You need a New York Times account to read it, but setting one up only takes a couple of minutes. Here are some exerpts in any case.
Obese people almost always regain weight after weight loss:
So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.
Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.
Thin people who are forced to gain weight find it easy to lose it again:
...His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.
Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.
When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.
The body’s metabolism changes with weight loss and weight gain:
The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.
Genes and weight:
.A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.
The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.
The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.
I’m not too clear on how to interpret hierarchical model coefficients, but they do give at least one description of effect size, on pg6:
These associations revealed clinically meaningful differences in weight.
For example, participants who scored in the top 10% of Neuroticism’s
Impulsiveness weighed, on average, over 11 Kg more than those
who scored in the lowest 10% of this trait. Likewise, participants
who scored high on Conscientiousness’s Order weighed about 4.5 Kg less than those who scored low on Order.
and pg8:
In addition, the emotional aspects of impulsivity (N5: Impulsiveness and E5: Excitement-Seeking) were also associated with greater increases in adiposity. For example, on average, at age 30, those who scored one standard deviation above the mean on impulsivity had a BMI that was approximately 2.30 points higher than those who scored one standard deviation below the mean on this trait. By age 90, this gap increased to a 5.22 BMI point difference (see Figure 3).
In principle, something (e.g. how much the mother eats during the pregnancy) might affect both those things, with no causal pathway from one down to the other.
Moderately surprising corollary: so society IS treating fat people in a horribly unjust manner after all. Those boring SJW types who have been going on and on about “fat-shaming” and “thin privilege”… are yet again more morally correct on average than the general public.
Am now mildly ashamed of some previous thoughts and/or attitudes.
What are we to make of the supposedly increasing obesity rate across Western nations? Is this a failure of measurement (e.g. standards for what count as “obesity” are dropping), has the Western diet changed our genetics, or something else altogether?
If it was mainly genetics, then I would think that the obesity rate would remain constant throughout time.
What are we to make of the supposedly increasing obesity rate across Western nations? [...]
If it was mainly genetics, then I would think that the obesity rate would remain constant throughout time.
Environmental changes over time may have shifted the entire distribution of people’s weights upwards without affecting the distribution’s variance. This would reconcile an environmentally-driven obesity rate increase with the NYT’s report that 70% of the variance is genetic.
The obvious cross comparison would be to look at populations distributions of weight and see if they share the same pattern shifted left or right based on the primary food source.
Hypothesis possibly reconciling link between impulse control and weight, strong heritability of both, resistance to experimental intervention, and society scale shifts in weight:
Body weight is largely determined by the ‘set point’ to which the body’s metabolism returns, hence resistance to intervention. This set point can be influenced through lifestyle, hence link to impulse control and changes across time/cultures. However this influence can only be exerted either a) during development and/or b) over longer time scales than are generally used in experiments.
This should be easy enough to test. Are there any relevant data on e.g. people raised in non-obesity ridden cultures and then introduced to one? Or on interventions with obese adolescents?l
I dunno, ask the OP. I was merely pointing out that in the event that obesity has a more or less significant hereditary/genetic component, the social stigma against it must be an even more horrible and cruel thing than most enlightened people would admit today.
(Consider, for example, just the fact that our attractiveness criteria appear to be almost entirely a “social construct”—otherwise it’d be hard to explain the enormity of variance; AFAIK the only human universal is a preference for facial symmetry in either gender. If society could just make certain traits that people are stuck with regardless of their will, and cannot really affect, fall within the norms of “beauty” in a generation or two… then all the “social justice”/”body positivity”/etc campaigns to do so might have a big potential leverage on many people’s mental health and happiness. So it must be in fact reasonable and ethical of activists to “police” everyday language for fat-shaming/body-negativity, devote resources and effort to press for better representation in media, etc.
Yet again I’m struck by just how rational—in intention and planning, at least—some odd-seeming “activist” stuff comes across as on close examination.)
A possible hypothesis is that the genes encode your set point weight given optimal nutrition, but if you don’t get adequate nutrition during childhood you don’t attain it. IIRC something similar is believed to apply to intelligence and height and explain the Flynn effect and the fact that young generations are taller than older ones.
I’ve moved away slightly from SJW attitudes on various matters, since starting to read LW, Yvain’s blog and various other things, however, I’ve actually moved closer to SJW attitudes to weight, since researching the issue. The fact that weight loss attempts hardly ever work in the long run, is what has changed my views the most.
I’ve moved away slightly from SJW attitudes on various matters, since starting to read LW and Yvain’s blog
[OT: just noting that one could be “away from SJW attitudes” in different directions, some of them mutually exclusive. For example, on some particular things (racial discrimination, etc) I take the Marxist view that activism can’t help the roots of the problem which are endemic to the functioning of capitalism—except that I don’t believe it’s possible or sane to try and replace global capitalism with something better anytime soon, either… so there might be no hope of reaching “endgame” for some struggles until post-scarcity. Although activists should probably at least try and defend the progress made on them to-date from being optimized away by hostile political agendas.]
