Suppose someone wrote an essay that sought to uncover the cause of climate change. Admitting that the explanation may be multiplex, they mention automobiles, TVs, and light-bulbs. “Any of these could be the real explanation for why the globe has warmed,” they explain, “but personally, my bet is on automobiles,” before laying the striking correlation between automobile adoption and global temperature.
Now you check and—indeed—they never once mentioned the role of greenhouse gasses, which is the factor connecting all of the candidate causes together. In that case, I would be quite exasperated by such an essay, as it would seem to distort, rather than clarify, the underlying mechanism driving climate change.
Similarly, I am exasperated by this essay in your neglect to mention the role of calories. We have overwhelming evidence that weight is determined directly by caloric intake and energy expenditure. There are, of course, sensible questions pertaining to how much of one’s weight can be explained these factors, but no doubt about whether the answer is at least “a great deal.”
The simple theory, as in the case of climate change, would begin by identifying how any potential cause connected to caloric intake and energy expenditure. Now, I may have missed something, but I did not see you do this. From the point of view of someone who already understands this background mechanism well, perhaps this omission makes sense. But as a casual reader, I didn’t quite understand why you believed this theory to be plausible.
I find the “Calories In, Calories Out” paradigm really exasperating. It may be technically correct, but it’s a red herring, useless in practice, because it completely misses the real issue.
The body has a multitude of feedback mechanisms to maintain homeostasis. Weight is usually pretty stable. If you exert willpower to count calories and eat fewer of them, then the predictable response of the body is to reduce energy expenditure and to become hungrier. Neither is pleasant.
The mistaken mainstream scenario goes like this: You have sinned. You’ve been a glutton, but just a little bit. Occasionally, over the years, you’ve indulged yourself in the pleasures of eating and had just a bit too much. But a little here and a little there adds up over the decades and now you’re definitely overweight!
Calories In, CaIories Out. But exercise seems to barely burn more than breathing, unless you’re literally running marathons, so it’s really just about Calories In.
So, if you want to lose the excess weight, then you simply have to Eat Fewer Calories. Ultimately, that’s the only way any diet can work. So let’s try the direct approach: fasting two days in a row per week will do it. (You can still have water, which has no Calories.) Couldn’t be simpler. You exhaust your glycogen stores the first day, so your body has not choice but to switch to burning fat on the second. (Fasting for even longer periods works even better, but there are risks. 48 hours is perfectly safe unless you’ve got a weird medical issue. People do it religiously all the time.)
Continue until you’re back to normal weight. Problem solved, right? Just do it again in a few decades when your gluttony catches up with you again. Right?
Except it doesn’t work like that.
If you try this, and you’re not already so overweight that you fail to sustain the program to hit your target, then when you stop you’ll probably gain most of it back within a year. Not the decades it took you in the first place. If you’re sufficiently overweight, then you’ll lose some, but then gain enough of it back each week between fasts that you stop making progress.
Why?
Somehow the body’s homeostasis program for weight got out of whack. That’s the real issue. That’s the part I’m interested in. Not the guilt/repentance cycle, because that never works. If things are working properly in the first place, then when you indulge, you have more energy and are less hungry. Homeostasis! For normal, healthy people, gaining weight seems to be as hard as losing it!
Why did the “set point” go up, permanently? Why don’t you just get more fidgety and burn it off? Why don’t you just get less hungry for your next meal? I don’t fracking know.
