291–300 of 403 posts
I bought a tub of BCAA powder from Ghost and was horrified after finding a large spidery plastic blob buried in there. I went to Burger King and looked inside the burger randomly which I never do and found plastic. Theres a microplastic issue but theres also a large plastic issue in food. Often times you do even notice when you eat it.
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Also the metabolic syndrome/obesity epidemic. 40% of US adults have obesity. By 2030 about half of US adults will, and in 29 states more than half of adults will be obese. We see obesity becoming increasingly normalized. People feel powerless to stop it and that we should just accept it. It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us. That's part of it, but I wonder if microplastics or so…
This the one area the administration should go after instead of alcohol or whatever else they think they’re doing. By addressing obesity, making it uncool, taxing the living daylights out of sugary additives, etc they would save more lives than the lives combined in all their other feel-good, virtue signaling efforts[1]they sound nice and all but in thd end this effort would actually save a many more lives. [1]gas st…
Unlike smoking, half the class is already fat. NGOs and media would frame it as a psychological harm to those children, fat-shaming, or who knows what else. It would be a political landmine.
There are two macro population health trends that suggest we are somehow poisoning ourselves at a large scale. Most people do not relate the two, but I personally wouldn't be surprised if they have related causes. The first is the Flynn effect, which was rising IQ levels decade over decade, which halted and then reserved for most Western nations around 1990s/2000s and is now declining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F…
Solvent-extracted hydrogenated seed oils for one thing. Canola is an industry term, not Latin plant name, but why would culture repressed by toxic ersatz foodstuffs and microplastics care to know about brassica seeds?
2: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jns.12261
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I don't understand this perspective, the need to wait for mountains of published evidence that something is "bad", or "bad enough" to do something about it. Plastic is toxic, we all know this. It's everywhere, it's in the food and in the water. In reality it's the "Citation needed" reflex that's the reddit-tier reaction to stuff like this, because it pretends that humans can't or shouldn't make decisions unless we al…
> Plastic is toxic, we all know this. There are thousands of plastics, and a blanket statement like this is simply false. We should be working to figure out which plastics are toxic, and why. You're essentially looking at lead and coming to the conclusion that "Metal is toxic, we all know this."
If it was comparable to lead in terms of identifying toxicity, we wouldn’t be having this debate.
So actually plastic is worse than lead in that it’s more insidious, some want to slowly kill things but it’s nearly impossible to tell which. If only it were like lead and upfront about it.
So no, they are not saying “metal is toxic”. That is extending the analogy to another topic: identification
Microplastics is the lead paint exposure of the current and past 2 generations. This article cites synthetic rubber from tires as a potential source of micro plastics. Are there any studies that show how much people are exposed to? Comparisons between rubber from bikes, motorcycles, and different classes of motor vehicles (sedans/cars, trucks, heavy duty trucks or machinery, and even the subclass of EVs). Even more o…
https://www.plasticstoday.com/medical/tire-wear-major-source...
I'm still shocked that there hasn't been more of a regulatory push to eliminate single-use plastics. In the US the closest we've gotten is banning plastic straws and charging for plastic carry bags. Everything I've read about plastic recycling points to it being ineffective and requiring massive amounts of fossil fuel to move the waste around the globe, often with much of it just getting burned or dumped into the env…
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Obesity itself is oestrogenic. It's the calories, stupid!
I used to think this, that the obesity thing was just a function of an increase in calorie consumption and a drop off in physical activity. I just can't take this view seriously anymore. When you look around today, there are body types that never existed prior to the 1970s - at least at any kind of scale. Comparing pictures of family gatherings from the 1950s through the 1970s, and then to the 1990s and beyond and th…
Then I did calorie counting with MyFitnessPal and ate at a 500 cal deficit, and I lost weight. It works. But I pretty much had to stop eating out because I couldn't know the numbers on restaurant meals. I was basically eating raw food half the time, just to make it easier to calculate.
I'm surprised there's no government initiative to help people do calorie counting. Open up-to-date database, force restaurants to feed it nutritional info, etc.
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This is how they do it in Germany. Most working Germans I know of eat at the work canteen and have a small bread meal at home in the evening Weird that you're getting downvoted for this. HN is on a weird one recently
Because the united states valued individualism for a very long time, before and during the cold war, and even now. It's a cultural aspect. Blame people like Reagan and Milton Friedman for this. It's a highly political problem. Inequality is already somewhat caused by individualism, but climate change is also caused by climate change. For example, if China wants to reduce its co2 emissions, you only have to convince C…
You also have to keep in mind the American entrepreneurial culture or DNA which has born fruit unlike any other system, and is even responsible for the very platform we're using right now. That's all about this idea that any individual can change the world.
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Obesity is caused by eating too much. If you don’t eat then you won’t gain weight, there is no subverting the laws of thermodynamics. It sounds callous but if you go to Africa or visit a prisoner of war camp you won’t find many fat people and so blaming chemicals in America for so many fat people doesn’t make much sense to me.
In an environment awash with cheap calories, some people get obese and some don't. That's something worth investigating. (I personally think it's more about natural mental variation than subtle chemical poisoning, but that's probably just my bias talking).
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Also the metabolic syndrome/obesity epidemic. 40% of US adults have obesity. By 2030 about half of US adults will, and in 29 states more than half of adults will be obese. We see obesity becoming increasingly normalized. People feel powerless to stop it and that we should just accept it. It feels to me like there is something besides diet changes happening to us. That's part of it, but I wonder if microplastics or so…
Obesity is caused in part by environmental toxins, probably to different extents in different people: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/19/environm... https://www.webmd.com/obesity/what-to-know-obesogens These so called "obesogens" just increase the propensity towards obesity and depending on exposure and your sensitivity to then, you can overcome them or not via exercise and dieting and other means.
Personally I avoid "sugary" food and drinks like the plague. I also don't snack and do regular exercise and sometimes don't eat dinner. I'm at a healthy weight in my 40s. How many adults that are obese have a healthy relationship with food and do regular exercise / fast? Obese children I have sympathy for, I'm uncertain how I feel about obese adults. I don't know if their metabolism is ultra slow, or they are just not taking care of themselves. Its complicated...