The fact that weight loss attempts hardly ever work in the long run, is what has changed my views the most.
Actually, I still suspect that the benefiits in increased happiness and mental health would still be better than the marginal efficiency of pressuring lots of people to try and lose weight even if it depended in large part on personal behaviour. And social pressure is notoriously indiscriminate, so any undesirable messages would still hit people who can’t or don’t really need to change. Plus there are still all the socioeconomic factors outside people’s control, etc.
Whether or not this result is correct, society is definitely shaming the wrong people: some perfectly healthy people (e.g. young women) are shamed for not being as skinny as the models on TV, and not much is being done to prevent morbid obesity in certain people (esp. middle-aged and older) who don’t even try to lose weight.
(Edited to replace “adult men” with “middle-aged and older” and “eat less” with “lose weight”.)
Yeah, and so it looks more and more that (as terribly impolite it might be to suggest in some circles on the Internet) we need much higher standards of “political correctness” and a way stronger“call-out culture” in some areas.
Most activists are neither saints nor superhumanly rational, of course—but at least in certain matters the general public might need to get out of their way and comply with “cultural engineering” projects, where those genuinely appear to be vital low-hanging fruit obscured by public denial and conformism.
I’m pretty sure that call out culture needs some work. It’s sort of feasible when there’s agreement about what’s privileged and what isn’t, but I’d respect it more if there were peace between transgendered people and feminists.
From a place of general agreement with you, looking for thoughts on how to go forward:
Are second-wave feminists more transphobic than a random member of the population? Or do you think second-wave hypocrisy is evidence that the whole second-wave argument is flawed?
Because as skeptical as I often am of third-wave as actually practiced, they are particularly good (compared to society as a whole) on transgendered folks, right?
I don’t think the problem is especially about transphobia, I think it’s about a harsh style of enforcing whatever changes people from that subculture want to make. They want to believe—and try to enforce—that the harshness shouldn’t matter, but it does.
I think that “calling out” types can be extremely harsh and unpleasant—I agree with NancyLebovitz there. However, I don’t get what she meant by the problems between feminist and trans people leading her to respect it less.
I mean that call out culture presents itself as an optimal way for people with different levels of privilege to live with each other, and I think that intractable problem between second wave feminists and transpeople is evidence that there are problems with call out culture, even if .what second wave feminists have been doing is technically before the era of call out culture.
There used to be a really good analysis of the problems with call out culture at ozyfrantz.com, but that blog is no longer available.
I see. Personally, I’m struggling with the proper application of the Tone Argument. In archetypal form:
A: I don’t like social expression X (e.g. scorn at transgendered). B: You might have a point, but I’m turn off by your tone. A: I don’t think my tone is your true rejection.
But in practice, this can devolve into: B: Social expression X isn’t so bad / might be justified. A: B deserves to be fired / assaulted / murdered. (e.g. a mindkilled response) B: Overreacting much?
which is clearly problematic on A’s part. Separating the not-true-rejection error by B from the mindkilled problem of A is very important. But the worry is that focusing our attention on that question diverts from the substantive issue of describing what social expressions are problematic and identifying them when they occur (to try to reduce their frequency in the future).
The fact that second wave feminists exercised cisgender privilege to be hurtful to the transgendered seems totally distinction from “Tone Argument” dynamic.
I’m pretty sure “trying to eat less” is exactly the wrong thing to do. Calorie restriction just triggers the starvation response which makes things worse in the long run.
Physics is still relevant. The only way to lose weight (outside of surgery) is to spend more energy than you take in. The problem, of course, is that your energy intake and your energy output are functions of each other plus a lot of other things besides (including what’s on your mind).
I still think that for most people (aka with an uninformative prior) the advice of “Eat less, move more” is a good starting point. Given more data, adjust as needed.
I’m pretty sure “trying to eat less” is exactly the wrong thing to do.
I’m pretty sure “Force feeding yourself as much fat as you can keep down with the aid of anti-emetics, taking glucose intravenously while injecting insulin, estrogen and testosterone and taking a β2 antagonist” is closer to “exactly the wrong thing to do”.
And here is the kind of attitude that, in my eyes, justifies all the anger and backlash against fat-shaming. Oh damn, I feel like I understand the SJW people more and more every time I see crap like this.
The harsh truth is that the obese are in a lot of trouble. They are less attractive in the workplace because of their combination of intelligence (or lack thereof) and personality. Work performance is best predicted by IQ scores and next best of Conscientiousness. Impulsive behavior on the other hand predicts crime and accidents. Most employers are probably not aware of the research linking obese people to these characteristics and outcomes, but they know from experience that employing an obese person is a financial risk with no apparent reward.
