The phrase that being overweight is "simply calories in vs calories out" is both trivially true and completely unhelpful.
It's similar to thinking we have solved poverty. People living in poverty should spend less and make more. Problem solved.
The much more interesting questions are
1. Why does it take some people more food to reach the same level of satiety as others?
2. Why do some people's bodies burn off excess calories through things like non-exercise activity thermogenesis and other store it as fat?
3. Do different types of food effect long term satiety? By changing what we eat can we effect our weight in the long term?
4. How does the body increase hunger and turn off self-control when there is reduced food intake?
The only known "solutions" we currently have to obesity are dieting and exercise. The problem is the long term efficacy rate of dieting is around 5%. If dieting were a drug it would never pass FDA approval for effectiveness. Exercise has only modest effects and is probably more effective as preventing weight gain than causing weight loss.
We still have so much more to learn. We are just at the beginning of figuring out the causes and solutions to this issue.
> The phrase that being overweight is "simply calories in vs calories out" is both trivially true and completely unhelpful.
Why is it completely unhelpful? The corollary is that if you adjust your intake to X (where X might have to be determined empirically for the individual), and use planning and your conscious brain to know when and what to eat, you _will_ lose weight.
This is a revelation to some people, who, once they realize the simplicity of it and plan around it, are able to completely change their bodies. Many of these same people try various intuitive plans that don't work for them (because they don't have the intuition) or try to manipulate exercise first (which makes some people increase appetite).
If you don't believe me that it works, is useful, and is a revelation, go lurk on the myfitnesspal forums for a while or /progresspics on reddit and read how people succeed.
> being overweight is "simply calories in vs calories out" is both trivially true and completely unhelpful
I appreciate your overall point, but would argue that the phrase in not necessarily "trivially true" in some cases. Unlike thermodynamics, biology is not simple. A person could potentially die of hunger while also being grossly overweight if they have a problem with certain metabolic genes. If your catabolic enzymes for lipids do not function, you cannot utilize fat or break it down regardless of your overall energy budget.
That being said, I doubt that very many people have mutations in the genes for those enzymes, since those variants will tend to be selected out of the population.
The long term efficacy of dieting is low, and that should be totally unsurprising: the very name implies temporariness. If the overweight wish to lose fat, a diet will work. If they wish to keep it off, they must make permanent diet and behavioral modifications, which is not what a diet is. Fewer calories and less sugar/carbs/highly processed foods does work, but it must be permanent.
People want a pill that you just pop once a day without any changes in behavior. And the vast majority of people complaining they can't lose weight don't prioritize losing weight over their current behaviors: diet composition, sedentary lifestyles, etc.
> Why do some people's bodies burn off excess calories through things like non-exercise activity thermogenesis and other store it as fat?
There is a very limited degree to which this can happen. The way some people eat, if it all burned by thermogenesis, they would die of overheating (hyperthermia).
Fat storage is saving them from cooking in their own juices.
I think modern "foods," of the extracted and refined sugars sort, and artificial colors and flavors sort, definitely play a large role in this.
I find all this searching for bio-chemical processes to blame obesity on pretty silly. A non-trivial portion of society has shown it is possible to not be obese. People have also shown it is possible to go from being obese to not being obese.
There are several inter-playing factors that shoulder most the blame I would say.
One major factor that seems to be missing from most conversations is that there is a huge mental factor in obesity I would surmise. And I think you're overlooking that when you ask why do some people feel satiety when others don't.
I think obesity can rightly be considered a mental illness. Why do some people continue to eat when it does their body no good? Everyone probably does this on occasion, but why do obese people do it routinely?
Most obese people I'm guessing would tell you that a lot of their eating has an emotional component, beyond a feeling of hunger.
When you think about it, present day "food" companies, are just as bad as tobacco companies, arguably worse when you calculate the costs. How many people are suffering from diabetes, or potentially will in coming years, how many from other 'diseases of civilization,' what amount of health and monetary resources are expended on these preventable conditions each year?
These are diseases of a civilization that is structured poorly. Just think about it, a civilization of overworked, overstressed, underslept, mindless-media over-exposed people who emotionally stuff their faces with garbage 'foods.'
The "food" industry and regulation there of no doubt shoulders a lot of blame, just consider for some people, the majority of their food energy intake comes basically from candy.
It appears that 'food' companies are exploitative of the low iq, low income segments of our society, but in the US I think that has a lot to do with agricultural policies that subsidize sugar and corn production and the like. And the people running these "food" companies navigate current market dynamics and govt incentives/subsidies to maximize shareholder returns, and that is producing negative health results for many people.
