I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar. I'm sure the researchers wouldn't dispute the benefits of exercise. But if there really is a safe, effective way to improve the metabolism and make it easier to keep off fat, why exactly is that a bad thing? (Naturally the research is far too early on to know that, but hypothetically speaking.) Of course you should continue to exercise and stay healthy in other ways, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also look for other ways to make it easier for people to get to, or remain at, a healthy weight.
You probably inherently understand that obesity is widely considered a moral disease.
Therefore, the only solution to a moral failing is trial by fire.
So, by recasting obesity as something OTHER than a moral failing, well you are removing the very thing that lets a portion of society feel superior to others.
Technically removing the consequences of gluttony is likely to increase demand for food products and therefore increase its price, reducing available food supply and increasing world hunger. Food supply can be temporarily boosted by farming the land more intensively, but in the long run will also be detrimental to food production. Until our food production can be dramatically increased with minimal effect on the environment, I'm against it.
You're doubling down on the "obesity is a moral disease" stance here ("gluttony" is explicitly a moral judgement). I've come to suspect that it really isn't as simple as "lack of self-control": too many people I know have gained significant weight due to medications or medical conditions, or despite sincere and sustained efforts to bring their weight under control. (I'm also quite intrigued by claims that even broad populations of lab animals in the US have gained weight over the same period that the US population has, despite their carefully managed diets and activity levels.)
Once something is this common, it just stops being reasonable to blame the individuals rather than broader factors. (In much the same way, if half of my students fail an exam, I'm pretty sure that's not entirely their fault: I clearly screwed something up in the teaching or the testing.)
The broadest factor is US food politics. And that's far easier to fix than trying to cure cancer - end market manipulation that keep the costs of some goods artificially high and the others artificially low.
Somehow instead we've created a food economy where the absolute worst food for you, even though it's not very economical to grow, is far cheaper because of the disincentive to produce things like cheese and non-bovine livestock and the incentive to grow corn.
"Once something is this common, it just stops being reasonable to blame the individuals rather than broader factors."
You are introducing one additional broad factor of world hunger through increase in food prices. And that is not something I would like to be morally responsible for.
I'm OK with people overeating - as long as they receive the consequences of doing so. They are adults who can make their own decisions with the trade-off between food consumption vs weight. Removing the consequences? That's where my moral judgement is - at all those people who think indulging our senses and removing consequences to those who do without thinking about the cost to everyone else - and not just the moral cost.
And, it looks like that includes you.
""gluttony" is explicitly a moral judgement"
'gluttony' is a word. Whether it's a moral judgement is in your mind. In it's most technical terms it means "over-consumption of food, drink, or wealth items to the point of extravagance or waste." It's like "goto". It's only bad if used with judgement - which I did not - only saying the utility of mankind would be greater if we do not artificially increase our metabolism to remove the consequence of overeating.
" too many people I know have gained significant weight due to medications or medical conditions, or despite sincere and sustained efforts to bring their weight under control."
Then that is the medication's problem. Why is obesity a much smaller problem in other countries? Why are so many people taking anxiety medications, for example?
And that is closer to the core problems in society than solving obesity via medication - obesity is just a symptom and by removing the appearance of the symptom you never get to solve the core problem, and additionally, make the world worse off by introducing more unintended consequences further away from what is really wrong with society.
Which states: "Derived from the Latin gluttire, meaning to gulp down or swallow, gluttony (Latin, gula) is the over-indulgence and over-consumption of anything to the point of waste."
Now, I highly doubt you have a different definition in mind. You are only backtracking now that people are heavily calling you out for it.
So why are you backtracking here? The rest of your comments indicate are really consistent with someone who is in fact judging people who are obese.
If you really aren't judging them, perhaps instead of arguing that 'gluttony' is a morally neutral word (it isn't), choose a different word? That's the nice thing about english, it has a lot of expressivity.
I had looked it up before I used it. It was a deliberate choice of a word. I'm not Christian and the use of the word "gluttony" was used to precisely mean the over-consumption of food. There is no backtracking.
"Gluttony, derived from the Latin gluttire meaning to gulp down or swallow, means over-indulgence and over-consumption of food, drink, or wealth items to the point of extravagance or waste. In some Christian denominations, it is considered one of the seven deadly sins—a misplaced desire of food or its withholding from the needy."
