Slime Mold Time Mold have the theory that the rise in anorexia (mostly in young women) is an adverse reaction to whatever's causing the obesity epidemic. So basically same theory.
> Imagine your fat sensor is even more buggered than mine. Imagine it always reads 0%, whatever the true amount of fat you're carrying is.
I don't think the sensor measures absolute amounts. There is on system in the body that takes a census of "total fat cells and their current contents" and I don't think such a mechanism exists for anything else in the body.
I suspect the sensor measures fat flux, or even "available energy" flux. In a metabolically healthy person, fat flux corresponds to available fat, because lipolysis constantly causes FFA release from your adipose tissue unless you JUST stuffed yourself. A few hours later, glucose and FFAs from intake are put to good use (either to build stuff, to burn, or stored in adipose tissue) and lipolysis starts up again.
But if this fat flux from adipose tissue is somehow not sending the right signal, e.g. by not "burning cleanly" in the mitochondria...
Yes, all on the same page here. It's hard to imagine how a total fat census would work, but something like 'amount of fat released when insulin drops a bit' would probably be a good proxy, or even 'amount of energy produced in mitochondria in response to insulin drop'.
I don't know why the Molds are so pro-lithium. Natalia completely debunked it as an explanation for obesity (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium), which criticisms they've never addressed and apparently she has sent them many messages about this, to which they've never responded.
Which is why we've stopped trusting them. They're still very interesting though!
It does seem to me that the lithium thing might well be involved in, say, extra obesity for mechanics, but to me everything is screaming PUFA. But the Molds don't seem to agree, and they are very clever and well informed, so I would like to know why.
You've actually met them haven't you? Can you get a response from them in person?
SM TM have written a reply to my own "Seed oils explain the 8 mysteries" post. Not sure why they haven't officially replied to Natalia's critique. Will ask.
The tricky thing is, this isn't Sherlock Holmes. Just because carbs and sugar and calories have an alibi doesn't prove seed oils did it - we can't use the process of elimination because there might be hundreds of suspects in the room that match the data points that we haven't even looked at yet.
Oh totes, which is why, although my intuition keeps screaming: "Seed Oilz! Seed Oilz! Seed Oilz!!!", I am trying my very best to keep an open mind on the subject and launching pitiless attacks on anyone who claims that it's seed oils.
I did not find SMTM's reply to you particularly convincing. There are some more mysteries (principally altitude and occupation), which indeed might be explained by lithium or other environmental contaminant, but "This only explains most of the problem" is not a strong counter-argument.....
I think I lose all respect for them at that point.
They made a good case for 'obesity is modern and weird', but if they can't be bothered to debate when someone's carefully demolished their idea in detail then they're just ignoring reality and going "nah nah nah" with their fingers in their ears. It makes me wonder what other crap they've smuggled into "A Chemical Hunger".
Anorexia-wise, it looks like mammal internal comms are deliberately obfuscated and different from person to person, it's thought maybe as a defence against parasites hacking the system!
There are drugs that mess with signals that work well for some people and just don't work for others.
So something that deadens the 'fat quantity signal' might well have the opposite effect in some people, and no effect in some others.
Ah, another trio of posts on one of my favorite topics. Couple of quibbles with this one:
Your second type invited recollection of the various men I've known who have complained of excessive appetite. None of us have ever been obese -- all unusually large and strong with a tendency to add some flab around the midsection during periods of depression.. Generally, people who see me eat are shocked that I'm not fat. Perhaps my thermostat wasn't really that off, given the PUFAs and emulsifiers in my diet,.
Your discussion of anorexia is a bit wide of the mark, though. It's an odd thing and is practically a field of study unto itself now that you can't be expected to know. Here are a couple of tidbits. One way to look at it is as an addiction to being hungry. Anorexics are, like addicts, notorious liars, and one saying she isn't hungry doesn't mean any more than an addict saying that no of course he isn't high. After recorvery, or in moments of clarity, they'll admit to enjoying the experience of being underfed - sometimes in a "yay, this feeling means I'm losing weight!" (a direct quote from an anorexic) or with a sense of energetic well-being (which I'll address momentarily). The first of these, studies show, is dopaminergic: minimizing food intake becomes more strongly the target for some rare few neural systems, bringing a feeling of success. It's a contest against the food, against the prying eyes of one's parents, against one's body, etc. It's exciting and motivating (but I already said dopamine, so I repeat myself). The second of these relates to an odd quirk of mammalian metabolism, where an animal that is approaching starvation suddenly experiences a burst of energy. The hypothesized purpose of this is to motivate the animal to leave whatever food-poor region it is in and seek out greener fields afar. The anorexic is one who learns to surf this wave of energy as long as it lasts (before suffering through a period of low-energy, usually marked by isolating and watching tiktok videos or whatever). Finally, for those adapted to fasting (as anorexics certainly are), eating anything at all is unpleasant. Especially if one were riding that starvation wave at the time. As a practitioner of intermittent fasting for approaching a decade, I find that I can cruise all day without food, feeling light and clear-headed and energetic. Eating triggers the rest-and-digest response. Anorexics are hit even harder by eating, especially since their stomachs have shrunk.
