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Plastic might be making us obese

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Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#91

Post by acuozzo »

2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #73
xkbarkar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it change your perception if you look at overeating as a symptom rather than a cause? A common enough symptom for untreated diabetes is eccessive thirst. Why should some ailments not cause lack of satiety or edcessive hunger. Or even metabolic issues. Complex ones. Imagine that the basis for the obesity pandemic may in fact lie in other, lack of proper digestive bacteria and yeast for example. I feel that point…

Regardless of the causes of the caloric intake, managing said intake is still the responsibility of said individual. Unless the chemicals involved block the ability to take dietary decisions, of course, but that's a different discussion. From my point of view as an obese individual: It is the cheeseburgers. And the lack of excersize. And the long days working at a screen with few breaks. Change is hard and bad habits…

> Change is hard and bad habits are not easy to get rid of

Which is exactly why no expert in treating addiction suggests using willpower to "cold turkey" as a treatment.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#92

Post by VyseofArcadia »

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…

> 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 a ton of it. My favorite sandwich bread recipe[0] is 8g of sugar to 500g flour, and with my long loaf pan I typically get 20-25 slices, so maximum 400mg a slice. Quite good compared to my favorite supermarket bread at 2g a slice.

Sure, "bog standard" bread could have less sugar, but some sugar is essential for this style of bread.

[0] https://www.nigella.com/recipes/old-fashioned-sandwich-loaf, omitting the butter and oil and using cultured buttermilk instead of spoiled milk or sour cream. I say "omitting the butter", but I do still butter the loaf pan. I just don't include any in the dough itself.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#93

Post by Engineering-MD »

mellavora wrote: post #46

So something else I wonder. Over the last 50-90 years we've selectively bred our entire food chain to prioritize rapid growth, then pack it full of growth hormones to accelerate this. My dad decided to raise chickens back in the 80's. The broiler hens grew so fast that they broke their legs, and this was when fed on our kitchen waste (i.e. no growth hormones). I do wonder how much of this spills over into human obesi…

Epigenetics is to do with how genes are activated and DNA is folded around his histones. I would be very surprised if DNA could survive digestion and influence human genetic expression/epigenetics. There may be other mechanisms I guess (and things like abnormal protein folding like prion diseases can influence other nearby proteins) but I think I’m grasping at straws.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#94

Post by aaomidi »

Engineering-MD wrote: post #93
mellavora wrote: post #46

So something else I wonder. Over the last 50-90 years we've selectively bred our entire food chain to prioritize rapid growth, then pack it full of growth hormones to accelerate this. My dad decided to raise chickens back in the 80's. The broiler hens grew so fast that they broke their legs, and this was when fed on our kitchen waste (i.e. no growth hormones). I do wonder how much of this spills over into human obesi…

Epigenetics is to do with how genes are activated and DNA is folded around his histones. I would be very surprised if DNA could survive digestion and influence human genetic expression/epigenetics. There may be other mechanisms I guess (and things like abnormal protein folding like prion diseases can influence other nearby proteins) but I think I’m grasping at straws.

Hormones are sometimes ingested and they have an impact.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#95

Post by wyre »

mylons wrote: post #71

is it possible to be in a caloric deficit and still gain weight if this is true? or is a caloric deficit + weight loss just a thermodynamics problem

Appetite and metabolism is much more complicated than a thermodynamics problem.

A calorie deficit implies knowledge of metabolic rate which can be highly variable. While calories in can be trivially counted, calories out needs to be calculated and cannot assume a significant level of accuracy.

