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Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

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Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#31

Post by DoingIsLearning »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #12
geraldhh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> colonoscopies the plural makes me curious; for medical reasons?

I get a colonoscopy every n years. Where n is some number between 1 and 5, depending on whether they found polyps or something the previous time. It's not that onerous, except that I assume going under propofol + midazolam comes with cognitive risks each time, and this might be cumulative. With that in mind, no idea how the risk/reward math of regular endoscopy/colonoscopy checkups works out.

Perhaps this is something you already know but nevertheless as long as you are able to relax and remain calm throughout the procedure nobody should stop you from choosing to just take some benzos and do some breathing exercises throughout the procedure.

(Not a doctor but I worked briefly on endoscope tech in the past) The use of propofol depends greatly on their protocol and the country you are in, but it is not something mandatory to perform a colonoscopy. In some places they give it to everyone in others they give to people that are at a higher risk of freaking out and messing with the procedure. My point is just that it is not indissociable from the procedure itself.

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#33

Post by hwillis »

tjrgergw wrote: post #2

> It has long been known that people can form defenses and thus antibodies against viruses. But antibodies can also develop against polyethylene glycol (PEG), a substance used in cosmetics, food and medicine. People can develop antibodies against things which are not foreign micro-organisms. TIL. (Obvious once you think about it. What you really develop antibodies to are proteins on the surface of micro-organisms) We…

> People can develop antibodies against things which are not foreign micro-organisms. TIL.

Well yeah- that's how many (most?) resistance to toxins works. When you are given pit viper antivenom, it's literally a bunch of sheep antibodies that attach to the venom molecules and neutralize them and/or make them easier to get rid of.

You do the same thing for novel toxins as you develop a tolerance to them. Alcohol and peroxide have specific enzymes that are produced to break them down, but the immune system is responsible for a ton of stuff.

I am not an expert but I do know it's heinously complex- there are tons of different pathways that are activated by a combination of foreign substances and/or different types of cellular damage (not to mention location in the body). Anaphylactic allergies are controlled by different types of antibodies in different cells that react to different types of damage, normal allergies are a whole other thing, blood antibodies are yet another (multiple types!) of thing...

Biologists are amazing. It seems like picking diamonds off the beach. The book documenting the (public) operation of a new CPU is 10k+ pages long, but a single mammalian cell (taking up joke.

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#34

Post by kragen »

xeckr wrote: post #29
kragen wrote: post #19

i guess they'll just have to use lalr(1) more seriously, i wonder if something like this is a cause of the obesity pandemic: an unrecognized widespread immune response to a novel food additive provoking continuous low-level inflammation though probably not peg itself; e1521 is not in that many foods, not like xanthan gum or nanoparticles of titanium dioxide

It doesn't look like obesity is infectious, so calling it a pandemic doesn't seem appropriate. The cure is eating less and exercising more. Many have done it.

there is substantial, but not convincing, evidence that much current obesity is due to an infectious etiology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infectobesity

the cure you suggest fails on 95% of obese people, though like many pseudoscientific quack cures, it does appear to work at first, and actually does work in a few cases

the implied etiology doesn't hold up to the most casual critical thinking: resting and eating have been part of every human life since long before there were humans, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old. this is like attributing deaths from dengue to "bleeding" and recommending that people bleed less

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#35

Post by schnitzelstoat »

kragen wrote: post #30
idiotsecant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find.

olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old

But they were relatively expensive and scarce.

And no-one is getting fat by drinking litres of olive oil or eating tubs of butter.

It's a combination of more high-calorie convenience foods and a more sedentary lifestyle than even just 50 years ago.

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#36

Post by Enginerrrd »

kragen wrote: post #34
xeckr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't look like obesity is infectious, so calling it a pandemic doesn't seem appropriate. The cure is eating less and exercising more. Many have done it.

there is substantial, but not convincing, evidence that much current obesity is due to an infectious etiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infectobesity the cure you suggest fails on 95% of obese people, though like many pseudoscientific quack cures, it does appear to work at first, and actually does work in a few cases the implied etiology doesn't hold up to the most casual critical thinking: resting and eating hav…

Diet and exercise absolutely does work. It's just that when you frame the intervention as TELLING people to eat less and exercise more, it is very ineffective. So from a physician's standpoint, it's not a great approach.

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#38

Post by atomicnumber3 »

kragen wrote: post #30
idiotsecant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find.

olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old

Let's be real though - sugar tends to be a lot more palatable than butter, especially when baked or dissolved in acid. I could eat an entire bag of crunch bars, but set me down with a box of sticks of butter and I'm not going to make much progress.

Fats also tend to be more filling, and aren't as addictive as sugar, especially refined sugar.

So I think the real cause here is we've discovered novel ways for making huge amounts of calories both palatable and addictive in a way things have never been before.

The closest I can think of is fruits, and they come with a lot of fiber, and again if you make it into juice, it tends to still not be palatable to drink gallons of it. Whereas people will literally drink a 2 liter of coke in a single sitting.

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#39

Post by phil21 »

kragen wrote: post #30
idiotsecant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find.

olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years, butter for ten thousand years, but the obesity pandemic is only 50 years old

Both of those until very recently were extremely expensive to the point of luxury for many, as well as much more difficult to effectively use a lot of cheap and easily.

Effectively zero people are chugging bottles of Olive Oil they buy from the corner store.

There just is no comparison whatsoever to modern processed foods set for immediate consumption and tuned for maximum taste and pleasure response.

Edit: to refute some other points downthread.

> the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia

I believe this to be false. Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items. Crisco started to exist because it was cheap. It took hours of work to turn these items into palatable calorie-dense foods, if that was even the outcome.

Today? The average working class person goes out to fast food multiple times per week. This was a luxury even in my time growing up. Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access.

> it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't

I'm not sure how you could come to such a conclusion? That is pretty much the sole feature of those foods. Readily available highly-addictive and highly calorie dense foods fit for immediate (or near it) consumption. No magic woo-woo explanations needed. We simply teleported society into a place literally surrounded by cheap easy to access food typically hundreds of feet away at any given time and then wondered what happened to "willpower" as if it ever existed in such a manner.

Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population

#40

Post by hwillis »

HPsquared wrote: post #4
tjrgergw wrote: post #2

> It has long been known that people can form defenses and thus antibodies against viruses. But antibodies can also develop against polyethylene glycol (PEG), a substance used in cosmetics, food and medicine. People can develop antibodies against things which are not foreign micro-organisms. TIL. (Obvious once you think about it. What you really develop antibodies to are proteins on the surface of micro-organisms) We…

In other words, allergies.

Yes but no. Allergies are a very particular reaction- you don't get allergy symptoms when you're sick. They're predominantly IgE (immunoglobulin E) which is a detector antibody rather than a neutralizing antibody (although those terms aren't really favored now). IgE activates a body response like anaphylaxis.

The antibodies in this study are IgG (the "normal" antibody) and IgM. In this case, these antibodies latch onto and neutralize/clean up the antigen. They cause much less of an immune system activation, and can act like a passive defense.

TL;DR: allergies are a subset of antibodies for substances, and in this case the antibodies found were non-allergenic.

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