Almost impossible, but not impossible. It has been found that giving blood (and then throwing that blood away) significant reduces PFOS levels. Not that I'm defending 3M or any of this. My favorite rivers where I fish turned out to be full of PFOS due to a leaking 3M waste dump and this was only announced in 2021. So I spent some time looking for solutions.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://www.aabb.org/news-resources/news/article/2022/04/26/...
There are a collection of things which are difficult for your body to eliminate, regularly extracting blood is a mechanism for getting rid of some of them.
But regardless of whether obesity is caused primarily by environmental contamination, chemical contamination is a huge risk for a few reasons:
-Once in the environment, chemical contaminants can react in unforeseen ways, creating new chemicals that we will have no idea how to monitor for.
-Health data prior to industrialization is not good and is confounded by poor medical practices, so we may think we've "solved" chemical contamination when in fact we haven't (e.g. maybe heart disease would go away if it weren't for some chemical that we started using in 1910 but we can't tell because everyone was dying of dysentery).
-The solution, in some most cases, may mean giving up significant technological advances, especially polymers and heavy metals extracted from the ground.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
But people will blame anything instead of taking action, so…
But to say "people will blame anything instead of taking action" makes no sense. We have had decades of action trying to get people to eat healthy and exercise. It hasn't done anything. We have to accept that just telling people to lose weight doesn't work and start pursuing other options.
And there are so many good options! In Spain, for example, "staple foods" such as vegetables, meat, and bread are taxed at a lower rate while highly processed foods are taxed at the normal rate. In most developed countries, universal healthcare helps people prevent and manage the worst diseases associated with obesity such as heart disease and diabetes. And yes, we should investigate alternate explanations outside of the exercise/diet nexus such as chemical contamination! It may not be the reason but it is a testable hypothesis that would be "big if true."
Do you know anything about these chemical? If so, please share. If not, well, ....
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925973/, from the abstract, "Based on the present literature, unless the overall volume of aerobic ET is very high, clinically significant weight loss is unlikely to occur. "
Doesn't seem completely out of the realm of possibility.
If you don't burn the calories you eat, no matter how few they may be, you will never lose weight.
That said, I have not yet read the SMTM piece, or looked at SMTM's data.
Here’s the deal, you’re going to die. It’s going to happen for one reason or another, and if you eliminate one reason, there will be another one lined up not so long after.
If your purpose in life is to maximize the number of days you live, I guess you do you, but it doesn’t seem like a very high quality life to me.
We take risks, we accept them, there’s middle ground between ignoring risks and obsessing over them. The toll from worrying about things can be much worse than the things you’re trying to avoid.
You know what causes obesity? Availability of food. You didn’t evolve in an environment where calories are essentially free so your motivations and feedback behaviors aren’t tuned to make good decisions when it comes to food. Sure there are probably secondary effects from all sorts of things, but it comes down to food not being scarce like it evolved to expect.
Paying attention to environmental risks makes sense, but only to a certain extent. You’re probably still going to live a long life, and the secret to a good one probably isn’t going to be found in avoiding the next scary chemical of the day.
The level of arrogance or just compelete lack of understanding is mind boggling here.
If I get cancer and that cancer kills me, that cancer will not kill anyone else.
If I die because of some man-made chemical, the source that I got that chemical from is still there and will affect others as well.
Not all sources of death are the same. Some are much more nasty. Man-made things like PFAS chemicals have been known to be nasty for a long time by their makers. Those makers have chosen to hide it. Any attempt at "we're all going to die" in order to lessen the guilt of these companies is just shameful on all who spread it, and you should be ashamed.
This comes off as a very ignorant take. The problem is not "if" we're going to die and "how", but "how soon" and with "how much suffering", along with "how much effort/money does it increasingly require to stay healthy".
People have a tendency to go to the extreme. There is a lot of middle ground between not caring at all and having a panic attack. This middle ground can be constructively used to make the lives of future generations easier, just like many of the people of the past have done for us.[0]
[0] Having spent a few months off-grid, I'm extremely grateful for things like electricity, tap water, sewage, central heating, a roof above my head, walls around me thicker than my tent, medicines, and many, many other things I used to take for granted.
As discussed in the article, this fails to explain why there have been societies with almost no obesity and almost unlimited access to food (e.g. the Mbuti people of the Congo who get 80% of their calories from a copious supply of honey but have no documented cases of obesity, or rich people in developed countries prior to about 1980).
Death is only one part of the equation. I want to be healthy while I live.
>The toll from worrying can be much worse than what you're trying to avoid.
Absolutely. I don't do any of the things the series lists as their recommended ways to lose weight (even though I am overweight). I haven't tried the all-potato diet and I haven't moved to the top of a mountain. I just keep exercising and limiting my sugar intake. And what has happened is exactly what the series said would happen: I lost about 15 pounds and then leveled out. Which I'm fine with - all the evidence points to the fact that just losing 15 pounds does quite a bit for your health, and that's enough for me! I'm happy to focus the rest of my energy on living life and enjoying it.
But I think someone should be doing the research. Why are dollars going to weight loss PSA campaigns and studies showing that this or that diet might help people lose weight? These approaches haven't worked for decades and we could be funding research into some theories like chemical-mediated hunger.
Second, obesity isn't caused by the availability of food. Most well developed countries have an essentially infinite amount of food for any given individual, and most individuals do not stop eating because they lack the resources to access more food. So why isn't every individual in these society with these resources massively obese? Because there are a number of psychological, chemical, and biological reasons for obesity. Largely, the cause for obesity comes in the form of appetite suppression vs satiation. There are many chemicals like PFAS which decreases satiety, increasing the calories you intake.
Just like how removing heavy metals from drinking water and increases in food availability increased the general quality of life for all affected people, decreasing the amount of chemicals affecting satiety in the general environment could have massive impacts for societies that are impacted.