There are a lot of interesting hypotheses. Maybe it’s the fats. Skim the milk! Go vegan! Except whole milk works better for weight loss. Maybe it’s the carbs. Atkins/Keto/Carnivore. /Paleo? No vegan! Maybe it’s only both at once? Maybe it’s the excess fructose building up fat in your liver. Maybe the antibiotics killed off an important strain in your gut flora, and no diet can work until you get it back. It’s a ratchet. Maybe it’s the emulsifiers emulsifying your gut lining, causing irritation. Maybe it’s the omega-6, causing inflammation. Maybe it’s just the ratio with the omega-3? Moar fish! Except mercury. Less fish! Maybe it’s the high–glycemic index foods causing insulin spikes causing insulin resistance. Maybe it’s the low–glycemic index foods not causing spikes not causing satiety. Maybe it’s just not enough fiber. Moar beans. Grains must be made Whole. Maybe it’s the lack of fiber that killed off the strain (and no diet can work until you get it back). Would fermented foods help? Some other probiotics? Which ones? Maybe it’s mysterious chemicals in our packaging. Could be the plasticizers? Preservatives? Pesticides? Maybe it’s the lectins. Beans are bawal. No moar beans. Grains are unWholy. Don’t get me started on all the deadly nightshades. In fact, all the New World Plants are a Paradox. Unless you’re Latino. GMOs are perfectly safe! Except they sometimes add pest-resistance, I mean “natural” pesticides, I mean lectins. Oops. Unless you cook them. Unless they’re soybeans. Or peanuts. Other nuts must be roasted. Other gurus will be roasted too. Because they’re nuts. It’s a racket. And that A1-casein looks suspiciously lectin-like. You need special organic cows instead. Or switch to goat milk. It’s the only way to be sure.
I am not making this up. I have evidence for all of this.
I notice I am Confused about this. No, I am very confused about this. So is everyone else. I think the global warming metaphor has thoroughly broken down. It’s like when no-one knew what was causing scurvy and thought vitriolic elixir, vinegar, or seawater might help. We are that confused about this. No-one knows what the hell is going on, and even if they do, I’ve got ten more hypotheses that sound just as plausible. And have studies. That maybe haven’t been replicated. Le sigh.
I don’t think I can respond to everything in your comment, but let me try to address the main point. As I understand, you say that something is left unexplained by the “Calories in, Calories out” paradigm. That something is explained by your question,
Why did the “set point” go up, permanently?
I think the most likely explanation is simply that modern food is tastier than the more bland food eaten in the past. “Taste” here should be interpreted as capturing all dimensions of the satisfaction of eating, including texture, mouthfeel, and aftertaste. There is also a simple explanation for why typical food has gotten tastier over time; namely, food science has gotten better, corporations have become more efficient at producing and marketing processed foods, and consumer incomes have gotten higher—thus enabling more access and greater choice.
This explanation also perfectly predicts your long paragraph addressing possible causes. Is it fat? Carbs? High-glycemic index foods? Not enough grains? I ask: why couldn’t it be all those things at once?
If the reason why we eat more is because food has gotten tastier, then we should also expect the “cause” to be multifaceted. After all, most people don’t think that there’s only “one thing” that makes food taste good. Taste is more complicated than that, and varies between people.
Reducing the question of “why are we getting obese?” to “why do foods taste good?” doesn’t solve the problem, of course—we still don’t have a full theory of why food tastes good. But, in my opinion, if it’s correct, then it totally deconfuses the proximate mechanism here.
In that sense, I think my CO2 analogy holds quite well. There are many reasons why people omit CO2: electricity, temperature control, transportation etc. And as we’ve gotten richer, those justfications have become more salient, as people can afford to purchase service that provide those benefits, omitting CO2 as a byproduct. Simply knowing this doesn’t mean you’ve solved climate change, of course, but it gets you a lot further than “Why are people burning more CO2 than before? I don’t know; could be anything.”
I think that analogy maps quite well. In both cases we have a net retention of energy—measured in temperature on earth and in weight in humans. I believe there’s the possibility that I’m writing about the metabolic equivalent of CO2 in humans here (both graphs go up and to the right with industrialization). See, we know that the net balance of calories in humans or joules retained on earth is going up. The question is why. I think the answer to “why” is CO2/possibly vegetable oils. As for “how,” from what I understand that is the source of your exasperation—in climate change the answer to “how” is the greenhouse effect—the mechanism. What is it about these substances that cause the energy to be retained? As for this theory, there are a many reasons that I don’t fully and completely understand, so I didn’t want to muse on about them in the OP. I am certainly at fault for your exasperation here.
