JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

Please post the link so I can professionally click it

Homocow posted:

saw this and thought of you all

https://twitter.com/dieDoktor/status/1454906038432501763?s=20

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

Please post the link so I can professionally click it

quote:

The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.

Mystery 1: The Obesity Epidemic

The first mystery is the obesity epidemic itself. It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human history. A century ago, the average man in the US weighed around 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195 lbs. About 1% of the population was obese back then. Now it’s about 36%.

Back in the 1890s, the federal government had a board of surgeons examine several thousand Union Army veterans who fought in the Civil War. This was several decades after the end of the war, so by this point the veterans were all in their 40’s or older. This gives us a snapshot of what middle-aged white men looked like in the 1890s. When we look at their data, we find that they had an average BMI of about 23 (overweight is a BMI of 25 and obese is a BMI of 30 or more). Only about 3% of them were obese. In comparison, middle-aged white men in the year 2000 had an average BMI of around 28. About 24% were obese in early middle age, increasing to 41% by the time the men were in their 60s.

(Most experts consider measures like body fat percentage to be better measures of adiposity than BMI, and we agree. Unfortunately, nearly every source reports BMI, and most don’t report body fat percentage. Here, we use BMI so that we can compare different sources to one another.)

It’s not just that we’re a little fatter than our great-grandparents — the entire picture is different.

People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. This seems closely related to observations like the French Paradox — the French eat a lot of fatty cheese and butter, so why aren’t they fatter and sicker?

Our great-grandparents (and the French) were able to maintain these weights effortlessly. They weren’t all on weird starvation diets or crazy fasting routines. And while they probably exercised more on average than we do, the minor difference in exercise isn’t enough to explain the enormous difference in weight. Many of them were farmers or laborers, of course, but plenty of people in 1900 had cushy desk jobs, and those people weren’t obese either.

Something seems to have changed. But surprisingly, we don’t seem to have any idea what that thing was.

Mystery 2: An Abrupt Shift

Another thing that many people are not aware of is just how abrupt this change was. Between 1890 and 1976, people got a little heavier. The average BMI went from about 23 to about 26. This corresponds with rates of obesity going from about 3% to about 10%. The rate of obesity in most developed countries was steady at around 10% until 1980, when it suddenly began to rise.

Today the rate of obesity in Italy, France, and Sweden is around 20%. In 1975, there was no country in the world that had an obesity rate higher than 15%.

This wasn’t a steady, gentle trend as food got better, or diets got worse. People had access to plenty of delicious, high-calorie foods back in 1965. Doritos were invented in 1966, Twinkies in 1930, Oreos in 1912, and Coca-Cola all the way back in 1886. So what changed in 1980?

Common wisdom today tells us that we get heavier as we get older. But historically, this wasn’t true. In the past, most people got slightly leaner as they got older. Those Civil War veterans we mentioned above had an average BMI of 23.2 in their 40s and 22.9 in their 60’s. In their 40’s, 3.7% were obese, compared to 2.9% in their 60s. We see the same pattern in data from 1976-1980: people in their 60s had slightly lower BMIs and were slightly less likely to be obese than people in their 40s (See the table below). It isn’t until the 1980s that we start to see this trend reverse. Something fundamental about the nature of obesity has changed.


Distribution of BMI and obesity prevalence, non-Hispanic white men in the US by time period and age group. Adapted from Helmchen & Henderson, 2003.

Mystery 3: The Ongoing Crisis

Things don’t seem to be getting any better. A couple decades ago, rising obesity rates were a frequent topic of discussion, debate, and concern. But recently it has received much less attention; from the lack of press and popular coverage, you might reasonably assume that if we aren’t winning the fight against obesity, we’ve gotten at least to a stalemate.

But this simply isn’t the case. Americans have actually gotten more obese over the last decade. In fact, obesity increased more than twice as much between 2010 and 2018 than it did between 2000 and 2008.

Rates of obesity are also increasing worldwide. As The Lancet notes, “unlike other major causes of preventable death and disability, such as tobacco use, injuries, and infectious diseases, there are no exemplar populations in which the obesity epidemic has been reversed by public health measures.”

All of this is, to say the least, very mysterious.

