SlimeMoldTimeMold

The guys at https://slimemoldtimemold.com were interested in a PFAS theory of obesity, but they seem to have moved onto lithium as a greater area of focus. My counterfactual: wouldn't you expect ski shop workers to become super obese? They're exposed to huge amounts of PFAS in ski wax.

Posted a while ago on HN: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/07/24/your-mystery-have-attention-s… A good litterature survey, easy to follow. Better than reading one or two isolated studies, since it does ask the crucial question of "well what is (and how do you measure) attention span anyway?" Less rigorous but similar conclusion in video if you prefer https://youtu.be/aDfeOvUZ7Kk?feature=shared

there are some fascinating hypotheses on what's caused the worldwide exponential increase in obesity in humans (and also some wild animals). here is the best summary i've seen: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-myst…

Norway has a very long and interesting history regarding natural resource development and stewardship, and lately a huge conversation has been about what is going to come after Oil. Would be very interesting if the answer is rare earth minerals! I highly recommend a particular paper, entitled "The New Oil" which gives a very good overview of the history of Norwegian resource development: https://www.idunn.no/doi/pdf/10.18261/issn.1504-2936-2021-01-01 Of course that is entirely in Norwegian, so for the anglophones here's a link to a translated version that I did for a friend's blog: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and-future-ge…

This same group has a lot of insightful exploration into what they call "N=1" studies. I'm no expert and haven't read but a subset of their work, but my impression is that they understand the limitations quite well and believe there is still value in publishing and trying to understand research with small sample sizes. Here's their intro article on the idea, which is only the tip of a massive iceberg: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/05/n1-introduction/

These folks suspect lithium in our water causes obesity. They also support several citizen-science diet experiments: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/

The "Chemical Hunger" hypothesis suggests that PFAS are a prime candidate for triggering the obesity epidemic. They started being introduced to the environment in large quantities just as obesity rates started to rise in the late 70s and 80s, the health effects are poorly understood but seem to have an impact on weight and the endocrine system, and they can be carried downstream (obesity rates are globally higher at lower altitudes). The other best candidate is lithium grease, which has the same distributional attributes but has also been proven to increase weight and explains some of the occupational discrepancies in obesity. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-myst…

Food addiction is for sure one reason for obesity, but the last few decades or so of research has really challenged the “you’re fat because of personal accountability” assertion. The single best read out there on the topic, for the layman like myself, is probably this series of articles: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-myst… It does a really good job of laying out all the contradictory information out there in a normal-human readable format while referencing studies to keep it real.

Have you read anything from SMTM? Their work has been on HN a few times and they dive deep into the rabbit hole of what causes obesity. Fascinating stuff. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/

Another (long) hypothesis, based on the observation that even lab animals have gained weight over the years: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-myst… I'm not sure I agree all the way to the conclusion, but it's definitely worth considering that inter-country obesity may be linked to an environmental factor.

This article is a great analysis of the environmental theory of obesity: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-myst…

By the way, I recently read Slime Mold Time Mold's hilarious diet proposal (https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/29/potato-diet-community-trial-s… namely "only eat potatoes, fry them lightly in vegetable oil if you want but prefer no extra fat, use hot sauce if you want but ideally literally just potatoes, supplement B12 and Vitamin A, definitely no dairy". They claim that this diet… just doesn't require willpower? Might be worth a quick go. God knows what nutrients are absent from the diet, but :shrug: Since the big selling point is that it doesn't take willpower, you'll know nice and quickly if it's failed - it's a very low-commitment diet. (I have never tried it, I lift and I want more protein than the diet can provide.)

If you look at the timing of the obesity epidemic you notice that it has a very sharp “knee” in the US around the 1970s. It does not coincide with the introduction of fast food or the automobile or sedentary living, and contemporary people exercise more in many cases than they did in the 60s and 70s, with vastly higher BMI as a result. The same pattern occurs in other countries just at later times. And the effect size is huge. Much larger than anything we can achieve with diet and exercise (durably) or even the best weight loss drugs. I don’t know what’s causing it, but “gosh people eat poorly” doesn’t seem like a good explanation. I thought this was a good (amateur, but accessible) summary of some of the stats: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-myst…

There's a pretty compelling case to be made that obesity is caused by some environmental factor that is making people hungrier. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/