So with these factors considered, I would say that there are better ways of addressing this issue than the search for obesity immunity conferring pills and the like.
"Calories in vs calories out" is really just Occam's razor in action an hence helpful. At least it was helpful to me to re-engineer my lifestyle from 10h TV per day and fastfood as a teenager to regular workouts and healthy food.
>The problem is the long term efficacy rate of dieting is around 5%. If dieting were a drug it would never pass FDA approval for effectiveness.
If your diet has an "end" you have already failed. There's a huge difference between a fad diet and a lifestyle change.
If we are going to compare it to medicine, let's use this as an example:
You suffer terrible headaches. Your doctor prescribes you a once-daily pill to treat it. After 30 days, you suffer no more headaches. After 60 days, you stop taking the pill. After 70 days, your headaches are back.
The pill didn't fail to fix your headaches, you failed to keep up with your medication.
If you diet for 6 months and lose 40Lbs, congrats! If you "stop dieting" and gain all 40Lbs back in a year, the diet didn't fail, you failed to maintain a healthy diet/lifestyle.
>The phrase that being overweight is "simply calories in vs calories out" is both trivially true and completely unhelpful.
For the issues most obese Americans face, which is a poor diet high in sugar, it is absolutely helpful. As I understand it, the bulk of the problem of our obesity epidemic is that people eat calorically dense foods with little nutrition, not that 40% of the population suddenly stopped being able to be sated by their food.
Of course people don't respond the same way to food and exercise. But your post is about fixing edge cases before the actual problem is solved. The low hanging fruit is in fact, calories in vs calories out. Once people's diets get back in line, then we can worry about why some people have a harder time losing weight than others.
It would be interesting if they could find some food that flipped this on... clearly obesity is reaching epidemic proportions and there appears to be some correlation between this and the consumption of processed foods. It would be interesting to figure out if there's something in our food that is flipping the switch to lead down that path. Now that we have some (apparently) credible evidence correlating these switches with obesity, it would be handy to be able to see what to avoid to prevent this switch from being triggered... also if there's something that's not in control of the drug companies that we could eat to flip it back.
>there appears to be some correlation between this and the consumption of processed foods.
Really? I would love a source on this, because it seems that the #1 reason is that the average portion size has increased greatly in the past 30 years while people are exercising less and less.
It would be great if we could find a way to "flip a switch" to make weight-loss easier, but it's downright foolish to pretend that we are gaining weight for any other reason than that we are eating too much and exercising too little.
This "processed foods make you fat" nonsense is infuriating because it just validates people's beliefs that their weight problems have nothing to do with their personal habits, instead placing the blame on the quality of the foods they've been eating.
I don't know if you need a switch to flip the gene variant on/off when it comes to processed food. I lost 10kg since February by just not eating sugars anymore.
I always assumed I wouldn't eat much sugar because I don't like sweets and I don't drink soda. But once I started counting added sugars in the processed foods I consumed it became clear I was consuming way too much of the stuff.
Nowadays I just watch out to buy products with 0 sugar in it. Now that's of course no silver bullet but a pretty low hanging fruit when it comes to improving your overall health.
Stop eating bread (yes, pizza counts as bread. beer counts as bread. stop it). Stop drinking calories unless you're exercising for 2+ hours at once (yes, fruit juice is bad for you. stop it).
The practice of making "processed foods" is essentially just cramming carbs and salt into everything and making it as highly concentrated as possible. Much processed food (read: basically anything pre-packaged in a wrapper) is more like a high calorie MRE food brick instead of something you should be combining with other foodstuffs.
We know how food interacts with human bodies. Water doesn't cause fat growth. Dietary fat doesn't cause fat growth (the chemical 'fat' isn't human fat tissue, so drinking a gallon of olive oil won't increase your fat stores). High glycemic sugars cause fat growth in non-glycogen depleted bags of bones. Turns out we can stop getting obese just by not eating things causing obesity.
>It would be interesting if they could find some food that flipped this on...
That might be good for the health side of the crisis, but the graphs of obesity correspond with food waste as calculated by the NIH. Only 30% of the excess calories have gone to making us fat, the rest is waste, so solving the health side alone will not fix the economic or environmental sides of the issue. This issue is discussed in depth at the end of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPi1LQHBWBk
It is better to think of this as a target of intervention with drugs and other therapies than as a "gene therapy" product.
