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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

#101

Post by kragen »

aksss wrote: post #87
kragen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, that is true, and we know several reasons for it, but it is irrelevant both to the narrow issue of whether fat cells produced in childhood derange your caloric intake regulatory homeostasis thereafter, and to the broader issue of why there's an obesity pandemic

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

#102

Post by kragen »

galangalalgol wrote: post #62
kragen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can get fruits and fruit juices in your winter months, that is newer. OJ came in small glasses because it too was a luxury. But HN linked an article a few years back about some research indicating that in the 1980s people ate as many or more callories, and got on average less physical activity, but were significantly less overweight. They reaction was that it was wrong, because thermodynamics, but the thermodynam…

do you have a link to the article or remember the authors

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

#104

Post by kragen »

nullindividual wrote: post #96
kragen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

industrialization was still 100 years before the obesity pandemic

the hypothesis that hfcs is significantly different in its nutritional effects from sucrose was interesting and has some anecdotal support but is not well supported by evidence so far

'refined foods' have many other nontraditional ingredients introduced around the same time as hfcs, like polyethylene glycol, and we might actually be talking about those instead

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

#105

Post by kragen »

thrwwyunpopular wrote: post #72
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

False equivalence. This doesn't help advance the debate. The amount of olive oil in the average diet is minuscule relative to the amounts of sugar or palm oil. Nuance is important.

it helps advance the debate by conclusively showing that caloric density is not the only relevant factor, or even a dominating one, and that in fact nuance is important, which is my point

there are lots of simple, well-known explanations, and they are all wrong. that was one of them. 'it's sugar' and 'it's hfcs' are two others that have popped up in this thread

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

#106

Post by spondylosaurus »

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.

To point (1), antibodies against non-alive substances are how you get things like allergies and autoimmune diseases. Your body goes "holy shit pollen!" and makes you break out in hives or "holy shit gluten!" and makes your guts inflamed.

Not all the time, obviously, and it depends on the type of antibody.

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

#107

Post by cubefox »

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.

Cake and ice cream did exist 50 years ago, and I doubt it was any healthier back then. Anyway, nobody doubts that excessive calorie intake causes obesity. The question is whether some chemicals in food cause an increased desire for excessive calorie intake, e.g. via confusing our hormone system.

Most thin people aren't just thin because they eat less, they are thin because they don't have a disposition for binge eating. They just aren't as hungry.

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

#108

Post by pvaldes »

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

The concept of beauty has changed a lot also. Many sex symbols in Rubens age would be seen as clearly obese today.

But I agree that the obesity could be boosted by chemical contamination. It should be treated as a disease and not as just a sin.

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

#110

Post by pvaldes »

pvaldes wrote: post #103

Footnote: PEG = polyethylene glycol in this context. So the study is related with people developing allergy to cosmetics and industrial products.

A interesting collateral effect is that Polyethylene Glycol is used to concentrate and catch viruses (adding common salt). Maybe it acts the same in the gutters and is seen as "a virus" by the immune system?

Just a thought

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