What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health? • Hacker News Board

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#331

Post by zamfi » Fri, May 20, 2022, 3:53 PM UTC

rajin444 wrote: post #327

zamfi wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm saying we have a large surplus of resources, and humans are designed to consume. You have no particular evidence of this either. In other contexts where humans have had a large surplus of resources, there has not been an obesity epidemic.

Can you point to other contexts with an equivalent level of surplus of today? Even if you could, our science is not advanced enough to control for all the confounds. You can’t point to “evidence” or “science” to prove your point because we are not advanced enough to accurately claim anything at the level you’re attempting to. Research like you’re referencing is great for “this is interesting” and not “this is why the…

> Research like you’re referencing is great for “this is interesting” and not “this is why the world works this way”.

You clearly didn’t read enough — the whole point of the piece I referenced is “this is interesting” and not “this is why the world works this way”.

Glad you finally agree that it’s great, though.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#332

Post by shadowpho » Fri, May 20, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

gloryjulio wrote: post #283

kaezon wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this citation! I've at least heard that CICO was nonsense, but the author has done a fantastic job researching the subject, breaking down common approaches to weight loss, and studies which have examined them.

How is CICO nonsense...? Unless you are breaking the law of thermodynamics, there is no way you could gain more from what you eat. The best you can do is utilize 100% of the calorie intake. It's physically impossible to gain weight if you are burning for example 150% of the total calories intake! The fuel has to come from somewhere. The variation lies in different utilization rate, the burn rate, and all other variab…

CICO is nonsense not in the sense that it's wrong, but because it's useless. It implies that the solution to obesity is either eating less or working out more. However, both of these do not work for vast majority of people. Diets for example fail for 98% of people over 1 year of dieting.

If people, try to eat less their body gets unhappy -- it starts to burn less calories. Furthermore, it starts ramping up your hunger trying to convince you that you are starving. Over a year it typically wins.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#333

Post by sgtnoodle » Fri, May 20, 2022, 7:22 PM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #300

sgtnoodle wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, simply cutting out sugar but otherwise making poor dietary choices isn't going to lead to weight loss. Cutting out sugar tends to make it easier to eat healthy, though. Long term weight loss requires lifestyle changes. In my personal anecdotal experience, my weight gain and loss correlates to my caloric intake. When I've explicitly calorie counted, foods with refined carbohydrates are typically what blows up my…

Can you give an example of what a typical high calorie / high carb day looked like for you? I eat lots of carbs, always have... yet I don't seem to gain weight. I generally feel like, and am regarded by people who know me, as someone who "eats a ton" yet I have never struggled to lose weight. The X food causes obesity theory is just too simple IMO, that or I have a tape worm or some kind of undiagnosed disorder that…

Have you ever tried tracking calories, not necessarily with the intention of hitting a goal? If not, the data can be rather informative, and doesn't necessarily match intuition. There's free apps like MyFitnessPal that makes it pretty easy. When I have done it, I've been able to correlate weight gain and loss to caloric intake. There are a few pounds of fluctuation from things like water retention and amount of food in your gut of course, but it's visible over the timespan of a week. If you eat a very consistent diet, you can measure differences on a scale across a few days.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#334

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 20, 2022, 7:34 PM UTC

gloryjulio wrote: post #283

kaezon wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this citation! I've at least heard that CICO was nonsense, but the author has done a fantastic job researching the subject, breaking down common approaches to weight loss, and studies which have examined them.

How is CICO nonsense...? Unless you are breaking the law of thermodynamics, there is no way you could gain more from what you eat. The best you can do is utilize 100% of the calorie intake. It's physically impossible to gain weight if you are burning for example 150% of the total calories intake! The fuel has to come from somewhere. The variation lies in different utilization rate, the burn rate, and all other variab…

[deleted]

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#335

Post by harpersealtako » Fri, May 20, 2022, 7:45 PM UTC

wbsss4412 wrote: post #249

sgtnoodle wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, simply cutting out sugar but otherwise making poor dietary choices isn't going to lead to weight loss. Cutting out sugar tends to make it easier to eat healthy, though. Long term weight loss requires lifestyle changes. In my personal anecdotal experience, my weight gain and loss correlates to my caloric intake. When I've explicitly calorie counted, foods with refined carbohydrates are typically what blows up my…

I mean yes, that’s something of a tautology though. Cutting down on calories necessarily means cutting down on fat, carbs, or both (technically protein as well, but protein doesn’t generally seem to be the issue.) If you were to follow an explicitly low fat diet, it would be very difficult to eat junk food as well. Almost all junk foods are high in both fat and carbs at the same time. You are right about refined carb…

I don't think "refined carbs are bad for you" is correct. Consider that many of the healthiest, least obese, longest lived societies on earth (e.g. Japan) have diets heavy in refined carbs (e.g. white rice).

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#336

Post by harpersealtako » Fri, May 20, 2022, 7:57 PM UTC

john567 wrote: post #212

zamfi wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may find this exposition interesting: http://achemicalhunger.com/

This must be part of some disinformation effort to streer people away from the simple answer. Their conclusion is that you're helpless if your fat and that's just not true. The idea that this is not in your hands is ridiculous. If you are fat and you don't want to be fat you simply change your eating habits. This can be very difficult to do because you have formed these habits throughout your life but it isn't compli…

I was similarly skeptical until I read it (ever since the first part appeared on HN) and it convinced me on many points.