The following are studies (not an exhaustive list) followed by what I would consider the statements that most closely map to “mechanism”
Here is perhaps the most direct answer for weight gain
Here we posited that excessive dietary intake of linoleic acid (LA), the precursor of AA, would induce endocannabinoid hyperactivity and promote obesity.
Here’s one for inflammation, which from what I know is quite correlated with weight gain:
Omega-6 (n-6) polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) (e.g., arachidonic acid (AA)) and omega-3 (n-3) PUFA (e.g., eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)) are precursors to potent lipid mediator signalling molecules, termed “eicosanoids,” which have important roles in the regulation of inflammation.
Metabolomics analysis of the liver showed an increased accumulation of PUFAs and their metabolites as well as γ-tocopherol, but a decrease in cholesterol in SO-HFD. Liver transcriptomics analysis revealed a global dysregulation of cytochrome P450 (Cyp) genes in SO-HFD versus HFD livers, most notably in the Cyp3a and Cyp2c families. Other genes involved in obesity (e.g., Cidec, Cd36), diabetes (Igfbp1), inflammation (Cd63), mitochondrial function (Pdk4) and cancer (H19) were also upregulated by the soybean oil diet. Taken together, our results indicate that in mice a diet high in soybean oil is more detrimental to metabolic health than a diet high in fructose or coconut oil.
And finally in terms I can really understand intuitively:
The primary fatty acid in most vegetable oils is linoleic acid, a type of omega-6 fat. The omega-6 content of vegetable oils is what makes them so problematic.
Omega-6 fats, while necessary in extremely small amounts, contribute to general inflammation when eaten in excess. While chronic inflammation is cited as a source of many of the diseases we face today [1], it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The unstable, reactive properties of dietary omega-6 create a host of other downstream effects that have been causally linked to poor health and chronic disease, including heart disease, the leading cause of death in the world [2].
Now that seems like a wall of proof, and if it were in defense of greenhouse gases, you would probably have good cause to be mostly convinced. From what I can tell in nutrition, that is probably not the takeaway that you should have, necessarily. You could probably make just as convincing a case against saturated fats or fructose or something. I am partial to a somewhat “zoomed out” approach, I’d love to just see more studies of humans over long periods of time eating vegetable oil in good experimental conditions. As I said, there’s a disproportionate lack of them, especially given how prominent they now are in our diet. Those sources were strong for this theory too. Here’s one, PDF warning.
Only a handful of randomized controlled trials have ever causally tested the traditional diet-heart hypothesis. The results for two of these trials were not fully reported. Our recovery and 2013 publication of previously unpublished data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study (SDHS, 1966-73) belatedly showed that replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid significantly increased the risks of death from coronary heart disease and all causes, despite lowering serum cholesterol.14 Our recovery of unpublished documents and raw data from another diet-heart trial, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, provided us with an opportunity to further evaluate this issue.
I do think I was mistaken to not have included this stuff, I kind of assumed people would read the sources but that probably didn’t happen lol
My primary claim was that we already understand the main proximate cause of the obesity pandemic. It has something to do with people maintaining calorie a calorie surplus—the difference between our calorie intake and our energy expenditure.
If I understand your reply correctly, you are essentially saying, “vegetable oils likely cause our bodies to retain extra calories than they otherwise would.” A reasonable conjecture, but let me offer another.
Assume that our bodies do not retain more or fewer calories depending on what we eat. Instead, our calorie surplus is measured reasonably well by the number on the nutrition label. Then, naturally, the problem is simply that we’re eating too much.
Of course, this theory leaves a lot to be explained, such as why we’re eating so much in the first place. However, we also have a simple answer for that: modern processed food generally tastes good, gets people hooked, and causes us to have more frequent and more intense food cravings. As far as Occam is concerned, I don’t see why we need much more than this theory.
