
Pesticides Could Be Making People Fat - jtdev
https://nuscimag.com/how-pesticides-could-be-making-you-fat-the-impact-of-glyphosate-on-the-gut-microbiome-fd6c75b2cf34
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5trokerac3
_consumes 5000kcal+ a day..._

"Must be them damn pesticides."

Edit: I'm more interested in all the other ways jacking up your gut microbiome
can negatively affect you, especially the potential links they're starting to
find with autism[0].

[0]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564498/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564498/)

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sp332
I don't know if you read the article, but it's more complicated than how many
calories you eat. This abstract shows some of the complexity:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26967715](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26967715)

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wang_li
> but it's more complicated than how many calories you eat.

It is and it isn't. It's how many calories your body is able to metabolize.
Usually those two numbers are similar, but the only way you're going to not
get fat from putting 5000 kcal a day into your pie hole is if you have
significant medical issues with your digestive system.

Also, it's odd that you'd say "it's not about calories" and link to an
publication that literally has "in chronic over nutrition" in it's title.

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sp332
And it sends with "a new class of food and drink that is low- or no-cost to
the consumer, convenient, savory, calorically dense, yet weakly satiating".
Only one of those things is about calories.

Edit: we're not talking about people actually eating 5,000 calories per day.
5trokerac3 made that up in order to blame fat people for being fat.

~~~
wang_li
Yet, weirdly enough, if a food item had all of those qualities except being
calorically dense it wouldn't make people fat. Everyone one of those factors
are things that lead to over eating, when paired with calorically dense you
end up with the chronic over nutrition mentioned in the title.

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sp332
Yes, but if it were missing the other factors and was only calorically dense,
it _also_ wouldn't make people fat.

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5trokerac3
That's like saying if cocaine made you feel like shit people wouldn't be able
to get high on it. The issue isn't the food, it's the individual's brain.

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cestith
I don't like that the article appears to conflate "GMO" with plants that have
been genetically altered with genes from an entirely different kingdom of life
specifically so they won't die when sprayed with glyphosate. Lots of genetic
modifications in the lab are nothing more than a faster version of guided
hybridization. Even in Roundup Ready corn and beans, I suspect it's the
glyphosate itself that's a much bigger issue for human health than using
bacterial genes in the plants to make them tolerate it.

~~~
hinkley
I'm not against accelerated husbandry (although I do take to heart some
warnings about selective breeding needing ethics too - see congenital defects
in purebred dogs). Gene testing chestnut hybrids to cull the ones without the
blight genes would be much safer than what they do now, which is test infect
the plants. That's how you get a pathogen to adopt a new host.

And that's my main complaint with transgenics, which perhaps we should use
that word instead of GMO. We are not exhibiting an 'abundance of caution' in
this work.

We have major illnesses crossing over from birds and pigs all through our
history. Some pretty bad ones in recent times. Moving genes between these
species (which we are doing, to try to make more pig organs biocompatible with
humans) could be very, very bad. Do we have a good model for what gene groups
can increase the likelihood of viruses crossing between species? If this
information exists they should be shouting it from the rooftops. But they
aren't, which suggests that no such practices are being observed.

If the next H1N1 turns into the Spanish Flu, 'I told you so' just isn't going
to cover it.

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cestith
The worst factor in the "Spanish" Flu was likely conditions in the
battlefields of World War I rather than the pathogen itself. Hogs and chickens
were kept close to troops so their mess could feed them under the tight land
constraints of trench warfare, and those troops were cramped together, wet,
cold, and undernourished. They then suddenly got redistributed into the
general European population after hostilities ceased. But I digress.

If someone wants to take a juicier tomato and a tomato with more flavor and
combine them to make a hybrid tomato, I don't so much care about a genetically
modified tomato that could have eventually been hybridized in the greenhouse.
As things get further from that, I have more reservations and I think we
should look a little closer. Across species is a little more concerning.
Across families moreso still, and so on as we talk about bigger and bigger
jumps.

You make a good case about our own genetics specifically, too. Things that
alter our DNA or the DNA of things we already share diseases with (other
primates, horses, hogs, for example) should probably get more attention to
possible risks and side effects.

