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Plastic might be making us obese

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#151

Post by TimedToasts »

aaomidi wrote: post #99
davidn20 wrote: post #88

Yes, plastic MIGHT be making us obese. But, we definitely know high caloric intake and sedentary lifestyle makes us obese. I don't understand why obesity is such a mystery. People are creatures of path of the least resistance. Developed countries have highly dense caloric food and people are inactive most of the day due to cars and office jobs.

And for me I don’t understand why people think obesity is such a simple problem? Every single other thing in our body is complex and has chains and chains of reactions and impacts. Why is obesity the single one where the answer is “obvious”? Anyway I agree that we should change how we design our cities, etc to deal with our sedentary lifestyle.

Eat less? No, too complex. Instead: change how we design our cities.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#152

Post by CharlieDigital »

bombcar wrote: post #101
CharlieDigital wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's poor people who eat more calories now, not rich people That's my point; if you look at a map of obesity rates in the US overlaid with a map of poverty, there's a very strong correlation. The cheap access to calories today makes it easier to overconsume. In the past, the high cost of calories meant that only the wealthy could really ever become obese (outside of genetic factors).

The snide comment would be that obesity and unbearable debt are indicators of lack of control, and that poor people will have this more (because lack of control leads to being poor). But even if absolutely true, how do you solve for that? Laws limiting what you can purchase/eat would simply be a non-starter.

There have been many studies looking at this phenomenon.

One hypothesis is that this is due to "food deserts" where the lack of access to fresh foods leads to over-reliance on processed foods for caloric needs.

It is no coincidence that there is also a strong correlation between food deserts (at a national and local level) with lower income. The solution probably isn't banning specific foods, but to solve the access problem and address socio-economic factors. Better health and nutrition education may also be key.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#153

Post by CodeSgt »

frankzander wrote: post #77
vallassy wrote: post #52

Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar? Over my last few years of reading, I've convinced myself that sugar is the main culprit in massive obesity in Western countries, especially the US (i.e. high fructose corn syrup). Sugar is in everything (like plastic, I suppose). Look at the ingredients of what you buy and you'll be surprised where it turns up. Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky, even bog standard brea…

> Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky But that's packed with fat calories as well and fat has a much higher energy density as carbohydrates. As an European I'm very very astonished over the size of the food portions in fast food restaurants in the US. If this portion size is the same on the diner table than it's not only sugar but a lot of non necessary calories. I don't think it's entirely caused by sugar but by a…

But fat increases satiety much more quickly than sugar. 500 cals of fats will make you feel "fuller" than 750 or even 1k cals of sugar. That's what makes sugar so much worse. Is may not be as colorically dense, but we can comfortably guzzle down far more empty calories from sugar than from fat.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#154

Post by bombcar »

scarmig wrote: post #136
bombcar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The snide comment would be that obesity and unbearable debt are indicators of lack of control, and that poor people will have this more (because lack of control leads to being poor). But even if absolutely true, how do you solve for that? Laws limiting what you can purchase/eat would simply be a non-starter.

I mean, if we were confident one particular food source contributes more to obesity than others, we have a solution that we know would work: tax it (and ideally dedicate revenues to some kind of universal food tax credit). People would consume less of it at the margin and then be less obese. It would rankle some people, but so do taxes on alcohol and nicotine. My big concern is that I'm skeptical whether we can reall…

That's the solution everyone wants "identify bad food and tax/ban it" - but when apple juice has as much or more calories than soda, what do you do? A per-calorie tax might work if you rebated it correctly, but the mechanics of that would be insane. Perhaps it could be tied to basic income - we will tax calories at ten cents per calorie, and give each person 2000 calories (200$) a day ...

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#155

Post by fortran77 »

tstrimple wrote: post #112
fortran77 wrote: post #98

I'm very skeptical. I think there are some things that may make us "feel hungrier" but there's nothing changing our metabolism. If we are to believe this, it would mean that "plastic" is making our bodies so much more efficient that there's extra energy that's being stored as fat. I like to keep my weight exactly at 155# (as a 5'10 59 year old man). Once a year, I "bulk" and go up to 160 while doing more strenuous we…

> but there's nothing changing our metabolism. Why would you be so confident when we know for a fact that hormone imbalances can absolutely impact our metabolism. Including signaling to your body to produce and store more fat than it normally would. Cortisol the hormone produced in stress responses is shown to do exactly that. Using yourself as an anecdote isn't useful in anyway.

