Plastic might be making us obese

Is it the plastic though, or is it the sugar? Over my last few years of reading, I&#x27;ve convinced myself that sugar is the main culprit in massive obesity in Western countries, especially the US (i.e. high fructose corn syrup).<p>Sugar is in everything (like plastic, I suppose). Look at the ingredients of what you buy and you&#x27;ll be surprised where it turns up. Peanut butter, mayonnaise, beef jerky, even bog standard bread. It seems like sugar is the elephant in the room that the mainstream doesn&#x27;t want to talk about.

If a factor can&#x27;t explain why non-Hispanic Asians have much lower prevalence of obesity than any other race, I tend not to trust it. Are Asians simply using less plastic than other races?<p>Look at the chart: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;nchs&#x2F;data&#x2F;databriefs&#x2F;db288.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;nchs&#x2F;data&#x2F;databriefs&#x2F;db288.pdf</a> The chart is simply striking. We should all be investigating what are the Asians doing right that all of us should learn from.

So something else I wonder. Over the last 50-90 years we&#x27;ve selectively bred our entire food chain to prioritize rapid growth, then pack it full of growth hormones to accelerate this.<p>My dad decided to raise chickens back in the 80&#x27;s. The broiler hens grew so fast that they broke their legs, and this was when fed on our kitchen waste (i.e. no growth hormones).<p>I do wonder how much of this spills over into human obesity; if everything you eat comes from a plant or animal which is hyperoptimizing for unhealthy growth rates, what does that do to the human body?<p>And if you are looking for a biological mechanism, it might be related to epigenetics. Not saying it is so, but am saying that a biological link is not a-priori impossible.

I&#x27;ve recently started taking &#x27;liraglutide&#x27;, which is an appetite suppressant.<p>I haven&#x27;t been taking it that long, but so far it&#x27;s amazing -- I eat a balanced meal with an approriate amount of calories in it, and then I am full, and don&#x27;t want to eat any more. Sometimes I snack and eat a biscuit, but then I don&#x27;t feel any need to eat a second biscuit.<p>I&#x27;m not saying this is a long-term solution for me, or people in general, but what it has shown me is some people (me included) have managed to mess up their digestive systems badly enough it is incredibly hard to eat healthily -- I previously lost 8 stone (50 kg), but I was hungry every minute of every day, no matter what I tried. Once I had a bad patch I ended up putting all the weight back on.

A very long series of essays about this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slimemoldtimemold.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slimemoldtimemold.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;a-chemical-hunger-p...</a><p>The authors take the view that obesogens account for 100% or nearly 100% of the rise in obesity, which is definitely a controversial view. However, they do an awesome job giving an overview of the arguments for obesogens.

&gt; Nearly 1,000 obesogens with such effects have already been identified in studies with animals or humans. They include Bisphenol A, a chemical widely used in plastics, and the phthalates, plasticizing agents used in paints, medicine and cosmetics. Others include parabens used as preservatives in food and paper products, and chemicals called organotins used as fungicides. Other obesogens include pesticides and herbicides, including glyphosate, which a recent study found to be present in the urine of most Americans.<p>It feels like modern, Western, society is like living in a big Petri dish. It’s one big experiment in which we’re swimming in chemicals that we later find out interact with us and each other in negative ways. We should have reigned in these kinds of “innovations” decades ago. Americans are now urinating carcinogenic pesticides, rainwater even in most remote regions in the would is undrinkable [0], and we’ve had strong evidence for a while that some of the constituent components of commonly used plastics disrupt biological processes in humans and other animals.<p>In 50-100 years people will be looking back in horror at the kinds of self-inflicted suffering we’ve produced. And for what? Money? Convenience?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.popularmechanics.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;a40859859&#x2F;rainwater-not-safe-to-drink&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.popularmechanics.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;a40859859&#x2F;rainwater...</a>

This is absurd. The authors should look at what some people (or perhaps they themselves, and that&#x27;s the issue) have in their trolley (cart?) next time they&#x27;re shopping (storing? ;)).<p>Obesity is, for at least the most part, plainly not caused by too many&#x2F;wrong pesticides on fruit and vegetables. It is caused by (far) too many things that are <i>not</i> fruits and vegetables.

