Registering a prediction about the potential error: "can't be bad for mice" doesn't necessarily mean "can't reduce mouse metabolism and fatten them up." It'd be good for mice to be fatter with low metabolisms during the winter. I think Brad has suggested before that PUFA-heavy foods are relatively more abundant in the fall/winter and less in the spring, so "getting fat from this" could be exactly what they're genetically programmed for.
A detail i haven’t seen you go into: other types of protein. We didn’t used to eat straight up muscle meat. Traditional food contains glycine and collagen in much higher amounts. Same for a predator in the wild; they wouldn’t eat just muscle meat
I don't know. I've no idea what mice's natural diet looks like in terms of fat content.
That would get us out of the paradox. We could then believe that PUFAs are bad and protein makes it even worse or stops us clearing PUFAs for some reason.
But then we have to explain why no-one's ever noticed that if you feed mice PUFAs (together with an excess of protein) they get fat and ill.
This is an experiment a child could do, right? Load of mice, two cages, food with beef fat, food with sunflower oil.... Wait a few months. Weigh mice....
Oh, plenty of people have noticed it. There are studies about it and everything.
I don't think there's any evolutionary aspect necessary to the explanation. We know it's happening in a black box sense, and we have pretty good mechanisms. And we can reverse it.
I don't care about evolution or if we can imagine some way in which it "makes sense." Evolution doesn't "make sense."
> Oh, plenty of people have noticed it. There are studies about it and everything.
Really?
I've no doubt you can produce some studies.
But I imagine that the pro-PUFA side can also produce some studies showing that saturated fats cause weight gain compared to PUFAs. That's what you'd expect if there's no, or very little, signal and the study results are just noise.
Everyone can always produce some studies to support their position. That's why I don't trust the field.
If there's a real, strong signal, if PUFAs really do make mice fat, then the study results should be overwhelmingly in favour of "PUFAs make mice fat". Are they?
And if that's true, why isn't it settled science? Why does anyone believe anything other than 'PUFAs are the cause of obesity'? Should be a slam dunk.
No I think they can't. It's really that we're right and they're wrong, and they ignore the evidence on purpose and purposefully obscure it with "high-fat, western diets."
It's not settled science because science is done by people. People are famously fallible and have incentives. The lab coats don't change that.
Oh wow! I guess, not having looked myself, that I must at least provisionally bow to your superior knowledge of the state of the literature.
In which case no paradox:
PUFAs are the cause of the problem, but we can't clear them quickly in the presence of excess isoleucine; give up PUFAs entirely, restrict isoleucine and we're done.
Rapid weight loss, probably right down to BMI 20 for the average person, and with the weight go most of the diseases of modernity. At which point you can start eating isoleucine again, as long as you never eat much PUFA.
And we have solid support from the literature.
(And although it doesn't apparently matter to anyone except me, my evolutionary quibbles are gone too)
All we need to do is sit back smugly and wait for 'no-PUFAs, little isoleucine' to go viral, which it inevitably will if it works.
Once everyone's well again, biochemists will be able to work out all the little details.
It's been great! Thank you for your inspiration and your good company on this surprisingly short road to total victory over a lot of the great problems of the world, which only last year looked really mysterious. Next one to cross the pond gets bought unlimited coffee when visiting the other?
Also ha ha slime-mold-time-mold, we said it wasn't lithium. But 'A Chemical Hunger' was still an inspiring read.
No, the hard work is still ahead. There are plenty of things "we know' that are absolutely wrong, especially in nutrition.
Yes, I think that almost all people in nutrition, especially those in power/institutions, are basically corrupt liars. They probably believe their own bullshit, and so it's some sort of science equivalent of manslaughter, not murder.
But sometimes we know it's actual, deliberate lies, e.g. with Ancel Keys about saturated fats, the whole lipid-heart hypothesis, well-documented in Nina Teicholz's book The Big Fat Surprise. It's a literal conspiracy, if you will.
Same is true for many thing even today. Mainstream nutrition science "knows" that only eating meat gives you scurvy (false, I tried it) and you can't poop (false, I tried it), and many other things that are more difficult to disprove just because of the timeframe.
And if you look at their studies, it's not that they got studies that show this, it's that they fabricated the data. The fiber stuff is totally debunked in "The Fiber Menace." The studies literally show fiber gives you butt cancer, and then the researchers conclude their own study with "But everybody knows you should eat fiber cause it's good for you!" and that's the part that is quoted.
This is why all progress in nutrition science comes from idiots like us, who are not "professionals" - we won't lose our mortgage and our car doesn't get repo'd when we deviate from the dogma of the holy church.
Yes, totally agree, if something's unambiguously true and my attempt to reason about it in evolutionary terms says that it can't be true then that means my reasoning is wrong. I'm fine with that, this stuff is hard.
Registering a prediction about the potential error: "can't be bad for mice" doesn't necessarily mean "can't reduce mouse metabolism and fatten them up." It'd be good for mice to be fatter with low metabolisms during the winter. I think Brad has suggested before that PUFA-heavy foods are relatively more abundant in the fall/winter and less in the spring, so "getting fat from this" could be exactly what they're genetically programmed for.