My original comment states:
"Technically removing the consequences of gluttony is likely to increase demand for food products and therefore increase its price"
---
I am morally against removing the consequences of gluttony, because it will increase human suffering through hunger as an unintended consequence.
---
People can call me out on it, threaten me with all kinds of abuse, I will not take one inch back from my statement.
Obesity is absolutely a moral disease, in the sense that you don't get fat without eating yourself fat, as well as a disease of our society, in terms of our society producing foods that encourage people to eat themselves fat.
Broader factors certainly share the blame, but so do individuals. It is possible for almost anyone to be thin in today's society, in the same way that it was possible for almost anyone to get fat a few hundred years ago (given access to plentiful enough food).
Saying "it's not just down to the individuals" is fair and true. Saying "it's not down to the individuals at all, how dare you imply that it might be" is obviously wrong-headed.
In general, I agree that there's always some responsibility on the individual. But in a lot of cases, I really don't think it's helpful to look at it that way.
I have a friend who was in great physical shape consistently for years. Then (going from memory on the details here) at some point she got on a new medication for migraines, and within a few months she'd gained a surprising number of pounds. Her eating and activity habits didn't change all that much along the way: the drugs just affected her metabolism somehow. Nothing she's tried since has gotten the weight off (and it's not feasible to drop the only medication that's been able to stop the searing pain).
So tell me: which part of that was a moral failure on her part? Because you've made it clear that if you saw her in the street, that's what you'd be thinking.
The case you mention is clearly exceptional. It does not explain the huge rise in obesity over the last few decades.
To clarify: when I say "obesity is a moral disease" I'm talking about obesity as a social trend, not a specific overweight person - those can have very good explanations... but the majority don't, imho.
So you think the population just got less moral recently? How about the fact that cheap food has less nutrition per calorie, and people have less money available in their food budget now. So they eat more calories because high-calorie food is what they can afford.
A lot of your statements are ignoring broad swaths of biology and neuro-psych research!
To talk about weight gain without digging in to the biochemical reasons why is ridiculous. To just chalk it up to "well the foods are bad, and hey don't eat them" is also just as ignorant as those poor people who are victims of the food industry.
And yes, I say victims, because I believe that the food that is typically produced, and labeled as healthy, is highly addictive. One of the things we are discovering is that much of what we eat affects our dopamine systems! Literally our food is addictive and has activation pathways similar to cocaine or heroin!
You have very little choice when struggling against your dopamine system. It's very powerful. Research in to 'will power' indicates its substantially less powerful than people think.
So, now you are saying people who are following advice, or forced by economic circumstances in to eating food that has been incredibly harmful (and carcinogenic!) are immoral. You are expecting everyone to be super-human, or you'll say they are literally bad people.
I refuse to take such a pessimistic view of humanity. People do what makes sense to them, and it is the responsibility of ALLEGED intelligent people like yourself to HELP them. Not sit on a high perch and laugh at them!
So, I finish this off by saying, not only is obesity a disease, and not a moral failing, that in fact YOU are the one with a moral failing!
Exactly. We can all agree that the environment that Humans live in is considerably different than it was 10K years ago. Expecting our bodies and minds to function well, within it, is asking for a lot.
I have no shame in taking medications and using technologies that help me sustain normality within an abnormal environment. Maybe someday we will also come up with a cure for 'moral judgement', as well.
Vaccination increases lifespan which leads to increased resource consumption, and the planet just can not afford it. So until we figure out how to transcend into beams of light I'm against it.
I actually find it surprising here given the large number of people here sympathetic to the transhuman/singularity/quantified-self/life-hacker type ideals.
Does it not occur to them that findings like this, combined with a good diet and exercise, are the most likely candidates for actually living longer and staying healthy further into your old age?
I don't care what lazy people will "get away with", I want these advances and to continue my healthy lifestyle.
Cognitive dissonance and beliefs-as-attire are a nasty thing to fall victim to. Yes, diet and exercise are the most effective longevity interventions we can possibly take on an individual scale. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean every self-proclaimed "transhumanist" or whatever will actually take the most effective action for their own health and longevity when it conflicts with long-built-up bad habits.
I switched my diet to substantially up my saturated fats, increased my red meat intake by 4x and ended up losing weight, improving my lipids, and blood pressure and a lot more.