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lazyguy
> killing the good bacteria in our gut microbiome can lead to nonalcoholic
> fatty liver disease, decreased insulin sensitivity, type two diabetes, and
> metabolic syndrome

Seems like that should be the main concern and thing to highlight in the title
of the article. I am less worried about be slightly overweight then fatty
liver disease.

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hammock
>nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, decreased insulin sensitivity, type two
diabetes, and metabolic syndrome

All of these ailments are typically comorbid with obesity, so saying "fat" is
a shorthand way of getting at these things in a limited-space headline.

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lazyguy
Right but you don't need to be fat to get any of them. They are just
'associated' with it. As in they are diseases that are more likely to impact
fat people.

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AstralStorm
Is there any direct evidence of causation or is someone shooting the wind
again?

(There are ways to do it, but it's extremely hard and finicky math.)

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ropiwqefjnpoa
Surely it's not my overall poor diet choices...

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reaperducer
This. I didn't get fat because Monsanto knocked my door and shoved
cheeseburgers down my throat for 30 years.

Nobody ever gained weight from not eating.

/Has lost 130 pounds in the last year by simply not eating when I wasn't
hungry, instead of eating when I'm bored or sad.

~~~
sneakernets
I'll admit I'm only saying anecdotes, but I've met very, very few obese people
who said they ate when "bored or sad". The friends I had who did gain weight,
did during the fat-free craze of the late 80s and early 90s, when "guilt-free"
candybars shot onto the market labelled as diet foods. It even has a name: the
"SnackWell Effect".

ref:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snackwell_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snackwell_effect)

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frogpelt
Be honest. Did you write that wiki article?

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AstralStorm
He didn't. It's an old one and it's not an example of citation genesis either.

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driverdan
It lost me at the opening sentence.

> It’s banned in several countries around the world, it’s a probable
> carcinogen, and it can cause severe kidney and liver damage, as well as
> birth defects, brain abnormalities, and mental illnesses.

This is terribly skewed, unscientific writing. Next time consult someone who
knows about the science behind glyphosate before writing about it.

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asimpletune
I don’t know anything about this subject. What is the correct way to
understand it?

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driverdan
Glyphosate is the safest and most effective herbicide to date. Countries
banning it has nothing to do with the science behind it. The WHO classified it
as a probable carcinogen based on a single flawed study. The rest of the
claims are not backed by research.

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thatcat
So why are countries banning it then?

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krageon
If it isn't because the science supports it, why is that important? Countries
do weird things for the wrong reasons all the time. The Swedish government
says the sale and consumption of MSG is "unwise" because it "might be bad",
even though there is absolutely no scientific support for it. I'm sure you
could find many, many examples of similar problems in practice and it does not
take a whole lot of thinking to realise it might impact other areas as well.

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thatcat
I mean its not like science could ever be politically biased /s

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trimbo
...and no link to the research?

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ScottFree
... the research that almost certainly hasn't been reproduced even once?

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manjana
1\. The only thing making you fat is excess calories - it cannot be any other
way.

2\. The article does in no way say that pesticides "might make you fat" \-
that is also pure non-sense, read (1) again if you didn't get the point. The
article mentions it increases risk factors for obesity. (risk factors for
obesity could be thought to be increased hunger).

3\. This isn't entirely new knowledge. The gut microbiome has been in the
spotlight for a while now. I first heard of this 3 or 4 years ago

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sp332
A calorie is not a calorie. A calorie of animal protein is less efficient to
digest than a calorie of sucrose. If you're lactose intolerant, you will get a
different number of calories from a glass of milk than someone who is not.
Chugging a can of Mountain Dew quickly probably means you won't digest all the
sugar before your gut bacteria get to it. Messing with metabolites in your gut
can change the way your body absorbs and stores energy.

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manjana
So you disagree that obesity is caused by excess caloric consumption? I fail
to see your logic on that part if that is so. It seems you are arguing with me
about something (entirely) different on which I never said anything about..

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intopieces
Pointing directly and solely to caloric intake when discussing obesity is the
“It’s just economics 101” of the nutrition issue: technically right, but so
lacking in nuance that it ceases to be interesting.

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manjana
That's a fair point. But saying pesticides causes obesity just paints the
wrong picture imo.

Contributes would've been a better word.

