[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.