Monocausal thinking doesn’t suit a complex system.
HFCS increases obesity. But you have increasing obesity in regions without it, and have people who eat it who aren’t obese. It’s neither necessary nor sufficient and your comment contributes nothing to evaluating the role of microplastics.
Vast quantities of extra calories are needed for large segments of the population to be obese. That kind of surplus is very recent and absolutely required for an obesity epidemic.
So we absolutely have the root cause, but not perhaps the only one.
Not really. The difference between obese and healthy weight is about 40 pounds. At 3,500 calories per pound, that is only 140,000 surplus calories to become obese. Over a period of 5 years, that is about 77 calories a day, or roughly 1 egg.
Obesity is not caused by a vast availability of calories. It is caused by a breakdown in the bodies ability to match caloric input with output.
To be clear, vast amounts of added sugar seem to cause this system to breakdown, but the mechanism is more complicated than simple calories available in the environment.
> It is caused by a breakdown in the bodies ability to match caloric input with output.
Not a breakdown. The human body is just way too efficient. Absurdly so. Humans can exercise for hours and not burn 1000 kcal but it takes mere minutes to ingest that many calories.
That depends on the exercise and your body eight. A 200lb guy can burn over 1,000 calories an hour during a heavy workout. Though few can keep that up for a full hour.
That’s how you end up with serious athletes on 8-10,000 calorie diets.
Fat cells also require energy to live and you need energy to move them around.
For a 25 year old 5’10” male living a sedentary lifestyle the difference between 160lb and 200lb is ~2,060 vs 2,278 calories or about a 10% surplus. A more active lifestyle increase that difference ~3,262 vs 3,607 is about 380 calories per day or a 12% surplus.
Though I suspect the average obese person is significantly more than 40lb overweight. At 300lb he needs ~2,822 or roughly a 40% surplus while sedentary.
HFCS increases obesity. But you have increasing obesity in regions without it, and have people who eat it who aren’t obese. It’s neither necessary nor sufficient and your comment contributes nothing to evaluating the role of microplastics.