Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mpip-mainz.mpg.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 169 posts

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

#81

Post by kragen »

flextheruler wrote: post #79
thrwwyunpopular wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevalence of sugar in modern diets along with how ludicrously industrialized food has become, particularly in America, is likely still the main cause for obesity rates. People point out all these other secondary factors but we should really focus on the 80%, the big ticket item. It's damn near impossible to find nutritiously acceptable breakfast, lunch and dinner choices near the office in big cities in America.…

What city do you live in? There is a huge array of healthy low calorie options near me all the way to pure vegetarian/vegan places. There is a ridiculously strong correlation between sedentariness and obesity. We our more sedentary than ever before and then remote work/school increased it again. I believe a person struggling with weight is basically determined in their childhood. Only in childhood will the body build…

yet most fat adults were not fat children, though in another 30 years that will no longer be true; childhood obesity was rare until this millennium

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

#82

Post by Scoundreller »

phil21 wrote: post #39
kragen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access.

It’s Gresham’s “law”: “bad money drives out good”, but applied to food.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law

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

#83

Post by thrwwyunpopular »

flextheruler wrote: post #79
thrwwyunpopular wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevalence of sugar in modern diets along with how ludicrously industrialized food has become, particularly in America, is likely still the main cause for obesity rates. People point out all these other secondary factors but we should really focus on the 80%, the big ticket item. It's damn near impossible to find nutritiously acceptable breakfast, lunch and dinner choices near the office in big cities in America.…

What city do you live in? There is a huge array of healthy low calorie options near me all the way to pure vegetarian/vegan places. There is a ridiculously strong correlation between sedentariness and obesity. We our more sedentary than ever before and then remote work/school increased it again. I believe a person struggling with weight is basically determined in their childhood. Only in childhood will the body build…

New York City

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

#84

Post by kragen »

nullindividual wrote: post #53
kragen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opti…

clearly

it's true about the laxative effect! you'd have to use a different oil. and it's true that steatorrhea ensues if you try to get all your calories from fat

but things like halvah, lemonade, buttercream frosting, and white chocolate are still a lot older than the obesity pandemic

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

#85

Post by Aurornis »

samus wrote: post #71
Aurornis wrote: post #58

The 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…

There are two considerable points here: 1) this is a simple molecule, not an organism that can react to the threat. As you said, it would be interesting to be evaluate whether the antibodies actually have an effect, but they probably have, else they likely wouldn't have been detected at all. 2) the blood samples were taken from patients. It would be interesting to evaluate blood samples from the population at large.

> As you said, it would be interesting to be evaluate whether the antibodies actually have an effect,

The article has a quote from the researchers about how the antibodies could remove a future PEG nanocarrier from the patients' system:

> "The antibodies formed against PEG attach themselves to the coated nanocarriers, thus counteracting the effect that is actually desired: the nanocarrier becomes visible to the immune system and is removed before it can exert its effect," explains Katharina Landfester, director of the department.

I don't know if there are other consequences outside of this. Having your body become good at removing a foreign substance doesn't sound like a bad thing, except in the case where you might want that foreign substance to help deliver a drug.

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

#86

Post by tomjakubowski »

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

> olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years

no it hasn't. for most of that timespan approximately no-one outside of the eastern Mediterranean even knew what an olive was

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

#87

Post by aksss »

kragen wrote: post #81
flextheruler wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What city do you live in? There is a huge array of healthy low calorie options near me all the way to pure vegetarian/vegan places. There is a ridiculously strong correlation between sedentariness and obesity. We our more sedentary than ever before and then remote work/school increased it again. I believe a person struggling with weight is basically determined in their childhood. Only in childhood will the body build…

yet most fat adults were not fat children, though in another 30 years that will no longer be true; childhood obesity was rare until this millennium

Fat parents often have fat children. There’s a strong correlation.

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

#88

Post by swatcoder »

4death4 wrote: post #57
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

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.

Sure, but something has made far more people make choices like yours than ever used to. We don't yet know what that is. We probably should.

Our individual choices are ours to make, but they don't happen in a vacuum. Cultural signals, environmental factors, biological processes, uncritically reinforced habits, etc all shape what choices we're inclined towards and what choices look implausible or untenable.

There's been a shocking shift in weight management and general wellness over the last hundred years, that seems to creep into every country that assimilates with " modern" culture, and it's prudent that we collectively understand why, because we probably should do something about it on that same collective scale.

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

#89

Post by kragen »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #86
kragen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> olive oil has been widely available for the last 7000 years no it hasn't. for most of that timespan approximately no-one outside of the eastern Mediterranean even knew what an olive was

the eastern mediterranean didn't have widespread obesity
Post reply on HN