That’s certainly fair enough! I really don’t think that I have any qualms with your logic, my reason for posting and exploring this is partially that maintaining a calorie surplus didn’t seem to be a very satisfactory answer, analogous in your argument to saying we know the proximate cause of climate change because more energy is coming in than out—and that opinion was shared by a lot of other people here. In particular, the mysteries of the Peery paper were definitely getting some discussion going.
I’d refer you to the comments on this post—I think a lot of others said it better than I why we at least think this merits more discussion.
Sounds like both of you think: something in modern food is causing our weight set point to go up.
You think it’s the taste, he thinks it’s some novel chemical.
I say ‘weight set point to go up’ rather than ‘we eat too much’, because I think you both agree that after a successful diet, weight goes quickly back up to where it was, rather than slowly like it would do if we just carried on eating too much.
Suppose someone wrote an essay that sought to uncover the cause of climate change. Admitting that the explanation may be multiplex, they mention automobiles, TVs, and light-bulbs. “Any of these could be the real explanation for why the globe has warmed,” they explain, “but personally, my bet is on automobiles,” before laying the striking correlation between automobile adoption and global temperature.
Now you check and—indeed—they never once mentioned the role of greenhouse gasses, which is the factor connecting all of the candidate causes together. In that case, I would be quite exasperated by such an essay, as it would seem to distort, rather than clarify, the underlying mechanism driving climate change.
Similarly, I am exasperated by this essay in your neglect to mention the role of calories. We have overwhelming evidence that weight is determined directly by caloric intake and energy expenditure. There are, of course, sensible questions pertaining to how much of one’s weight can be explained these factors, but no doubt about whether the answer is at least “a great deal.”
The simple theory, as in the case of climate change, would begin by identifying how any potential cause connected to caloric intake and energy expenditure. Now, I may have missed something, but I did not see you do this. From the point of view of someone who already understands this background mechanism well, perhaps this omission makes sense. But as a casual reader, I didn’t quite understand why you believed this theory to be plausible.
I find the “Calories In, Calories Out” paradigm really exasperating. It may be technically correct, but it’s a red herring, useless in practice, because it completely misses the real issue.
The body has a multitude of feedback mechanisms to maintain homeostasis. Weight is usually pretty stable. If you exert willpower to count calories and eat fewer of them, then the predictable response of the body is to reduce energy expenditure and to become hungrier. Neither is pleasant.
The mistaken mainstream scenario goes like this: You have sinned. You’ve been a glutton, but just a little bit. Occasionally, over the years, you’ve indulged yourself in the pleasures of eating and had just a bit too much. But a little here and a little there adds up over the decades and now you’re definitely overweight!
Calories In, CaIories Out. But exercise seems to barely burn more than breathing, unless you’re literally running marathons, so it’s really just about Calories In.
So, if you want to lose the excess weight, then you simply have to Eat Fewer Calories. Ultimately, that’s the only way any diet can work. So let’s try the direct approach: fasting two days in a row per week will do it. (You can still have water, which has no Calories.) Couldn’t be simpler. You exhaust your glycogen stores the first day, so your body has not choice but to switch to burning fat on the second. (Fasting for even longer periods works even better, but there are risks. 48 hours is perfectly safe unless you’ve got a weird medical issue. People do it religiously all the time.)
Continue until you’re back to normal weight. Problem solved, right? Just do it again in a few decades when your gluttony catches up with you again. Right?
Except it doesn’t work like that.
If you try this, and you’re not already so overweight that you fail to sustain the program to hit your target, then when you stop you’ll probably gain most of it back within a year. Not the decades it took you in the first place. If you’re sufficiently overweight, then you’ll lose some, but then gain enough of it back each week between fasts that you stop making progress.
Why?