So far, I've just been regurgitating (something of a bulimia joke) the scientific consensus on anorexia. Here's an additional theory of my own: it's HPFs, too: highly processed foods. Anyone who wants to feel healthy would benefit from keeping (even quite informally) a food/energy journal, which tracks how various foods make you feel. You've done that, which is how you eliminated sulfites. Most people, especially most young people, don't. But some of us are more sensitive to changes in how we feel than others, especially food-related changes (a well-studied example of what they call one-trial learning is where you eat some food, get sick [coincidentally or not], and then can't eat that food again for years or perhaps ever). Anorexics often begin by eliminating specific foods from their diets, starting with heavy, rich, inflammatory, or hard-to-digest foods (for instance, good luck finding an anorexic teenage girl who has enjoyed a chicken-fried beef steak lately or indeed at all). Because in a standard household these days, a preponderance of calories come from processed foods, eliminating everything that makes a sensitive person feel bad when she eats it leaves only plain greek yogurt, leafy green vegetables without [sulfite-and-emulsifier-heavy] bottled dressings, and a little bit of fruit and almonds.
I'd dare say that nobody raised on a diet of abundant fish, fruit,' green vegetables, rice, and sweet potatoes would end up anorexic.
Anorexia, yeah, what would I know? But if I'm pontificating about weight homeostats I should note that they could go wrong either way, and I can imagine what the opposite way would look like, and I can imagine how that would get treated by the branch of medicine whose job is to blame the victim for things that they don't understand..
So I make the prediction that my theory implies, as a good philosopher should, and let's see how it pans out.
Ah! I've been assuming that you were spectacularly fat! I'm having trouble squaring 'eats ice-cream in gallons and hangs around on weight-loss blogs' with 'normal weight'.
Why would you complain about having a vast appetite if it doesn't make you overweight? That just sounds like you're eating what you need to eat. When I was sporty I used to eat a hell of a lot. Rather a pleasant experience, as I remember!
You know, that's actually an interesting question. It has something to do with distorted self image on the one hand and the lifelong sense of being out of control on the other. I was frequently criticized as a child for appearing to live to eat rather than eat to live. I've recovered from the negative psychological effects, but it's still strange always having such an appetite. And yes, I work out every day, and although I weigh a ton, I'm also tall and muscular, even in these my middle years.
Most of my interest in weight loss at this point is prophylactic. In the sense that when I look at how much I eat, it is impossible to shake the feeling that I'm going to become terrifically fat in old age if I don't do something.
Ah, that is very wise! My feeling is that obesity is a most unnatural and unhistorical state, definitely a disease in the Darwinian sense, and common in us moderns, which leaves us with recently evolved disease or recent environmental poison as the possible causes, by Cochran.
Probably something that started in the fifties and really got going in America in the eighties and Europe in the nineties.
Evidence from non-farming peoples is relevant as to what humans can live happily on, but they won't have the adaptations we've got from thousands of years of farming, so we've got to interpret that carefully, carbs and alcohol could be bad for them but not for us. And the descendants of the proto-indo-Europeans have special adaptations for milk too.
The patterns aren't right for disease, so it must be a poison. It does seem to be something to do with our diet, and everyone's agreed that processed food is bad, so I'm thinking it must be something that lives in processed food.
Obviously we've tested everything in processed food for short-term toxicity in rats, so we'd know if it was something obvious like that. So the effect must be long-term and probably cumulative.
That's screaming PUFAs, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was one of the million other novel chemicals, even something leaking out of the ubiquitious plastic packaging.
I think if you can avoid eating processed food you'll be fine. Good luck!
Assuming you're an American, you seem to have been very lucky to avoid the curse. Have you by any chance avoided processed food these last twenty years?
To reassure you that you're normal, which I'm sure you know intellectually but perhaps not emotionally, all my life I was admired for my heroic eating and drinking. When I was really sporty I was probably eating as much as it's physically possible to eat most days and washing it down with buckets of booze.
You could do that, in the old days....
As long as you're healthy, and you are, you can just trust your appetite to work to maintain your weight at the right levels. Doesn't matter what you do, you'll eat appropriately.