They should of course look at the individual, but not everyone can afford testing every potential employee. Nor can a doctor test his patients. But he can use his experience, which tells him that the obese person is much less likely to follow his professional advice. And even if they could check every individual it wouldn’t solve the problem because the reason the group has these characteristics is because so many individuals belonging to the group have them.
So, is there any way to help this group? My guess is that the best solution would be to introduce vice taxes and similar paternalistic measures. You can’t leave someone who is out of control to their own devices. The worst solution is the one used right now – blaming negative stereotypes and discrimination, when scientific research validates those exact stereotypes as well as provides perfectly rational reasons for discrimination.
The “harsh truth” is that people suffering from obesity need to be protected from such vile treatment somehow, and that need is not recognized at the moment. Society shouldn’t just let some entitled well-off jerks with a fetish for authoritarianism influence attitudes and policy that directly affect vulnerable groups.
I found that quite hard to read. Even if poor impulse control were the sole cause of obesity, there would be no reason to attack the obese so nastily, instead of, for instance, suggesting ways that they might improve their impulse control. I find the way he relishes attacking them incredibly unpleasant.
In fact, the internet has quite a lot to say about improving impulse control.
I reckon there’s special pleading going on with the obese. Way more anger & snottiness gets directed at them (at least on the parts of the Internet I see) than at, say, smokers, even though smoking is at least as bad in every relevant way I can think of.
Hint hint: it matters less to some people whether the group they are trying to subjugate is delineated by economic class, race, gender, sexuality or body issues… as long as they get to impose their hegemony and see the “deviants” suffer. It’s scary to see such a desire to dominate, control and punish.
Perhaps we should dominate, control and punish those evil people who use the available Bayesian evidence when dealing with individuals.
Not nearly all such people are outright sadistic and power-hungry, but those who are can spin complex ideological rationalizations that push the “overton window” and allow the “good” bourgeois to be complicit with a cruel and unjust system.
See e.g. the “Reagan revolution” in America and the myth of the “welfare queen” that’s a 3-for-1 package of racism, classism and sexism. I’ve read a bit about how it has been fuelling a “fuck you, got mine” attitude in poor people one step above the underclass; the system hasn’t actually been kind to a white/male/lower-middle-class stratum, but it has given them someone to feel superior to. It’s very similar to how the ideologues of the Confederacy explicitly advocated giving poor white men supreme rule over their household as a means of racial solidarity across the class divide.
I also predict that a lot of those evil people will be white, male, and wealthy, so we should focus on members of those groups.
False equivalence. Of course, any movement can degrade into an authoritarian-populist, four-legs-good-two-legs-bad version, given a vicious political atmosphere and polarized underlying worldviews, but… it happens to dominant/conservative ideologies, too! The dominant group just doesn’t notice the resulting violence and victimization because from its privileged position it can afford an illusion of social peace.
If we agree that it’s a danger of political processes in general rather than of specific movements, could we stop sneaking in implicit arguments that a particular ideology is safe from viciousness and indiscriminatory aggression?
Various processes of hierarchical discrimination are driven by legitimizing myths (Sidanius, 1992), which are beliefs justifying social dominance, such as paternalistic myths (hegemony serves society, looks after incapable minorities), reciprocal myths (suggestions that hegemonic groups and outgroups are actually equal), and sacred myths (the divine right of kings, as a religion-approved mandate for hegemony to govern). Pratto et al. (1994) suggest the Western idea of meritocracy and individual achievement as an example of a legitimizing myth, and argues that meritocracy produces only an illusion of fairness. SDT draws on social identity theory, suggesting that social-comparison processes drive individual discrimination (ingroup favouritism). Discriminatory acts (such as insulting remarks about minorities) are performed because they increase the actors’ self-esteem.
People of all kinds of political opinions are able to use myths to support their opinions. People of all kinds of political opinions can be power-hungry. People of all kinds of political opinions can declare other people evil and use hate against them for their own political advantage.
Can we agree on this, or can you tell me an example of a major political movement that does not do that? (Because you provided some specific examples, and I am too lazy to counter that with specific examples in the other direction, unless that really is necessary. I suppose we could just skip this part and agree that it is not necessary.)
My assumption is that SJs are good at finding faults of everyone else, and completely blind to their own. (Which is actually my assumption for all political movements.) I don’t consider SJs more untrustworthy that any other group of mindkilled people explaining why they are the good guys and their enemies are the bad guys.
Their amateur psychoanalysis lacks self-reflection. Those other people, they want to dominate, control and punish. That would obviously never happen to us! Now let me explain again why everyone who disagrees with us is evil and must be stopped...
The “harsh truth” is that people suffering from obesity need to be protected from such vile treatment somehow,
I think you’re right in general, but I don’t think “protected from” is a good way to frame it, as though fat people are the passive recipients of attacks, and some stronger force has to come in to save them. (I’m not sure quite what you meant, or even if you were just angry about a bad situation and used the first phrase that came to mind.)