Basically, what I'm saying is, by ignoring ALL the advice of medical professionals and the USDA/etc was I able to change my life and establish a new, sustainable (as in for me to keep doing it), diet.
Is that the question we're talking about? I was referring to the comments casting being overweight as moral failing and viewing this research as negative in some way. I found it quite silly and I have never been overweight or even had immediate family members with weight issues.
I've always gone with "Eat food (not food-like products), not too much, mostly plants." as a baseline for what a good diet is. Its likely not the best, and there are likely completely different diets that are as good or better, but we don't know what they are.
And I sacrifice a fair amount to get a lot of physical activity. And pay attention to what you eat, don't let habit or compulsion have too much control of your eating. Incidentally this is why most diets work at the beginning, starting to pay attention to what you eat has more benefit than anything else.
Macro-nutrient adjustment diets seem particularly untrustworthy to me - there are healthier cultures around the world with diets of all macro-nutrient balances, and the fact that the "good ones" change every ten years for diet fads looks exactly like what happens when people demand answers from science when it doesn't have them but has to give their best guess.
Also, the idea that food or a certain diet is simply healthy or not healthy is a childish simplification. Your body is complex, and the same food will have different consequences on different organs and systems in your body. What makes something a net negative or net positive depends on the current state of your body and how you weight different effects.
That's basically it, I have no strong opinions because there is no strong evidence.
So no, I can't tell you what a good diet is specifically, and anyone who says they can is a liar.
A good diet is highly subjective and individual. You should know this. My parents are strictly vegan and although they are in their mid 60s, they're physically more fit and active than most people 30 years younger.
I was watching "Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry, Marketing & the Creation of a Health Crisis" on LinkTV last night and they talked about how obesity is rising in 3-6 year olds. The point being that children in that age group are no less active today than in the past, so something else is causing obesity, type II diabetes and other problems.
The most likely culprit is processed food, where nutrients are not used in their natural form, but instead converted into something else. So using corn to make high fructose corn syrup, soy and cottonseed to make oil, or feeding animal protein to herbivores are a few examples of where the food supply is getting contaminated. For example, cottonseed oil is not only a relatively unhealthy oil, but it also contains one of the highest concentration of pesticides (because cotton was not traditionally a food crop).
Not to mention that plastics contain hormone-like chemicals like BPA, they use preservatives in things like canned food that don’t need them, and add animal byproducts like pork lard to foods like refried beans that don’t need them. So our immune systems are getting bombarded by substances we either have no evolutionary history with or simply don’t need to be eating in the quantities that we are. So that inhibits aspects of our immune systems and metabolism (triggering autoimmune disorders like allergies, asthma, arthritis and metabolic syndrome).
I could literally go on forever about this, so the gist of it is “it’s the food supply, stupid”. Yes, being more active helps a great deal, but without proper nutrition we’re looking at a modern form of the wasting diseases similar to the ones they used to get in the 1800s before they understood vitamins and minerals, except it’s masked by obesity. I think if we didn’t have the social stigmas around laziness and the political monkeying of the farm and retail lobbies, we would have recognized obesity as an epidemic the way we did with polio and done something about it decades ago. Nothing short of going back to the foods we ate before about 1980 is going to work for the vast majority of the population. And that’s going to start with campaigns to inform people about what’s in their food and reform the way we design cities so that food centers are near where people live.
TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it.
> TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it.
Some of this is cross generational. Children born to obese parents have a much higher likelihood of lifetime obesity. Wikipedia lone has a lot of good info on this.
Some day humanity will realize that the freedom to say and pursue a different opinion, is not the same as "competition".
The freedom to a diff opinion, and pursuing it, is good. Cooperation and sharing, is good. Competition, is bad. It focuses on "wining" and not on solutions and improvement.
PS: Yeah, I know, I live in a wrong, fucking, century :-(
Could we please not pretend the failings of capitalism are entirely coordination problems and/or eldritch abominations? I mean, come on, your average capitalist society is actually very well-coordinated when it comes to the interests of big banks or agribusiness.
Only in terms of time, at least here in Europe. If you get noodles, flour, rice and in-season vegetables and fruit (and don't choose these for wants but for price, there are some ridiculous deals sometimes), plus some more expensive ingredients such as eggs and milk sparingly, it is very cheap. There's no way processed food can beat that.
See, you are assuming that noodles, flour, rice are healthy for you.
