[elil17]

After reading the series "A Chemical Hunger" by the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, I'm pretty convinced that chemical contamination is a global-warming level threat to humanity. The authors talk about the evidence that chemicals released into the environment by human activity (such as PFAS) are causing obesity, and they present compelling evidence that this is plausible. They are also working on research to confirm this hypothesis.

But regardless of whether obesity is caused primarily by environmental contamination, chemical contamination is a huge risk for a few reasons:

-Once in the environment, chemical contaminants can react in unforeseen ways, creating new chemicals that we will have no idea how to monitor for.

-Health data prior to industrialization is not good and is confounded by poor medical practices, so we may think we've "solved" chemical contamination when in fact we haven't (e.g. maybe heart disease would go away if it weren't for some chemical that we started using in 1910 but we can't tell because everyone was dying of dysentery).

-The solution, in some most cases, may mean giving up significant technological advances, especially polymers and heavy metals extracted from the ground.

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

[mensetmanusman]

When my mother moved in and we went on daily walks, she lost a pound a week for a year. Her entirely sedentary lifestyle (and that of most Americans I know) is a major factor for her obesity. Standing is now considered exercise it has gotten so bad.

But people will blame anything instead of taking action, so…

[elil17]

While a sedentary lifestyle causing obesity may be true on an individual basis (and exercise is really really good for you regardless of your weight), it fails to explain why people who do manual labor tend to be as fat or fatter than people who have office jobs and why sedentary people of the past were not that fat compared to people today. There are a lot of reasons detailed in the series about why personal choice cannot adequately explain how it is we are getting fatter as a society. I think there are many good arguments for a non-chemical cause, like more and more appetizing highly processed foods.

But to say "people will blame anything instead of taking action" makes no sense. We have had decades of action trying to get people to eat healthy and exercise. It hasn't done anything. We have to accept that just telling people to lose weight doesn't work and start pursuing other options.

And there are so many good options! In Spain, for example, "staple foods" such as vegetables, meat, and bread are taxed at a lower rate while highly processed foods are taxed at the normal rate. In most developed countries, universal healthcare helps people prevent and manage the worst diseases associated with obesity such as heart disease and diabetes. And yes, we should investigate alternate explanations outside of the exercise/diet nexus such as chemical contamination! It may not be the reason but it is a testable hypothesis that would be "big if true."

[hansword]

Just because a sedentary lifestyle is bad for your health, doesn't mean smoking is harmless.

Do you know anything about these chemical? If so, please share. If not, well, ....

[mensetmanusman]

Smoking is an interesting example, Japan smokes a lot more and has less obesity and seems to have higher general health…

[elil17]

Japan has 18% smokers vs. 12.5% in the US. They have a five year longer life expectancy but they also have universal healthcare, so it's not really a fair comparison. Plus, Japan has good air quality and robust elder care.

On top of that, they may have chemical factors (such as no lithium mines) that differentiate them from other developed countries.

[anon_d]

Smoking decreases appetite. A lot of people who quit smoking gain significant weight.

[PuppyTailWags]

I'm pretty sure daily walks (no heart rate elevation, not HIIT, no muscle being built, etc.) didn't contribute significantly to your mother's weight loss. Moving around is not a significant contributor to weight loss[1]. Diet is the most significant contributing factor to gaining or losing weight. Moving in with someone new, new environment, new dietary changes, etc. might've done significantly more.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/, from the abstract, "Based on the present literature, unless the overall volume of aerobic ET is very high, clinically significant weight loss is unlikely to occur. "

[bretpiatt]

Depending on fitness level (cardio, muscle strength, physical weight) walking can very much be strenuous exercise.

Direct caloric burn, long term metabolism changes, etc. for a given activity vary based on the input fitness level of the person.

Calories in is the easiest levee to pull for rapid change as exercising enough for major direct calorie burn is challenging at the beginning. The biggest short term exercise impact is from activities that increase muscle mass as muscle takes calories to maintain thus boosting metabolism.

[mensetmanusman]

Well, since I was there, I can say that her diet was mostly unchanged.

I will add that the walks were around an hour to two to get 10k steps and over 4 miles.

I challenge anyone to walk an extra ~25 miles a week with no diet change to see if they gain weight.

