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Plastic might be making us obese

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#221

Post by boltzmann-brain »

elil17 wrote: post #177
oneoff786 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing a tough 1 hour exercise is not the same as being on your feet all day. You may be able to offset doing nothing all day with a burst of effort. You may not. People who are moving constantly are very rarely fat. I cannot find their article on professions. I’d be very skeptical. In general being poor in America means a terrible diet is likely so that’s a huge part of the equation. It seems very unlikely that expos…

Why then, for example, are cleaning services workers, mechanics, and health workers all more obese than average? Those are jobs where you are much more active than an office worker. Those are all cases where someone gets exposed to chemicals (cleaning chemicals, lithium grease, and PFAS-based medical fabrics). In fact, healthcare support workers are more obese than healthcare technicians, even though technicians are…

it's easier to explain it by more stress, less money, less ability to care for their health or eat healthily, etc etc.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#222

Post by tdehnel »

aaomidi wrote: post #193
TimedToasts wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean, yes. We have to do the redesign for a multitude of reasons. Including the impacts our current cities have for scalability of various services and growth. Also how it’s fucking our response to climate change.

Oh knock it off

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#223

Post by boltzmann-brain »

bombcar wrote: post #72
oneoff786 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this to be a pretty lame analysis. > People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. This seems closely related to observations like the French Paradox — the French eat a lot of fatty cheese and butter, so w…

It's calories in/calories out for the majority - sure there's edge cases where you an discuss more "efficient" bodies, etc, but I daresay our diets are way more caloric than they used to be. And a lot of that is portion size and "added eating" between meals. I'd love to work out just how many calories the various soda companies ship a year.

what i find interesting is that most people don't realize that the majority of your calories out is actually breathed and peed out. it doesn't, eh, turn into heat or something silly like that, which is common wisdom.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#224

Post by CountSessine »

tdehnel wrote: post #216

This has got to be the most idiotic, speculative comment section of the year. Literally not a single coherent explanation of how plastics might actually cause obesity, and a bunch of people going on about sugar and hormones.

Diet is an HN magnet for bike-shedding and anecdotes.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#225

Post by Eleison23 »

LeftHandPath wrote: post #209
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even bog standard bread Yes, we definitely have too much sugar in everything, but as an amateur baker I will defend sugar in bread. Sure, you don't need it in a baguette or a rustic boule, but it is indispensable for a nice, soft sandwich loaf. It's not there to make the bread sweeter. It makes the bread softer, it boosts the yeast for a nicer rise, and it keeps it from going stale as quickly. Granted, I don't use…

The difference between a nice brioche - made with plenty of sugar, with a soft, fluffy character - and a standard loaf of french bread is quite large. I spring for the french bread only because it's cheaper. Bread with sugar is superior.

I consume nothing but sourdough, because of the simplicity of ingredients and no sugar is necessary in its recipe. Lately I've found that "take-and-bake" loaves can be purchased, frozen, and freshly baked on demand. It works out great, and I love the simple, honest flavor of San Francisco style sourdough for sandwiches or just a buttered slice to go with my supper.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#226

Post by bsder »

Auracle wrote: post #176

I do a lot of high school senior photography. It's hard to talk about this without sounding crude as a guy but something that I've noticed that contrasts with when I graduated high school (2006) is just how many girls have huge breasts. I think there were 2 girls in my grade that were skinny and had what would be called "large" breasts. Most other skinny girls had the standard A or B cups. Now a very large portion ha…

1) I have a suspicion that girls are getting birth control pills at much earlier ages than they used to. Putting a girl on bith control pills in the middle of puberty is going to have an effect somewhere and weight gain is one of the documented effects of birth control.

2) Girls getting fatter likely triggers other changes as well. Given that the female body works very hard to shut down reproduction when fat is scarce, it may very well supercharge reproductive changes when fat is plentiful.

3) I think you heavily underestimate the number of girls who get breast implants. For a while, it seemed like every 16-year-old girl was getting them. You could notice a significant contrast when shifting between areas with different socioeconomics--blue-collar areas mysteriously had lots of girls with much smaller breasts than white-collar ones.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#227

Post by hamiltonians »

maybe the bmi is also wrong. if your index is labelng half or more of ppl as diseased, maybe the index is broken. except for jockeys, meth addicts, and runners, most men are going to be aleast borerline overweight by 30. i dont know any thin people. maybe we need to make drugs legal..that will fix it. perhaps there is a good biological reason people weigh more, why fight nature.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#229

Post by jonwinstanley »

OJFord wrote: post #213

This is absurd. The authors should look at what some people (or perhaps they themselves, and that's the issue) have in their trolley (cart?) next time they're shopping (storing? ;)). Obesity is, for at least the most part, plainly not caused by too many/wrong pesticides on fruit and vegetables. It is caused by (far) too many things that are not fruits and vegetables.

Agreed.

And it’s not like everyone is obese.

There’s a large proportion of people who eat healthily, avoid processed food, keep their portion sizes regular and refrain from too much alcohol.

Unsurprisingly these people are in good shape despite probably being in close proximity to the plastics/chemicals described in the article.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#230

Post by evol262 »

briefcomment wrote: post #159
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.

What's your daily caloric intake, though? It's not just sugar that's negative. Traditional diets which are high in either carbohydrates or fats are broadly ok, it's the combination which is problematic, because it's all the caloric consumption of fats at 9kcal/g along with ghrelin/insulin spiking/dropping with carbohydrates (at 4kcal/g) which is an issue, because all of a sudden daily caloric intake is much higher.
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