Well, I never called them stupid. In fact, quite the opposite. I promised a series on SMTM on my new blog, but life has got in the way somewhat the last few weeks. I should perhaps get around to that now. Just a few notes on this:
Their interpretation of overfeeding studies is extremely odd. That’s an aside, but it’s one that I’ll make good on in a few days. I’ve already discussed it at length on the ACX discord server, but not in a format conducive to just reposting here. So, a little note on my distaste for their appeals to “common interpretations”, since those literally do not matter- something that is a mystery to Bob on the street and not a mystery to diet scientists, is not a mystery that requires extra research. It requires education and publicity, maybe.
The “linear relationship” is one such appeal- it’s not something I think anyone actually believes. Or rather, there is a sensible and a less sensible interpretation. The sensible interpretation is that your metabolism changes as you get fatter, because fat is metabolically active tissue. A person with 300lbs of “extra” fat on them will “be” a metabolism which is burning through more calories daily/weekly regardless. Add 3500 calories onto what they eat weekly for maintenance of that weight and you’d expect about a lb of gain, holding things like activity level equal (and probably for someone very fat you can). But you can’t stop at time t1, determine the caloric surplus for such a person would be, say 4500 calories a day for a surplus of 1lb a week, and just run that forever. That’s not how any of this works.
Also I know of literally not a soul writing in the literature today (maybe random “diet coaches” at weightwatchers and the like) that thinks weight loss is equally hard for everyone. You have different cultures, access to different foods, tolerance of different foods, different leptin signalling, different hormonal responses, different fat distribution, so on- oh and just differing lifestyle factors between individuals. Much of this explains how some get fat in the first place and how some fail to do so. It also explains how those differences could become more stark in environments where suddenly lots of hyper-palatable and not-very-satiating food becomes the norm.
But anyway, these are just a few notes, and I’ll cover more when I write up the post responding there. I’ll just add that I think there is clear intent to mislead in various places (to the “why would I call them lying liars and aren’t I really missing the point” issue). I refer you to (1) especially here- if you don’t think, having read the underlying article, and their commentary, that they are being even remotely misleading, well, that’s an interesting data point at least. Because I’m not seeing a retraction or an edit there, which would be reasonable if one thought there was danger of misunderstanding. And it seems to me the reason why is because it’s a nice hook- “people ate all the bad food years ago and they don’t eat the bad food as much now even, but they’re getting fatter”, “never mind about the fact that we just swapped what fats we consume and have quadrupled our intake or whatever”.
Since SMTM's mystery is (among other things) "why are people eating more"
If I thought their only point was “environmental contaminants might be making people hungrier” then, well, I’d still have lots of issues- not least that we already have plenty of research on diets which talk about this very issue. But, y’know, fine. There are plenty of interesting things which do affect hunger-signalling, But the “among other things” troubles me, and the main one- which SMTM very evidently devote quite some time too, is the “ability of the body to just dump fat stores”. It’s noted in various places, sometimes explicitly, sometimes through the writing equivalent of raised eyebrows and nodding in a certain direction. But it’s there. And (1) to reference back, goes precisely to that issue. The claim isn’t that people just feel like they must eat more now, it’s that they ate “badly” in the past and yet didn’t seem to gain weight in spite of it. No mention of calories specifically there, but of course that does come up later with overfeeding studies and this utterly ludicrous “we don’t deny that if you eat only 400 calories a day you’ll lose weight, and10,000 a day you’ll gain weight”, as if this is a concession to common sense. They seem to believe, or at least write as if it is the case that, a person at weight [x] today, could eat the same amount as someone 100 years ago, also at weight [x], calorically, and yet gain more weight, for reasons having nothing to do with exercise (obviously not diet since that’s the control here). That is where I have serious issues. If you think that is not something in the SMTM canon, then let me know why I’m misreading them, please.
I think the most straightforward way to prevent people from giving SMTM money is to stop questioning their motives and just answer the question (if it really is so easy): Why does the obesity rate curve look the way that it does?