The article says that the key process is enabling thermogenesis:
"Follow-up experiments showed that IRX3 and IRX5 act as master controllers of a process known as thermogenesis, whereby adipocytes dissipate energy as heat, instead of storing it as fat. Thermogenesis can be triggered by exercise, diet, or exposure to cold, and occurs both in mitochondria-rich brown adipocytes that are developmentally related to muscle, and in beige adipocytes that are instead related to energy-storing white adipocytes."
If you apply all the methods in terms of exercise, diet, and exposure to cold, you are pushing this switch the right way -- some people might need harder pushing than others.
Extend a finding like this out to the (il)logical conclusion 5, 10, 15 years out -- we figure out what causes the body to store fat, we develop the wonder drug that everyone's been waiting for that 'flips the switch' (even in otherwise healthy people), and suddenly everyone has 7.5% bodyfat and weighs exactly as much as they want to.
And then....what? Well from a macro scale, I think some things get better -- overall population health goes up, obesity/fat-related diseases go down. But does heart disease? I wonder if it goes up -- if everyone looks like they've wanted by shutting off the body's fat stores, does the motivation to do cardio go down for some people? (Cardio has huge benefits for things way beyond your bodyfat, but that won't stop a big chunk of the population from giving up on it.)
And from a purely superficial angle -- now everyone who wants one has a "ripped" body. But some guys are still bald, or have back hair, or or or. We'll still find a way to feel bad about ourselves, even with six-packs.
> And then....what? Well from a macro scale, I think some things get better -- overall population health goes up, obesity/fat-related diseases go down. But does heart disease? I wonder if it goes up -- if everyone looks like they've wanted by shutting off the body's fat stores, does the motivation to do cardio go down for some people?
I don't understand the tendency some people have to find a negative in something that is mostly positive. It doesn't make sense to me. Sure, some negatives MIGHT happen, but are you really trying to justify not moving forward with this research because some people might use it as an excuse to be lazy? Really?
What if everyone being the weight they want gives them more self-confidence, which gives them reason to get out more? What if there's less depression? What if there are fewer people with diabetes? There's potential to have some really great effects on the population at large here.
"By editing a single nucleotide position using the CRISPR/Cas9 system — a technology that allows researchers to make precise changes to a DNA sequence — the researchers could switch between lean and obese signatures in human pre-adipocytes."
How far off are we from therapy using the CRISPR/Cas9 system? I would imagine that while it's easy to edit the sequence for cells in a petri dish, editting the cells of an entire organism (human) is not likely to happen in our lifetime?
As I recall: it works great, is super cheap (~ $80 per application?), and is pretty easy to use, they successfully used it on rats already and it seems like it should work on any type of organism.
> I would imagine that while it's easy to edit the sequence for cells in a petri dish, editting the cells of an entire organism (human) is not likely to happen in our lifetime?
We've been doing it experimentally for decades, though the technique is controversial. Recently, a few gene therapies have been approved for clinical use.
> “Obesity has traditionally been seen as the result of an imbalance between the amount of food we eat and how much we exercise, but this view ignores the contribution of genetics to each individual’s metabolism”
People might misunderstand this to justify laziness. I have an obese co-worker, who likes to eat several hundred grams of chocolate along with soft-drinks daily. He always quotes genetics to counterargument my elaborations on the first law of thermodynamics.
People who have never struggled with their weight typically talk about obesity as if it is an uncomplicated phenomenon, an equation to follow, and pretend that cause and effect are obvious and easily discernible.
If he is consuming ridiculous quantities and types of food, it probably means he has given up. Spend enough time carefully controlling your diet and producing minimal gains while the people around you don't seem to have to put any effort into maintaining their weights, and you will give up too.
People are complicated and biology is complicated, and yet every thin person in the country thinks they can express The Fundamental Truth About Obesity in a single sentence.
edit: I will reply to several responses here - your experience that 'losing weight is simple' is not a data point, it's an anecdote. Losing weight is simple for quite a few people. It's also astonishingly difficult for quite a few other people. Stop acting like your personal experience is strong scientific evidence for your point of view.
What if your co-worker requires 2x the willpower to overcome their genetic predispositions to consuming sweet food, but they only come up with 1.5x your willpower (and therefore fail)?
Are they still "lazy" even though they are trying way harder than you are?
While the human body is still ultimately governed by the laws of thermodynamics, it is an overly simplistic viewpoint by which to manage such a complex system.