Yes, plastic MIGHT be making us obese. But, we definitely know high caloric intake and sedentary lifestyle makes us obese. I don&#x27;t understand why obesity is such a mystery. People are creatures of path of the least resistance. Developed countries have highly dense caloric food and people are inactive most of the day due to cars and office jobs.

Maybe? It&#x27;s easier to believe that 100 years of massively increasing calorie density and engineering chemical perfection in terms of hitting the body&#x27;s pleasure markers might have had a larger effect.<p>That and our move to sedentary, thinking jobs. Or prolonging the day with evening entertainment, so eating later. And services that make the worst food arrive on your doorstep in 30 minutes.<p>There are so many things above &quot;plastics&quot; we should blame first. But I&#x27;m sure blaming someone else is far more appetising than looking at our own lack of self control.

My guess is that obesogens are to blame, but that they&#x27;re in food, not plastics. This is because people on weirdo diets (vegans, carnivore, ultra low fat) all lose weight and keep it off, even when they are using the same amount of plastic as everyone else. The common denominator is that they stopped eating industrially manufactured food.<p>I am no expert in the area, just wondering what the hell is going on.

Calories certainly aren&#x27;t the only factor. If you feed animals the same exact diet and they have similar exercise habits and their excrement has the same caloric value, why does one get obese while the other doesn&#x27;t? Genetics, epigenetics and gut biome likely all contribute to the problem. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nautil.us&#x2F;what-if-obesity-is-nobodys-fault-234639&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nautil.us&#x2F;what-if-obesity-is-nobodys-fault-234639&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;rmlCA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;rmlCA</a>

I have a fri3nd that has an over active thyroid and she&#x27;s very fit. she had a six pack when she was younger. she didn&#x27;t really work out. so makes me think hormones are a big part of it too.

This has got to be the most idiotic, speculative comment section of the year.<p>Literally not a single coherent explanation of how plastics might actually cause obesity, and a bunch of people going on about sugar and hormones.

Overlooked throughout this discussion, afaict, is an explanation as to why <i>animals</i> are also getting fatter.<p>&gt; The problem of obesity isn&#x27;t confined to just humans. A new study finds increased rates of obesity in mammals ranging from feral rats and mice to domestic pets and laboratory primates.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;10277-obesity-rise-animals.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;10277-obesity-rise-animals.html</a>

My pet theory on obesity is how varied and delicious food is these days. Literally my grandparents ate homemade porridge, cheese sandwiches, Potatoes&#x2F;Carrots&#x2F;Cabbage&#x2F;BeefOrPork nearly every day of their lives. No wonder they didn&#x27;t over eat. New generation has a huge number of yummy dishes to choose from.

I am very skeptical the effect would be meaningful relative to diet&#x2F;exercise.<p>We have never been more seditary, and sugar has never been more a part of our diet.<p>When my mother moved in and we started going on daily walks, she lost a pound a week for one year. When she injured her foot and stopped, with no diet change throughout the entire time, she gained it all back in a couple months.<p>I would be surprised if people gained weight with no diet change and introduced mostly standing or walking throughout the day into their life.

I doubt that obesity is caused by &quot;hundreds&quot; of chemical pollutants... I suspect it to be more like a handful that cause the most effect.<p>Since obesity causes millions of deaths annually, solving this warrants a covid-scale response. It should therefore be easy enough to direct a few billion dollars of funding into hundreds of avenues of research to find which those handful of pollutants are, what the main sources of them are, how to remove them, and how the effects of damage already done might be reversed.<p>I imagine that with a covid-scale response, we could guarantee that nothing new would contain any of the offending chemicals within a year, and perhaps within 5 years we could have replaced every piece of tupperware&#x2F;insulation foam&#x2F;whatever already manufactured goods contain it.

