I enjoyed this article. This part felt weird though when you go on to explain the pitfalls of correlation chains:
> Now, obesity causes diabetes. That much is indisputable.
The odds-ratios you quote still just means obesity is correlated with diabetes. They could both be caused by the same thing, for instance an inflammatory diet. Or diabetes could cause obesity (temporally this doesn't seem to make sense, obese people go on to develop type-2 diabetes. But there could be a pre-diabetic state that we don't currently understand/measure which, when entered, leads to obesity.)
Yeah, what I really meant was "pre-prediabetes." Because temporally what's called prediabetes usually occurs after being overweight too. If there is a physiological switch that, once triggered, leads to diabetes and also causes obesity, then it would also explain the odds-ratio but it would not be obesity causing diabetes.
> And, despite our best efforts, we still don’t have a single good answer as to the cause of obesity’s rapid rise in prevalence.
What compelled this person to write that sentence!? I know he's looking for a very technical answer but the answer to this question is simple and everybody knows it. They just ignore it.
That's is part of it, but not the single answer. Since cheap sugar has been around for a century at least. Epigenetics, lack of exercise, cultural changes, car dependence, also factor in.
More to it than sugar. Processing subtracts as well as adds. Pthylates, endocrine disruptors, lots of good stuff in our water and food now. Gut biomes aren't the same either, thank you antibiotics.
(Plus/minus on antibiotics is plus, I'll take alive and obese over painful and dead most days.)
Not talking about fortification. Food processing in this context means taking food through some incredible steps in order to create a cheap, "addictive" product you can sell. This often involves adding some kind of sugar.
We agree on that. It subtracts and it adds other stuff too. Mac and cheese add pthalates in the cheese from the rubber used in the machinery. It could be as simple as the sugar, but have you controlled for any other variables as well?
Most of what you can buy in a grocerie store is bad for you. It has been optimized for profit, i.e. consumption.
Then you can of course pile on all kinds of contributing factors but this isn't necessary to understand why people are fat.
I don't blame fat people for being fat but it's not a mystery why they're fat. And it's not easy for them to change everything about their lifestyle to get fit but that's what they need to do.
You’re in luck because that’s exactly what happened over the last 20 years and it’s had basically no affect on the increase in obesity[1]. I’m curious, does this information change your belief at all?
This is false because everything isn't metabolized the same. I don't like this idea of trying to apply physics. It's not the right model.
Simple example, you eat only protein and fat, you don't gain weight. You substitute some fat for carbohydrates and you suddenly go up in weight. This despite you just went down in calories.
You can also mess with your feeding window and loose weight. Simply cram in a days worth of calories over a few hours and eat nothing for the rest of the day and you'll likely loose weight do the opposite (eat several times during the day) and you gain weight. Assuming same total calorie count overall.
To add to this train of thought: different diets might change the use of the incoming calories in more or less favorable ways. If you hold calories constant, but otherwise vary the diet, conceivably the body could respond with differing amounts of muscular hypertrophy, cell repair, etc. Given that different diets result in different impacts to various hormone levels, it is (in my view) worth consideration.
Interesting. So is it sugar, lithium, gut and system biome, or God? (Lots of God in our decision-making, apparently beliefs make things important.) Do I have a shred of science of my own? Not going to "think" about it, evidence please.
I strip the sugars pretty heavily from my diet now. But I ate a pint of ice cream, a big bowl of Lucky Charms, and supermarket bagged bread every day for over a year and didn't get even slightly fat. So maybe there's not a single known answer here.
Given what you just shared, I'd guess your metabolism is quite high. That just means it takes more for you to put on weight. If you're young then this even less of an issue. For me, a lot of sugar has about the same effect as a lot of alcohol because they break down into glucose all the same. Didn't use to be like this but gotten more noticable with age for me.
Refined sugar is evil. Food companies use this to sell more, lookup "bliss point". Sugar is also addictive. We are not equipped to deal with this.
Nutrition science is recovering but it was set back by some bad research that should have been abandoned post WW2. Lookup the origin of calorie counting. Since you're cutting out sugar from your diet I'm assuming you understand precisely how bad something like the standard American diet is for your health.
Insulin is key to weight gain and loss. If you struggle with high insulin levels then you cannot lose weight because your body doesn't burn fat when insulin is high.
I believe (based on what I've read) that weight gain and loss is not a mystery. If someone is fat it is because of what they eat. You may wish to find a specific chemical reaction at the core but the body is a complex system. You make one change and it will effect something else. This is what should have been studied in place of "calories". Hormones regulate and we mess with them by putting bad food into our bodies, we fix that by not putting bad food into our bodies.
Therefore, I see no reason to say that we don't know why people are fat. We know precisely why people are fat.
Which is sugar or too many calories altogether? About time some actual experts joined the threads or we'll just be talking past each other. I'm simply doubting the absolute simplicity that you are presenting, without saying that you are wrong.
Nothing wrong with taking out the refined sugar IMHO. I don't even like the supermarket bread, I need real bakery stuff now.
I've been doing this long enough and I know this stuff well.
If you want a simple answer there is one. It's all about the nutritional quality of the food you eat. Everything is down stream from that.
We can go into all the specifics but it doesn't change the fundamentals. Moreover, given just how complex biological systems are you are of course going to have things like gut health play a role but it doesn't change the fact that if you eat the wrong stuff you wreck your gut. This in turn will create more complexities but the solution though is somewhat simple. Stop eating and give your body a break. This is why fasting is super useful.
You talk about going to a bakery to get "real stuff" unfortunately bread is excess carbohydrates (like sugar) no matter what. Unless you're physically active you should probably just cut down on bread altogether. Bakery stuff could be made with love and care which would make it a better quality food but it's not nutritionally important. It's just rocket fuel for your muscles and you don't need a lot of it.
> Now, obesity causes diabetes. That much is indisputable.
The odds-ratios you quote still just means obesity is correlated with diabetes. They could both be caused by the same thing, for instance an inflammatory diet. Or diabetes could cause obesity (temporally this doesn't seem to make sense, obese people go on to develop type-2 diabetes. But there could be a pre-diabetic state that we don't currently understand/measure which, when entered, leads to obesity.)