Site is a link aggregation of a series of blog posts that cite various studies about the mystery of why the obesity rate is increasing, and why the rate of increase is itself accelerating. Authors make a compelling argument that normal homeostatic processes (the theorized lipostat specifically) tend to keep people within a certain BMI range. Authors argue that environmental contamination is breaking the lipostat, driving obesity rates upwards, and faster where there's more contamination.
Interesting read and a great reason to switch to :vegan-v: with a focus on not buying anything wrapped in plastic.
Yeah, I've read some interesting articles talking about this, and comparing it to an old 'study' where they paid prisoners to try to gain weight, and gave them unlimited food, and most couldn't gain more than a few pounds, and the couple that gained more lost it as soon as the 'study' ended. Obviously, pretty unethical, but shows that weight regulation is pretty intrinsic.
Seen quite a few theories about what specifically it could be. Most fleshed out one was environmental lithium, but as much as the theory cited a bunch of stuff, I think the amounts are just too low. Microplastics is possible, since the obesity epidemic kinda started in about 1970, at least in the US, and plastics really got popular in the 60s, but we don't really have great evidence, just that the timeline fits.
But lots of other things are possible. Seed oils get blamed, since they more or less replaces other fats in the SAD in the 70s-ish, but we don't see people losing weight after stopping seed oils, and also I just find the idea of that kind of implausible. Medications in the water also get blamed, basically from us drinking treated sewer water, but again, find that unlikely and just appealing to 'gross factor'.
Could just be any number of food or drink additives though, or other cost cutting measures from things that are considered 'safe' to store food in or around. Its just a needle-in-a-haystack problem; there are probably tens or hundreds of thousands of possible culprits, and the true cause could even only happen when you're exposed to like three of them at once or something.
Edit: Oh hey, didn't realize this was 'slimemoldtimemold', the guy that AFAIK popularized the lithium theory. Missed the big link at the top saying that lol. Already read a lot of this then, though I'm interested enough I'll probably skim to see if I missed any of these articles. He, like a lot of rationalists, are politically very lib and often straight-up reactionary, but I do think they write well in their wheelhouse, like in analyzing scientific studies, or talking about pharmacopeia issues.
They actually bring up those prisoner studies as an example of lipostat function. The body will kind of drift back to its normal weight. The big contaminant they suspect is PFAs, since they're ubiquitous to all industrial nations and their contamination map is nearly a perfect match with any given obesity map. But PFAs are a group of several thousand different chemicals, most of which are poorly studied but which generally disrupt endocrine function.
Yeah, didn't realize that this blog is where I first read several of these arguments; the link was for A Chemical Hunger, and I was familiar with Slime Mold Time Mold, which it turns out is the same blog, just different name. What I get for skimming rather than reading before leaving a comment haha
At the time I read it, it lacked several of the side-bars and edits it has now, as I seem to remember them going harder on Lithium as the culprit, but I don't know if that's because of edits, or because I misread or forgot exactly what it said