Matter isn't created out of thin air.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#156

Post by omginternets »

sithadmin wrote: post #44
omginternets wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It also corrects insulin resistance Is liraglutide doing that directly, or is it mediated by people eating less sugar?

Directly. It stimulates insulin release from the pacreas.

Eesh… that doesn’t seem great. How does this not cause further habituation?

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#157

Post by bombcar »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #152
bombcar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The snide comment would be that obesity and unbearable debt are indicators of lack of control, and that poor people will have this more (because lack of control leads to being poor). But even if absolutely true, how do you solve for that? Laws limiting what you can purchase/eat would simply be a non-starter.

There have been many studies looking at this phenomenon. One hypothesis is that this is due to "food deserts" where the lack of access to fresh foods leads to over-reliance on processed foods for caloric needs. It is no coincidence that there is also a strong correlation between food deserts (at a national and local level) with lower income. The solution probably isn't banning specific foods, but to solve the access…

The food desert thing should be testable, no? Like identify one of the worst ones, and subsidize a normal grocery store for however many years necessary, and see what it has done?

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#158

Post by garren »

> Nearly 1,000 obesogens with such effects have already been identified in studies with animals or humans. They include Bisphenol A, a chemical widely used in plastics, and the phthalates, plasticizing agents used in paints, medicine and cosmetics. Others include parabens used as preservatives in food and paper products, and chemicals called organotins used as fungicides. Other obesogens include pesticides and herbicides, including glyphosate, which a recent study found to be present in the urine of most Americans.

It feels like modern, Western, society is like living in a big Petri dish. It’s one big experiment in which we’re swimming in chemicals that we later find out interact with us and each other in negative ways. We should have reigned in these kinds of “innovations” decades ago. Americans are now urinating carcinogenic pesticides, rainwater even in most remote regions in the would is undrinkable [0], and we’ve had strong evidence for a while that some of the constituent components of commonly used plastics disrupt biological processes in humans and other animals.

In 50-100 years people will be looking back in horror at the kinds of self-inflicted suffering we’ve produced. And for what? Money? Convenience?

[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a40859859/rainwater...

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#159

Post by briefcomment »

vallassy wrote: post #52

Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar? Over my last few years of reading, I've convinced myself that sugar is the main culprit in massive obesity in Western countries, especially the US (i.e. high fructose corn syrup). Sugar is in everything (like plastic, I suppose). Look at the ingredients of what you buy and you'll be surprised where it turns up. Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky, even bog standard brea…

I consume multiple times more sugar than the average person, and I'm thin as a rail with a healthy metabolism. Sugar in itself isn't likely to be bad. Sugar in addition to a deranged metabolism is probably bad. Fixing the deranged metabolism, (which is likely to be caused by various environmental factors) will probably be the best solution.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#160

Post by suoduandao2 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #137
suoduandao2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hybrid varieties bred in the late 50's have about 50x the amount of gluten as previous strains of wheat did.

Fascinating. I was curious because I eat the three I mentioned kind of like rice (along with barley and oats). I’m behind on this science. A 50x increase in gluten sounds crazy, but I don’t know how much gluten is known to be bad. For example, I sometimes eat things with wheat gluten powder as a primary ingredient. It doesn’t seem to cause harm, but maybe I’m missing something. I certainly don’t think of it as a heal…

The science on gluten is ongoing and controversial, but the position I believe will ultimately be vindicated is that some people seem to derive no ill effects while many others develop a mild allergy to it, which can fly under the radar and lead to all sorts of chronic inflammation issues if the person keeps eating it. As a result, there's no 'standard safe dosage' of gluten, some people become violently ill if they encounter a trace, others (myself included) find a lot of seemingly unconnected annoyances clear up if they avoid it for a few weeks. Excess weight gain seems to be one of those, though in my case the major symptom was actually an excessively fast metabolism.
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