Pryor on Fire posted:

Hiking up in the middle of nowhere this morning, I didn't see anyone until I got to a mountain lake at about 10,500 feet up. It's sunny and 50 degrees.

I think a sorority house planned a trip or something because there are dozens of naked college girls skinny dipping in the lake. They are drinking beer and smoking weed and laughing their asses off about how it is November

This collapse owns.

tuyop posted:

Some real legit science journalism here.

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/

I also can't remember who originally dropped it, it was like 7-8 pages back. But thank you so much!

bowser posted:

So they suspect it's livestock antibiotics, PFAS, or lithium. I think we've got a Murder on the Orient Express scenario here.

Raine posted:

im like 110lbs at 6' and apparently this is so concerning that my family unironically gifted me a huge tub of protein shake powder last week

reminds me of my time in new zealand where a specific stretch of american fast food joints was dubbed "fatty lane"

anyways skeleton crew rise up

Raine posted:

im like 110lbs at 6' and apparently this is so concerning that my family unironically gifted me a huge tub of protein shake powder last week

reminds me of my time in new zealand where a specific stretch of american fast food joints was dubbed "fatty lane"

anyways skeleton crew rise up

Pryor on Fire posted:

Hiking up in the middle of nowhere this morning, I didn't see anyone until I got to a mountain lake at about 10,500 feet up. It's sunny and 50 degrees.

I think a sorority house planned a trip or something because there are dozens of naked college girls skinny dipping in the lake. They are drinking beer and smoking weed and laughing their asses off about how it is November

This collapse owns.

tuyop posted:

Some real legit science journalism here.

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/

I also can't remember who originally dropped it, it was like 7-8 pages back. But thank you so much!

Homeless Friend posted:

Norton posted:

i really enjoyed the blog but I find it a little sus that they make certain to not attach their name to any of the work. Blog site, reddit account, patreon... none of it mentions who this person is. Some of the arguments are a bit weak too, and who knows how many sources they cherry picked through to get the data they present. It's very easy for me to have believe chemicals are at least partly to blame for the rise in obesity, so I think I'm on the blame dupont train, but there was nothing here that seemed conclusive of anything. One of the most interesting points that gets glossed over is how the rats got so much fatter off fruit loops than their normal food despite the nutrition being similar. I feel like that is important

Shima Honnou posted:

another thing with laser eye surgery is for some reason it can gently caress up your ability to use certain firearm sights so it could make the part of the future where everyone's wearing bondage gear and shooting each other harder for you as well

quote:

The team estimates there are 24.4 trillion pieces of microplastics in the world's upper oceans, with a combined weight of 82,000 to 578,000 tons -- or the equivalent of roughly 30 billion 500-ml plastic water bottles.

"While this work improves our grasp of the actual situation, the total amount of microplastics is still likely to be much greater since this is just what we can estimate on the surface," states Isobe. "For us to get a clearer picture, we must develop 3D maps probing the depths of the oceans and continue to fill the gaps within our dataset."

Homocow posted:

Twenty-four trillion pieces of microplastics in the ocean and counting

we love our plastics don't we folks

Homocow posted:

Twenty-four trillion pieces of microplastics in the ocean and counting

we love our plastics don't we folks

Tekne posted:

10 battleships worth of plastic, not great but not terrible

Mameluke posted:

Have fun buying bondage gear in the deindustrialized future lmao

Spergin Morlock posted:

thinking back to the early 00s when there were literally face washing creams with "exfoliating micro-plastic balls" that people would use and just wash down the sink lol

Pryor on Fire posted:

Hiking up in the middle of nowhere this morning, I didn't see anyone until I got to a mountain lake at about 10,500 feet up. It's sunny and 50 degrees.

I think a sorority house planned a trip or something because there are dozens of naked college girls skinny dipping in the lake. They are drinking beer and smoking weed and laughing their asses off about how it is November

This collapse owns.

Raine posted:

im like 110lbs at 6' and apparently this is so concerning that my family unironically gifted me a huge tub of protein shake powder last week

reminds me of my time in new zealand where a specific stretch of american fast food joints was dubbed "fatty lane"

anyways skeleton crew rise up

goochtit posted:

what if the plastics are in our craniums exfoliating our folds

RIP Syndrome posted:

e: I wonder what the shade balls are made of