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A Chemical Hunger – Part III: Environmental Contaminants

by danieka on 7/13/21, 5:29 PM with 36 comments

• by errantmind on 7/14/21, 5:32 AM

  I'm usually all about investigations like this but the repeated claims that obesity is, for sure, not caused by diet is a leap. Also, the claim "people ate worse in the past (bread and lard)" doesn't ring true and is unsubstantiated.

  My own opinion: we are seeing what happens when we combine an increasingly sedentary lifestyle with eating mass produced, low quality foods. Fruits and vegetables are becoming decreasingly nutritious. Animals (even organic) are force fed poor diets to slaughter them a few days earlier, whose fats contain high concentrations of these poor diets. There are lots of examples of food quality going down.

  I especially think the problem is related to a combination of excessive carb intake, and PUFAs (think vegetable / seed oils found in a huge portion and variety of foods). There is a growing body of research this is the case [1].

  DYOR.

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16184193/

• by mickaelP38 on 7/14/21, 7:46 PM

  I found the first two articles were interesting despite obvious flaws in the presented evidence. After reading the third one, it just looks like logical fallacy to me.

  For example, taken from the first article:

  > In the past, most people got slightly leaner as they got older.

  How can you claim that with so few data. From the same data I would conclude that obese people die at young age...

  I don't think we should exclude any possible cause but a global contaminant which is the only cause of obesity seems far fetched.

  Simple logic would suggest that our food is the main culprit.

  Personaly I would bet obesity is due to weakened gut microbiome (due to consumption of process foods), transmitted from mothers to their children. In other words, each generation consuming processed food gives birth to children more susceptible to obesity. It has actually been modeled with rats (cannot find the published link though).

• by ncmncm on 7/14/21, 3:58 AM

  I feel like this will someday be exhibit A for a presentation on "Correlation is not causation".

  I am blaming sucrose being added to literally everything.

• by FredJames on 7/14/21, 7:01 PM

  I would love to see an RCT on a ton of really common environmental contaminants at different dosages in the human diet. Of course this would be incredibly unethical and inefficient with respect to human welfare, but it would, I think, finally get people to believe that there are obesegenic compounds (and viruses) that need to be avoided for proper metabolic health.

  Phthalates, Adenovirus 36, bisphenols, certain pesticides and fungicides--which ones should we be investing in getting rid of?

• by sasaf5 on 7/14/21, 8:00 AM

  > People’s diets were “worse” in the past — full of lard and bread — because diet doesn’t cause obesity. The ~1% of people who were obese in the past were people with one of the various medical conditions known to cause obesity, such as Prader-Willi Syndrome, hypothyroidism, or hypothalamic lesions.

  This is a very strong claim that is lacking a source. There are entire groups of people in history that were documented to be obese, especially in religion or sports.

• by JabavuAdams on 7/15/21, 6:46 PM

  I just ate 4 Oreos I didn't need because this discussion is starting to stress me out. I'm going to stop responding, but I wanted to be on record as having said these things. Thanks for the information and perspectives.

• by jaqalopes on 7/13/21, 6:33 PM

  I have never found scientific writing as gripping as I have found this series. My mouth just hangs agape as I scroll and the implications hit me.

• by briefcomment on 7/14/21, 4:17 AM

  The section on Altitude and Watershed quality is really interesting.

• by JabavuAdams on 7/14/21, 4:07 AM

  This is nonsense.

• by fithisux on 7/14/21, 5:22 AM

  Very serious research .