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Plastic might be making us obese

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#331

Post by [deleted] »

wahern wrote: post #320
kccqzy wrote: post #210

If a factor can't explain why non-Hispanic Asians have much lower prevalence of obesity than any other race, I tend not to trust it. Are Asians simply using less plastic than other races? Look at the chart: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db288.pdf The chart is simply striking. We should all be investigating what are the Asians doing right that all of us should learn from.

Higher BMI correlates with various morbidities, but is not necessarily the direct cause.[1] East Asians have higher rates of type-2 diabetes than Caucasians, both in the U.S. and in East Asia, despite having lower BMIs. So, theoretically, plastics could absolutely be a factor here. But this nonetheless bolsters your larger point, which is that we need to better appreciate how diseases manifest and evolve across diffe…

[deleted]

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#332

Post by spywaregorilla »

Qem wrote: post #318
spywaregorilla wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number one most obese job is a truck driver. Your hypothesis is that chemicals cause obesity. You cite cleaning services workers as receiving substantially more chemicals due to their work than the average person. Why then, are truckers more obese? If this is the primary factor causing obesity, and these people are receiving substantially more exposure than everyone else, why aren't they substantially the fattest…

Volatile organic compounds from upholstery and plastics in the dashboard may explain it. Spending a lot of time in trucks is like living in a mobile plastic house.

It seems insane to me that someone would think the reason truckers, who spend all day every day sitting down and eating on the go foods, are fat because their dashboards have plastic in them.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#333

Post by naikrovek »

hollywood_court wrote: post #291
naikrovek wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shame is just as unhealthy as obesity. the west recognizes that, somehow.

I suppose I should have clarified that I don’t advocate for shaming others. But personal shame and shame avoidance has been the single greatest tool for my own success.

if you've come through that unharmed you're a miracle.

shame is a fantastic motivator and holy cow is it one of the most caustic things ever to the recipient's psyche.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#334

Post by hollywood_court »

naikrovek wrote: post #333
hollywood_court wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I should have clarified that I don’t advocate for shaming others. But personal shame and shame avoidance has been the single greatest tool for my own success.

if you've come through that unharmed you're a miracle. shame is a fantastic motivator and holy cow is it one of the most caustic things ever to the recipient's psyche.

The most important thing in the world is leverage.

And shame can make for some pretty powerful leverage.

I’m a hyper critical individual especially when it comes to myself. If I didn’t work to avoid shame, it’s very likely I’d be a lot more miserable and a lot less successful.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#336

Post by travisjungroth »

serf wrote: post #313
travisjungroth wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mix up desert (sand) and dessert (cake)?

a food desert is a (usually) hyperbolic phrase used to describe areas where access to nutritionally balanced food is hindered by something like scarcity or economy and replaced with access to food that is cheap and plentiful but nutritionally unsound.

I'm familiar with the phrase. I just wanted to see if they meant something more like "don't eat cookies" than "don't be poor".

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#337

Post by cowmoo728 »

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.

Calories in / calories out is not an interesting question. If you present a healthy person with 4000 calories of cake, they don't eat it. They may have some cake, but not all of it. Oftentimes, they simply can't eat it all without feeling sick and stopping. Healthy people constantly pass on adding extra calories to their diet, and it's not through willpower. Healthy people have different hormonal balances, different gut bacteria, different brain structures, etc. They simply cannot eat the same quantity of unhealthy food that an obese person can, and they do not have the constant level of background hunger cravings that obese people do. Changing a healthy person into an unhealthy one takes a while, but several months of being sedentary and eating low quality food generally seems to put someone on track for obesity and metabolic syndrome.

Conversely, an obese person, or particularly a formerly obese person that has recently dieted, has pretty extreme cravings and withdrawal symptoms, even if they're eating a complete and healthy diet. Something is going wrong with the complicated dance of insulin, ghrelin, leptin, and various others. Something is driving obese people to eat enormous amounts of food and still feel hungry. Poor sleep, chemical exposure, change in nutrient content of easily available foods, are all potential culprits. Something far more interesting is going on than "they're eating more calories".

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#338

Post by nineteen999 »

Well it might be.

What might make us lose our obesity is regular exercise, building a reasonable amount of muscle mass, eating less food and better food, consuming less alchohol, spending less time sedentary in front of a computer screen, etc.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#339

Post by sp332 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #277
sp332 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Developed countries" don't have 40% of high school students clinically obese. Only the US does.

I haven't been able to find a source claiming higher than 16% for US high school students, fwiw. I wouldn't bat an eye if europe caught up soon.

I think you're right, but the the article says: "In the US, roughly 40% of today’s high school students were overweight by the time they started high school." Not sure what the source is.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#340

Post by kmc059000 »

klipt wrote: post #266
Melatonic wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say food - most asian people I know (even ones that eat a pretty western diet) still randomly incorporate a lot of things that are Real Foods or processed type foods that are close to Real Foods. They also eat a lot (generally) more mushrooms and fermented food (and great variety of fermented food - not just yeast based stuff like yogurt). Does it really make sense that Western diets basically just ignore a w…

Yeast is a fungus? So if you eat bread or drink wine/beer you're probably consuming some amount of fungus that way.

Most commercial beer completely removes the yeast though, even many microbreweries. If you don't visibly see sediment in the bottle, it has been filtered. The reason is consistency in product and consumer preferences.
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