The world would be a much better place if the attacks stopped. I’m not sure what the best strategies are to get people to stop seeing fatness and thinness as moral issues. The long slow grind of bring the subject up again and again with whatever mix of facts and anger seem appropriate seems to be finally getting some traction.
I don’t think “protected from” is a good way to frame it, as though fat people are the passive recipients of attacks, and some stronger force has to come in to save them. (I’m not sure quite what you meant, or even if you were just angry about a bad situation and used the first phrase that came to mind.)
Absolutely. I just meant to say that there’s a need for intersectionality and solidarity in such struggles, i.e. even people who aren’t from marginalized groups that are directly targeted by shit-stains like Mr. Staffan here should still call such shit-stains out on their shit.
As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade.
In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence: records show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities.
I sometimes explain this to people with the following metaphor: severe weight gain is a common side effect of psychiatric drug Clozaril. The average Clozaril user gains fifteen pounds, and on high doses fifty or a hundred pounds is not unheard of. Clozaril is otherwise very effective, so there have been a lot of efforts to cut down on this weight gain with clever diet programs. The journal articles about these all find that they fail, or “succeed” in the special social science way where if you dig deep enough you can invent a new endpoint that appears to have gotten 1% better if you squint. This Clozaril-related weight gain isn’t magic – it still happens because people eat more calories – but it’s not something you can just wish away either.
Imagine that some weird conspiracy is secretly dumping whole bottles of Clozaril into orange soda. Since most Americans drink orange soda, we find that overnight most Americans gain fifty pounds and become very obese.
EDIT: More links. Haven’t gone through them thoroughly yet though. Putting this stuff here more for future reference:
It concludes that high intrinsic fitness (high base VO2 max for example) is correlated with lower mortality, but identical twins with different exercise habits did not have different mortality rates.
A previous study found that overweight people who were ‘metabolically fit’ (no insulin resistance, no diabetes, no high triglycerides or high blood pressure and good cholesterol levels) were not at a higher risk of mortality compared to people who weren’t overweight.
This study had participants pedal on a bicycle until they were tired (they used this as a proxy for ‘aerobic fitness’). They found that men (the study only looked at men) in the ‘normal’ bodyweight range had lower mortality rates than men who were overweight regardless of ‘aerobic fitness’. Moreover, the study reports that the benefits of aerobic fitness are decreased in overweight men.
Looking for any relevant research or articles on the causes of obesity, or effectiveness of interventions.
It is unclear to what extent weight is genetic rather than environmentally set at a later stage in development.
Given that in adulthood adipocyte number stays constant, and weight changes are predominantly accompanied by changes in adipocyte volume, one may conclude that at some critical point in development the final fat cell number is attained and after this point no fat cell turnover occurs. Analysis of adipocyte turnover using carbon-14 dating (for a detailed methodological description, see Ref. [5]), however, has recently shown that this is not the case, but rather that adipocytes are a dynamic and highly regulated population of cells. New adipocytes form constantly to replace lost adipocytes, such that approximately every 8 years 50% of adipocytes (...) are replaced (emphasis added).
I am unable to find whether fat cell count can be changed over this 8 year time scale, though my biochemistry professor was inclined to that hypothesis.
Obesity can be characterised into two main types, hyperplastic (increase in adipocyte number) and hypertrophic (increase in adipocyte volume). Obese and overweight individuals may exist anywhere along the cellularity scale, however on average certain trends appear. Hypertrophy, to a degree, is characteristic of all overweight and obese individuals. Hyperplasia, however, is correlated more strongly with obesity severity.
Heredity and weight:
at present, it is impossible to conclude whether the average increase in adipocyte number seen in obese and severely obese individuals is the result of adult adipocyte recruitment or rather a reflection of a population of people predisposed (by their pre-adulthood fat cell number) to be become obese/severely obese.
The long-term weight loss cited in this review used a 1-2 year followup, during which time only <16% of adipocytes could have turned over.
it is clear that fat cell number does not decrease in adulthood, even following long-term weight loss. (emphasis added) In line with this, hyperplastic obese individuals have a poorer treatment outcome following diet-induced weight loss than hypertrophic individuals (when controlled for fat mass). Often for hyperplastic obese individuals, treatments other than diet and exercise are necessary if substantial and permanent weight loss is to be achieved. Successful, but invasive therapies include surgery to reduce the amount of calories ingested (e.g. gastric bypass) and/or surgical removal of fat tissue (e.g. reconstructive surgery or liposuction). The recent discovery of a high turnover of adipocytes in adult human white adipose tissue (approximately 10% annually) now establishes an additional therapeutic target for the pharmacological intervention of obesity [1].
I am unable to find whether fat cell count can be changed over this 8 year time scale, though my biochemistry professor was inclined to that hypothesis.