Regardless, the problem with solving the obesity epidemic isn’t that people can’t lose weight, but is keeping weight off after reaching a goal weight.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#96

Post by bombcar »

dayvid wrote: post #64
elil17 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just saying "cheeseburgers" or "calories in, calories out" fails to explain why people eat more calories now than they did before. There is a vague, and I think very unhelpful, sense in society today that this is some sort of mass moral failing. In reality there are a few factors that could, alone or in combination, explain this change in average behavior. The most convincing to me: chemicals could be messing with ou…

Spend 2 days and write down everything you eat or drink in a spreadsheet with calorie count (including oil and condiments). Use a digital scale if possible for more accurate measurement. The answer will be glaringly obvious. Most people don’t do this and spend their lives wondering why they can’t control their weight. Some quick culprits: sodas and juices (huge amount of calories), excess oil in food cooking (oil has…

The immense marketing around "healthy" vs "unhealthy" food has also contributed to it. Most people consider a glass of orange juice to be "healthy" and a can of Coca Cola to be "unhealthy" but a can of coke has 140 calories and the exact same size of orange juice is 150 - but most people drink a glass of orange juice which is often 16-20 ounces, getting you up near 300 calories.

Sure the orange juice is probably "healthier" per calorie, whatever that means, but you're still drinking a lot of calories.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#97

Post by sithadmin »

psychphysic wrote: post #59
sithadmin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-diabetic (though demonstrably insulin resistant and leptin resistant), I've found metformin's gastro side effects and impact on blood glucose levels to be annoyingly unpredictable. Metformin also causes a noticeable drop in testosterone that can be especially counterproductive for men if weight loss/maintenance is a goal and one already has relatively low baseline testosterone levels.

Definitely heard that the gastro side effects are unacceptable to many and can even impact social life. I'd heard a bit about the testosterone, i.e. that you don't get the testosterone rise associated with successful management for diabetes. And perhaps Metformin short circuits that. Also that it might correlate with the life expectancy improvement and it does make sense since Metformin is also used for PCOS with wid…

Metformin never really yielded noticeable benefits for me (neither in terms of fat loss nor any bloodwork metrics) above and beyond other lifestyle changes I had already made, so I discontinued it after a trial period of about 4 months.

The MD I was working with argued that I could have seen a impact on weight loss if taking a more extreme approach to dieting (basically an extremely high protein, moderate fat, moderate carb diet with 300-400 calories of intake every ~4 hours from sunrise to sunset) in conjunction with the metformin, but that approach didn't really fit my lifestyle at the time. If done correctly, this ostensibly maximizes the gluconeogenesis inhibition effect of metformin in conjunction with minimizing fatty acid synthesis by keeping blood levels at a consistent glucose deficit (thus encouraging lipolysis). I was also unconvinced that this isn't a just-so story, and thus I preferred to take a traditional 'keto' diet route (which has a lot more evidence backing it).

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#98

Post by fortran77 »

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 weight training. The math always works exactly -- for every 3000 extra k/cal I eat, I go up a pound. When it's time to "cut" back to 155#, for every 3000 k/cal deficit I drop a pound.

15 years ago, I got fat. I stopped paying attention to what I was eating. Got my weight up to 205#. I lost it by strictly counting calories. The math worked perfectly. I went to 1200 k/cal and lost 2 pounds a week. Exactly. Every week.

Eating no more calories than your body needs works for everyone. You cannot create matter out of thin air, no matter what fat people will tell you.

The Obese and Overweight cost society greatly. The fact that they're consuming more than they need, use more fuel to move around, and get sick and require more medical care costs us trillions. It's time they stopped pointing their fingers at "plastics" and started obeying the laws of thermodynamics.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#99

Post by aaomidi »

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.

Re: Plastic might be making us obese

#100

Post by Engineering-MD »

aaomidi wrote: post #94
Engineering-MD wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epigenetics is to do with how genes are activated and DNA is folded around his histones. I would be very surprised if DNA could survive digestion and influence human genetic expression/epigenetics. There may be other mechanisms I guess (and things like abnormal protein folding like prion diseases can influence other nearby proteins) but I think I’m grasping at straws.

Hormones are sometimes ingested and they have an impact.

That is certainly true, I was addressing the epigenetic side of things. In his thread he was referencing fast growing chickens fed scraps only
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