I&#x27;m very skeptical. I think there are some things that may make us &quot;feel hungrier&quot; but there&#x27;s nothing changing our metabolism.<p>If we are to believe this, it would mean that &quot;plastic&quot; is making our bodies so much more efficient that there&#x27;s extra energy that&#x27;s being stored as fat.<p>I like to keep my weight exactly at 155# (as a 5&#x27;10 59 year old man).<p>Once a year, I &quot;bulk&quot; and go up to 160 while doing more strenuous weight training. The math always works exactly -- for every 3000 extra k&#x2F;cal I eat, I go up a pound. When it&#x27;s time to &quot;cut&quot; back to 155#, for every 3000 k&#x2F;cal deficit I drop a pound.<p>15 years ago, I got fat. I stopped paying attention to what I was eating. Got my weight up to 205#. I lost it by strictly counting calories. The math worked perfectly. I went to 1200 k&#x2F;cal and lost 2 pounds a week. Exactly. Every week.<p>Eating no more calories than your body needs works for everyone. You cannot create matter out of thin air, no matter what fat people will tell you.<p>The Obese and Overweight cost society greatly. The fact that they&#x27;re consuming more than they need, use more fuel to move around, and get sick and require more medical care costs us trillions. It&#x27;s time they stopped pointing their fingers at &quot;plastics&quot; and started obeying the laws of thermodynamics.

Maybe now we can finally get the FDA to ban glyphosate (Round-Up) like they do in the EU. It is currently impossible to purchase oat cereal in the U.S. that doesn&#x27;t have some level of glyphosate in it. Cheerios is loaded with it.<p>So something sold as &quot;heart healthy&quot; is loaded with obesogens and will contribute to obesity.

There is a Nobel Prize waiting for whoever figures this out. I am glad scientists are finally taking it seriously. Statistically, something is most definitely out of whack.

I don&#x27;t know the last time I could trust an article or even scientific paper about weight &#x2F; diets &#x2F; food effects.<p>You&#x27;d think the vast amounts of scientific papers would be conclusive, but they&#x27;re constantly contradicting each other or people uncover ulterior motives, like having shares in a questionable weight loss company.<p>In some of these cases, the source material uses inappropriate sample sizes or has other similar problems, or references other studies that had problems like this.<p>I bet if you type &quot;X is the reason for obesity,&quot; you will find information for any noun.<p>Here&#x27;s a partial list of topics off the top of my head from the best of my ability that I believe have been blasted as the definitive one-and-only &quot;root cause&quot; of obesity: [Sugar, Aspartame, Plastic, Butter, Margarine, Carbs, Milk, Bread, Fruit, Nuts, Phones, The Internet, TV, Video Games, Your job in general, Canned Products, Gluten, Pollution, Global Warming, Cars, Cheese, Alcohol, No Exercise, Cardio-only exercise, Blue Light (from electronics in general)]

Our food chain has a lot to do with obesity. There are many studies on this stuff.<p>We eat 5 times as much meat on average as people did 100 years go. Animal based products are a major source of fat. People used to eat more fruits and vegetables. The fat type has shifted with more fat (which has higher calorie per gram amounts than carbs or protein) and fat moving from polyunsaturated fats to saturated fats (which causes lots of medical problems).<p>In there is the growth hormone. Kids &quot;mature&quot; physically at younger ages now than they used to. Kids to stop stop dairy or a lot of mean may physically mature at the older slower pace.<p>Eating less fruits, vegetables, and whole grains means less fiber. Most people (in the US anyway) are deficient in fiber. Fiber traps certain fats and cholesterols so they aren&#x27;t absorbed. So, we absorb more fats.<p>Then there are processed foods.<p>So much about our diets have changed in the last 100 years. A lot is known and we even know how to eat to be really healthy. It&#x27;s just not widely known by the general public.

&quot;Thus, rigorously collected national data provide no support for higher energy consumption as a driver of the obesity epidemic since 2000. Strikingly, these data do not even support increasing energy consumption as a consequence of the obesity epidemic, i.e., that as people gain weight, they need to eat more. Rather, the data suggest that Americans have been eating relatively less, for their larger body sizes, over the last 2 decades.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;ajcn&#x2F;article&#x2F;115&#x2F;6&#x2F;1445&#x2F;6572830?fbclid=IwAR1GlamuWwnp6xr0xP9vzCrb4MNdqOuFmnNF-o4oH3rsivjIuiU9oJYXBSc&amp;login=false#:~:text=year%20after%20year.-,US%20Trends%20in%20Energy%20Intake,-The%20United%20States" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;ajcn&#x2F;article&#x2F;115&#x2F;6&#x2F;1445&#x2F;6572830?fbc...</a>

Well it might be.<p>What might make us lose our obesity is regular exercise, building a reasonable amount of muscle mass, eating less food and better food, consuming less alchohol, spending less time sedentary in front of a computer screen, etc.