People such as the author of The Hacker’s Diet, who lost a sizeable fraction of his weight as an adult and then stayed there for decades, seem to me to suggest that it can.
In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.
ADBOC. I don’t know that seeming like someone who is starving, so long as you aren’t actually risking to die from starvation and your micronutrient intake stays adequate, is a bad thing, and indeed theevidence seems to suggest that it isn’t.
And yeah, slowed metabolism means that if you go straight back to eating as much as you did before starting the diet, you’ll gain back the weight. Which is why people are usually advised not to do that.
The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance,
I think the problem is that maintaining a state on semi-starvation for the rest of one’s life is very unpleasant and difficult, and is achieved by very few people:
“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe,” Dr. Friedman wrote. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.
Controlling for height and sex?
Well, the identical twin parts of the study would automatically control for height and sex :)
Well, the identical twin parts of the study would automatically control for height and sex :)
What?
I meant, it doesn’t surprise me at all that if you pick a bunch of pairs of twins, the correlation between “x’s weight” and “x’s twin’s weight” would be very large—but if you only picked pairs of male twins between 1.77 m and 1.80 m tall and you got the same result...
Link to twin study. A quick scan (I don’t have time to read it in full right now, but I will later) suggests they used twins of the same sex, and they also compared BMI not weight, which controls for height.
Lesswrongers are surprised by this? It appears figuring out metabolism and nutrition is harder than I thought.
I believe that obesity is a problem of metabolic regulation, not overeating, and this result seems to support my belief. Restricting calories to regulate your weight is akin to opening the fridge door to regulate its temperature. It might work for a while but in the long run you’ll end up breaking both your fridge and your budget.
Far better to figure out how to adjust the termostat.
Some of the things that upregulate your fat set point are a history of starvation (that’s why calorie restriction is bad in the long run), toxins in your food, sugars (especially fructose—that stuff is toxic) and grains. Wheat is particularly bad—it can serioysly screw with your gut and is addictive to boot.
Genes take charge and diets fall by the wayside.
You need a New York Times account to read it, but setting one up only takes a couple of minutes. Here are some exerpts in any case.
Obese people almost always regain weight after weight loss:
Thin people who are forced to gain weight find it easy to lose it again:
The body’s metabolism changes with weight loss and weight gain:
Genes and weight:
On the other hand, here’s a study that shows a very strong link between impulse control and weight. I’m not really sure what to believe anymore.
The impulse control they use is a facet of Conscientiousness; and we already know Conscientiousness is highly heritable...
Yes, but it is still potentially useful to know how much of the heritability is metabolically vs. behaviorally manifested.
Also more generally, we should be careful about mixing different levels of causation.
Unless I’m missing something, they don’t describe the size of the effects of personality that they found, just the strength of the correlations.
I’m not too clear on how to interpret hierarchical model coefficients, but they do give at least one description of effect size, on pg6:
and pg8:
Thanks. Those differences are small compared to common differences of BMI, though.
Well, yeah, you should’ve expected that from the small correlations.
I don’t have much knowledge of statistics. You may have forgotten what that’s like.
In principle, something (e.g. how much the mother eats during the pregnancy) might affect both those things, with no causal pathway from one down to the other.
Moderately surprising corollary: so society IS treating fat people in a horribly unjust manner after all. Those boring SJW types who have been going on and on about “fat-shaming” and “thin privilege”… are yet again more morally correct on average than the general public.
Am now mildly ashamed of some previous thoughts and/or attitudes.
What are we to make of the supposedly increasing obesity rate across Western nations? Is this a failure of measurement (e.g. standards for what count as “obesity” are dropping), has the Western diet changed our genetics, or something else altogether?
If it was mainly genetics, then I would think that the obesity rate would remain constant throughout time.
Environmental changes over time may have shifted the entire distribution of people’s weights upwards without affecting the distribution’s variance. This would reconcile an environmentally-driven obesity rate increase with the NYT’s report that 70% of the variance is genetic.
The obvious cross comparison would be to look at populations distributions of weight and see if they share the same pattern shifted left or right based on the primary food source.
Hypothesis possibly reconciling link between impulse control and weight, strong heritability of both, resistance to experimental intervention, and society scale shifts in weight:
Body weight is largely determined by the ‘set point’ to which the body’s metabolism returns, hence resistance to intervention. This set point can be influenced through lifestyle, hence link to impulse control and changes across time/cultures. However this influence can only be exerted either a) during development and/or b) over longer time scales than are generally used in experiments.
This should be easy enough to test. Are there any relevant data on e.g. people raised in non-obesity ridden cultures and then introduced to one? Or on interventions with obese adolescents?l
I dunno, ask the OP. I was merely pointing out that in the event that obesity has a more or less significant hereditary/genetic component, the social stigma against it must be an even more horrible and cruel thing than most enlightened people would admit today.