And note that “because people are inexplicably eating more” doesn’t really answer the question, and an explanation like “Americans had substantially easier access to delicious food in 2018 (obesity rate 42%) than they did in 2008 (obesity rate 34%)” would be surprising and need evidence backing it up.
To be completely clear, I honestly want the answer to this question (and I like SMTM since they seem to understand why it’s an interesting question)..
There is nothing at all inexplicable about that. Access to very palatable and not-very-satiating (cal for cal) food will change behaviours over time, these behaviours are also inherited in familial environments, and compound since once someone is obese, it becomes increasingly hard to get not-obese. With micro-cultural behaviour change which favours obesity, we’re also seeing actual cultural changes toward acceptance and promotion of obesity-promoting behaviours, excessive eating among family and friends, increasingly sedentary lifestyles (lord knows the last two years will have accelerated that), forgetting how to cook, or deciding to not bother cooking the sorts of foods which are satiating and lower cal.
The “linear relationship” is one such appeal- it’s not something I think anyone actually believes.
People definitely believe this.
Also I know of literally not a soul writing in the literature today (maybe random “diet coaches” at weightwatchers and the like) that thinks weight loss is equally hard for everyone.
People definitely believe this.
“people ate all the bad food years ago and they don’t eat the bad food as much now even, but they’re getting fatter”, “never mind about the fact that we just swapped what fats we consume and have quadrupled our intake or whatever”.
There are definitely people who think that if they just eat less butter/sugar/etc. but replace it with the same amount of calories in something else that they’ll lose weight.
They seem to believe, or at least write as if it is the case that, a person at weight [x] today, could eat the same amount as someone 100 years ago, also at weight [x], calorically, and yet gain more weight, for reasons having nothing to do with exercise (obviously not diet since that’s the control here).
What makes you think SMTM believe this?
It seems like you don’t believe that layman beliefs can be as wrong as they are, and then assume from that that SMTM is bringing these things up to mislead people, but the article makes way more sense if read it literally, as-if people actually believe these things and SMTM is arguing that they don’t (fully) explain the rise in obesity.
The weird thing is that none of this matters, since this is just the “Why are we writing this series?” article. SMTM’s actual hypothesis (so far) is that there’s some sort of contaminant that makes people gain weight in an unspecified way. It doesn’t actually matter if comtaminant x makes you eat more or makes you gain more weight while eating the same amount. If this hypothesis is right and we could eat less of the contaminant, then we’d stop gaining weight (and hopefully lose some).
To be clear I think you’ve misunderstood me here, and that may be my fault. But, to clarify, I’m not saying anything, really, about the laymans’ beliefs. Whenever I talk about “people believing x”, I’m meaning “people who research diets and such”. I don’t care what laymen believe. As I said, laymen believe all sorts of silly stuff in all sorts of fields. But laypeople disproportionately believing astrology would not, for sake of argument, mandate that we do more research showing why astrology is bunk (no, I am not comparing the arguments of SMTM to astrology, I am only using the comparison for the specific point here about laymen and their irrelevance to research). It might be the case that we should do more to educate laypeople on matters of calories and and weight-gain and all the adjacent funky stuff too. But none of this requires more research.
Actually my second quote does make it clear “not a soul writing in the literature today”- so I think that one is on you, but the first is on me, fair enough.
“What makes you think SMTM believe this?” All of the talk about mechanisms for dumping fat, in relation to changes in weight at the population level. Also their later commentary about diets basically not being possibly workable, which would only be true if there was some mechanism meaning people retained fat way more than others, instead of “some people have disproportionately strong hunger signalling relative to others”. But mostly the prior stuff.
“If you eat more calories than you expend, you store the excess as fat and gain weight, and if you expend more than you eat, you burn fat and lose weight.
This perspective assumes that the body stores every extra calorie you eat as body fat, and that it doesn’t have any tools for using more or less energy as the need arises. But this isn’t the case. Your body has the ability to regulate things like its temperature, and it has similar tools to regulate body fatness.”
