
Is obesity an oral bacterial disease? - ph0rque
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/07/08/is.obesity.oral.bacterial.disease
======
siukwai
I question whether or not this is causality or correlation. It may just be
that overweight females have a higher concentrtion of that oral bacteria; not
that the oral bacteria in higher concentrations is -causing- obesity.

~~~
xiaoma
The article raised exactly that question in the last paragraph.

------
seldo
No.

By which I mean: this is much more likely to be effect than cause, e.g.
overweight people might have more sugary diets, so sugar-loving bacteria would
be favoured.

------
tokenadult
This is just the kind of news report about a new research study that should be
examined with Peter Norvig's checklist of issues to consider in scientific
research:

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

------
haseman
Misleading headline. The article posits the existence of a bacteria in obese
women, it does not go into the issue of causality as the headline suggests.

------
vaksel
no its the I am too lazy to workout disease

being fat is not even about overeating, as long as you put in the effort to
workout to burn those calories, you can eat whatever you want and still remain
in shape.

You won't get a sixpack, since that requires a proper diet, but you should
still be in decent shape.

~~~
thras
After being fat from early childhood, I lost 160 pounds by eating 900 calories
a day. Eventually I got down to the weight I wanted (normal weight for my
height) and was running 5 miles a day. I couldn't take the diet any more. I'm
a fellow with tremendous willpower. But it was the strangest thing -- I
couldn't force myself to stay on an _easy_ 2100 calorie a day diet even though
that was what I thought about every day, nearly every moment of the day. Even
though I had managed 900 a day for more than a year.

Anyway, while running 5 miles a day still, I immediately began gaining 15
pounds a month. Eventually I couldn't run anymore.

I'm sorry, but the argument from thermodynamics is as bankrupt at explaining
fat gain as it is in explaining height gain for adolescents. For height gain,
the fact that energy in equals energy out is a true statement, but the
explanation is growth hormone. If you calorie limit a growing child, the child
will be somewhat (not very though) stunted, but will make up the energy
difference through lethargy and by consuming all sorts of internal tissues.

For obesity, the explanation is insulin. I cut carbohydrates almost completely
from my diet in January. Otherwise I ate what I wanted when I wanted (I
measure my consumption in pounds of red meat per day). I'm amazingly
healthier. I've lost 50 pounds. I've gained so much muscle that I can do pull-
ups. Fucking pull-ups at my weight. With low-calorie dieting, I couldn't do
pull-ups until I had lost another 70 pounds past that point. I'm putting on
muscle and losing fat, and I'm eating huge quantities at every meal. Plus I
have a desk job and barely exercise.

The argument from thermodynamics assumes that the fat tissue is a trash can
and that weight homeostasis doesn't exist. It's a bankrupt theory that can't
explain diseases like progressive lipodystrophy (a disease which makes people
obese and emaciated at the same time). It can't explain why people who starve
the calories off are not the same at the end as normal thin people and almost
inevitably gain the pounds back. It can't explain why 1950s treatment to get
anorexics to gain weight was through injecting them with insulin and not
feeding them any more than they had been (during treatment).

In summary, you're seeking a psychological explanation of a physiological
problem. Kind of like the discredited quack Sigmund Freud often did, eh? A
physiological explanation might lead to the suggestion that we eat the way we
evolved to eat -- no refined carbohydrate.

~~~
dflock
I agree with you about the refined carbohydrates but the underlying facts
about the thermodynamics are also important, but in a slightly more subtle
way.

People almost always underestimate just how incredibly - almost unbelievably -
efficient the human body is. We're used to being impressed by cars that can do
60 mpg, but the human body can easily manage 300 mpg, even for an unfit hacker
like me; fitter people will be slightly more efficient, maybe up to 400 mpg
([http://health.howstuffworks.com/health-
illness/wellness/phys...](http://health.howstuffworks.com/health-
illness/wellness/physical-fitness/weight-loss/diet1.htm)).

What this means is that you have to run an enormous distance to burn off even
a tiny amount of food - about 1 mile for every 100 calories. So you can run a
mile on one banana (<http://www90.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=banana>), or 1.5
average cookies (<http://www90.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.5+cookies>), or
just over one rasher of bacon. You can run a entire marathon (26.2 miles) on
2,600 calories - or one big mac and a packet of cookies.

A scary number of people in the western world eat enough to run a marathon
every single day and still have enough calories left over of keep themselves
ticking over (~1500 calories) - without changing their diet at all. This
wouldn't be physiologically supportable for wear and tear reasons, but calorie
wise a lot of us could support it.

These two facts in combination: the abundance of high quality, high calorie
food in the developed world, and the incredible efficiency of the human body
are a virtually guaranteed recipe for obesity, whatever other factors come
into play. The fact that almost all of the easily available junk calories
people consume come from highly refined carbohydrates (because these are so
cheap to produce), massively compounds the problem.

Obviously there isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between calories in and weight
gain and everyone is slightly different and most food isn't just converted
into glycogen and then to fat, etc, etc... but as far as I can see, most
people will not reasonably be able to burn off the calories from an average
western diet, no matter how hard they try - there just isn't enough time to
run that far and hold down a job. Trying to do that much exercise, on top of
trying to diet and do everything else is just too much mental strain. On the
whole, I think people are better off just not eating the carbohydrate in the
first place - cutting it off at source is much easier than trying to get rid
of it later, and only requires you to do one thing, rather than two.

