The study of obesity is the study of mysteries | Hacker News Reader

The study of obesity is the study of mysteries

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24 pointshncurious8 comments

Their environmental contaminant hypothesis is very interesting and seems like it could be further confirmed or disproved with more data.

Can we link childhood obesity to areas with particularly high rates of some kind of industrial contamination? (Poverty as a confounding effect may make this hard)

If the watershed is part of the mechanism, can we confirm lower obesity rates in areas without much industrial pollution that have similar diet & exercise to obese areas? (Independent of the already-mentioned altitude effects)

Thirteen thousand words and no discussion of the elephant in the room: 95% of Americans don't eat enough fiber. Fiber is the bulk that keeps you full between meals and that bulk -- quite literally -- helps prevent overeating. If 19/20 people aren't even getting their macronutrient balance right, perhaps we should start there.

You would have to show that people 50 years ago were getting more fiber than people are now for that to even be something worth researching.

Standard advice in the nutrition community is to that most people should be substituting processed foods and meats in the diet with whole fruits, whole vegetables and whole grains (a "plant based" diet):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991921/

Healthy diets strongly correlate with both sufficient fiber and healthy BMIs. The point is that 95% of people don't have healthy diets. As long as diets remain so poor -- the phrase "standard American diet" purposely forms the acronym SAD -- there is no obesity mystery.

There was very little obesity in the 70s. There is a lot now. If you can show that diets are worse now than they were in the 70s, you might have something. But are they worse?

"Eating five or more fruits and vegetables a day has decreased from 42 percent to 26 percent" ... "between the period 1988-1994 and then 2001-2006."

https://www.livescience.com/5435-american-diets-worse.html

If healthy diets have sufficient fiber and insufficient fiber is what's causing the obesity problem, then why do the overwhelming majority of people gain the weight back within a year on almost every diet?

Should China be much more obese?Or india? Aren’t they producing a lot of contaminants?

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