Even speaking of only thermodynamics, don't forget that there is a second law: http://www.nutritionj.com/content/3/1/9 ... i.e. someone who prefers sugary things can store more energy than someone who prefers protein. Not all thermodynamic processes are created equal when it comes to the 2nd law.
Yep, but knowing that smart researchers are finding more evidence for why people are overweight despite running and cycling regimes, and trying to maintain a relatively strict balance of nutrition sure makes my efforts feel a little less futile ;)
You can't do much about people who are dishonest with themselves anyway.
The first law of thermodynamics does not imply that every metabolism is the same. The human body and digestive system is not a physically simple system. There are many biological variables which change how food is processed. People like you (and the entire Fat People Hate movement using the same playbook involving the same misunderstanding of the first law of thermodynamics) might misunderstand this to justify spreading hate.
Much as your coworker faces health risks if he overindulges in sugar, it is not your business to try to regulate the weight of your coworker by arguing with him at work, it is not professional, and it is not civil. His health is his problem. If you find fat people disgusting and feel a compulsion to aggress against them, that is your problem. Please don't also make it HN's problem by using HN comments to spread hate.
The naive thermodynamics argument doesn't say much, because:
When you eat "too much" high-energy food such as your co-worker, the excess energy can be excreted rather than digested and stored. The energy that is digested may be burned off in the form of maintaining a higher core temperature (as mentioned in TFA) or making the body more active.
To sum up, thermodynamics alone doesn't tell us where the "excess" energy will go -- storing it as fat is only one of several options.
Of course some people will use this as an excuse to do nothing to change their lifestyle and expect everyone else to adjust for them, but those people would find some other reason anyway so there is no point worrying about them.
And the best be to counter this, if it is actually possible, is to point out that while he might be genetically predisposed to a slow metabolism that burns less that means he needs less calories not that he has an excuse to be fat. It means he needs to either burn more through exercise or eat less. Genetics is the reason he needs to do that to stay in shape not an excuse not not bother about his health. Not that he'll listen. If he is someone you like enough to make the effort (or you want to win the intellectual discussion) try use other conditions as a comparison to see if you can get through that way. Anaemia, a genetic condition, is the reason some people have trouble with wounds not clotting and healing properly, it isn't something they use as an excuse to bleed everywhere, get infected wounds, and so forth.
I've recently turned my health around (down from more than 17 stone 18-to-24 months ago to just under 10 stone now, and running 5K at least twice a week (sometimes 10+) where I couldn't run 2K in one go in January). It is slightly irritating that some people can eat a shed load more than I can while not putting on weight, but that didn't mean it was impossible for me to get into a reasonable shape and maintain it. The reason I didn't before was just that I didn't care enough to.
"The paper is a tour de force, according to Evan Rosen, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the research."
That's some pretty high praise.
Also, it wasn't entirely clear to me if they're already testing this on humans. They mentioned using the CRISPR/Cas9 to manipulate genes in human cells, is that just donated human tissue?
What I don't like is how the press and often scientists make every paper seem like something was newly identified. With no disrespect to the authors of this particular study, they didn't "unveil a new pathway". Several previous works over the past decade have honed in on this exact "master switch".
I found the master switch of why your software is ridden with bugs. It's called lack of attention (since you didn't type it flawless and perfectly complete the first time around).
I also found the master switch of why your project is behind schedule. It's called lack of passion (because you keep choosing those pesky hobbies, social life and family/civic responsibilities over working 100+ hours per week).
I could keep going all day, but I think the point should be clear now. :P
What if you were a fat kid. Other kids made fun of you and adults told you to "lose weight", but never gave you actual tips just "eat healthy and move more".
How do you go about eating healthy as a 10 year old? You don't. You eat what your parents put on the table and if your parents are also fat there is going to be a lot of fatty foods and few healthy foods and the healthy foods will often taste horrible in comparison.
How do you go about moving more? You could play outside, but who plays outside these days? You just spend your time playing video games and even if other kids are into sports ball you are fat and slow, and most likely to complain, so no one wants to play with you.
Now imagine this goes on for ~20 years. You are now pushing 30, being overweight/obese your whole life. When people talk about weight they just tell you to "lose weight", but again without any solid steps just: "have self control and eat less and move more".
Running is out of the question because of your bad knees, under your weight. Walking is fine as long as you take it slow and don't walk too long. So your gains are very minimal, you don't even sweat (expect from the Sun) since you can't go fast or long before your legs start to hurt. So people tell you it's all about food, so you try to lower your food intake. It's hell for a week, but somehow you manage it. You starve yourself for two months which feels like 5 years.