That said, I think you're half right? SMTM's environmental contagion hypothesis is an explanation for population-level obesity rates, not individual cases of obesity. Anybody who cares sufficiently about their own obesity can change it through individual efforts. However, on a population level, "just change your habits", or even worse, shaming people who are obese, is a less effective strategy than "figure out what is causing their bodies to signal hunger and store fat in dysfunctional, self-harmful ways that they didn't used to anywhere on earth until the mid-1900s".

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#337

Post by dhosek » Fri, May 20, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

mleonhard wrote: post #308

dhosek wrote: post #246

Two simple things that you can do are to (a) don’t wash plastics in the dishwasher and (2) don’t microwave stuff in plastic containers. This last will require taking stuff out of the disposable container that many frozen meals come in to cook it. Some brands have a cardboard/waxpaper tray instead of a plastic one although there might be identical looking packaging that has different internals based on the store (I re…

The cardboard bowl from Whole Foods is likely water-proofed with PFAS. People with PFAS in their blood tend to be overweight or underweight. The body eliminates PFAS very ver slowly. There was a recent study that showed that replacing a person's blood plasma was an effective way to remove PFAS. Keeping it out of the blood seems to be much harder.

I normally remove the bowl when I microwave just to be safe.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#338

Post by john567 » Sat, May 21, 2022, 7:32 AM UTC

zamfi wrote: post #237

john567 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This must be part of some disinformation effort to streer people away from the simple answer. Their conclusion is that you're helpless if your fat and that's just not true. The idea that this is not in your hands is ridiculous. If you are fat and you don't want to be fat you simply change your eating habits. This can be very difficult to do because you have formed these habits throughout your life but it isn't compli…

Obviously you [0] didn't read the article, but that is not their conclusion. There seems to be some kind of unfortunate "shame brigade" out on the Internet that comes out of the woodwork to overrun any conversation around obesity that even hints that there might be reasons for the obesity epidemic other than individual people's poor choices. The lab rats whose rate of obesity has increased over the last 30 years, des…

This is exactly their conclusion.

> Our suggestions are very prosaic: Be nice to yourself. Eat mostly what you want. Trust your instincts. > > Diet and exercise won’t cure obesity, but this is actually good news for diet and exercise. You don’t need to put the dream of losing weight on their shoulders, and you can focus on their actual benefits instead

I haven't read it all but I have read a lot and I have been doing this for a long time.

To give people an excuse that diet and exercise is not the answer, it's irresponsible.

Our world makes it incredibly difficult to be healthy. My opinion is simply that you should still try everything you can to be healthy. The problem as I see it is that people have no clue what to eat and what not to. Most people just eat what their parents ate and think nothing of it. We buy food at a grocerie store thinking this is food because it came from a grocerie store. Most stuff in a grocerie store will slowly kill you.

And about those lab rats. They are inbred clones. Maybe suitable for some lab work but the fact that they are getting fatter has to do with their awful genetics. And yes, there's obviously some variability there.

I've been thinking about what this blog series for the past days and they don't seem to understand that muscle gain and weight loss happens slowly over years. If you're fat and you don't want to be fat anymore you have a really difficult job a head of you.

To make up excuse to pretend and act as if reality isn't exactly this is disingenuous and it's going to lure people into false sense of security. Not good.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#339

Post by john567 » Sat, May 21, 2022, 7:44 AM UTC

harpersealtako wrote: post #336

john567 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This must be part of some disinformation effort to streer people away from the simple answer. Their conclusion is that you're helpless if your fat and that's just not true. The idea that this is not in your hands is ridiculous. If you are fat and you don't want to be fat you simply change your eating habits. This can be very difficult to do because you have formed these habits throughout your life but it isn't compli…

I was similarly skeptical until I read it (ever since the first part appeared on HN) and it convinced me on many points. That said, I think you're half right? SMTM's environmental contagion hypothesis is an explanation for population-level obesity rates , not individual cases of obesity. Anybody who cares sufficiently about their own obesity can change it through individual efforts. However, on a population level, "j…

Well the messaging should be positive. Maybe we someday can have a public informed discussion on health. I don't think shaming will work too well but we have to acknowledge that being fat is not good. But also that it's a fixable thing you shouldn't be ashamed of. When we concede language to protect feelings I'm not sure we're going down the right road. I wish for people to be healthy and their best but you have to know that there are options to be better.

Re: What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

#340

Post by flaviut » Mon, May 23, 2022, 7:41 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #328

flaviut wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheap activated charcoal filters are bullshit. You can't absorb things without absorbant mass. The black plastic sponge has hardly any mass at all, period. I however do not have a good solution. I've DIY'd my own filter with charcoal pellets, but I've been unable to test it, and I'm somewhat unhappy with the design anyway.

Are commercial air purifiers using something better? Part of the reason I'm skeptical of the commercial market is that when I look at the teardowns of these products they're either doing something questionable where they're sacrificing air volume for noise, or they're basically using regular filters of the same or less quality that you can buy from a store. I don't doubt you at all that cheap filters work less well,…

The only place I've seen carbon pellet filters commercially are in things like marijuana grow tent filters and here: http://www.air-purifier-power.com/sharpwashablecarbonfilters...

Unfortunately it seems like the air filtration market as a whole is incredibly prone to snake-oil claims.

As far as your idea goes, I'm not sure. And I don't have a great idea of how to test something like this. I've seen bags of activated charcoal marketed as something you can leave around for better air (sounds like bs).