zamfi wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, CICO definitely applies, but so what? The first derivative of stored calories doesn't tell you anything interesting about causes . Your bank balance is a sum of money coming and and money going out, but what causes money coming in and what causes money going out are much more useful to anyone trying to earn wealth or avoid debt than the mere fact that your bank balance is their sum. Like you, many people are co…

I read enough. > (1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too? There are so many explanations for this outside of "some environmental factor causing everyone to get fat" that I don't think it needs explaining. > Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure The methods…

> There are so many explanations for this outside of "some environmental factor causing everyone to get fat" that I don't think it needs explaining.

Do you not realise that this point alone jeopardizes your entire argument? If this effect is real, the rest of this discussion belongs straight in the trash.

So yes, very much needs explaining.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#300

Post by rubicon33 »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #235
wbsss4412 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not at all clear that the current epidemic is caused by sugar. Lustig is a great speaker, and I’ll admit that when I first watched that I was quite convinced. His position, however, is still not representative of a consensus within the field, and for good reason. While sugar consumption is likely detrimental to one’s overall health. Simply cutting out sugar is not necessarily going to lead to better weight manag…

Sure, simply cutting out sugar but otherwise making poor dietary choices isn't going to lead to weight loss. Cutting out sugar tends to make it easier to eat healthy, though. Long term weight loss requires lifestyle changes. In my personal anecdotal experience, my weight gain and loss correlates to my caloric intake. When I've explicitly calorie counted, foods with refined carbohydrates are typically what blows up my…

Can you give an example of what a typical high calorie / high carb day looked like for you?

I eat lots of carbs, always have... yet I don't seem to gain weight. I generally feel like, and am regarded by people who know me, as someone who "eats a ton" yet I have never struggled to lose weight.

The X food causes obesity theory is just too simple IMO, that or I have a tape worm or some kind of undiagnosed disorder that results in me maintaining a pretty consistent BMI despite eating whatever and whenever I want.

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