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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

#91
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.…

Various industry sources and think tanks (with various biases, including IfG, IEA, Czarnikow) suggest sugar consumption has fallen very significantly in the UK and Australia since 1970, without any apparent impact on obesity rates.

However, I can't find trustworthy original academic research on it, which makes it difficult to draw any firm conclusions. In any case, it doesn't appear that sugar consumption has risen dramatically in the last 50 years in the UK, yet obesity rates (and associated metabolic diseases) have continued to rise. Most research seems to suggest sugar is a marker of an unhealthy lifestyle rather than the cause, but the cause still seems to be essentially unknown. It is true that countries that eat very little sugar tend to have lower obesity rates, but that seems mainly to be because they are usually extremely poor.

In my opinion, there's more evidence that low fibre and easily digestible food is a bigger culprit than sugar, but the evidence is very poor quality on all sides.

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

#92
post #30

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

Why mention butter? It is delicious in morning tea or coffee and somewhat pricey having been imported from Ireland. I'm in the recommended weight, while some of the fattest people I know consume loads of low-fat products.

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

#93
PEG is in vape cartridges as a solvent. I’ve read the rationalization that “food grade” PEG is probably safe there because doctors use PEG to help with organ transplants, but missing from such a simple analysis is that you end up breathing PEG into your lungs with a vape pen, certainly different than anything studied thus far with organ transplants. Can’t be good, man. I mean, like all our other exposure to low-grade toxicity, it won’t kill you by itself, but I’m not interested in being a beta tester for inhaled PEG.

Anyway, maybe this is a more common route for PEG exposure besides Miralax.

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

#94

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.…

Various industry sources and think tanks (with various biases, including IfG, IEA, Czarnikow) suggest sugar consumption has fallen very significantly in the UK and Australia since 1970, without any apparent impact on obesity rates. However, I can't find trustworthy original academic research on it, which makes it difficult to draw any firm conclusions. In any case, it doesn't appear that sugar consumption has risen d…

there's also evidence that sugar consumption in the usa a century ago was already high, and the hadza famously eat mostly honey in july and august, so i think that while sugar is probably a contributor, it's probably not sufficient by itself

it would be pretty surprising to find that, say, propionate intake suppressing intestinal yeast growth was a major cause of the obesity pandemic. but it certainly seems to be something about industrial food manufacturing that goes beyond just caloric density and macronutrient balance, and additives seem like a promising place to look

i mean the village baker a century ago didn't put calcium propionate in his bread so it wouldn't get moldy, he just threw the moldy bread out

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

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

One time in Korea they tried an endoscopy on me completely raw. I think they sprayed my throat first. This wasn’t olden times, it was just a decade back. I promptly gagged, pulled out the scope and vomited.

I went through with it twice without sedation. Hilariously uncomfortable but not really painful or anything. Lots of gagging.

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

#96
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

None of those would have been common as we know them today. Refined sugar was expensive until ~industrialization. And HFCS simply didn't exist, which is what people are really discussing when they talk about sugar, refined foods, and the obesity epidemic.

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

#97
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

Why mention butter? It is delicious in morning tea or coffee and somewhat pricey having been imported from Ireland. I'm in the recommended weight, while some of the fattest people I know consume loads of low-fat products.

because butter's caloric density is 7-9 kcal/g, higher than the 'cheap calorie dense food' being blamed for the obesity pandemic, yet the widespread availability of butter (in some societies) starting ten thousand years ago did not cause widespread obesity, even when it wasn't pricey

this shows that the explanation is wrong; cheap calorie-dense food is not enough to cause widespread obesity

probably the loads of low-fat products you're talking about are packed with sugar and modified food starch, though, as well as xanthan gum, guar gum, carob bean gum, dibutylhydroxytoluene, carboxymethylcellulose, aspartame, polyethylene glycol, all kinds of novel food colorings including titanium dioxide nanoparticles, antifungal additives like propionate, and so on. some of these don't occur naturally, and others aren't traditional food ingredients. it wouldn't be very surprising if one or more of those novel additives affected hormone balances, inflammation levels, or intestinal microbiota in a way that promoted overeating and inactivity. some of them are well-known to affect intestinal microbiota

this is the first time i've seen one that provoked an antibody response, though

i think i'm going to go buy a delicious, cold coca-cola now

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

#98
post #76
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and there are many people like you! yet a century ago you could have eaten cake every day if you wanted, though not ice cream, and in many places, many people already had office jobs to which they could take the subway. why did your counterparts in new york not have an obesity epidemic? somehow they didn't want to eat cake instead of food, and they felt restless if they had so little activity clearly diet and exercis…

heck, a hundred years ago you could just drive to work. Car ownership was exploding in the '20s, and people did not balloon up immediately

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

#99
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bee…

How have the labor trends shifted in the last 50, 100 years?

Labor intensive jobs(also calorie intensive) are down. Even the jobs that remain have more of the physical demands taken out i.e. using an airgun to frame up a house instead of a hammer.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It should be labeled the 'Star Trek Away Team' effect.
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