You manage to lose weight, not that you know how much since no scale is big enough for you, but your pants start to sag. So you do what people around you want to do, you celebrate, because what's one night of having fun going to do, right? You got your new smaller pants and it's time to hit the town. Next thing you realize it's 6 weeks later, you are shoveling cake in your face at alarming rate and your pats are starting to look like skinny jeans. You feel like shit, and since you were a kid what have you been doing when you feel like shit? You grab a soda or a cupcake or something else that's bad for you.
It's not just about having self-control, because you have life time of nagging about your weight on your back. People have always told you that you weren't good enough, that you should lose weight, but no one has taken the time and guide you on the right path. Losing weight is simple in theory, but hard in practice and it takes a lot of time and effort, more than most people are willing to dedicate.
I think the bigger danger is people accusing others of laziness. Making people miserable over a thing they probably have very little explicit control of may not be the best way to go.
[+] [-] JamesBarney|10 years ago|reply
It's similar to thinking we have solved poverty. People living in poverty should spend less and make more. Problem solved.
The much more interesting questions are
1. Why does it take some people more food to reach the same level of satiety as others?
2. Why do some people's bodies burn off excess calories through things like non-exercise activity thermogenesis and other store it as fat?
3. Do different types of food effect long term satiety? By changing what we eat can we effect our weight in the long term?
4. How does the body increase hunger and turn off self-control when there is reduced food intake?
The only known "solutions" we currently have to obesity are dieting and exercise. The problem is the long term efficacy rate of dieting is around 5%. If dieting were a drug it would never pass FDA approval for effectiveness. Exercise has only modest effects and is probably more effective as preventing weight gain than causing weight loss.
We still have so much more to learn. We are just at the beginning of figuring out the causes and solutions to this issue.
[+] [-] Almaviva|10 years ago|reply
Why is it completely unhelpful? The corollary is that if you adjust your intake to X (where X might have to be determined empirically for the individual), and use planning and your conscious brain to know when and what to eat, you _will_ lose weight.
This is a revelation to some people, who, once they realize the simplicity of it and plan around it, are able to completely change their bodies. Many of these same people try various intuitive plans that don't work for them (because they don't have the intuition) or try to manipulate exercise first (which makes some people increase appetite).
If you don't believe me that it works, is useful, and is a revelation, go lurk on the myfitnesspal forums for a while or /progresspics on reddit and read how people succeed.
[+] [-] biomcgary|10 years ago|reply
I appreciate your overall point, but would argue that the phrase in not necessarily "trivially true" in some cases. Unlike thermodynamics, biology is not simple. A person could potentially die of hunger while also being grossly overweight if they have a problem with certain metabolic genes. If your catabolic enzymes for lipids do not function, you cannot utilize fat or break it down regardless of your overall energy budget.
That being said, I doubt that very many people have mutations in the genes for those enzymes, since those variants will tend to be selected out of the population.
[+] [-] x0x0|10 years ago|reply
People want a pill that you just pop once a day without any changes in behavior. And the vast majority of people complaining they can't lose weight don't prioritize losing weight over their current behaviors: diet composition, sedentary lifestyles, etc.
[+] [-] kazinator|10 years ago|reply
There is a very limited degree to which this can happen. The way some people eat, if it all burned by thermogenesis, they would die of overheating (hyperthermia).
Fat storage is saving them from cooking in their own juices.
[+] [-] cb18|10 years ago|reply
I find all this searching for bio-chemical processes to blame obesity on pretty silly. A non-trivial portion of society has shown it is possible to not be obese. People have also shown it is possible to go from being obese to not being obese.
There are several inter-playing factors that shoulder most the blame I would say.
One major factor that seems to be missing from most conversations is that there is a huge mental factor in obesity I would surmise. And I think you're overlooking that when you ask why do some people feel satiety when others don't.
I think obesity can rightly be considered a mental illness. Why do some people continue to eat when it does their body no good? Everyone probably does this on occasion, but why do obese people do it routinely?
Most obese people I'm guessing would tell you that a lot of their eating has an emotional component, beyond a feeling of hunger.
When you think about it, present day "food" companies, are just as bad as tobacco companies, arguably worse when you calculate the costs. How many people are suffering from diabetes, or potentially will in coming years, how many from other 'diseases of civilization,' what amount of health and monetary resources are expended on these preventable conditions each year?
These are diseases of a civilization that is structured poorly. Just think about it, a civilization of overworked, overstressed, underslept, mindless-media over-exposed people who emotionally stuff their faces with garbage 'foods.'
