Paradoxical Reactions

Anorexia Is A Type of Obesity?

I was wondering about anorexia. It seems to be another 'disease of modernity'.

Anorexia sure looks like a 'deranged lipostat'.

Anorexics are sometimes catastrophically underweight. They often know that they are in trouble, and should eat more. But they "just can't". They're not hungry. They don't think about food at all unless someone's on their case, and they come up with strategies to avoid being nagged.

There's a whole subreddit for people who are underweight and can't do anything about it.

This happened to a member of my own family at one point, and they were subjected to all the usual patient-blaming and psychological witchcraft, which did no good whatsoever. Until a physical cause was found, quite by accident as I remember, and fixed, at which point the problem resolved itself immediately and has never recurred.

This experience showed me pretty firmly that psychiatrists have absolutely no idea how to tell a mental disorder from a physical one, and no idea what to do in either case. They do lots of things, they’re not bad people, they try their best. And their patients waste away and die horribly anyway.¹

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I think that polyunsaturated fats are interfering with leptin signalling somehow. https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/pufas-cause-obesity

And so that doesn't fit. Seed oilz should make you hungry. They should fix anorexia, not cause it.

What could be going on?

Imagine that some polyunsaturated fat, or one of its breakdown products or metabolites, or something else in processed food, some other chemical poison, can interact with leptin detectors. It would be like a key that almost, but not quite, fits a lock.

It could do that in such a way that it binds badly to the receptor but blocks the attachment site and prevents real leptin getting through.

It might eventually detach, but then not get broken down like real leptin does. So it's still hanging around, and can reattach to another receptor, with the process repeating a few times, until some other process eventually latches on to it and turns it into something else.

In that case you've got deadened leptin receptors, you can't see how much fat you're carrying and your brain thinks it needs more fat reserves. You get hungry.

But the strange molecule might also attach in such a way that it causes the receptor to fire. It might then stick there, and keep causing the receptor to fire, or just stick there and block the receptor for a while.

Depending on the rate and chances of all these possible processes, your brain might think you're fatter than you need to be, and turn off your appetite.

What would determine which effect predominates?

Some sort of polymorphism of the leptin receptors that affects how they bind to the strange molecules that they weren't designed to either recognise or reject.

There are quite often such polymorphisms in receptors, they all work in the same way for the specific molecules they're designed to attach, but they work differently for other molecules. This is either because evolution doesn't care, or because various diseases and poisons can also latch onto these receptors, and so the polymorphisms are in mixed-strategy equilibrium with some other evolving process.

And this process in the leptin receptors is going to be independent of whatever process is interfering with leptin production, so you might have someone who’s bad at making leptin but also sensing leptin that isn’t there, so that the effects balance out roughly.

I'd imagine that there's a type of person who reacts to seed oilz (or whatever is interfering with the lipostat) by developing an overeating disorder, and a type that reacts by developing an undereating disorder. And maybe there's a type where the effect doesn't add up to much either way at first.

Both disorders should be fixed by reducing the amount of circulating poison, whatever it actually is².

Only a lunatic would recommend a weight-loss diet to an anorexic. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

Renounce All Polyunsaturated Evil.

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One thing that worries me about this idea is that anorexia doesn't seem to have risen in parallel with overweight. Both have risen over recent time, but the curves don't look the same.

But that’s not necessarily a problem.

Anorexia is generally not much of a problem in an environment where there’s always food around. You’re not carrying much of a reserve against famine, but there’s never a famine.

Undereating is generally considered to be a mental problem, and if you look at the associated risk factors, it’s a classic case of ‘we don’t know, let’s blame the patient and a load of mysterious genetic and environmental factors and whatever political problem we like to blame for things’.

Until suddenly the problem becomes so bad that the sufferer starts eating their own body, at which point there’s a rapid progression into cachexia³ and death.

No one likes excessively thin boys, but excessively thin girls seem to be objects of some envy, if anything. Christ knows why. It sure doesn’t look either healthy or attractive to me.

So I think that anorexia is both not as much of a problem, and a much more serious problem, than obesity.

And it’s probably easier to force yourself to eat when you’re not hungry than it is to force yourself to not eat when you are. I don’t know. I don’t have much experience with either, and I can’t imagine there are many people who do both who can tell us which is easier.

All those things are going to affect what the statistics look like.

1. Give them their due. They’re doing a lot better than traditional Western Medicine did!

2. I’m not saying it’s seed oilz. But it’s seed oilz.

3. Literally Greek for ‘bad state’. When medicine calls something ‘bad state’, you don’t want to go looking for pictures.