Slime Mold Time Mold have the theory that the rise in anorexia (mostly in young women) is an adverse reaction to whatever's causing the obesity epidemic. So basically same theory.
> Imagine your fat sensor is even more buggered than mine. Imagine it always reads 0%, whatever the true amount of fat you're carrying is.
I don't think the sensor measures absolute amounts. There is on system in the body that takes a census of "total fat cells and their current contents" and I don't think such a mechanism exists for anything else in the body.
I suspect the sensor measures fat flux, or even "available energy" flux. In a metabolically healthy person, fat flux corresponds to available fat, because lipolysis constantly causes FFA release from your adipose tissue unless you JUST stuffed yourself. A few hours later, glucose and FFAs from intake are put to good use (either to build stuff, to burn, or stored in adipose tissue) and lipolysis starts up again.
But if this fat flux from adipose tissue is somehow not sending the right signal, e.g. by not "burning cleanly" in the mitochondria...
Yes, all on the same page here. It's hard to imagine how a total fat census would work, but something like 'amount of fat released when insulin drops a bit' would probably be a good proxy, or even 'amount of energy produced in mitochondria in response to insulin drop'.
I don't know why the Molds are so pro-lithium. Natalia completely debunked it as an explanation for obesity (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium), which criticisms they've never addressed and apparently she has sent them many messages about this, to which they've never responded.
Which is why we've stopped trusting them. They're still very interesting though!
It does seem to me that the lithium thing might well be involved in, say, extra obesity for mechanics, but to me everything is screaming PUFA. But the Molds don't seem to agree, and they are very clever and well informed, so I would like to know why.
You've actually met them haven't you? Can you get a response from them in person?
SM TM have written a reply to my own "Seed oils explain the 8 mysteries" post. Not sure why they haven't officially replied to Natalia's critique. Will ask.
The tricky thing is, this isn't Sherlock Holmes. Just because carbs and sugar and calories have an alibi doesn't prove seed oils did it - we can't use the process of elimination because there might be hundreds of suspects in the room that match the data points that we haven't even looked at yet.
Oh totes, which is why, although my intuition keeps screaming: "Seed Oilz! Seed Oilz! Seed Oilz!!!", I am trying my very best to keep an open mind on the subject and launching pitiless attacks on anyone who claims that it's seed oils.
I did not find SMTM's reply to you particularly convincing. There are some more mysteries (principally altitude and occupation), which indeed might be explained by lithium or other environmental contaminant, but "This only explains most of the problem" is not a strong counter-argument.....
SM TM replied with a screenshot of a Tweet saying: "You don't actually have to win any debates, you can just let time prove people wrong."
I think I lose all respect for them at that point.
They made a good case for 'obesity is modern and weird', but if they can't be bothered to debate when someone's carefully demolished their idea in detail then they're just ignoring reality and going "nah nah nah" with their fingers in their ears. It makes me wonder what other crap they've smuggled into "A Chemical Hunger".
Anorexia-wise, it looks like mammal internal comms are deliberately obfuscated and different from person to person, it's thought maybe as a defence against parasites hacking the system!
There are drugs that mess with signals that work well for some people and just don't work for others.
So something that deadens the 'fat quantity signal' might well have the opposite effect in some people, and no effect in some others.
Ah, another trio of posts on one of my favorite topics. Couple of quibbles with this one:
Your second type invited recollection of the various men I've known who have complained of excessive appetite. None of us have ever been obese -- all unusually large and strong with a tendency to add some flab around the midsection during periods of depression.. Generally, people who see me eat are shocked that I'm not fat. Perhaps my thermostat wasn't really that off, given the PUFAs and emulsifiers in my diet,.
Your discussion of anorexia is a bit wide of the mark, though. It's an odd thing and is practically a field of study unto itself now that you can't be expected to know. Here are a couple of tidbits. One way to look at it is as an addiction to being hungry. Anorexics are, like addicts, notorious liars, and one saying she isn't hungry doesn't mean any more than an addict saying that no of course he isn't high. After recorvery, or in moments of clarity, they'll admit to enjoying the experience of being underfed - sometimes in a "yay, this feeling means I'm losing weight!" (a direct quote from an anorexic) or with a sense of energetic well-being (which I'll address momentarily). The first of these, studies show, is dopaminergic: minimizing food intake becomes more strongly the target for some rare few neural systems, bringing a feeling of success. It's a contest against the food, against the prying eyes of one's parents, against one's body, etc. It's exciting and motivating (but I already said dopamine, so I repeat myself). The second of these relates to an odd quirk of mammalian metabolism, where an animal that is approaching starvation suddenly experiences a burst of energy. The hypothesized purpose of this is to motivate the animal to leave whatever food-poor region it is in and seek out greener fields afar. The anorexic is one who learns to surf this wave of energy as long as it lasts (before suffering through a period of low-energy, usually marked by isolating and watching tiktok videos or whatever). Finally, for those adapted to fasting (as anorexics certainly are), eating anything at all is unpleasant. Especially if one were riding that starvation wave at the time. As a practitioner of intermittent fasting for approaching a decade, I find that I can cruise all day without food, feeling light and clear-headed and energetic. Eating triggers the rest-and-digest response. Anorexics are hit even harder by eating, especially since their stomachs have shrunk.
