No doubt environmental factors should be considered. Assuming for a moment it’s plastics in the water, say, I’m curious what mechanisms would explain why we don’t see really obvious trends by geographic area (independent of other factors). For example, it’s of course not all environmental because people in the same neighborhood/family have different outcomes.
To throw my hat in the ring: all things metabolic seem highly intertwined. I faced an interesting trillemma once upon a time—I had high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and low testosterone(alcoholism). I initially cut calories: that was tough because my testosterone declined even more, and burning fat also “releases” (not a technical term) cholesterol from the fat back to the bloodstream. But I improved blood sugar. After that miserable time, I messed around with a lot of different things, but ultimately settled on a general healthy whole-foods based diet, lifting weights, and hiit. Worked like a charm. What was interesting to me was how everything failed at once, and in roughly the same proportion: my cholesterol and blood sugar were just hitting the danger zone, and my testosterone was just about hypogonadal. Interesting, because you would think one acute stressor would affect, say, only blood sugar. But that’s not the case, it seemed as if the system was highly interconnected, and “slack” could be taken from one parameter to improve another. Along the same line, it seemed as if the whole system could be tightened up all at once as well, by a holistic approach. But focusing on blood sugar came to the detriment of cholesterol and testosterone. So one bad input could turn all the outputs, even the non-direct relationships, bad all at once. But the opposite was not true.
Another thing, anecdotally I’ve observed that generally people either stay at a good weight, or pretty much always decline monotonically, once they hit some sort of inflection, i.e. insulin resistance, past a threshold. Rarely do you see that their tendency goes from effortlessly maintaining 150lbs>effortlessly maintaining 155lbs. It seems more that they effortlessly maintain 150lbs, then something breaks, and they add weight until they are old enough to have even bigger problems. This may be why the acceleration at once, perhaps the average level of some cumulative damage /other measure went from just under to just over said threshold around 1980.
What am I saying? It’s probably fundamentally super complicated. I almost don’t even think we’re lacking in data or really in understanding of the basics—it seems we need a statistical revolution to really get to the bottom of this. My intuition tells me that the answer is there, it’s just not going to be a simple linear correlation. Same goes for most complex systems too, by the way. Or, equally likely, God just starts fucking with us when we try to figure out things that he simply wills, so he fudges the data
No doubt environmental factors should be considered. Assuming for a moment it’s plastics in the water, say, I’m curious what mechanisms would explain why we don’t see really obvious trends by geographic area (independent of other factors). For example, it’s of course not all environmental because people in the same neighborhood/family have different outcomes.
To throw my hat in the ring: all things metabolic seem highly intertwined. I faced an interesting trillemma once upon a time—I had high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and low testosterone(alcoholism). I initially cut calories: that was tough because my testosterone declined even more, and burning fat also “releases” (not a technical term) cholesterol from the fat back to the bloodstream. But I improved blood sugar. After that miserable time, I messed around with a lot of different things, but ultimately settled on a general healthy whole-foods based diet, lifting weights, and hiit. Worked like a charm. What was interesting to me was how everything failed at once, and in roughly the same proportion: my cholesterol and blood sugar were just hitting the danger zone, and my testosterone was just about hypogonadal. Interesting, because you would think one acute stressor would affect, say, only blood sugar. But that’s not the case, it seemed as if the system was highly interconnected, and “slack” could be taken from one parameter to improve another. Along the same line, it seemed as if the whole system could be tightened up all at once as well, by a holistic approach. But focusing on blood sugar came to the detriment of cholesterol and testosterone. So one bad input could turn all the outputs, even the non-direct relationships, bad all at once. But the opposite was not true.
Another thing, anecdotally I’ve observed that generally people either stay at a good weight, or pretty much always decline monotonically, once they hit some sort of inflection, i.e. insulin resistance, past a threshold. Rarely do you see that their tendency goes from effortlessly maintaining 150lbs>effortlessly maintaining 155lbs. It seems more that they effortlessly maintain 150lbs, then something breaks, and they add weight until they are old enough to have even bigger problems. This may be why the acceleration at once, perhaps the average level of some cumulative damage /other measure went from just under to just over said threshold around 1980.
What am I saying? It’s probably fundamentally super complicated. I almost don’t even think we’re lacking in data or really in understanding of the basics—it seems we need a statistical revolution to really get to the bottom of this. My intuition tells me that the answer is there, it’s just not going to be a simple linear correlation. Same goes for most complex systems too, by the way. Or, equally likely, God just starts fucking with us when we try to figure out things that he simply wills, so he fudges the data