That's a book review. Read the actual book.[1] Notes: - Prologue: (Behaviorism) ended up being a terrible way to do psychology, but it was admirable for being an attempt at describing the whole business in terms of a few simple entities and rules. It was precise enough to be wrong, rather than vague to the point of being unassailable, which has been the rule in most of psychology. - Thermostat: An intro to control theory, but one which ignores stability. Maxwell's original paper, "On Governors", (1868) is still worth reading. He didn't just discover electromagnetics, he founded control theory. Has the usual problems with applying this to emotions, and the author realizes this. OK, so living things have a lot of feedback control systems. This is not a new observation. The biological term is "homeostasis", a concept apparently first described in 1849 and named in 1926. (There are claims that this concept dates from Aristotle, who wrote about "habit", but Aristotle didn't really get feedback control. Too early.) - Motivation: Pick goals with highest need level, but have some hysteresis to avoid toggling between behaviors too fast. - Conflict and oscillation: Author discovers oscillation and stability in feedback systems. - What is going on? Author tries to derive control theory. - Interlude Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, which was peak fascination with feedback in the 1950s. - Artificial intelligence "But humans and all other biological intelligences are…

My opinion is the only reliable way to lose weight (other than ozempic) is to eat in such a way that regulates satiety such that you don't feel hungry when losing weight. Intermittent fasting + lower carb + whole foods can do this. But the trick is satiety in any one person is regulated by multiple processes. I doubt there's a one size fits all and probably the problem gets harder the more satiety is dysregulated. But I think any approach aimed at undereating in the sense of being hungry is not likely what people who lose weight successfully are doing. Or at least those who avoid rebounds. You'd instead want to find something that is highly satiating and satisfying and that also can't be overeaten. Example: almonds may be high satiety by some technical definition. But is is very very possible to eat past hunger with them. In my own experience it is very difficult to eat too much steak. I find it delicious but simply couldn't past a certain point. Others have reported similar results by adding lots of potatoes. I don't guarantee success by targeting satiety but I think it's worth trying rather than calories or weight directly. At some level you need to roughly figure out macronutrients to know where you can err but anytime I've lost weight it's been by focussing on type of food rather than amount. But strictly so. Re potatoes:…

I really enjoyed SMTM's "A Chemical Hunger" series[1]. But recently they've gone into weird fad-diet territory with their potato obsession. Like, they crow that the potato mono-diet "works," in that the people who successfully followed it lost weight. Well, sure -- all of those 70s fad diets "worked" in that sense! Grapefruit and popcorn? Sure, you can lose weight on that! But their own numbers show that people regain the weight after they start eating other foods again: "On average, people gained back most of the weight they lost."[2] People who successfully follow very restrictive diets will lose weight... as long as they follow it. And these "riffs" in the OP where it's potatoes and bacon, or potatoes and gummi worms, or whatever, won't change that basic observation. [1]: http://achemicalhunger.com/ [2]: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/26/smtm-potato-diet-community-tr…

I also highly recommend at least the first few of the Chemical Hunger series as well: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/tag/a-chemical-hunger/ While not without it’s problems (which is to be expected considering the impossibly complex subject matter), It does a fantastic job detailing how the obesity epidemic is not some kind of oversimplified moral sin issue where we all suddenly became gluttonous (“just eat less!”) and slothful (“just do more”). The only thing I find lacking is the omission of just much the many different types of fatty and amino acids also act as major chemical signals that ultimately[0] affect whether your body tries to burn energy “wastefully” for heat, or tries to store it. The articles leans toward environmental chemicals as being the primary effectors subtly acting on our metabolism, but the very food we eat is itself a massive load of chemicals with complex effects that we can’t ignore. [0] The next time someone who wanting to feel clever and smug about it says “calories in, calories out” or “muh thermodynamics”, send them this: http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1

This is a great article but the best part is an off hand link to a book review of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression [1] which includes choice quotes like > The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted 946 different sandwich varieties stuffed with fillings such as watermelon and pimento, peanut butter, fried oyster, Bermuda onion and parsley, fruit salad, aspic of foie gras, spaghetti, red snapper roe, salmi of duck, bacon and fried egg, lettuce and tomato, spiced beef, chow-chow, pickled herring, asparagus tips, deep sea scallops, and so on ad infinitum.” I ordered it off Amazon right away only to immediately realize, to my horror, that the hardcover version I had chosen would not arrive until Saturday, a full fortnite after my aspic of foie gras, salmi of duck, and the $5 esp32-wroom dev kits that were part of the same order. What is this, the 1930s? Civilization is seriously going down the drain. [1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/04/book-review-a-square-meal-par…

The only reason the potato diet is interesting to me (and presumably the reason it's interesting to the https://slimemoldtimemold.com/ folks) is the likely relationship to their environmental contaminant hypothesis for the public health issue of increasing body weights since 1980, outlined in a series of posts here: http://achemicalhunger.com/ In short, while the variety and satiety explanations make a lot of sense subjectively for an individual on this diet, they don't match up with the empirical data on weight gain since 1980. Here are a few phenomena that are not explained by this hypothesis: * The inflection point at right around 1980. There's no specific change that occurred in 1980 that anyone can point to that indicates a major change in variety of food in the average diet. * The correllation of weight gain with location in watersheds: high altitude locales where surface water has not moved very far (e.g. Colorado) exhibit the weight gain phenomena much less than locales deeper down in the watershed (e.g. Mississippi and Louisiana) I'm not interested in fad diets or disordered eating because they have a track record of bad long term outcomes, but I am interested in the potato diet as a blunt tool for taking action on this hypothesis, which looks pretty compelling to me. And if it doesn't work out, that's fine, too!