[windowsrookie]

Weight loss is simply calories in - calories out. If she walked an hour a day and ate the same amount, she was burning around ~300 extra calories a day.

Pretty sure her daily walks did contribute significantly to her weight loss.

[elil17]

Calories in - calories out fails to explain why people consume and expend as many calories as they do. As the series discusses, many calorie sinks such as fidgeting and body temperature are subconscious or autonomic and seem to be used by our bodies to help regulate our weight. And some people clearly have very strong hunger drives.

Clearly something has changed over the past hundred years. Saying that we got richer fails to explain why the rich people of yore, while fat by the standards of their day, are not fat by modern standards. Saying we have gone down hill in terms of sticktoitiveness is not really a verifiable claim and does nothing to offer a solution. So it is absolutely worth further investigating what is going on.

[mensetmanusman]

Food scientist do engineer foods to make you want to eat more of it (and not feel full). It is hard to resist processed food technology.

[shadowpho]

>If she walked an hour a day and ate the same amount

If she does more activity, she gets hungrier. This will pressure more eating. Fighting that is a losing battle for majority of dieters.

Furthermore, consider that the body is a lot more complicated than "calories in, calories out". It can change your hunger level, lower the body temperature, reduce energy spent on fighting disease...

[BizarroLand]

Also, women seem to lose more weight from walking than men do.

(I do apologize as my response was based on a science article that I read not too long ago but I cannot find it to substantiate my claim)

[TylerE]

If you're sedentary, walking is going to boost your heartrate

[xxpor]

What if the chemicals aren't making you fat directly, but messing with your neurotransmitters and sapping your motivation?

Doesn't seem completely out of the realm of possibility.

[elil17]

This is what the series actually discusses as the most likely possibility. Essentially the idea is that PFAS or lithium could be making you hungry when you don't need to be. Hence the name "a chemical hunger."

[mensetmanusman]

That would be an interesting study.

I wonder if one could find an ethical human study that could parse out a molecule and its effect on demotivation compared to the effect of media, sunlight exposure, obesity, etc.

[elil17]

The bloggers are working on designing such a study. The good news is that weight loss studies almost all show small effect sizes so if remove a chemical exposure factor is the solution you would expect the results to be pretty obvious. I mean, if getting rid of PFAS "prevents obesity" but a McDonalds ad undoes the effect, then it was probably the McDonalds ad causing the obesity, not the PFAS. The bad news is that preventing chemical exposure is really hard to do.

[MomoXenosaga]

People hate exercise so much they prefer expensive diets.

If you don't burn the calories you eat, no matter how few they may be, you will never lose weight.

[mensetmanusman]

That’s why I don’t call it exercise anymore.

Literally, it’s walking while reading your email on the phone. Find a beautiful spot in nature, take advantage of local rivers and beaches…

Lack of vitamin D due to low levels of sunlight exposure is very harmful…

[ravel-bar-foo]

If the chemical contamination hypothesis were true, one would expect obesity to correlate with/lag industrial activity/contamination. I'm not sure that this is true. Obesity in Europe didn't start going up until the early 2000s, when Europe was transitioning to a more service-based economy. In Korea it has become a problem in the last 5 years (again, as the country deindustrializes), and in China it seems to be mostly a problem of the wealthy rather than a problem of the poor factory worker (and the factory worker is presumably exposed to more industrial contaminants).

That said, I have not yet read the SMTM piece, or looked at SMTM's data.

[colechristensen]

There is a whole lot of mild panic going on.

Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after.

If your purpose in life is to maximize the number of days you live, I guess you do you, but it doesn’t seem like a very high quality life to me.

We take risks, we accept them, there’s middle ground between ignoring risks and obsessing over them. The toll from worrying about things can be much worse than the things you’re trying to avoid.

You know what causes obesity? Availability of food. You didn’t evolve in an environment where calories are essentially free so your motivations and feedback behaviors aren’t tuned to make good decisions when it comes to food. Sure there are probably secondary effects from all sorts of things, but it comes down to food not being scarce like it evolved to expect.

Paying attention to environmental risks makes sense, but only to a certain extent. You’re probably still going to live a long life, and the secret to a good one probably isn’t going to be found in avoiding the next scary chemical of the day.