In short, if your baseline hunger is lower, you won't get fat.
Likewise there are risks that are better ignored. There is risk in flying on an airplane, but it’s not risky enough to forego the good that comes of it.
Only with quantification comes the ability to rationally decide whether to take a risk or not.
The issue with these chemicals is that we do not know how to even quantify their risk. So we have to estimate and people’s gut estimates vary wildly. Your gut estimate is that there is a low risk, others estimate a high risk.
Only time will tell who is correct, such is the uncertainty of life.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/05/health-body-says-avoid...
It was known for decades that Asbestos and cigarettes causes lung cancer, that adding lead to gasoline is a terrible idea, that burning oil warms the atmosphere. The truth was suppressed through intimidation, lawsuits and bribes. Regulatory agencies are corrupted by the revolving door system. You cannot trust these organisations.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
And if you live in America, diesel pickups have to meet a far less stringent set of emissions standards.
On top of that, many people who own duramaxes, powerstrokes, and cummins diesels strip out the emissions control equipment and run modded firmware on their ECUs to not throw a code...spewing far more pollution than these "dirty" diesels.
You probably have done the same when you did revision just before a geography test at school - you probably only learnt the syllabus rather than going to the library and learning everything in the geography section.
The VW engineers made a car that had only 'revised' enough to do well in the test, not to do well in the real world. Here is another example of engineers doing the same in a different industry[1].
[1]: http://omattos.com/2021/11/11/appliancegate-the-energy-effic...
What's worse is that for demanding accountability for such crimes you get called "environmental extremist" or something similar.
I suspect that means there is a flip side we aren't seeing. It means there is a huge disadvantage to banning some probably harmful chemical. For example, if you were a small island and you banned imports of everything containing any PFAS, you'd end up in the technological stone age - there are no PFAS-free iPhones, food, paper, or shoes. So, unless you have your own shoe factory, your people will have to go barefoot...
It is a very different piece of legislation to apply a cautionary principle to any substance in cookware, food containers, or in contact with human skin, versus a full out ban on iphones because some processor inside it used a PFAS lubricant at some point in the supply chain.
Also we are way way beyond "probably harmful".
Why not have a serious system based on punishment instead, after the fact? For example-
"If a company is found to be responsible for a material environmental disaster, whoever was employed by that company during the relevant period shall be sentenced to life in prison and a fine of 100% of their net worth. No liability should apply for occupations which can be conclusively demonstrated to be unrelated to the activities of the firm, such as janitors or security guards.
The statute of limitations shall equal the duration of life of the concerned natural persons or the victims, whichever is longer."
This would cause people to self-regulate, based on whatever informal information they hear ("3M is doing really dodgy stuff, I wouldn't work there if I were you"), rather than having to wait for regulation. It would be much better suited, and would allow for the government to scrap other bothersome regulation.
A strong incentive to finish off the victims
-Manufacturing the best firefighting chemistry (e.g. military purchases for missile warehouses, resorts, apartments, etc.) -Using the chemistry to actually fight fires
It might be a case where sometimes second best should have been the way to go, but it’s hard to know beforehand I imagine, especially in safety scenarios where people are laser focused on optimizing for that.
> In fact, in the case of the V-2, more than twice as many Allied prisoners died outfitting the factory and producing it than did Allied civilians and soldiers hit by it in rocket attacks.
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/wonder-weapons-...
The citizens being affected have very little recourse.
It seems like we need everyone working together because it’s such a complicated game theory problem.
Is humanity’s goal to march forward with scientific discovery at the risk of inventing risky things?
Or is the goal to make people comfortable? (was going to say healthy, but I think that ship has sailed in the west where we are approaching 50% obesity with no foreseeable counter measure).
[insert other goals from key stakeholders]
E.g. if the civilian government said “we need the best X” but it also can’t by Y,Z,Q, etc. and the more qualifiers you add the less likely that there will ever be something new in the arena (which is good for corporations that rely regulatory capture).
The military’s approach to dealing with waste in that era was essentially “dump it over there” or “burn it with fire”. Airbases are particularlye bad as the crap they spray on the wings for de-icing and the firefighting foam. Is everywhere and often is nasty stuff.
I've been kicking around an idea I've been tentatively calling "techno-conservatism". The tl;dr: "Like Amish, not Luddites." It's becoming more and more clear that each of our technologies has trade-offs, and the uncritical acceptance of those trade-offs has lead us to poison ourselves and the world in several fairly significant ways. This would seem to me to make a more considered and conservative relationship with our technology imperative.
There are movements like the "Slow Food" movement, and of course the Amish are famously conservative in their acceptance and use of modern technology.
The general idea is to start with a simple and ecologically harmonious low-tech (but sophisticated!) lifestyle and then add essential technology (in a kind of "progressive enhancement", eh?) to increase QoL (Quality of Life) without, y'know, poisoning anything.
"Techno-conservatism" isn't a political stance. Ecological harmony isn't a political goal, it's a prerequisite of any durable regime at all. The thing is living in harmony with nature is fun and economical so I would hope it's very popular once you've experienced it. (E.g. we have some hydrogen-powered buses here and the exhaust they put out is not smelly poison, it's actually refreshing! It has a delightful not-quite-aroma, it's moist and oxygenated. You only have to stand upwind of one once to realize that ICE vehicles are inferior.)
In the short-term, and on the personal scale, I'm imagining something like a neighborhood or small town as a kind of experimental zone or context. ( Check out Village Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes ) You're right that this wouldn't mitigate truly global issues like "forever chemicals" or global warming, but it's an improvement on what we're doing now. I think once there's a kind of "theme park" you can visit that shows what it's like to live well without messing up the environment it would really convince people to do it.