So we have this. In the same article, we also have them talking about how fat and carbohydrate consumption have gone down, yet obesity has gone up. Frankly, if they sincerely believe people are eating less (I do not believe this to be true, I think we have good reasons to think this is not true), then its’ not just hunger-signalling that they’re talking about as being a difference maker.
Well, I never called them stupid. In fact, quite the opposite. I promised a series on SMTM on my new blog, but life has got in the way somewhat the last few weeks. I should perhaps get around to that now. Just a few notes on this:
Their interpretation of overfeeding studies is extremely odd. That’s an aside, but it’s one that I’ll make good on in a few days. I’ve already discussed it at length on the ACX discord server, but not in a format conducive to just reposting here. So, a little note on my distaste for their appeals to “common interpretations”, since those literally do not matter- something that is a mystery to Bob on the street and not a mystery to diet scientists, is not a mystery that requires extra research. It requires education and publicity, maybe.
The “linear relationship” is one such appeal- it’s not something I think anyone actually believes. Or rather, there is a sensible and a less sensible interpretation. The sensible interpretation is that your metabolism changes as you get fatter, because fat is metabolically active tissue. A person with 300lbs of “extra” fat on them will “be” a metabolism which is burning through more calories daily/weekly regardless. Add 3500 calories onto what they eat weekly for maintenance of that weight and you’d expect about a lb of gain, holding things like activity level equal (and probably for someone very fat you can). But you can’t stop at time t1, determine the caloric surplus for such a person would be, say 4500 calories a day for a surplus of 1lb a week, and just run that forever. That’s not how any of this works.
Also I know of literally not a soul writing in the literature today (maybe random “diet coaches” at weightwatchers and the like) that thinks weight loss is equally hard for everyone. You have different cultures, access to different foods, tolerance of different foods, different leptin signalling, different hormonal responses, different fat distribution, so on- oh and just differing lifestyle factors between individuals. Much of this explains how some get fat in the first place and how some fail to do so. It also explains how those differences could become more stark in environments where suddenly lots of hyper-palatable and not-very-satiating food becomes the norm.
But anyway, these are just a few notes, and I’ll cover more when I write up the post responding there. I’ll just add that I think there is clear intent to mislead in various places (to the “why would I call them lying liars and aren’t I really missing the point” issue). I refer you to (1) especially here- if you don’t think, having read the underlying article, and their commentary, that they are being even remotely misleading, well, that’s an interesting data point at least. Because I’m not seeing a retraction or an edit there, which would be reasonable if one thought there was danger of misunderstanding. And it seems to me the reason why is because it’s a nice hook- “people ate all the bad food years ago and they don’t eat the bad food as much now even, but they’re getting fatter”, “never mind about the fact that we just swapped what fats we consume and have quadrupled our intake or whatever”.
Since SMTM's mystery is (among other things) "why are people eating more"If I thought their only point was “environmental contaminants might be making people hungrier” then, well, I’d still have lots of issues- not least that we already have plenty of research on diets which talk about this very issue. But, y’know, fine. There are plenty of interesting things which do affect hunger-signalling, But the “among other things” troubles me, and the main one- which SMTM very evidently devote quite some time too, is the “ability of the body to just dump fat stores”. It’s noted in various places, sometimes explicitly, sometimes through the writing equivalent of raised eyebrows and nodding in a certain direction. But it’s there. And (1) to reference back, goes precisely to that issue. The claim isn’t that people just feel like they must eat more now, it’s that they ate “badly” in the past and yet didn’t seem to gain weight in spite of it. No mention of calories specifically there, but of course that does come up later with overfeeding studies and this utterly ludicrous “we don’t deny that if you eat only 400 calories a day you’ll lose weight, and10,000 a day you’ll gain weight”, as if this is a concession to common sense. They seem to believe, or at least write as if it is the case that, a person at weight [x] today, could eat the same amount as someone 100 years ago, also at weight [x], calorically, and yet gain more weight, for reasons having nothing to do with exercise (obviously not diet since that’s the control here). That is where I have serious issues. If you think that is not something in the SMTM canon, then let me know why I’m misreading them, please.