Somehow the body’s homeostasis program for weight got out of whack. That’s the real issue. That’s the part I’m interested in. Not the guilt/repentance cycle, because that never works. If things are working properly in the first place, then when you indulge, you have more energy and are less hungry. Homeostasis! For normal, healthy people, gaining weight seems to be as hard as losing it!
Why did the “set point” go up, permanently? Why don’t you just get more fidgety and burn it off? Why don’t you just get less hungry for your next meal? I don’t fracking know.
There are a lot of interesting hypotheses. Maybe it’s the fats. Skim the milk! Go vegan! Except whole milk works better for weight loss. Maybe it’s the carbs. Atkins/Keto/Carnivore. /Paleo? No vegan! Maybe it’s only both at once? Maybe it’s the excess fructose building up fat in your liver. Maybe the antibiotics killed off an important strain in your gut flora, and no diet can work until you get it back. It’s a ratchet. Maybe it’s the emulsifiers emulsifying your gut lining, causing irritation. Maybe it’s the omega-6, causing inflammation. Maybe it’s just the ratio with the omega-3? Moar fish! Except mercury. Less fish! Maybe it’s the high–glycemic index foods causing insulin spikes causing insulin resistance. Maybe it’s the low–glycemic index foods not causing spikes not causing satiety. Maybe it’s just not enough fiber. Moar beans. Grains must be made Whole. Maybe it’s the lack of fiber that killed off the strain (and no diet can work until you get it back). Would fermented foods help? Some other probiotics? Which ones? Maybe it’s mysterious chemicals in our packaging. Could be the plasticizers? Preservatives? Pesticides? Maybe it’s the lectins. Beans are bawal. No moar beans. Grains are unWholy. Don’t get me started on all the deadly nightshades. In fact, all the New World Plants are a Paradox. Unless you’re Latino. GMOs are perfectly safe! Except they sometimes add pest-resistance, I mean “natural” pesticides, I mean lectins. Oops. Unless you cook them. Unless they’re soybeans. Or peanuts. Other nuts must be roasted. Other gurus will be roasted too. Because they’re nuts. It’s a racket. And that A1-casein looks suspiciously lectin-like. You need special organic cows instead. Or switch to goat milk. It’s the only way to be sure.
I am not making this up. I have evidence for all of this.
I notice I am Confused about this. No, I am very confused about this. So is everyone else. I think the global warming metaphor has thoroughly broken down. It’s like when no-one knew what was causing scurvy and thought vitriolic elixir, vinegar, or seawater might help. We are that confused about this. No-one knows what the hell is going on, and even if they do, I’ve got ten more hypotheses that sound just as plausible. And have studies. That maybe haven’t been replicated. Le sigh.
Never be too sure.
I don’t think I can respond to everything in your comment, but let me try to address the main point. As I understand, you say that something is left unexplained by the “Calories in, Calories out” paradigm. That something is explained by your question,
I think the most likely explanation is simply that modern food is tastier than the more bland food eaten in the past. “Taste” here should be interpreted as capturing all dimensions of the satisfaction of eating, including texture, mouthfeel, and aftertaste. There is also a simple explanation for why typical food has gotten tastier over time; namely, food science has gotten better, corporations have become more efficient at producing and marketing processed foods, and consumer incomes have gotten higher—thus enabling more access and greater choice.
This explanation also perfectly predicts your long paragraph addressing possible causes. Is it fat? Carbs? High-glycemic index foods? Not enough grains? I ask: why couldn’t it be all those things at once?
If the reason why we eat more is because food has gotten tastier, then we should also expect the “cause” to be multifaceted. After all, most people don’t think that there’s only “one thing” that makes food taste good. Taste is more complicated than that, and varies between people.
Reducing the question of “why are we getting obese?” to “why do foods taste good?” doesn’t solve the problem, of course—we still don’t have a full theory of why food tastes good. But, in my opinion, if it’s correct, then it totally deconfuses the proximate mechanism here.
