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.
The author is apparently a Rationalist, so their politics are guaranteed techbro dogshit, but what this series of posts is doing is just linking a bunch of actual peer reviewed studies to discuss the common finding of obesity going up near environmentally contaminated waters.
Oh god no, fuck rationalists. I view everything of theirs with immediate distrust
I read the whole thing. the author has lib brain in a lot of places but this is well-researched. it's not so much making the case that one particular contaminant is to blame (though they've apparently slowly convinced themselves that lithium exposure through drinking water is at least fairly correlated) as that it's environmental contaminants and not the behavioral choices of people that's led to the global obesity epidemic. they make a pretty strong case that industrial run-off from the petroleum, coal, and natural gas industry is a huge factor, and that if one of the contaminants is water-born, well water and surface water bearing industrial run-off is directly to blame.
this series was very worth reading.
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they're saying that changes to diet don't reliably produce weight change in either direction over the long-term - the effects of diet are usually erased within a year or two, except in around 5% of cases. (they note one exception to this, which is veganism). like there have been studies done where they paid prisoners to gain as much weight as they could as fast as they could and people barely gained any weight and lost it as soon as the experiment was ended, faster than they'd put it on in the first place. that is, the body tries to maintain homeostasis and changes of more than about 10-20 pounds in either direction are extremely difficult. their hypothesis is that obesity is a chemical effect on the body - something breaks the homeostatic impulse and makes people's bodies believe they're starving even when they're extremely clearly not. we know this is a possibility because many drugs (especially psychiatric drugs) reliably induce significant weight gain or loss.
The Rationalists have been turning on the chemical hunger people. There's a lot of suspicious cherrypicking going on in the choices of studies, that sort of thing.
I mean yeah, I read the article and it states that people are eating less fats and less carbs and sugar than in the past, but are somehow consuming 400 calories/20% more calories than in the past, with the same macronutrient split. So where do the excess calories come from lmao?
different people, no? like if one group cuts fats, they're necessarily eating more carbs and protein, while another group that cuts carbs is going to wind up eating more fats and protein?