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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, and if that's true (which I believe you), then I'd argue that Feinman is out of touch with reality. It seems like Lustig is both a researcher and an actual MD, while Feinman is pure research. This is possibly what is keeping Lustig in better touch with the realities of western nutrition.

Quickly going Feinman's blog, he seems like a bit of an ass too..

"Avoiding ad hominem is tough. Lustig’s Nature paper contains the single stupidest line in the history of the journal..."

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Meh. I generally assume people have good motives, unless proven otherwise. Lustig is screaming "the sky is falling!" Feinman is responding in a perfectly natural fashion, "If they sky were falling, we would have noticed by now."

Uhm.. But the sky IS falling. You can't argue that there's not an obesity epidemic.

Watch out, you can't easily assume that it's not caused by general bad nutrition and lifestyle. Assuming that you're probably from the USA, where obesity is ramping up, from a (especially southern) European perspective, the eating culture of USA is very, very bad.

Please stop using the word epidemic in this way. Especially for a medical condition which is not contagious. I know what you mean but the wording makes it sound you can get obese by being around obese people. Thats tabloid vocabulary at best.

But it's not an incorrect usage of the term. Epidemic is not exclusive to contagious conditions.

I know. That's why I mentioned clearly "especially for a medical condition" - because then you use a figurative word associated with a medical term, while you would expect in that context the other meaning of "epidemic". If you were talking about "epidemic unemployment" there would be no ambiguity, but "epidemic obesity" is a very improper use of the word, ambiguous in this context.

Anyway, most of the time if you use the figurative sense of the word, just replacing it with "growth/increase/spread" is good enough. Why use an overly dramatic word ?

But it's not incorrect or even unusual in a medical context. Epidemic has often been used for non contagious conditions including diabetes, ADHD and obesity. It's a dramatic word, but the obesity rate in the US is dramatic.

It certainly is contagious. You can find it occurring in the same patterns of groups of people as other contagious diseases.

The method of contagion is peer influence on lifestyle and peer acceptance of the symptoms.

People do indeed tend to "get fat by being around fat people". Obesity can be called "socially contagious".

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500368_162-3097001.html

I have been reading a study arguing that people are more predisposed to obesity if they have fat friends, being a factor more important than genetic predisposition. I can't find the link right now.

Also, more and more people are getting fatter / obese every day. Clearly genetic predisposition can't explain this problem for such a large scale in such a small amount of time ... so this is in fact a social problem that grows by network effects.

So whether it is our lifestyle, or our diet, it's clearly spreading. Therefore I don't think it's a stretch to call it an epidemic.

>Especially for a medical condition which is not contagious.

But the fact is, obesity is contagious. Habit and culture are huge factors in obesity, both of which are contagious to those who you share extended proximity with.

Lustig is screaming "the sky is falling!"

Are you on a sugar high?

The sky's fat ass is falling! Dude, never in my life did I see fat people like the ones I've seen in US, and bear in mind, I'm in California. The median is pretty fit, but there are some heavy, heavy tails on that bell curve.

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