(Consider, for example, just the fact that our attractiveness criteria appear to be almost entirely a “social construct”—otherwise it’d be hard to explain the enormity of variance; AFAIK the only human universal is a preference for facial symmetry in either gender. If society could just make certain traits that people are stuck with regardless of their will, and cannot really affect, fall within the norms of “beauty” in a generation or two… then all the “social justice”/”body positivity”/etc campaigns to do so might have a big potential leverage on many people’s mental health and happiness. So it must be in fact reasonable and ethical of activists to “police” everyday language for fat-shaming/body-negativity, devote resources and effort to press for better representation in media, etc.
Yet again I’m struck by just how rational—in intention and planning, at least—some odd-seeming “activist” stuff comes across as on close examination.)
A possible hypothesis is that the genes encode your set point weight given optimal nutrition, but if you don’t get adequate nutrition during childhood you don’t attain it. IIRC something similar is believed to apply to intelligence and height and explain the Flynn effect and the fact that young generations are taller than older ones.
Flynn effect?
Sure. Fixed. Thanks.
I’ve moved away slightly from SJW attitudes on various matters, since starting to read LW, Yvain’s blog and various other things, however, I’ve actually moved closer to SJW attitudes to weight, since researching the issue. The fact that weight loss attempts hardly ever work in the long run, is what has changed my views the most.
[OT: just noting that one could be “away from SJW attitudes” in different directions, some of them mutually exclusive. For example, on some particular things (racial discrimination, etc) I take the Marxist view that activism can’t help the roots of the problem which are endemic to the functioning of capitalism—except that I don’t believe it’s possible or sane to try and replace global capitalism with something better anytime soon, either… so there might be no hope of reaching “endgame” for some struggles until post-scarcity. Although activists should probably at least try and defend the progress made on them to-date from being optimized away by hostile political agendas.]
Actually, I still suspect that the benefiits in increased happiness and mental health would still be better than the marginal efficiency of pressuring lots of people to try and lose weight even if it depended in large part on personal behaviour. And social pressure is notoriously indiscriminate, so any undesirable messages would still hit people who can’t or don’t really need to change.
Plus there are still all the socioeconomic factors outside people’s control, etc.
Whether or not this result is correct, society is definitely shaming the wrong people: some perfectly healthy people (e.g. young women) are shamed for not being as skinny as the models on TV, and not much is being done to prevent morbid obesity in certain people (esp. middle-aged and older) who don’t even try to lose weight.
(Edited to replace “adult men” with “middle-aged and older” and “eat less” with “lose weight”.)
Yeah, and so it looks more and more that (as terribly impolite it might be to suggest in some circles on the Internet) we need much higher standards of “political correctness” and a way stronger “call-out culture” in some areas.
Most activists are neither saints nor superhumanly rational, of course—but at least in certain matters the general public might need to get out of their way and comply with “cultural engineering” projects, where those genuinely appear to be vital low-hanging fruit obscured by public denial and conformism.
A social justice style which includes recruiting imperfect allies rather than attacking them.
I’m pretty sure that call out culture needs some work. It’s sort of feasible when there’s agreement about what’s privileged and what isn’t, but I’d respect it more if there were peace between transgendered people and feminists.
From a place of general agreement with you, looking for thoughts on how to go forward:
Are second-wave feminists more transphobic than a random member of the population? Or do you think second-wave hypocrisy is evidence that the whole second-wave argument is flawed?
Because as skeptical as I often am of third-wave as actually practiced, they are particularly good (compared to society as a whole) on transgendered folks, right?
I don’t think the problem is especially about transphobia, I think it’s about a harsh style of enforcing whatever changes people from that subculture want to make. They want to believe—and try to enforce—that the harshness shouldn’t matter, but it does.
This may offer some clues about a way forward.
IME “call out culture” feminists are very anti-transphobia. Second wave feminists aren’t so interested in getting people to check their privilege.
If that’s true, then I don’t understand NancyLebovitz’s criticism of “call out culture” or the relevance of her statement to Multiheaded’s point.
I think that “calling out” types can be extremely harsh and unpleasant—I agree with NancyLebovitz there. However, I don’t get what she meant by the problems between feminist and trans people leading her to respect it less.
I mean that call out culture presents itself as an optimal way for people with different levels of privilege to live with each other, and I think that intractable problem between second wave feminists and transpeople is evidence that there are problems with call out culture, even if .what second wave feminists have been doing is technically before the era of call out culture.
There used to be a really good analysis of the problems with call out culture at ozyfrantz.com, but that blog is no longer available.
I see. Personally, I’m struggling with the proper application of the Tone Argument. In archetypal form:
A: I don’t like social expression X (e.g. scorn at transgendered).
B: You might have a point, but I’m turn off by your tone.
A: I don’t think my tone is your true rejection.
But in practice, this can devolve into:
B: Social expression X isn’t so bad / might be justified.
