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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28320 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Why do you think some people are able to lose weight, then?

Eating a lot is a habit. It is probably closer to an addiction. Eating less is very unpleasant and your body will fight you unless you satisfy it. Just like your body will fight you when you try to stop smoking.

I don't think you have a set point that demands you eat 2-3 times what a normal person does. I think you have a habit of eating that much, and if you stopped doing it, yes, you would feel like you are "starving" until either you give in, or your body adjusts to a lower intake.

I am not speaking hypothetically. I am a former fat person.

Why do you think some people are able to lose weight, then?

Independent upper and lower set points?

The more I hear about set point theory the more it sounds like just-so stories to explain why they can lose weight but I can't.

There may be something to it, but it looks as rigorous as most pseudoscientific theories, and I am suspicious of a theory that happens to be embraced mostly by fat acceptance activists.

I am suspicious of a theory that happens to be embraced mostly by fat acceptance activists.

I am suspicious of any hypothesis which allows people to think their cruellest instincts justifiable.

CICO wasn't invented as an excuse to be cruel to fat people and blame them for being fat. Cruelty is how you treat people, not what you believe about them.

What is "cruel" about finding set point theory hard to believe?

It may well be embraced by fat acceptance activists, but it is also embraced by most of the field of nutrition science.

CICO, meanwhile, is only popular with laymen (who very often pair it with moral condemnation of fat people).

I don't think it's possible to look at a chart like this and conclude that what's really going on is a linear increase in laziness starting in the mid-C20th for no reason. Pick any profession full of intelligent, hardworking people (medicine, law, programming, high-level business) and you'll see similar proportions of fat people to the general population. While there are entire premodern cultures where nobody is fat at all.

CICO feels better than set-point theory in the same way that complaining about greedy landlords feels better than campaigning for YIMBY zoning reform. Most people will choose righteous outrage over real explanations if given the choice.

Pick any profession full of intelligent, hardworking people (medicine, law, programming, high-level business) and you'll see similar proportions of fat people to the general population.

I work at a software firm. You don't. I don't think we have a single obese person at the main office, and definitely no morbidly obese. I used to work at Google NYC, and obese people were few and far between there. For all the years I've been working, I've worked with few obese people. Go take public transportation (especially in Philadelphia), and they're everywhere. Same at the WalMart. Or many other "general public" places.

This study suggests that in 2011, about 31% of white men working in 'computing and mathematics' were obese, which is actually higher than the obesity rate for white men overall (28%).

But that's missing the point that it isn't just individual groups of people getting fat, it's the entire developed world. Look at a list of the fattest countries, does this look like a list of laziest to most disciplined countries? Are the Italians really skinny because they work harder than Chileans or Finns?

One metric that does vary massively is the proportion of the diet that consists of processed food, which is another name for food that is full of vegetable oil.

I can believe your link, or my lying eyes.

Sorry, there's actually nothing in that blog post about independent upper and lower set points. Or even really about set point theory, broadly speaking, at all.

This was the part I was referencing:

But there's a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.).

Sure, but that's pretty generic and not really making any claims about set point theory. Just that there are some feedback pathways. You might be interested in my old lengthy comment about the gap between simply observing that there are some feedback pathways somewhere and something that could properly be called "set point theory" with all of the features that many of its proponents would like. There are some significant theoretical and empirical challenges that would need to be overcome in order to close that gap.

I've seen a lot of control theory models for a lot of biological systems in my professional career, and there is a wide range in terms of quality. I would not bin what I've seen of set point theory in the high end of that range.

I wasn't making a claim about the detail of the theory, merely pointing out that some version of it is the consensus among nutrition researchers, as opposed to the 'fat people decided to get fat by eating lots of food and can get skinny again by deciding to stop' which is popular among laymen.

Just because it's trivially true doesn't make it not a fact. Eating less will make you lose weight (or at the very least, slow down the rate of which you gain it.) You need a great deal of education to come to a different conclusion.

I'm reminded of the midwit bell curve, where the genius and the idiot agree.

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merely pointing out that some version of it

The bold part is what I am contesting. I don't think that this blog post is actually speaking to any version of "set point theory".

I think adherents of both theories can be accused of motivated reasoning. But I don't attribute the rise in obesity to a lack of willpower. I think any society in the past suddenly presented with an overabundance of tasty fattening food would see skyrocketing obesity rates. We see this now with primitive societies suddenly exposed to Western diets.

I think our positions are pretty close, although I'd be more specific. After all, tasty food existed before the mid-20th century, and any food is 'fattening' tautologically if eating it leads to obesity. People in the past ate vast amounts of calories, but their bodies handled it. Even processed food existed for hundreds of years before the obesity epidemic.

What distinguishes the modern western diet is vegetable oil. All the data on 'processed' or 'junk' food is really just looking at foods with lots of vegetable oils. Consider a big mac meal with a shake from McDonalds. There is nothing modern about minced beef, bread or pickles, nor about fried potatoes, milk or sugar. What defines it as fast food the fact that everything is fried in, or contains vegetable oils. The same is true of essentially all processed food.

The fact that vegetable oil turned up at the exact time that the obesity epidemic kicked off makes it the most plausible candidate in my mind.

Oh my, the epicycles keep on coming. How would one design an experimental protocol in order to verify/falsify such a hypothesis?

Why do you think some people are able to lose weight, then?

Malfunctioning set point regulator? Not sure. But as far as I know, the overwhelming majority of people fail to lose weight in the long-term.

Eating a lot is a habit. It is probably closer to an addiction. Eating less is very unpleasant and your body will fight you unless you satisfy it. Just like your body will fight you when you try to stop smoking.

The food addiction hypothesis fails to explain why skinny people find it just as hard to gain weight as fat people find it to lose weight. The set point model explains both.

why skinny people find it just as hard to gain weight

But no. Lift according to a good program and track your macros. You'll put on weight. It will happen.

But as far as I know, the overwhelming majority of people fail to lose weight in the long-term.

Yes, because they fail to change their CICO equation long term. They diet and/or exercise, lose some weight, then resume eating like they used to and stop exercising.

The food addiction hypothesis fails to explain why skinny people find it just as hard to gain weight as fat people find it to lose weight. The set point model explains both.

And yet in a post above you claimed that it's just like an addiction to smoking or porn or drugs, which we should not expect people to stop because it takes "superhuman willpower."

You are right that most people will not break their addictions, and most people will not lose weight. Because it's hard and unpleasant, and people do not like to do hard and unpleasant things. That doesn't mean it's impossible.

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