I thought this article was going to cite plastic as being the container of choice for most of the ultra processed junk that supermarkets are selling and we shouldn&#x27;t be eating.

is it possible to be in a caloric deficit and still gain weight if this is true? or is a caloric deficit + weight loss just a thermodynamics problem

Hunger is incredibly hard to study because it is made up of many physiological sensations and psychological responses to those sensations, and none of those are readily comparable between individuals.<p>So we don&#x27;t really study hunger very much - there are some really good studies out there, but not very many.<p>And we don&#x27;t talk about managing hunger, we talk about managing calories and managing weight.

There is an old saying &quot;If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself&quot;<p>I take that to heart. Including what I put in my body. I have little to no faith in modern food. And so I grow my own. I know where it came from and what went into it. And yes, I have had my soil tested.<p>Rely on modern food at your own peril. You are what you eat, as they say.

I have no doubt that many of these plethora of chemicals that are in our every day environment are endocrine disruptors or worse, most of us would be surprised just how significantly we have changed the chemistry of our environments over the last century. But I&#x27;m not convinced that they&#x27;re the cause for obesity. Contributors, sure. The cause? Your body has to make fat out of something, with or without an endocrine disruptor. I&#x27;ve never met a fat person that doesn&#x27;t drink soda every day.<p>It&#x27;s sugar and seed oil. That&#x27;s what it comes down to. Most of what we eat is not food really, but the last mile in a marketing campaign, it barely even qualifies as a product. That combined with the rise in sedentary work and recreation is all you need to explain it.

$5 says it&#x27;s the food and not the plastic that the food comes in.

If we assume everyone agreed tomorrow that the cause is 100% plastics, what can we actually do about this? What would our lives look like if we were to address this?

I don&#x27;t know why they&#x27;re still grasping at straws. We know why we&#x27;re fat, the science has already been concluded, and a dozen papers get published every year continuing to hammer nails in a coffin we already buried: diets low in salt and&#x2F;or low in saturated fat and&#x2F;or high in oxidized unsaturated fats and&#x2F;or high in carbohydrates and otherwise devoid of nutrition case weight gain, and the Standard American Diet prides itself on being all four.<p>Washington Post doesn&#x27;t publish stories about <i>those</i> papers.

maybe the bmi is also wrong. if your index is labelng half or more of ppl as diseased, maybe the index is broken. except for jockeys, meth addicts, and runners, most men are going to be aleast borerline overweight by 30. i dont know any thin people. maybe we need to make drugs legal..that will fix it. perhaps there is a good biological reason people weigh more, why fight nature.

It&#x27;s just calories in and calories out.

Seems impossible to avoid I guess?

Why do they report these huge obesity rates but whenever I go out in public almost no one is overweight?

I was pretty sure it was the over eating but I&#x27;ll happily blame plastic...

I do a lot of high school senior photography. It&#x27;s hard to talk about this without sounding crude as a guy but something that I&#x27;ve noticed that contrasts with when I graduated high school (2006) is just how many girls have huge breasts. I think there were 2 girls in my grade that were skinny and had what would be called &quot;large&quot; breasts. Most other skinny girls had the standard A or B cups.<p>Now a very large portion have what must be D cups. I&#x27;ve tried to look up studies but I couldn&#x27;t find any that controlled for weight.<p>This was also the first year I had not one, but two, morbidly obese girls. One was so large I ran out of poses pretty much right away as she couldn&#x27;t clasp her hands together behind her back, couldn&#x27;t do the same near her waist in front, and she couldn&#x27;t even sit down on the ground - only kneel. She told me she wanted to be a lawyer. I find it incredibly sad that you could be that large already at that age. I can only imagine how difficult it would make life.

Well that plus the cheeseburger