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

121–130 of 169 posts

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

#121

Post by mrguyorama »

Scoundreller wrote: post #82
phil21 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. All the money accrued to the top, and the workers were left trying to make the same value of take home pay stretch farther and farther.

The reason most people think inflation sucks is because modern society would rather collapse than pay workers in line with historical norms.

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

#122

Post by billyjmc »

kragen wrote: post #97
landemva wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Have you ever known anyone to say “I think I’m going to go buy (and eat) a delicious, cold stick of butter now.”? And even if you have, they’re clearly the outlier. The point everyone else is making that you are missing is that even if calorie-rich foods were widely available in the past, the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite – the food also needs to be palatable. Modern processed food is both calorie-dense and engineered to be highly palatable. This is new, and unlike what historical humans generally experienced and evolved around.

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

#123

Post by oh_sigh »

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

That's probably because people don't chug olive oil. It's more of a food ingredient than a food itself.

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

#124

Post by bigbillheck »

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…

> Then some researchers

I'm not in any position to dispute the claimed facts but the way you phrased this hits many of the same beats as what we used to call an urban legend.

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

#125

Post by oh_sigh »

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.

Easy to say, but your body isn't a static system. It is going to respond to the lack of food(or increased exercise). And that response may be the actual problem for people. Maybe your body will say "Oh, I'm only getting 1500 calories a day now? Okay, we will just be sleepy, miserable, with no energy or motivation, until we get our calories"

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

#126

Post by RC_ITR »

kragen wrote: post #80
phil21 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

if you're from the usa, your grandparents could buy corn oil and margarine, and didn't see them as luxury items; but their generation didn't make a diet out of it conventional convenience foods like mcdonalds hamburgers, coca-cola, and twinkies are about 3, 0.5, and 4 kilocalories per gram; olive oil and butter are 9. healthier foods like whole-wheat bread, eggs, eggplant, and fatty steak are 2.5, 1.5, 0.4, and 3.5 c…

The amount of calories available per capita has gone up by c. 20% over the last 60 years.

Meanwhile, the amount of fat available has gone up 40%, while protein supplies have risen closer to c. 10%.

It is absolutely anti-data to imply that previous generations had access to the same amount/mix of food/calories as we do today.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply

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

#127

Post by lofaszvanitt »

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

Have you tried gulping down olive oil...? And marvel at what happens later...? :D

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

#128

Post by lamontcg »

billyjmc wrote: post #122
kragen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Have you ever known anyone to say “I think I’m going to go buy (and eat) a delicious, cold stick of butter now.”? And even if you have, they’re clearly the outlier. The point everyone else is making that you are missing is that even if calorie-rich foods were widely available in the past, the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite – the food also needs to be palatable. Modern processed food is both calorie…

It is probably the sugar/highly refined carbs: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.023...

Then you dump calories on top of those metabolic changes (and appetite stimulation by the carbs) and you pack on the weight.

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

#129

Post by mrguyorama »

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…

>the cure you suggest fails on 95% of obese people

This has nothing to do with "Diet and exercise don't work" and everything to do with the fact that every single fat person KNOWS they are fat, already KNOWS diet and exercise are the solution, and has likely already tried diet and exercise in some way and couldn't manage it. People usually get fat because eating calorie dense foods feels good and people are desperate for anything to feel good because the average person has spent the last 6 decades being squeezed for every last drop of wealth by the ownership class, which it turns out is a very stressful experience.

Diet and exercise are extremely difficult to tack onto your existing life if you aren't already predisposed to it, and if you are already predisposed to it, you probably aren't fat because you have a healthy diet and exercise!

My mom's family grew up eating fried lard(!) as a regular food. Not a single one of them got overweight because they had regular exercise when they played with friends or did chores like tending the garden or worked the potato fields, and because they literally could not afford to eat enough lard to get fat

The reason that food insecure households are fat is not some magic bullet substance that we will be able to remove from our life, but because for a lot of Americans, you buy your groceries at dollar general or walmart and the frozen nuggets are cheaper than a pound of chicken thigh.

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

#130

Post by atomicnumber3 »

notJim wrote: post #113
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #38

Earlier 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…

Fruits are not calorically dense. A huge ripe pear can be incredibly delicious and sweet, and only has like 100 calories. The best peach you've ever eaten is like 60-80. It would be pretty challenging to eat a calorically problematic portion of them. A better example is probably nuts. Nuts are super calorically dense, and it's easy to loads of them.

Yeah that's what I meant by the fiber - they cut the density substantially and would fill you up super fast. And just juicing them gets you into palatability problems - try drinking a gallon of raw apple juice. (Vs drinking a 64oz large coke).
Post reply on HN