That *might* be true for mice, although I do not believe it myself, because there are better signals for approaching winter than "suddenly PUFAs".
But that would only work in temperate-climate animals that go sluggish in winter, not in e.g. humans, who are African animals living far from home.
And why, in either case, would the presence of isoleucine matter?
A detail i haven’t seen you go into: other types of protein. We didn’t used to eat straight up muscle meat. Traditional food contains glycine and collagen in much higher amounts. Same for a predator in the wild; they wouldn’t eat just muscle meat
Yes, that sure sounds like the sort of thing that might be worth investigating! But I don't know anything about it.
How much PUFA is in earthworms? By weight, grains are actually extremely low. If a mouse would eat a whole kilogram of wheat, it'd get 5g of LA.
I'm not convinced that wild mice eating wild mice things would've gotten very much PUFA at all.
I don't know. I've no idea what mice's natural diet looks like in terms of fat content.
That would get us out of the paradox. We could then believe that PUFAs are bad and protein makes it even worse or stops us clearing PUFAs for some reason.
But then we have to explain why no-one's ever noticed that if you feed mice PUFAs (together with an excess of protein) they get fat and ill.
This is an experiment a child could do, right? Load of mice, two cages, food with beef fat, food with sunflower oil.... Wait a few months. Weigh mice....
Oh, plenty of people have noticed it. There are studies about it and everything.
I don't think there's any evolutionary aspect necessary to the explanation. We know it's happening in a black box sense, and we have pretty good mechanisms. And we can reverse it.
I don't care about evolution or if we can imagine some way in which it "makes sense." Evolution doesn't "make sense."
Maybe making mice fat makes sense to evolution.
> Oh, plenty of people have noticed it. There are studies about it and everything.
Really?
I've no doubt you can produce some studies.
But I imagine that the pro-PUFA side can also produce some studies showing that saturated fats cause weight gain compared to PUFAs. That's what you'd expect if there's no, or very little, signal and the study results are just noise.
Everyone can always produce some studies to support their position. That's why I don't trust the field.
If there's a real, strong signal, if PUFAs really do make mice fat, then the study results should be overwhelmingly in favour of "PUFAs make mice fat". Are they?
And if that's true, why isn't it settled science? Why does anyone believe anything other than 'PUFAs are the cause of obesity'? Should be a slam dunk.
No I think they can't. It's really that we're right and they're wrong, and they ignore the evidence on purpose and purposefully obscure it with "high-fat, western diets."
It's not settled science because science is done by people. People are famously fallible and have incentives. The lab coats don't change that.
Oh wow! I guess, not having looked myself, that I must at least provisionally bow to your superior knowledge of the state of the literature.
In which case no paradox:
PUFAs are the cause of the problem, but we can't clear them quickly in the presence of excess isoleucine; give up PUFAs entirely, restrict isoleucine and we're done.
Rapid weight loss, probably right down to BMI 20 for the average person, and with the weight go most of the diseases of modernity. At which point you can start eating isoleucine again, as long as you never eat much PUFA.
And we have solid support from the literature.
(And although it doesn't apparently matter to anyone except me, my evolutionary quibbles are gone too)
All we need to do is sit back smugly and wait for 'no-PUFAs, little isoleucine' to go viral, which it inevitably will if it works.
Once everyone's well again, biochemists will be able to work out all the little details.
It's been great! Thank you for your inspiration and your good company on this surprisingly short road to total victory over a lot of the great problems of the world, which only last year looked really mysterious. Next one to cross the pond gets bought unlimited coffee when visiting the other?
Also ha ha slime-mold-time-mold, we said it wasn't lithium. But 'A Chemical Hunger' was still an inspiring read.
No, the hard work is still ahead. There are plenty of things "we know' that are absolutely wrong, especially in nutrition.
Yes, I think that almost all people in nutrition, especially those in power/institutions, are basically corrupt liars. They probably believe their own bullshit, and so it's some sort of science equivalent of manslaughter, not murder.
But sometimes we know it's actual, deliberate lies, e.g. with Ancel Keys about saturated fats, the whole lipid-heart hypothesis, well-documented in Nina Teicholz's book The Big Fat Surprise. It's a literal conspiracy, if you will.
Same is true for many thing even today. Mainstream nutrition science "knows" that only eating meat gives you scurvy (false, I tried it) and you can't poop (false, I tried it), and many other things that are more difficult to disprove just because of the timeframe.
And if you look at their studies, it's not that they got studies that show this, it's that they fabricated the data. The fiber stuff is totally debunked in "The Fiber Menace." The studies literally show fiber gives you butt cancer, and then the researchers conclude their own study with "But everybody knows you should eat fiber cause it's good for you!" and that's the part that is quoted.
This is why all progress in nutrition science comes from idiots like us, who are not "professionals" - we won't lose our mortgage and our car doesn't get repo'd when we deviate from the dogma of the holy church.
Yes, totally agree, if something's unambiguously true and my attempt to reason about it in evolutionary terms says that it can't be true then that means my reasoning is wrong. I'm fine with that, this stuff is hard.