[dylan604]

>Here’s the deal, you’re going to die.

The level of arrogance or just compelete lack of understanding is mind boggling here.

If I get cancer and that cancer kills me, that cancer will not kill anyone else.

If I die because of some man-made chemical, the source that I got that chemical from is still there and will affect others as well.

Not all sources of death are the same. Some are much more nasty. Man-made things like PFAS chemicals have been known to be nasty for a long time by their makers. Those makers have chosen to hide it. Any attempt at "we're all going to die" in order to lessen the guilt of these companies is just shameful on all who spread it, and you should be ashamed.

[cromka]

> Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after.

This comes off as a very ignorant take. The problem is not "if" we're going to die and "how", but "how soon" and with "how much suffering", along with "how much effort/money does it increasingly require to stay healthy".

[hdjjhhvvhga]

> If your purpose in life is to maximize the number of days you live, I guess you do you, but it doesn’t seem like a very high quality life to me.

People have a tendency to go to the extreme. There is a lot of middle ground between not caring at all and having a panic attack. This middle ground can be constructively used to make the lives of future generations easier, just like many of the people of the past have done for us.[0]

[0] Having spent a few months off-grid, I'm extremely grateful for things like electricity, tap water, sewage, central heating, a roof above my head, walls around me thicker than my tent, medicines, and many, many other things I used to take for granted.

[elil17]

>You know what causes obesity? Availability of food.

As discussed in the article, this fails to explain why there have been societies with almost no obesity and almost unlimited access to food (e.g. the Mbuti people of the Congo who get 80% of their calories from a copious supply of honey but have no documented cases of obesity, or rich people in developed countries prior to about 1980).

Death is only one part of the equation. I want to be healthy while I live.

>The toll from worrying can be much worse than what you're trying to avoid.

Absolutely. I don't do any of the things the series lists as their recommended ways to lose weight (even though I am overweight). I haven't tried the all-potato diet and I haven't moved to the top of a mountain. I just keep exercising and limiting my sugar intake. And what has happened is exactly what the series said would happen: I lost about 15 pounds and then leveled out. Which I'm fine with - all the evidence points to the fact that just losing 15 pounds does quite a bit for your health, and that's enough for me! I'm happy to focus the rest of my energy on living life and enjoying it.

But I think someone should be doing the research. Why are dollars going to weight loss PSA campaigns and studies showing that this or that diet might help people lose weight? These approaches haven't worked for decades and we could be funding research into some theories like chemical-mediated hunger.

[nscalf]

Well this is just wrong. First off, there is no evidence that it will be impossible for medical science to eventually solve most aging related illness, and mitigate most diseases. There is no practical reason to assume that trying to increase lifespan is a fools errand. Medical advancements look like big breakthroughs followed by decades of incremental improvements. Right now, it's starting to look like AI can increase the rate of breakthroughs and tighten the incremental improvement periods, so an extra 5 years of life may end up being enough to benefit from substantial medical progress.

Second, obesity isn't caused by the availability of food. Most well developed countries have an essentially infinite amount of food for any given individual, and most individuals do not stop eating because they lack the resources to access more food. So why isn't every individual in these society with these resources massively obese? Because there are a number of psychological, chemical, and biological reasons for obesity. Largely, the cause for obesity comes in the form of appetite suppression vs satiation. There are many chemicals like PFAS which decreases satiety, increasing the calories you intake.

Just like how removing heavy metals from drinking water and increases in food availability increased the general quality of life for all affected people, decreasing the amount of chemicals affecting satiety in the general environment could have massive impacts for societies that are impacted.

In short, if your baseline hunger is lower, you won't get fat.

[zarzavat]

Clearly there exist risks we should invest time in avoiding. It takes time to look both ways when crossing the road, but that is time well spent given the large risk of death when crossing without looking.

Likewise there are risks that are better ignored. There is risk in flying on an airplane, but it’s not risky enough to forego the good that comes of it.

Only with quantification comes the ability to rationally decide whether to take a risk or not.

The issue with these chemicals is that we do not know how to even quantify their risk. So we have to estimate and people’s gut estimates vary wildly. Your gut estimate is that there is a low risk, others estimate a high risk.

Only time will tell who is correct, such is the uncertainty of life.