The "food" industry and regulation there of no doubt shoulders a lot of blame, just consider for some people, the majority of their food energy intake comes basically from candy.
It appears that 'food' companies are exploitative of the low iq, low income segments of our society, but in the US I think that has a lot to do with agricultural policies that subsidize sugar and corn production and the like. And the people running these "food" companies navigate current market dynamics and govt incentives/subsidies to maximize shareholder returns, and that is producing negative health results for many people.
So with these factors considered, I would say that there are better ways of addressing this issue than the search for obesity immunity conferring pills and the like.
[+] [-] s3nnyy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RIMR|10 years ago|reply
If your diet has an "end" you have already failed. There's a huge difference between a fad diet and a lifestyle change.
If we are going to compare it to medicine, let's use this as an example:
You suffer terrible headaches. Your doctor prescribes you a once-daily pill to treat it. After 30 days, you suffer no more headaches. After 60 days, you stop taking the pill. After 70 days, your headaches are back.
The pill didn't fail to fix your headaches, you failed to keep up with your medication.
If you diet for 6 months and lose 40Lbs, congrats! If you "stop dieting" and gain all 40Lbs back in a year, the diet didn't fail, you failed to maintain a healthy diet/lifestyle.
[+] [-] benihana|10 years ago|reply
For the issues most obese Americans face, which is a poor diet high in sugar, it is absolutely helpful. As I understand it, the bulk of the problem of our obesity epidemic is that people eat calorically dense foods with little nutrition, not that 40% of the population suddenly stopped being able to be sated by their food.
Of course people don't respond the same way to food and exercise. But your post is about fixing edge cases before the actual problem is solved. The low hanging fruit is in fact, calories in vs calories out. Once people's diets get back in line, then we can worry about why some people have a harder time losing weight than others.
[+] [-] nosideeffects|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kybernetyk|10 years ago|reply
I guess the cause of my overweight is my laziness then :)
[+] [-] balabaster|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RIMR|10 years ago|reply
Really? I would love a source on this, because it seems that the #1 reason is that the average portion size has increased greatly in the past 30 years while people are exercising less and less.
It would be great if we could find a way to "flip a switch" to make weight-loss easier, but it's downright foolish to pretend that we are gaining weight for any other reason than that we are eating too much and exercising too little.
This "processed foods make you fat" nonsense is infuriating because it just validates people's beliefs that their weight problems have nothing to do with their personal habits, instead placing the blame on the quality of the foods they've been eating.
[+] [-] kybernetyk|10 years ago|reply
I always assumed I wouldn't eat much sugar because I don't like sweets and I don't drink soda. But once I started counting added sugars in the processed foods I consumed it became clear I was consuming way too much of the stuff.
Nowadays I just watch out to buy products with 0 sugar in it. Now that's of course no silver bullet but a pretty low hanging fruit when it comes to improving your overall health.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|10 years ago|reply
Some environmental factor could be behind all of it
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/278/1712/1626...
[+] [-] seiji|10 years ago|reply
Stop eating bread (yes, pizza counts as bread. beer counts as bread. stop it). Stop drinking calories unless you're exercising for 2+ hours at once (yes, fruit juice is bad for you. stop it).
The practice of making "processed foods" is essentially just cramming carbs and salt into everything and making it as highly concentrated as possible. Much processed food (read: basically anything pre-packaged in a wrapper) is more like a high calorie MRE food brick instead of something you should be combining with other foodstuffs.
We know how food interacts with human bodies. Water doesn't cause fat growth. Dietary fat doesn't cause fat growth (the chemical 'fat' isn't human fat tissue, so drinking a gallon of olive oil won't increase your fat stores). High glycemic sugars cause fat growth in non-glycogen depleted bags of bones. Turns out we can stop getting obese just by not eating things causing obesity.
[+] [-] mhurron|10 years ago|reply
http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/news_and_pol...
There you go. We are eating more. As other nations adopt an American diet, they also eat more and get fatter.
There may be other things as well, but far too many people are looking for the magic pill that lets them eat all they want and not get fat.
Make sure you're eating a healthy diet and getting needed exercise, then you can move on. But god damn, act responsibly first.