A: B deserves to be fired / assaulted / murdered. (e.g. a mindkilled response)
B: Overreacting much?
which is clearly problematic on A’s part. Separating the not-true-rejection error by B from the mindkilled problem of A is very important. But the worry is that focusing our attention on that question diverts from the substantive issue of describing what social expressions are problematic and identifying them when they occur (to try to reduce their frequency in the future).
The fact that second wave feminists exercised cisgender privilege to be hurtful to the transgendered seems totally distinction from “Tone Argument” dynamic.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130412201542/http://ozyfrantz.com/2012/12/29/certain-propositions-concerning-callout-culture-part-one/
Thanks very much.
I wanted all three of the major articles, but that was easy enough to find from your link.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130412200333/http://ozyfrantz.com/category/callout-culture/
I’m pretty sure “trying to eat less” is exactly the wrong thing to do. Calorie restriction just triggers the starvation response which makes things worse in the long run.
Change what you eat, not how much.
Physics is still relevant. The only way to lose weight (outside of surgery) is to spend more energy than you take in. The problem, of course, is that your energy intake and your energy output are functions of each other plus a lot of other things besides (including what’s on your mind).
I still think that for most people (aka with an uninformative prior) the advice of “Eat less, move more” is a good starting point. Given more data, adjust as needed.
It’s not that unusual for people to regain what they lost plus more after a failed diet.
I’m pretty sure “Force feeding yourself as much fat as you can keep down with the aid of anti-emetics, taking glucose intravenously while injecting insulin, estrogen and testosterone and taking a β2 antagonist” is closer to “exactly the wrong thing to do”.
I’ve replaced “eat less” with “lose weight” because I don’t want to go into this, but see Lumifer’s reply.
And here is the kind of attitude that, in my eyes, justifies all the anger and backlash against fat-shaming. Oh damn, I feel like I understand the SJW people more and more every time I see crap like this.
http://staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/the-ugly-truth-about-obesity/
The “harsh truth” is that people suffering from obesity need to be protected from such vile treatment somehow, and that need is not recognized at the moment. Society shouldn’t just let some entitled well-off jerks with a fetish for authoritarianism influence attitudes and policy that directly affect vulnerable groups.
...
Goddamn reactionaries everywhere.
I found that quite hard to read. Even if poor impulse control were the sole cause of obesity, there would be no reason to attack the obese so nastily, instead of, for instance, suggesting ways that they might improve their impulse control. I find the way he relishes attacking them incredibly unpleasant.
In fact, the internet has quite a lot to say about improving impulse control.
I reckon there’s special pleading going on with the obese. Way more anger & snottiness gets directed at them (at least on the parts of the Internet I see) than at, say, smokers, even though smoking is at least as bad in every relevant way I can think of.
(Here’re some obvious examples. At an individual level, smoking is associated with shorter life at least as much as obesity. At a global level, smoking kills more and reduces DALYs far more than high BMI. Like obesity, smoking is associated with lower IQ & lower conscientiousness. And so on.)
Hint hint: it matters less to some people whether the group they are trying to subjugate is delineated by economic class, race, gender, sexuality or body issues… as long as they get to impose their hegemony and see the “deviants” suffer. It’s scary to see such a desire to dominate, control and punish.
(Related: check out the pingback on that post.)
Perhaps we should dominate, control and punish those evil people who use the available Bayesian evidence when dealing with individuals.
I also predict that a lot of those evil people will be white, male, and wealthy, so we should focus on members of those groups.
It’s not scary if the good people are doing it, right? And, of course, by “good” I mean members of our tribe.
Not nearly all such people are outright sadistic and power-hungry, but those who are can spin complex ideological rationalizations that push the “overton window” and allow the “good” bourgeois to be complicit with a cruel and unjust system.
See e.g. the “Reagan revolution” in America and the myth of the “welfare queen” that’s a 3-for-1 package of racism, classism and sexism. I’ve read a bit about how it has been fuelling a “fuck you, got mine” attitude in poor people one step above the underclass; the system hasn’t actually been kind to a white/male/lower-middle-class stratum, but it has given them someone to feel superior to. It’s very similar to how the ideologues of the Confederacy explicitly advocated giving poor white men supreme rule over their household as a means of racial solidarity across the class divide.
False equivalence. Of course, any movement can degrade into an authoritarian-populist, four-legs-good-two-legs-bad version, given a vicious political atmosphere and polarized underlying worldviews, but… it happens to dominant/conservative ideologies, too! The dominant group just doesn’t notice the resulting violence and victimization because from its privileged position it can afford an illusion of social peace.
If we agree that it’s a danger of political processes in general rather than of specific movements, could we stop sneaking in implicit arguments that a particular ideology is safe from viciousness and indiscriminatory aggression?
See also: social dominance theory.
(More on SDT)
People of all kinds of political opinions are able to use myths to support their opinions. People of all kinds of political opinions can be power-hungry. People of all kinds of political opinions can declare other people evil and use hate against them for their own political advantage.
