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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?

#301

Post by gloryjulio »

Riseed wrote: post #293
gloryjulio wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

That's such a typical straw-man argument. Firstly nobody with the right mind will say "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code. Knowing principle doesn't automatically helps you solve the problem. It's like saying I know programming but why aren't I a successful tech company billionaire? Knowing the principle gives your a solid start, it doesn't guarantee your eventual success

Similarly, CICO is just an simple scientific fact to give you the idea what's happening physical world. Did anyone say CI and CO calculation is simple? Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air?

Tell me just one dieting method is simple, effective, helps everyone 100% to achieve the target weight again? As I mentioned in the above post, a good recipe doesn't make you a successful cook. You are not going to become Gordon Ramsay by watching his video alone

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

#302

Post by jasonfarnon »

paulmd wrote: post #269
formerly_proven wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a lab animal with a controlled diet get obese? Thermodynamics suddenly not a thing?

an increase in the effectiveness of absorbing calories, or something in the food affecting their metabolic rate. 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 vario…

"lab animals being fed controlled diets are now getting fat, as are feral animal colonies"

What does "now" refer to here? I imagine in the case of the human population's growing obesity, the "now" means contemporary western diet. If this weren't lab rats, I guess I would assume you mean street rats eating trash produced from contemporary western diet is leading them to get fat. But these are lab animals and the diet is "controlled".

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

#303

Post by notahacker »

zamfi wrote: post #296
notahacker wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960, and were no more obese then.

That's his assertion, but all we've got is a link to a complex dataset on "food availability" and his word for it (and some probably-unjustified ancillary assumptions about calorie burning between the two eras being similar, of course). Extraordinary claims, I think, demand a higher standard of evidence.

> 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.

Sure. But that's furiously demolishing a straw man that there's no variability in weight gain between individuals whilst dismissing the actual finding that it takes as little as 3 weeks to show a clear increase in weight from eating 1000 extra calories as incidental. And he's trying to use it to argue against the notion that average calorie intake data consistent with the obese ~40% of the US population eating ~1000 extra calories on a permanent basis could have caused the latter group to have gained weight!

> 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).

One obvious difference is that people overfeed for longer. This doesn't seem to be a gotcha for the basic assumption "people eat too much" and nor does the fact that eating "too much" is obviously likely to be caused by different factors in different people. But whilst "people eat too much" might have little explanatory power, its not nearly as dubious as the blog's assertion that "diet and exercise are out as explanations for the epidemic" despite them being both consistent with macro trends and a change in one undoubtedly entirely to blame for some individuals' weight changes

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

#304

Post by tintedfireglass »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #122
barbegal wrote: post #11

The actual study is here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942... The study presents three scenarios assuming different assumptions about the mass of plastic particles. In the worst case scenario, where I think the assumptions are bad, they estimate 5g of plastic per week. In the other two scenarios which used more complex but more realistic modelling they estimate 0.15 and 0.3g of plastic cons…

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.

If it is related to plastics obesity should have been distributed evenly worldwide. But it is not. Even among developed countries it isn't evenly distributed.

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

#305

Post by tintedfireglass »

jrootabega wrote: post #70
alanek2007xD wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or are the comments haha funny here, like reddit 2.0.

This is the Purge. It's how the rest of the threads are able to be kept so serious.

Eternal September (saying that as someone who joined HN a few weeks ago is ironic)

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

#306

Post by Riseed »

gloryjulio wrote: post #301
Riseed wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

That's such a typical straw-man argument. Firstly nobody with the right mind will say "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code. Knowing principle doesn't automatically helps you solve the problem. It's like saying I know programming but why aren't I a successful tech company billionaire? Knowing the principle gives your a solid start, it doesn't guarantee your eventual success Similarly, CICO…

> Did anyone say CI and CO calculation is simple?

Yes, I have seen and heard plenty of people say CICO is simple and "all there is to it", often along with some "laws of physics" snip, as included in your previous comment.

> Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air?

That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.

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

#307

Post by Terry_Roll »

jnwatson wrote: post #260
Terry_Roll wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 50 years into an unexplained epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease that nobody has a clear explanation for, I think you need to look at how the food has changed in this time. For example, here in the UK supermarkets dont want pigs with 1 1/2" of back fat so the farmer get the nutritionist to make up a diet low in vitamin B5 because it helps to shift the fat under the skin. Nett result, you have fatty organs and…

Right but it happens to our pets too.

Food generally is not as nutritious as it was 50years ago, its going to affect alot of animals.

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

#308

Post by mleonhard »

dhosek wrote: post #246

Two simple things that you can do are to (a) don’t wash plastics in the dishwasher and (2) don’t microwave stuff in plastic containers. This last will require taking stuff out of the disposable container that many frozen meals come in to cook it. Some brands have a cardboard/waxpaper tray instead of a plastic one although there might be identical looking packaging that has different internals based on the store (I re…

The cardboard bowl from Whole Foods is likely water-proofed with PFAS.

People with PFAS in their blood tend to be overweight or underweight. The body eliminates PFAS very ver slowly. There was a recent study that showed that replacing a person's blood plasma was an effective way to remove PFAS. Keeping it out of the blood seems to be much harder.

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

#309

Post by zamfi »

notahacker wrote: post #303
zamfi wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

> Americans ate more calories in 1909 than in 1960, and were no more obese then. That's his assertion , but all we've got is a link to a complex dataset on "food availability" and his word for it (and some probably-unjustified ancillary assumptions about calorie burning between the two eras being similar, of course). Extraordinary claims, I think, demand a higher standard of evidence. > Hmm, I think the point here is…

Wait, I think we’re talking past each other. “People eat too much” (where “too much” is defined not in raw calorie numbers but in terms of “more than burned or excreted”) is the obvious proximate cause, and I don’t think these folks are denying that.

The confusing question is: why is everyone suddenly eating “too much” and seemingly unable to control it? Why does it now require willpower and dieting to not become obese? People in the 1960s had plenty of food access, plenty of cars, etc. etc., and did not have obesity rates in the 40%+ range. Their diets were not so different from today’s diets in terms of macronutrient composition, in fact they were probably worse: plenty of sugar, fat, etc., components that have since been demonized.

Why are so many people eating “too much” now?

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

#310

Post by gloryjulio »

Riseed wrote: post #306
gloryjulio wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a typical straw-man argument. Firstly nobody with the right mind will say "garbage in, garbage out" is all there is to producing good code. Knowing principle doesn't automatically helps you solve the problem. It's like saying I know programming but why aren't I a successful tech company billionaire? Knowing the principle gives your a solid start, it doesn't guarantee your eventual success Similarly, CICO…

> Did anyone say CI and CO calculation is simple? Yes, I have seen and heard plenty of people say CICO is simple and "all there is to it", often along with some "laws of physics" snip, as included in your previous comment. > Are you seriously telling me your could gain weight when you just eat air? That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.

> Yes, I have seen and heard plenty of people say CICO is simple and "all there is to it", often along with some "laws of physics" snip, as included in your previous comment.

Your problem is with the people who say it, not CICO itself. Once again, if you can't cook with a recipe from Gordon Ramsay, are you saying the recipe is bad? Btw I replied to above post when he said CICO is nonsense. Do you have a problem with his claim?

> That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.

Because I am countering his arguments? All am I saying CICO is simple physics, I am NOT saying CICO is simple weight reduction method. Can you tell the difference? If someone are saying the CICO nonsense, then isn't the logical conclusion is that you can defy physics and gain calorie from the thin air?

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