[+] [-] voidlogic|10 years ago|reply
That might be good for the health side of the crisis, but the graphs of obesity correspond with food waste as calculated by the NIH. Only 30% of the excess calories have gone to making us fat, the rest is waste, so solving the health side alone will not fix the economic or environmental sides of the issue. This issue is discussed in depth at the end of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPi1LQHBWBk
[+] [-] otabdeveloper1|10 years ago|reply
There is, it's called carbohydrates.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|10 years ago|reply
The article says that the key process is enabling thermogenesis:
"Follow-up experiments showed that IRX3 and IRX5 act as master controllers of a process known as thermogenesis, whereby adipocytes dissipate energy as heat, instead of storing it as fat. Thermogenesis can be triggered by exercise, diet, or exposure to cold, and occurs both in mitochondria-rich brown adipocytes that are developmentally related to muscle, and in beige adipocytes that are instead related to energy-storing white adipocytes."
If you apply all the methods in terms of exercise, diet, and exposure to cold, you are pushing this switch the right way -- some people might need harder pushing than others.
[+] [-] nlh|10 years ago|reply
Extend a finding like this out to the (il)logical conclusion 5, 10, 15 years out -- we figure out what causes the body to store fat, we develop the wonder drug that everyone's been waiting for that 'flips the switch' (even in otherwise healthy people), and suddenly everyone has 7.5% bodyfat and weighs exactly as much as they want to.
And then....what? Well from a macro scale, I think some things get better -- overall population health goes up, obesity/fat-related diseases go down. But does heart disease? I wonder if it goes up -- if everyone looks like they've wanted by shutting off the body's fat stores, does the motivation to do cardio go down for some people? (Cardio has huge benefits for things way beyond your bodyfat, but that won't stop a big chunk of the population from giving up on it.)
And from a purely superficial angle -- now everyone who wants one has a "ripped" body. But some guys are still bald, or have back hair, or or or. We'll still find a way to feel bad about ourselves, even with six-packs.
Thoughts?
[+] [-] gambiter|10 years ago|reply
I don't understand the tendency some people have to find a negative in something that is mostly positive. It doesn't make sense to me. Sure, some negatives MIGHT happen, but are you really trying to justify not moving forward with this research because some people might use it as an excuse to be lazy? Really?
What if everyone being the weight they want gives them more self-confidence, which gives them reason to get out more? What if there's less depression? What if there are fewer people with diabetes? There's potential to have some really great effects on the population at large here.
[+] [-] rubicon33|10 years ago|reply
How far off are we from therapy using the CRISPR/Cas9 system? I would imagine that while it's easy to edit the sequence for cells in a petri dish, editting the cells of an entire organism (human) is not likely to happen in our lifetime?
[+] [-] no_news_is|10 years ago|reply
As I recall: it works great, is super cheap (~ $80 per application?), and is pretty easy to use, they successfully used it on rats already and it seems like it should work on any type of organism.
[+] [-] munificent|10 years ago|reply
We've been doing it experimentally for decades, though the technique is controversial. Recently, a few gene therapies have been approved for clinical use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy
[+] [-] s3nnyy|10 years ago|reply
People might misunderstand this to justify laziness. I have an obese co-worker, who likes to eat several hundred grams of chocolate along with soft-drinks daily. He always quotes genetics to counterargument my elaborations on the first law of thermodynamics.
[+] [-] nevinera|10 years ago|reply
If he is consuming ridiculous quantities and types of food, it probably means he has given up. Spend enough time carefully controlling your diet and producing minimal gains while the people around you don't seem to have to put any effort into maintaining their weights, and you will give up too.
People are complicated and biology is complicated, and yet every thin person in the country thinks they can express The Fundamental Truth About Obesity in a single sentence.
edit: I will reply to several responses here - your experience that 'losing weight is simple' is not a data point, it's an anecdote. Losing weight is simple for quite a few people. It's also astonishingly difficult for quite a few other people. Stop acting like your personal experience is strong scientific evidence for your point of view.
[+] [-] gduffy|10 years ago|reply
Are they still "lazy" even though they are trying way harder than you are?
While the human body is still ultimately governed by the laws of thermodynamics, it is an overly simplistic viewpoint by which to manage such a complex system.
Even speaking of only thermodynamics, don't forget that there is a second law: http://www.nutritionj.com/content/3/1/9 ... i.e. someone who prefers sugary things can store more energy than someone who prefers protein. Not all thermodynamic processes are created equal when it comes to the 2nd law.
[+] [-] ygjb|10 years ago|reply
You can't do much about people who are dishonest with themselves anyway.
