Interesting, that would definitely jive with processed foods being bad. I think you could make a great argument that it’s more primarily processed foods too, vegetable oils included. Now in these findings, are they under isocaloric conditions? I ask because you could certainly posit that processed foods are bad because they avoid satiating us somehow, but that wouldn’t necessarily hold in situations where we get the same number of calories from them. I think that’s an easier hurdle to start with, it’s very easy to imagine structures in food that our body measures satiety with getting broken down under any type of processing, but your idea of reduced efficiency or side effects would be next on my list after that.
skot523
Karma: 134
A Response to A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic
EDIT: My complete thoughts are here: https://goodtosell.substack.com/p/a-response-to-a-contamination-theory
https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease
I’ll add more and fix this up tomorrow at my pc. Sorry bout the sloppiness and the formatting, you’ll see why I was so excited. I really can’t stress just how much this adds up. It’s really quite uncanny. I encourage anyone to just read that instead of me, but I gave this a shot for when you’re done with that.
Just found this, it reminded me of your post, as I’d been thinking about it a ton.
Looks to me like it’s vegetable oils. Practically fits everything perfectly. The new addition to our diet. They were only invented about a hundred years ago. They’re in nearly everything packaged in the supermarket—hence why it looks environmental, why the rats got fat, why the processed food looks bad, even why the Cubans got skinnier, since these oils are highly implicated in global trade.
If you look at what soybean oil does in mice studies it’s kind of ridiculous. Not a medical professional, so who knows. Especially how it solves most of the points addressed in that paper.
Changed over the last hundred years
Yep
With a major shift around 1980
For the 1980 thing, I think the author focuses on that date a little too much anyways, it’s a monotonic increase in both oils and obesity all the way up.
-It could be a threshold that got passed around that time—it looks like that’s about when the average man went from just under to just about overweight BMI
-Perhaps a large cohort was hitting a certain age around that time
-Global trade really starts kicking off
And whatever it is, there is more of it every year
Yep. See source.
It doesn’t affect people living nonindustrialized lives, regardless of diet
Global trade, new invention from USA, ticks this box for me.
But it does affect lab animals, wild animals, and animals living in zoos
Lab animals fed store bought food, yep. Wild animals, no source from what I can tell, surely raccoons are eating plenty of cheetos nowadays.
It has something to do with palatable human snackfoods, unrelated to nutritional value
Yep. Unrelated to carb or fat content.
It differs in its intensity by altitude for some reason
Also think they’re a bit too focused on this one, maybe there’s a mechanism, maybe Colorado is an outlier. There’s a lot of talk of lipids, and oxidization in papers about veggie oils, perhaps that’s something—less oxygen, less oxidization, less CVD? I don’t have the expertise. Maybe it’s something else for that.
And it appears to have nothing to do with our diets Not so sure about that one
Some quotes and my rebuttals:
But again, it’s not just the contents. For some reason, eating more fat or sugar by itself isn’t as fattening as the cafeteria diet
Well, not the macronutrient contents. I think we have plenty of studies that show low fat vs low carb etc is kinda a wash. But surely there’s plenty of vegetable oil in all those processed foods.
For an abrupt shift, 1980 is when the USA started guidance going against saturated fats….and we replaced lard and butter with veggie (soybean) oil.
When humans switch from an ancient to a Western lifestyle,” he says, “they experience increased waistlines, reduced insulin sensitivity, higher blood pressure and a host of related disorders and diseases.“
Same location, new lifestyle? If they didn’t also move, I don’t see why you should say it’s in the water, vs a complete diet makeover. Note that these oils do all these things to rats. The oils also seem to act on their brains, messing with the hypothalamus which from what I could tell seems somewhat implicated in set point type stuff.
Diet won’t work—only potatoes did. Whole foods does. Those get rid of veggie oils for sure. Switching from fats to carbs won’t get rid of the veggy oils that are in near all processed foods though.
“palatable supermarket food”; not only Froot Loops, but foods like Doritos, pork rinds, and wedding cake.
Oils are in doritos (ingredient 2), in froot loops even, presumably in ‘fried pork skins’. As for wedding cake, couldn’t find a good label on the internet, if it’s store bought it’s probably there though.
I actually doubt it’s chemical contaminants—you’d think China with the factories and air pollution, or the Congo with mines and terrible water would be worse than us. The USA really cleaned up its air in the past 60 years or so, no dice on that in my book.
Finally, I don’t have a horse in this race, i posted some thoughts a few weeks ago here too with an entirely different explanation. I don’t usually get emotional about science, and try to kill my bias. But something smells here. This works way too well, it’s new, it’s simple, why is this not one of the first things anyone thinks of? The people who wrote the paper in the OP didn’t address this at all, when veggie oils are in nearly everything and absolutely exploded from nothing about a hundred years ago. I’ve done a fair bit more digging, there are allegations of corruption—especially of Proctor and Gamble (crisco) buying out the American Heart Association essentially. I’m skeptical, but it does seem like they were throwing some money around in support of Crisco.