I think the most straightforward way to prevent people from giving SMTM money is to stop questioning their motives and just answer the question (if it really is so easy): Why does the obesity rate curve look the way that it does?
And note that “because people are inexplicably eating more” doesn’t really answer the question, and an explanation like “Americans had substantially easier access to delicious food in 2018 (obesity rate 42%) than they did in 2008 (obesity rate 34%)” would be surprising and need evidence backing it up.
To be completely clear, I honestly want the answer to this question (and I like SMTM since they seem to understand why it’s an interesting question)..
There is nothing at all inexplicable about that. Access to very palatable and not-very-satiating (cal for cal) food will change behaviours over time, these behaviours are also inherited in familial environments, and compound since once someone is obese, it becomes increasingly hard to get not-obese. With micro-cultural behaviour change which favours obesity, we’re also seeing actual cultural changes toward acceptance and promotion of obesity-promoting behaviours, excessive eating among family and friends, increasingly sedentary lifestyles (lord knows the last two years will have accelerated that), forgetting how to cook, or deciding to not bother cooking the sorts of foods which are satiating and lower cal.
For what it’s worth, I think https://www.livenowthrivelater.co.uk/2021/09/is-the-obesity-epidemic-a-mystery-part-1/ is a good response to SMTM arguing something similar (that the problem is hyperpalatable foods).
People definitely believe this.
People definitely believe this.
There are definitely people who think that if they just eat less butter/sugar/etc. but replace it with the same amount of calories in something else that they’ll lose weight.
What makes you think SMTM believe this?
It seems like you don’t believe that layman beliefs can be as wrong as they are, and then assume from that that SMTM is bringing these things up to mislead people, but the article makes way more sense if read it literally, as-if people actually believe these things and SMTM is arguing that they don’t (fully) explain the rise in obesity.
The weird thing is that none of this matters, since this is just the “Why are we writing this series?” article. SMTM’s actual hypothesis (so far) is that there’s some sort of contaminant that makes people gain weight in an unspecified way. It doesn’t actually matter if comtaminant x makes you eat more or makes you gain more weight while eating the same amount. If this hypothesis is right and we could eat less of the contaminant, then we’d stop gaining weight (and hopefully lose some).
To be clear I think you’ve misunderstood me here, and that may be my fault. But, to clarify, I’m not saying anything, really, about the laymans’ beliefs. Whenever I talk about “people believing x”, I’m meaning “people who research diets and such”. I don’t care what laymen believe. As I said, laymen believe all sorts of silly stuff in all sorts of fields. But laypeople disproportionately believing astrology would not, for sake of argument, mandate that we do more research showing why astrology is bunk (no, I am not comparing the arguments of SMTM to astrology, I am only using the comparison for the specific point here about laymen and their irrelevance to research). It might be the case that we should do more to educate laypeople on matters of calories and and weight-gain and all the adjacent funky stuff too. But none of this requires more research.
Actually my second quote does make it clear “not a soul writing in the literature today”- so I think that one is on you, but the first is on me, fair enough.
“What makes you think SMTM believe this?”
All of the talk about mechanisms for dumping fat, in relation to changes in weight at the population level. Also their later commentary about diets basically not being possibly workable, which would only be true if there was some mechanism meaning people retained fat way more than others, instead of “some people have disproportionately strong hunger signalling relative to others”. But mostly the prior stuff.
“If you eat more calories than you expend, you store the excess as fat and gain weight, and if you expend more than you eat, you burn fat and lose weight.
This perspective assumes that the body stores every extra calorie you eat as body fat, and that it doesn’t have any tools for using more or less energy as the need arises. But this isn’t the case. Your body has the ability to regulate things like its temperature, and it has similar tools to regulate body fatness.”
So we have this. In the same article, we also have them talking about how fat and carbohydrate consumption have gone down, yet obesity has gone up. Frankly, if they sincerely believe people are eating less (I do not believe this to be true, I think we have good reasons to think this is not true), then its’ not just hunger-signalling that they’re talking about as being a difference maker.