[+] [-] pekk|10 years ago|reply
Much as your coworker faces health risks if he overindulges in sugar, it is not your business to try to regulate the weight of your coworker by arguing with him at work, it is not professional, and it is not civil. His health is his problem. If you find fat people disgusting and feel a compulsion to aggress against them, that is your problem. Please don't also make it HN's problem by using HN comments to spread hate.
[+] [-] dsjoerg|10 years ago|reply
When you eat "too much" high-energy food such as your co-worker, the excess energy can be excreted rather than digested and stored. The energy that is digested may be burned off in the form of maintaining a higher core temperature (as mentioned in TFA) or making the body more active.
To sum up, thermodynamics alone doesn't tell us where the "excess" energy will go -- storing it as fat is only one of several options.
[+] [-] dspillett|10 years ago|reply
Of course some people will use this as an excuse to do nothing to change their lifestyle and expect everyone else to adjust for them, but those people would find some other reason anyway so there is no point worrying about them.
And the best be to counter this, if it is actually possible, is to point out that while he might be genetically predisposed to a slow metabolism that burns less that means he needs less calories not that he has an excuse to be fat. It means he needs to either burn more through exercise or eat less. Genetics is the reason he needs to do that to stay in shape not an excuse not not bother about his health. Not that he'll listen. If he is someone you like enough to make the effort (or you want to win the intellectual discussion) try use other conditions as a comparison to see if you can get through that way. Anaemia, a genetic condition, is the reason some people have trouble with wounds not clotting and healing properly, it isn't something they use as an excuse to bleed everywhere, get infected wounds, and so forth.
I've recently turned my health around (down from more than 17 stone 18-to-24 months ago to just under 10 stone now, and running 5K at least twice a week (sometimes 10+) where I couldn't run 2K in one go in January). It is slightly irritating that some people can eat a shed load more than I can while not putting on weight, but that didn't mean it was impossible for me to get into a reasonable shape and maintain it. The reason I didn't before was just that I didn't care enough to.
[+] [-] jobu|10 years ago|reply
That's some pretty high praise.
Also, it wasn't entirely clear to me if they're already testing this on humans. They mentioned using the CRISPR/Cas9 to manipulate genes in human cells, is that just donated human tissue?
[+] [-] linuxguy2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untilHellbanned|10 years ago|reply
E.g.,
Identification of FTO as relevant to obesity (2007): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17434869
Connection of FTO and IRX3 (2014): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=24646999
[+] [-] grok2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jug5|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] linkydinkandyou|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] forrestthewoods|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crpatino|10 years ago|reply
I also found the master switch of why your project is behind schedule. It's called lack of passion (because you keep choosing those pesky hobbies, social life and family/civic responsibilities over working 100+ hours per week).
I could keep going all day, but I think the point should be clear now. :P
[+] [-] 746F7475|10 years ago|reply
How do you go about eating healthy as a 10 year old? You don't. You eat what your parents put on the table and if your parents are also fat there is going to be a lot of fatty foods and few healthy foods and the healthy foods will often taste horrible in comparison.
How do you go about moving more? You could play outside, but who plays outside these days? You just spend your time playing video games and even if other kids are into sports ball you are fat and slow, and most likely to complain, so no one wants to play with you.
Now imagine this goes on for ~20 years. You are now pushing 30, being overweight/obese your whole life. When people talk about weight they just tell you to "lose weight", but again without any solid steps just: "have self control and eat less and move more".
Running is out of the question because of your bad knees, under your weight. Walking is fine as long as you take it slow and don't walk too long. So your gains are very minimal, you don't even sweat (expect from the Sun) since you can't go fast or long before your legs start to hurt. So people tell you it's all about food, so you try to lower your food intake. It's hell for a week, but somehow you manage it. You starve yourself for two months which feels like 5 years.
You manage to lose weight, not that you know how much since no scale is big enough for you, but your pants start to sag. So you do what people around you want to do, you celebrate, because what's one night of having fun going to do, right? You got your new smaller pants and it's time to hit the town. Next thing you realize it's 6 weeks later, you are shoveling cake in your face at alarming rate and your pats are starting to look like skinny jeans. You feel like shit, and since you were a kid what have you been doing when you feel like shit? You grab a soda or a cupcake or something else that's bad for you.
It's not just about having self-control, because you have life time of nagging about your weight on your back. People have always told you that you weren't good enough, that you should lose weight, but no one has taken the time and guide you on the right path. Losing weight is simple in theory, but hard in practice and it takes a lot of time and effort, more than most people are willing to dedicate.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
Yvain has a great post on the topic, I highly recommend it: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que....