You're right and wrong. Many obese people have done this and lost weight... and then gained it right back again. Over, and over again. There is a persistent myth that the obese person lacks some spiritual strength or willpower. I think your comment implies this. And yet they do have the willpower to lose weight? And something happened in 1980 which turned 30% of adults into weak-willed moral degenerates, and more and more every year? Is that actually plausible in an era with unsurpassed interest in healthy eating, where people voluntarily exercise more than they ever have, with better quality food than we have ever had? The original researchers who suggested a mass trial of the potato diet over social media aptly said "the study of obesity is the study of mysteries". They're investigating some high-risk hypotheses that chemical contaminants are the cause of skyrocketing obesity. Worth a read. > People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. This seems closely related to observations like the French Paradox — the French eat a lot of fatty cheese and butter, so why aren’t they fatter and sicker? https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-myst…

This will likely be buried in all the answers, but I'll try anyway. I've recently read this here: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-myst… It's a long article series, but IMHO very worth it. In it, the authors posit that the body has a "lipostat", like a thermostat, but for regulating body fat and weight. If you are breathing pure oxygen and burning more calories, you'll just feel hungrier and eat more to compensate; if you don't, you'll feel sluggish and tired. The authors also claim that the most likely cause for the obesity crisis is that some environmental contaminant causes the lipostat to be mis-adjusted. That makes it pretty hard to deal with obesity, so the author's advise is: * move to a high altitude, since contamination follows watershed * avoid jobs that correlate with high obesity rates * avoid highly processed food, since each processing step has the option to add contamination I am not sure if all of this is real or some of it is bunk, but I found some of the arguments quite convincing, so I'd encourage you to read it and form your own opinion. (Do NOT just rely on my summary, it doesn't do the article series justice).

I'm a bit more skeptical of the CIM than I was in the past, but the EBM to me just seems hilariously inadequate to explain the obesity crisis. It's like if a patient came to their doctor complaining of water retention, and the doctor said "well clearly you're drinking more than you're excreting" and sent the patient home with instructions to drink less and pee more. My hunch with the CIM is that a human in good health can pretty effortlessly maintain a non-obese weight without much regard for things like macronutrient balance, but that some fairly widespread factor has disrupted that regulation mechanism in a large fraction of the population. That in a sense a keto/low-carb diet is a workaround for a mechanism that's broken in a lot of people, rather than some platonic ideal of how everyone should be eating. As to what broke it, there are some interesting hypotheses here [https://slimemoldtimemold.com] but no clear answers. I do personally feel a bit better eating a lower glycemic diet (from the standpoint of consistent energy levels), but I haven't achieved any weight loss that way (BMI hovers just under 25).

Even if it were in DSM-5-*, would that mean it's a standalone disorder? I haven't read much psychology, but this article suggests a lot of psychological diagnoses are just labels for symptoms: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the-mind-in-the-wheel-prologu… Imagine that your car breaks down and you bring it to a mechanic and he tells you, “Oh, your car has a case of broken-downness.” You’d know right away: this guy has no idea what he’s talking about. “Broken-downness” is an abstraction; it doesn’t refer to anything, and it’s not going to help you fix a car.

So even beyond the factors in the article (calorie density and hyper-palatability) there's other contributing factors in processed food. First of all, the processing itself introduces several factors: mechanical and heat energy changing the structure (but not composition) of the food, usually into smaller particle sizes; and the potential introduction of new contaminants - one that has been discussed before is lithium grease[1]. The other thing that processed food does, partially discussed in the article, is sit on shelves much longer. I wonder whether we've detected the acute effects of spoilage (e.g. food-borne illness) but missed some chronic effect. [1]: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2024/07/27/lithium-hypothesis-of-obesity…

It also causes obesity and may be the cause of American obesity in the South. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/02/a-chemical-hunger-part-vii-li…

You are not alone in this. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-myst… This series of blog posts goes through various theories (and myths) regarding obesity.

Maybe this one: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2024/03/15/gradient-descending-through-b…

Hi! We think that the way science was done 100 years ago was in fact better and we are consciously emulating parts of the old-fashioned approaches that we like. :) What do you think of this: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-weird-and-you…

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/02/a-chemical-hunger-part-vii-li… This guy claims that Lithium may be partially responsible for some weight gain in our population, but also, that desalination plants cause extra lithium as well. If it was mined out, that would be viable, but if not...