@ifrit said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
I read a really interesting series of articles recently that posited (with graphs!) that there may be a chemical component to obesity that is down to industrial processing introducing additional chemicals to our foodstuffs (one of the suggestions is lithium from lithium grease for example).
I believe that the current leading theory goes like this:
The 'sedentary lifestyle' theory of obesity has been somewhat discredited just based on observable history: in the 1930's we started transitioning from farm work to office work, and beef, beer, and other high-calorie foods became readily available as industry kept taking off and prices kept falling as production and distribution tech got better and better. And yet, from the actuarial tables that insurance companies kept, there was no obesity epidemic despite rather sedentary lifestyles with lots of fat and alcohol.
But around the 50's and 60's, we start getting into heavily processed foods: starches and carbs that are very easy and quick to digest that our biological processes are just not meant to handle effectively. And so our systems freak the hell out, and by the 70's we're seeing an incredible rise in obesity despite activity and caloric consumption just based on the prevalence of these kinds of cheap, fast, ultra-processed foods.
And then we blame fat, naturally, because fat clearly makes you fat for reasons, it has a lot of calories, whatever. So we strip out fat and start adding processed sugars to absolutely everything, which doesn't actually help and really just makes it worse as the set points (the 'baseline' weight of our bodies, the one that it works to actively maintain) just skyrockets higher and higher and higher because the biological processes that regulate your metabolism in proportion to your caloric intake has no idea how to handle this crap that you're eating.
Here's the hat trick, though -- if you stop eating those kinds of foods, your body goes into an entirely different kind of starvation freakout and starts packing on as much fat as possible because your fucked up internal processes assume that you are dying and in a famine, so the more you try to eat 'regular' foods and move and work out the more your body thinks that you're in a desert death march and works against you.
Interestingly, this is one of the reasons that bariatric surgery has such a high efficacy rate: It does actually reset this system, whereas dietary regulation doesn't. It removes both producers and receptors of a buttload of hormones and biochemical regulators and forces your anatomy to start over from scratch.
Naturally, more research needs to be done to verify these results and whatnot. But from what we understand, right now, of the biochemical processes, it's the food supply itself that is causing it, not consumption or activity, combined with just genetic predisposition toward large or small bodies.
