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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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The causes of the obesity epidemic are also worth considering. From reading slime mold time mold, it seems pretty clear to me that there should be more emphasis on the importance of your body being properly calibrated towards whatever your proper weight is, and we should be more aware of what is causing them so much more frequently to diverge.

Of course, willpower also can suffice, should the first fail; that just becomes progressively harder to make oneself do the more they are misaligned.

SMTM's 'a chemical hunger' posts were quite bad, see here for more. I haven't followed their later posts but I doubt it was much better.

To be clear, I was not asserting that their lithium thesis was correct; the concerns you listed seem quite serious.

I was just asserting that there's more to the story of the rising rates of obesity than "everyone has less willpower than they used to"—that many are calibrated worse, for whatever reason that may be, and so weight gain is fairly common, and we should probably try harder to figure out what exactly is going on.

there's more to the story of the rising rates of obesity than "everyone has less willpower than they used to"

This is the strawest of straw men.

The thing that I took away from SMTM that seems most important is that something weird is going on, and it's getting worse despite our best attempts to fix it. People are getting fatter and fatter, and as a society we've been putting more and more resources into not getting fat. This does seem mysterious, and I do think something more is going on then just "food is cheap and corporations make food taste great".

Until someone figures out what that thing is definitively, though, the best I can do is employ willpower to try not to get any fatter than I am now.

It’s quite possibly endocrine disrupters.

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