Can we agree on this, or can you tell me an example of a major political movement that does not do that? (Because you provided some specific examples, and I am too lazy to counter that with specific examples in the other direction, unless that really is necessary. I suppose we could just skip this part and agree that it is not necessary.)
???
Is your assumption that any effort to limit cruelty will necessarily be cruel? Or that SJs in particular are especially untrustworthy? Something else?
My assumption is that SJs are good at finding faults of everyone else, and completely blind to their own. (Which is actually my assumption for all political movements.) I don’t consider SJs more untrustworthy that any other group of mindkilled people explaining why they are the good guys and their enemies are the bad guys.
Their amateur psychoanalysis lacks self-reflection. Those other people, they want to dominate, control and punish. That would obviously never happen to us! Now let me explain again why everyone who disagrees with us is evil and must be stopped...
I think you’re right in general, but I don’t think “protected from” is a good way to frame it, as though fat people are the passive recipients of attacks, and some stronger force has to come in to save them. (I’m not sure quite what you meant, or even if you were just angry about a bad situation and used the first phrase that came to mind.)
The world would be a much better place if the attacks stopped. I’m not sure what the best strategies are to get people to stop seeing fatness and thinness as moral issues. The long slow grind of bring the subject up again and again with whatever mix of facts and anger seem appropriate seems to be finally getting some traction.
Absolutely. I just meant to say that there’s a need for intersectionality and solidarity in such struggles, i.e. even people who aren’t from marginalized groups that are directly targeted by shit-stains like Mr. Staffan here should still call such shit-stains out on their shit.
Am I missing a connection between your post and coffespoons’ that makes your a response to his?
http://aeon.co/magazine/health/david-berreby-obesity-era/
(EDIT: Found another article about that here: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/08/the-animals-are-also-getting-fat.html)
The study referenced appears to be from here: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/278/1712/1626.short
Here is one theory on an environmental cause of obesity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesogen
Here is a study that suggests Jet fuel causes obesity. And it’s an epigenetic effect: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3587983/
Another interesting link I’d like to save here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/04/contra-hallquist-on-scientific-rationality/
EDIT: More links. Haven’t gone through them thoroughly yet though. Putting this stuff here more for future reference:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3xyu5r/fat_but_fit_may_be_a_myth_researchers_say_the/cy9b52l
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3xyu5r/fat_but_fit_may_be_a_myth_researchers_say_the/cy91nu5
Looking for any relevant research or articles on the causes of obesity, or effectiveness of interventions.
another link to dump for now: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4zupkq/new_study_finds_that_the_bmi_of_adopted_children/
Adipocyte count is essential to maintaining weight.
It is unclear to what extent weight is genetic rather than environmentally set at a later stage in development.
I am unable to find whether fat cell count can be changed over this 8 year time scale, though my biochemistry professor was inclined to that hypothesis.
Heredity and weight:
The long-term weight loss cited in this review used a 1-2 year followup, during which time only <16% of adipocytes could have turned over.
People such as the author of The Hacker’s Diet, who lost a sizeable fraction of his weight as an adult and then stayed there for decades, seem to me to suggest that it can.
ADBOC. I don’t know that seeming like someone who is starving, so long as you aren’t actually risking to die from starvation and your micronutrient intake stays adequate, is a bad thing, and indeed the evidence seems to suggest that it isn’t.
And yeah, slowed metabolism means that if you go straight back to eating as much as you did before starting the diet, you’ll gain back the weight. Which is why people are usually advised not to do that.
Controlling for height and sex?
I think the problem is that maintaining a state on semi-starvation for the rest of one’s life is very unpleasant and difficult, and is achieved by very few people:
Well, the identical twin parts of the study would automatically control for height and sex :)
What?
I meant, it doesn’t surprise me at all that if you pick a bunch of pairs of twins, the correlation between “x’s weight” and “x’s twin’s weight” would be very large—but if you only picked pairs of male twins between 1.77 m and 1.80 m tall and you got the same result...
Link to twin study. A quick scan (I don’t have time to read it in full right now, but I will later) suggests they used twins of the same sex, and they also compared BMI not weight, which controls for height.
Lesswrongers are surprised by this? It appears figuring out metabolism and nutrition is harder than I thought.
I believe that obesity is a problem of metabolic regulation, not overeating, and this result seems to support my belief. Restricting calories to regulate your weight is akin to opening the fridge door to regulate its temperature. It might work for a while but in the long run you’ll end up breaking both your fridge and your budget. Far better to figure out how to adjust the termostat.
Some of the things that upregulate your fat set point are a history of starvation (that’s why calorie restriction is bad in the long run), toxins in your food, sugars (especially fructose—that stuff is toxic) and grains. Wheat is particularly bad—it can serioysly screw with your gut and is addictive to boot.