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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I am trying, but it is just not well backed by data. The author goes on about diets all the time, grossly generalizing and totally ignoring, that it is also important how much you consume. They cite an example of France in the 1800s and say, that they ate more bread and butter (the link to the source not working). Okay, sure. And then they say, that they could still maintain their health easily, followed by the statement, that they exercised more, but this minor difference is not enough to explain it. Like, what are they going on about? In 1800 about two thirds of the population were working on farms, that’s not just “a bit more exercise”. And no word about food scarcity. People just couldn’t afford gluttony. Often enough they were just one bad harvest away from a famine. It’s ridiculous to assume, that they got to the same calorie intake on their bread, butter and dairy diet, that we have today with the amounts of sugar we eat and the affordability of food.

    And while they probably exercised more on average than we do, the minor difference in exercise isn’t enough to explain the enormous difference in weight.

    That statement is just plain wrong. Let’s say a minor difference in exercise is 50kcal a day. That’s about 6min running at 10km/h. This adds up to 18250kcal a year, which translates to over 2kg of body weight in ONE year. Multiply that by multiple years and it adds up quite fast. Keep that in mind for the following statement:

    Many of them were farmers or laborers, of course, but plenty of people in 1900 had cushy desk jobs, and those people weren’t obese either.

    Well, how did people get to these cushy desk jobs? By not available cars? How did they get their groceries? How did they clean their clothes? That’s all stuff, that takes a minimum of exercise nowadays. What did they do on their free time? It probably wasn’t sitting in front of the screen with minimal movement.

    That’s just the first of these “mysteries” and the whole thing is written in this style. They take an observation and then give an explanation for it, that fits their narrative. Alternative explanations are either not acknowledged or ruled out on flimsy evidence.

    Here, from the CICO part:

    Sources have a surprisingly hard time agreeing on just how much more we eat than our grandparents did, but all of them agree that it’s not much. Pew says calorie intake in the US increased from 2,025 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,481 calories per day in 2010. The USDA Economic Research Service estimates that calorie intake in the US increased from 2,016 calories per day in 1970 to about 2,390 calories per day in 2014. Neither of these are jaw-dropping increases.

    How are these not giant increases in calorie intake? This metric is per DAY. It adds up fast over years. We are speaking about 16kg worth of body weight in calories per year. Okay, they addressed this in the interlude:

    Studies show that people with obesity eat and expend more calories than lean people. From this study, for example, consider this sentence: “TDEE was 2404±95 kcal per day in lean and 3244±48 kcal per day in Class III obese individuals.” From this perspective, the average daily consumption per Pew being 2,481 calories per day doesn’t seem like much — that’s about what lean people expend daily.

    TDEE includes exercise. Class 3 obese is a BMI of 40, so for a 1.8m tall male, that is 130kg, lean is probably at the lower end of normal, so 65kg. Then you can calculate the basal metabolic rate for both cases, leading to 1655kcal/day for the lean and 2300kcal/day for the obese. The difference is exercise. So lean people burn ~800kcal worth of exercise while obese people burn ~900kcal, but at double the weight. Since calorie burning during exercise goes linear with weight, you can conclude, that lean people workout more than obese people. So their argument does not work.

    I never said, that it would be easy to lose weight. It definitely is hard. Your body is adapted to your lifestyle and breaking out of your habits and completely changing your lifestyle can be extremely hard. However, blaming some mysterious contaminant will not help people lose weight. Especially, when things like liquid calories tend to add a lot to your calorie intake, but your body does not really register them. Our body has evolved to control its body weight over thousands of years to a different type of diet. I do really not know, why the authors think, that subjecting it to the modern day achievements of high calorie foods and liquid calories will not affect this balance.




  • I do not have time right now to read the whole thing, but what strikes me as odd, is that the author blames everything on contaminants, when a change in lifestyle could also be an option. They write about indigenous people moving to western societies and becoming fat, blaming it on industrial food contaminants, but ignore, that western people do not exercise enough. At least mention it and give a reason why you think, that this does not factor into it.

    Then they also generalize about people in the western world getting obese at the same rate, which is not true at all. People in the US are more obese than in the Netherlands, for example. Japan has one of the lowest average BMIs in the world. It just doesn’t add up. Furthermore, there is a lot of talking about causation, when they only prove correlation.






  • Sorry, that was imprecise. The correct German term would be Energiewirtschaft, that can be translated to energy industry. That’s not only electricity, but also production of biogas, district heating, refining of fossil fuels and so on. The struggling departments from worst to slightly struggling are: -transportation: widespread use of fossil fuels -building: heating with fossil fuels and emissions from concrete -industry: high use of energy and no alternative to fossil fuels in some cases






  • The goal is complete decarbonization until 2045 and a lot of sectors in Germany are already on track with that goal, energy being one of them. That with a minister of finance, that does not want to spend money and a minister of transportation, that is more a puppet of the automobile industry and does not care about decarbonization. Imagine the US without the huge subsidies into clean energy. That’s what Germany is trying to do under their current minister of finance.



  • People will still laugh, even if scientists say, that half a beer (250ml) is already bad for you. Scientists need to present facts, if people head their conclusions or not, is not really their problem in most cases. Our society is deeply ingrained with alcohol abuse. How do you think scientists or science journalism should present the fact, that even small amounts of alcohol are detrimental to your health, to the general public?


  • My point was, that it is an illusion, that consuming alcohol will help with most of the problems. Okay, for something like grief, where you mostly heal with time, it might not make it actively worse. But for every issue, that you need to tackle proactively, it does nothing. No, it even makes it worse, because you won’t deal with your problem while you are drunk and not even on the next day, because you will most likely be hangover. Alcohol not only messes with your body, but also with your brain. Post-drinking depression is a thing. You get your respite and a curve ball of even worse emotions the days afterwards. Really helpful.

    You make running away from your problems sound like a good thing. It isn’t. Alcohol is an easy way out, until you slide down the slippery slope to addiction and it fucks up even more of your life. It is the same with other drugs. Oh, I feel so stressed, I need a cigarette and boom, you can’t do without cigarettes anymore. Oh, I am so tired, I need caffeine to function. No, you need more sleep.