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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28318 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?

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.

That answer is not even wrong.

The problem with using the CICO tautology as weight-loss advice is that an individual cannot control calories-out (if you exercise, the body will reduce your non-exercise caloric expenditure to compensate) and cannot control calories in either, at least over the long term. People eat because their appetites tell them to, and stop eating when their appetites tell them to stop.

Going outside of this is essentially impossible in the long term for 95% of the population, which is why Biggest Loser contestants, Minnesota Starvation Study subjects and prison weight gain study subjects returned back to their set-point eventually. This is also why the entire developed world is getting fatter. We're not deciding to eat more collectively, it's that something is messing with our lipostats. I personally think it's vegetable oil, but I wouldn't be too shocked if it was microplastics, xenoestrogens or some other environmental stressor.

CICO is either one of two things:

  1. A tautology that is axiomatically true
  2. A weight loss protocol that can be tested

If it's 1 then there's no point even discussing it, tautologies cannot be wrong, by definition. If it's 2, then we can test it. We have done so, and it has failed those tests completely.

What we usually see with CICO advocates is the fallacy that this site is named after. The bailey is telling fat people 'just to eat less', the motte is retreating to the tautology when someone points that that calorie-restricting diets don't actually work.

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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?

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