Per the source:
Throughout our decades-long battle with chronic disease, Americans have closely followed everything the CDC, AHA, and USDA have told us to do. We’re smoking less, drinking less, exercising more, eating less saturated fat and sodium, and eating more fruits and vegetables. Still, chronic disease and obesity rates continue to rise. All the while, vegetable oil has steadily and stealthily made its way into our pantries, restaurants, and packaged foods, now contributing 699 calories per day to our diets, or about 20% of everything we eat.
Tldr, vegetable oils were invented about 100 years ago, highly promoted around when they started to turn on saturated fats, and line up with close to every mystery the authors assert. It’s also a way simpler explanation.
I’ve never been a strict EMH believer. My definition is that you can’t find any free money anywhere. The market does obviously stupid things sometimes—see gamestop or amc recently. You can say what you want, but in my mind at least one of the meme stocks was for all intents and purposes objectively overvalued. But my definition is revealed by the state of the world currently—I am not rich because I saw something that was, in my mind, clearly wrong. See, even when GME was at it’s highs, the cost to borrow was over 100%, with the possibility of a squeeze going even higher and thus a margin call. Buying puts at 600 IV, yeah sure. The thing was, everyone recognized that it was too high, but the cost to realize that made it such that you were essentially indifferent. And that’s what markets being efficient means to me. It’s not that it’s always right, it’s often wrong. But it’s really hard to be lesswrong than the market.
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
I completely lost my sense and smell and it did return over the next few months, for the record. Therefore, I wouldn’t consider that damage final in all cases.
Cool stuff, like always a bit over my head. I’d be very interested to hear strategies about either getting “not okay” mode to “okay” mode, or for more accurately assessing when things are truly not okay (more more rarely than our brain states would suggest). It is my experience that in our modern world, and especially in the world of white collar work, this switch is flipped much much more than is necessary. When you get the email that you need to file some form that you probably should have known about, but in reality is no big deal, you definitely get sent into “not okay” mode both in the sense that there is a problem and you are technically at fault. On the micro level it is correct, but disproportionate in the reaction, and lacking context in that you’ll never be able to tie up the loose end hydra that afflicts us all. But that doesn’t stop the acute cortisol injection or the chronic stress! In my experience, the people who are most successful in these jobs ironically have the largest response to a stressor like that, and are obsessive about rectifying it. But one has to wonder the long term effects of that!
I know it’s a complete meme but have you given CBD a try? Also, I imagine the swipe feature on keyboards on phones/tablets would be a fair bit less irritating
I think you’re right that it’s an overall loss. If they’re going to be sold at above msrp, it might as well go to the manufacturer to incentivize more supply. Otherwise, that delta goes to scalpers, and the scalpers have to spend their time. I think the reason Sony doesn’t raise prices is because it is sensitive to perception of users. The console itself is really just a portal to the Sony ecosystem, which is where the money is made anyways. They don’t want to be seen as charging you for the privilege of paying them for subscriptions and $80 games, especially since their model vis-a-vis PC gaming is lower upfront cost, higher ongoing costs. I think they’re playing the long game here, content to let the scalpers take the heat, while they wait out supply shocks that everyone sees as transient anyways.
Underproducing seems very silly, at least for Sony and Microsoft. A lot of the value is in the network—playing with friends. Nintendo may well be a different story, especially since their model is more single player focused and their profit (i think) is relatively more concentrated in hardware sales.
In the past, there was always talk of the consoles being sold at a loss. I’m sure that is very near the case still, especially now that they have people paying yearly subscriptions for online play. There is no reason to be hemorrhaging users when the $ is in the ecosystem
If by “negate” you mean render irrelevant, very very low chance in my opinion. There will still be business, even if it’s just maintaining robots or peddling luxury goods. And you’ll have years of earnings compounding. And there’s REITs in indexes, they’re not making any more land anytime soon. Financial obligations are surprisingly sticky across regimes, Germany is still paying pensions for soldiers from world wars, and national debt from before the wars, too. What you’d really want to worry about with bonds is inflation. If we are talking pure finances, I’d buy VT with like 90% of the money, and put roughly 10% in crypto, especially crypto that you can stake and earn an income on
Yeah I know absolutely nothing about cigars! You may well be right about horses, I’m just trying to think about rich-guy leisure activities. In a world of no work and a perfectly engineered environment, I imagine we’ll be doing a lot of sitting around, and God knows we’ll still care about status. Even if new printed wine or whisky is better, you’ll get a ton of credit for busting the old bottle out—it was never really about taste anyways.
If I can’t do something lame like a stock, probably a basket of art, precious metals, and liquor/wine or cuban cigars. I think the alcohol bit is probably my best idea, as it actually improves in quality across time, not just in perceived scarcity. Even in post-scarcity, I find it hard to believe that people will flex with printed/conjured wine, we’ll all jockey for French 2020 wine or real old Kentucky bourbon while we sit around and smoke cigars all day. Of course it’ll actually be top tier racing horse jizz and we’ll all be kicking ourselves because it should have been so obvious.