There is good evidence that in fact, it is not. Many of those things are inflammatory. Also, following advice they get from doctors, they are using more and more poly-unsaturated fats. Which as we are discovering are actually substantially LESS healthy for you than saturated fat!
And in terms of time, you are ignoring the only thing people have a fixed amount of. By ignoring that, you're ignoring a very important factor that causes people in to bad eating choices. Not that they even know what good vs bad are (as I hinted above, so-called 'healthy' food for you isn't!)
Well, you can also get lentils, whole-grain bread/noodles/rice/flour, chickpeas and other things as cheap staples (if one leaves the meat out as in my example it's not even optional), but I guess that's not what you mean? What would be your suggestion as staple?
There's a problem with nutrition research in that it changes recommendations every once in a while. The only constant seems to be 'Eat food, mix it up - naturally colourful things are good, don't eat too much of it', so I'm going with that for now.
Concerning time.. it's maybe more of a knowledge and organisation thing, which takes time to aquire. Unless you want really fancy food like sushi.
There are few topics that create as much controversial conversation. The well known ones are religion and politics, the third is 'diet/exercise.' Always a lot of energy.
Especially around here. Health-related posts bring out the same well-informed, scientifically literate opinions from the HN crowd that I'd expect when reading posts about C++ programming on webmd.com.
Covers a number interesting stats that show increase in sugar and other cost cutting products growth is growing with obesity.
I have lost over 100lbs in 2 years once weighing near 300 from hard work exercising, risky metabolism boosters stacks with ephedrine (not banned in Canada), interval training constantly monitoring my heart rate during workouts especially cause of ephedrine and changing my diet.
I have kept it off for 3 years without having really exercising in the past 3 years by lowering carb and sugar intake and removed all fast food. Still eat out and don't watch any calorie or fat content
Exercise alone won't help. Exercise in western/ euro coultures didn't gain popularity till mid 1900s. Obesity rate has exploded since then.
More people are going to the gym and exercising yet even more population is even fatter...
Higher Energy Expenditure in Humans Predicts Natural Mortality
I personally am trying to somewhat keep my metabolism slower by eating less often, and less in general, plus intermittent fasting. But of course everything is still open for debate.
Well I was going to deride the article because they're bragging about a medical finding that still only works in mice models. These often don't carry over into human beings.
But other than that, always nice to see progress made against wasting diseases and aging.
I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar.
The problem is, from a libertarian/rugged individualism point of view, failure to lose weight is a simple failure of self control. Calories out have to be greater than calories in, after all. Also, I'm willing to bet more than a few people here have heard the fatlogic of "it's my genetics" or "it's the drugs I'm on". While there are some conditions and drugs that can contribute to weight gain, it's not nearly as common as most people using the excuse would like to think, and it usually doesn't work that way (most drugs that "cause" weight gain do it by intensifying hunger signals, not modifying metabolism, which is fairly difficult to do to any great degree via drugs - otherwise this article wouldn't be noteworthy!).
In the end, this most likely won't help the majority of the obese, who do have a medical condition (try being obese for any amount of time and tell me it's not having a negative impact on your joints, at a minimum; there is no good health above or below certain sizes). If anything, this will just make the problem worse by enabling people to consume even more food, and probably end up putting on more weight, especially since it seems that most causes of obesity are psychological (unconscious eating, eating past satiety, bad food choices, etc). Also, if some of the comments here are to be believed, this drug will just treat the symptom of obesity and not the cause (eg, processed food, BPA, etc).
I do think this research could have great applications into life extension, or helping people feel younger, but my money is on this drug not having any noticeable effect on the obese population.
But what exactly about that situation makes it worse? Let's assume for a moment that a therapy exists that is funtionally identical to proper diet. It seems that each person could choose to weigh the costs of the drug vs. the increased enjoyment of eating whatever, or vs. the decreased time spent at a gym.
The way things work today, you're right. People "should eat less". It used to be that if you didn't want children, then you shouldn't have sex. Thankfully we have a wide variety of options that allow us to decouple sex from reproduction. I don't see why we shouldn't also have options to decouple eating from getting fat.
"you have gotten older and should eat less" isn't a fact, it's an assumption baked into society's mind based on how aging has worked in the past. This breakthrough could break that assumption. In that case, some people (adopters) will internalize that and some people won't.