In that sense, I think my CO2 analogy holds quite well. There are many reasons why people omit CO2: electricity, temperature control, transportation etc. And as we’ve gotten richer, those justfications have become more salient, as people can afford to purchase service that provide those benefits, omitting CO2 as a byproduct. Simply knowing this doesn’t mean you’ve solved climate change, of course, but it gets you a lot further than “Why are people burning more CO2 than before? I don’t know; could be anything.”
I think that analogy maps quite well. In both cases we have a net retention of energy—measured in temperature on earth and in weight in humans. I believe there’s the possibility that I’m writing about the metabolic equivalent of CO2 in humans here (both graphs go up and to the right with industrialization). See, we know that the net balance of calories in humans or joules retained on earth is going up. The question is why. I think the answer to “why” is CO2/possibly vegetable oils. As for “how,” from what I understand that is the source of your exasperation—in climate change the answer to “how” is the greenhouse effect—the mechanism. What is it about these substances that cause the energy to be retained? As for this theory, there are a many reasons that I don’t fully and completely understand, so I didn’t want to muse on about them in the OP. I am certainly at fault for your exasperation here.
The following are studies (not an exhaustive list) followed by what I would consider the statements that most closely map to “mechanism”
Here is perhaps the most direct answer for weight gain
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22334255/
Here’s one for inflammation, which from what I know is quite correlated with weight gain:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22570770/
Here’s the really crazy study in mice:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31912136/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26200659/
And finally in terms I can really understand intuitively:
https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/why-is-vegetable-oil-unhealthy
Now that seems like a wall of proof, and if it were in defense of greenhouse gases, you would probably have good cause to be mostly convinced. From what I can tell in nutrition, that is probably not the takeaway that you should have, necessarily. You could probably make just as convincing a case against saturated fats or fructose or something. I am partial to a somewhat “zoomed out” approach, I’d love to just see more studies of humans over long periods of time eating vegetable oil in good experimental conditions. As I said, there’s a disproportionate lack of them, especially given how prominent they now are in our diet. Those sources were strong for this theory too. Here’s one, PDF warning.
https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1246.full.pdf+html
I do think I was mistaken to not have included this stuff, I kind of assumed people would read the sources but that probably didn’t happen lol
My primary claim was that we already understand the main proximate cause of the obesity pandemic. It has something to do with people maintaining calorie a calorie surplus—the difference between our calorie intake and our energy expenditure.
If I understand your reply correctly, you are essentially saying, “vegetable oils likely cause our bodies to retain extra calories than they otherwise would.” A reasonable conjecture, but let me offer another.
Assume that our bodies do not retain more or fewer calories depending on what we eat. Instead, our calorie surplus is measured reasonably well by the number on the nutrition label. Then, naturally, the problem is simply that we’re eating too much.
Of course, this theory leaves a lot to be explained, such as why we’re eating so much in the first place. However, we also have a simple answer for that: modern processed food generally tastes good, gets people hooked, and causes us to have more frequent and more intense food cravings. As far as Occam is concerned, I don’t see why we need much more than this theory.
That’s certainly fair enough! I really don’t think that I have any qualms with your logic, my reason for posting and exploring this is partially that maintaining a calorie surplus didn’t seem to be a very satisfactory answer, analogous in your argument to saying we know the proximate cause of climate change because more energy is coming in than out—and that opinion was shared by a lot of other people here. In particular, the mysteries of the Peery paper were definitely getting some discussion going.
I’d refer you to the comments on this post—I think a lot of others said it better than I why we at least think this merits more discussion.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fD8jXHvLJrEdSLQrE/obesity-epidemic-explained-in-0-9-subway-cookies
Sounds like both of you think: something in modern food is causing our weight set point to go up.
You think it’s the taste, he thinks it’s some novel chemical.
I say ‘weight set point to go up’ rather than ‘we eat too much’, because I think you both agree that after a successful diet, weight goes quickly back up to where it was, rather than slowly like it would do if we just carried on eating too much.
Is this fair?