Would this explain, or partially explain, why some drugs can such varying efficacy across different populations?
Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
51–60 of 169 posts
Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
it's almost as ineffective when undertaken on your own initiative; that's where the 95% number comes from diet and exercise is clearly the proximate cause of obesity, but the question is what drives diet and exercise, and what changed so suddenly?
Education and socioeconomic status correlate with lower obesity rates, healthy diet, and exercise.
The “sudden” change is easy to see in the supermarket. Most people don’t shop at Whole Foods, Sprouts, or Central market. Go to Walmart and admire all of the densely caloric colorful boxed foods.
Did you know young people actually use door dash/uber to get their fast food? It’s wild. So not even expending a few calories to get it but also wasting a bunch of cash.
Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
the fact that no-one is getting fat by drinking litres of olive oil would seem to conclusively disprove your hypothesis as previously stated the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia clearly the proximate cause of obesity is eating more and metabolizing less (both by way of lower exercise and lower basal metabolism). but why are people doing tha…
Olive oil is a natural laxative. If you're gaining weight on olive oil, I'd be impressed, beyond how one would keep it down due to taste and texture.
People aren't gaining weight on olive oil because people aren't consuming it in mass quantities required to gain weight, if one could even do so after having your intestines coated by oil. But many are consuming highly processed foods which is shown to lead to less optimal health outcomes.
> clearly
Clearly a post on HN doesn't make for a scientific study!
Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
#54i 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
Here’s an interesting Twitter thread with various explanations for the obesity pandemic [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/mold_time/status/1412827749828513800?s=2...
Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
#55Fortunately, the Cootings machine did not develop any immunity against PEG-9.
Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
#56When I lived in Germany, I learned that one interesting, cultural aspect is that they don’t drink nearly as much tapwater as in America. This means everyone buys water in plastic containers at the grocery store, all this plastic is PET-based, and PEG is always present in small quantities in that water (because water is slightly acidic, and acids disassociate the PET molecule).
It's funny how impressions can differ, because my impression as a German visiting the US a couple times was that people there have an aversion towards drinking tap water. That being said, the takeaway from this study shouldn't be that this is peculiar for the German population, it just happens that the Max Planck Institute for Polymers is located in Germany.
It really depends on the location. Every city has a different perception of their tap water in the USA.
Where I'm from we drink tap water with no filter etc.
Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
#57i 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
Just speaking from personal experience, I’m fat because I eat cake and ice cream every day and walk 6,000 steps on a good day. I don’t really see a mystery here tbh.
Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
#58The presence of antibodies isn’t as big of a signal as we once thought.
There have been several companies developing antibody tests for various things, including your body’s own natural receptors. They have been appealing to people with chronic illnesses as an explanation for unexplained symptoms. For example, implying that if their tests show antibodies to certain receptors then that is a diagnostic clue.
Then some researchers started using one of the company’s tests with a control group (healthy volunteers) and discovered that healthy people had the same antibodies at the same rates as the sick people. They couldn’t differentiate between the sick group and the healthy group at all by the presence of antibodies.
So there’s a lot more to this than simply looking for antibodies to a substance. I don’t know enough about the topic to say exactly what that nuance might be, but after reading the research and talking to some experts in this field I don’t put much weight in simple binary analyses of antibodies.
Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hug…
i think it's almost certainly something about industrially-mass-produced food that tubs of butter don't share, so i think you're a bit closer to the mark. and sugary drinks are surely an especially bad food even among industrially-mass-produced foods clearly calorie density alone is not it. and i don't think it's even as simple as 'palatability'. even if you mix cacao, butter, sugar, vanillin, and citric acid into ca…
Modern fast food is deliberately engineered to make it as addictive as possible while still being palatable and cheap to produce, in order to maximize sales.
That sounds more nefarious than I intended, so let me rephrase it. Modern fast food is the result of rapidly iterating, debugging, and optimizing recipes in a huge market for the last 70 years, leaving only the best selling, low cost, consistently reproducible recipes and discarding the rest. This process naturally selects recipes that contain lots of junk calories and bring in the most repeat customers.
Although many of the ingredients and similar foods have been around for centuries, it wasn't possible to do this kind of agile cooking on a massive scale until after WW2.
Re: Study shows antibodies against PEG in 83% of the German population
#60When I lived in Germany, I learned that one interesting, cultural aspect is that they don’t drink nearly as much tapwater as in America. This means everyone buys water in plastic containers at the grocery store, all this plastic is PET-based, and PEG is always present in small quantities in that water (because water is slightly acidic, and acids disassociate the PET molecule).
As a German I find that to be a pretty wild generalization, especially comparing it to the US where tap water quality varies massively (Oregon vs say Michigan (Flint...)). German tap water tends to be quite good. I live in Berlin, where tap water is excellent (albeit with a lot of minerals/calcium). The vast majority of people I know drink tap water, sometimes filtered, sometimes with CO2 added, but tap water nonthel…
> As a German I find that to be a pretty wild generalization
Most generalizations that come from someone taking a short trip to another country are like this: Someone visits a foreign country, interacts with a couple dozen people in a small area, then projects that experience on to the entire country.
I think almost everyone does it when they’re young and they first start traveling. It’s not until you’ve gained more exposure to the size and diversity of the world that you realize you can’t draw conclusions about entire countries from a couple of experienced.