I think the essence of the future pose scarcity value proposition is the signaling, especially of taste and status.
Assuming it has to actually be “physical”, I’d probaby buy some berkshire hathaway stock and pay to get the actual certificates sent. I’m not sure you could do the same for an etf or a mutual fund. Berkshire because 1: it is diversified, and 2: it doesn’t pay a dividend, which would be tricky if one has to have something physical.
Well, I’d probably start with some expected value stuff. What’s the probability of a scenario, multiplied by the payoff. For housing specifically, I know the govt does a weird calculation for inflation in housing where they ask honeowners what they think they could rent their house for, something like that may help you make a framework for directly comparing
From the perspective of a store of value, I’m starting to think the costs are a feature, not a bug. Bitcoin is the most popular>huge fees to transact>more miners for bitcoin>bitcoin is more popular. Requiring more energy in some way means firms that mine have higher costs, there was an according use of resources on one side of the ledger from the value of the bitcoin it created. In 101 talk, it’s worth what people will buy it for, but I can’t help but think that those costs to mine find their way into the prices somehow—not just energy, but entrepreneurship and fixed costs. That is to say, congestion begets high price for mining, which begets higher prices in bitcoin, which is the main idea for like 99% of bitcoin users
I just assumed everyone knew this
Rant on the way, not an exhaustive list by any means! I kinda extrapolated ‘short-termism’ to mean lack of investment and more so a lack of results in technological progress—as I see the critique or ‘short-termism’ to really hit hard in the idea that companies aren’t investing when they should to make technological progress.
Perhaps it’s the market working as intended, value outperforms growth in the long term, and growth necessitates higher investment to expand. Doubtful, as no one outside of hardcore finance guys know about this anyways.
Perhaps it’s companies becoming more beholden to financial interests in Wall Street—increasing financialization. One of the simpler explanations, but I’d argue that not much has formally changed on this front, and convention is going in the opposite direction. Additionally, if we’re talking about long term technological progress—government, private, and academic progress hasn’t been obviously faster than ‘short term’ public companies, in my opinion at least, I could easily be corrected here.
Paradoxically, as markets get more competitive, economic profits decrease and investment capital dries up. This would necessitate a shorter term outlook to simply survive or profit at all. I don’t favor this one either, if anything natural monopolies are more common when complexity and scale really start ramping up—see Apple or Google.
When interest rates go up, future earnings are more heavily discounted (aka: money now>>>money later, as opposed to money now>money later). Probably the easiest one to strike off, unless you’re an inflation truther, lol.
My pet theory is as follows: we have orders of magnitude more scientists and researchers, rGDP is much higher than in the past as well. Yet, outside of IT, earth shattering innovation that reaches the market has been lacking in recent decades (debateable, surely, again my theory here). This leads me to believe that we are simply running out of “low hanging fruit,” or we are looking in the wrong places. Or it’s so complex, that scientists are forced to specialize to such a degree as to render their findings realistically irrelevant. I think this is among the simplest explanations for the apparent stagnation in technological progress.
Allow me to pick a bone here though, as I (largely) take issue with the premise to begin with. A company has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. As the other commentator touches on, there’s pressures on CEO’s and corporations to show results. None of this has changed significantly in recent years, in fact I’d argue pushes towards ESG and ‘stakeholder capitalism’ are now working in the opposite direction of pure shareholder value. I don’t put the blame entirely on companies, because if they legitimately saw value in long term high R&D spending, their shareholders should be convinced to see that, and failing that, they could carry out said duty and stick to their guns. Not an easy thing do, however. Tesla’s shareholders seem to see it, likewise investors saw the value in the tech bubble, EV’s, green energy, crypto, biotech etc (ARKK anyone?). Capital is pouring into smaller, nimbler, forward thinking (perhaps to a fault?) companies, elevating multiples to bubble territory in some cases. The companies are there, the (investment) money is there, where I see the problem is largely either the execution or the feasibility of many of these ideas. Or maybe somewhere else, I won’t pretend to be more than an amateur in anywhere but Economics. That’s not to say that every company is doing it perfectly, but in the long run those that have a vision and an execution will win out. Disclaimer: I’m a finance guy, not an inventor or scientist, and probably quite obviously not a competent rationalist either.
Good stuff, I’m still digesting it all! This adds to my idea that different types of oils/fats and different types of w3 and w6′s act quite differently in studies. I see very little bad about olive oil, and virtually nothing about soybean oil in particular even though it’s used most intensively in the US. People tend to talk of them in monolithic ways, but when you get down to it something like olive oil almost always stacks up well. As for the intuition, same here, not sure what to really make of this stuff other than it I don’t see a downside to excluding seed oils from my diet—our ancestors were certainly fine without them, and they’re found mainly in processed foods. The other low downside takeaway I have is that this should be studied more. When zoomed out, it definitely looks like a preponderance of the evidence is against seed oils, but when you get lost in the really specific studies you always come away thinking that whatever pathway they chose wasn’t quite proven.