So far, I've just been regurgitating (something of a bulimia joke) the scientific consensus on anorexia. Here's an additional theory of my own: it's HPFs, too: highly processed foods. Anyone who wants to feel healthy would benefit from keeping (even quite informally) a food/energy journal, which tracks how various foods make you feel. You've done that, which is how you eliminated sulfites. Most people, especially most young people, don't. But some of us are more sensitive to changes in how we feel than others, especially food-related changes (a well-studied example of what they call one-trial learning is where you eat some food, get sick [coincidentally or not], and then can't eat that food again for years or perhaps ever). Anorexics often begin by eliminating specific foods from their diets, starting with heavy, rich, inflammatory, or hard-to-digest foods (for instance, good luck finding an anorexic teenage girl who has enjoyed a chicken-fried beef steak lately or indeed at all). Because in a standard household these days, a preponderance of calories come from processed foods, eliminating everything that makes a sensitive person feel bad when she eats it leaves only plain greek yogurt, leafy green vegetables without [sulfite-and-emulsifier-heavy] bottled dressings, and a little bit of fruit and almonds.
I'd dare say that nobody raised on a diet of abundant fish, fruit,' green vegetables, rice, and sweet potatoes would end up anorexic.
Anorexia, yeah, what would I know? But if I'm pontificating about weight homeostats I should note that they could go wrong either way, and I can imagine what the opposite way would look like, and I can imagine how that would get treated by the branch of medicine whose job is to blame the victim for things that they don't understand..
So I make the prediction that my theory implies, as a good philosopher should, and let's see how it pans out.
> None of us have ever been obese
Ah! I've been assuming that you were spectacularly fat! I'm having trouble squaring 'eats ice-cream in gallons and hangs around on weight-loss blogs' with 'normal weight'.
Why would you complain about having a vast appetite if it doesn't make you overweight? That just sounds like you're eating what you need to eat. When I was sporty I used to eat a hell of a lot. Rather a pleasant experience, as I remember!
You know, that's actually an interesting question. It has something to do with distorted self image on the one hand and the lifelong sense of being out of control on the other. I was frequently criticized as a child for appearing to live to eat rather than eat to live. I've recovered from the negative psychological effects, but it's still strange always having such an appetite. And yes, I work out every day, and although I weigh a ton, I'm also tall and muscular, even in these my middle years.
Most of my interest in weight loss at this point is prophylactic. In the sense that when I look at how much I eat, it is impossible to shake the feeling that I'm going to become terrifically fat in old age if I don't do something.
Ah, that is very wise! My feeling is that obesity is a most unnatural and unhistorical state, definitely a disease in the Darwinian sense, and common in us moderns, which leaves us with recently evolved disease or recent environmental poison as the possible causes, by Cochran.
Probably something that started in the fifties and really got going in America in the eighties and Europe in the nineties.
Evidence from non-farming peoples is relevant as to what humans can live happily on, but they won't have the adaptations we've got from thousands of years of farming, so we've got to interpret that carefully, carbs and alcohol could be bad for them but not for us. And the descendants of the proto-indo-Europeans have special adaptations for milk too.
The patterns aren't right for disease, so it must be a poison. It does seem to be something to do with our diet, and everyone's agreed that processed food is bad, so I'm thinking it must be something that lives in processed food.
Obviously we've tested everything in processed food for short-term toxicity in rats, so we'd know if it was something obvious like that. So the effect must be long-term and probably cumulative.
That's screaming PUFAs, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was one of the million other novel chemicals, even something leaking out of the ubiquitious plastic packaging.
I think if you can avoid eating processed food you'll be fine. Good luck!
Assuming you're an American, you seem to have been very lucky to avoid the curse. Have you by any chance avoided processed food these last twenty years?
To reassure you that you're normal, which I'm sure you know intellectually but perhaps not emotionally, all my life I was admired for my heroic eating and drinking. When I was really sporty I was probably eating as much as it's physically possible to eat most days and washing it down with buckets of booze.
You could do that, in the old days....
As long as you're healthy, and you are, you can just trust your appetite to work to maintain your weight at the right levels. Doesn't matter what you do, you'll eat appropriately.