Peter Attia - Obesity

hookilau

While this was posted a couple of times in the last couple of days already twice, I already believe in his hypothesis, so it's not news to me.

What I'm wondering about is what *other* people who do not have a present bias (as I do) think of this. Please have a look at the vid if you've got time, I'd really love to hear other opinions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3oI104STzs

Hexahedra

There is no doubt in my mind that there's a number of people who are born to be fat. Some people can get to 300 lbs, I personally don't think my body can survive at that level because my blood readings were horrible simply for being 11 lbs overweight. I would be hospitalized way before I reach 250 lbs.

The most important question (and coincidentally also the eternal question) is how much of obesity is inherited and how much of it is environmental. My personal belief is that it's mostly environmental, and as such it's within our control. The good doctor (unlike many other overweight people) put some serious effort into finding out what's wrong with his own body, and then worked on fixing it. So many people out there simply don't bother.

I had a friend with persistent body odor problem. he's not dirty or unhygienic, his body is simply built that way. He gets a pass for being stinky, but just because there are people like him we can't reject the concept of good hygiene and personal responsibility.

shannashannabobana

The most important question (and coincidentally also the eternal question) is how much of obesity is inherited and how much of it is environmental. My personal belief is that it's mostly environmental, and as such it's within our control.

I think the majority of it IS environmental (otherwise obesity wouldn't be increasing) but I do think it's possible there is a genetic component that means person A gets obese on said diet/environment while person B doesn't. I don't think it's strict metabolism, though, because that seems to have been well tested, but it could be something like Attia is suggesting.

I absolutely do not believe it is simply an increase in laziness or lack of willpower, I think there is some specific trigger in our foods that makes people have problems/increased hunger/increased fat storage/some other mechanism. What that is precisely is still up for debate.

Acg67

While this was posted a couple of times in the last couple of days already twice, I already believe in his hypothesis, so it's not news to me.

What I'm wondering about is what *other* people who do not have a present bias (as I do) think of this. Please have a look at the vid if you've got time, I'd really love to hear other opinions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3oI104STzs

Attia, buddy of Taubes? lol

bcattoes

Replying mostly to watch the video later. But if this is about genetic causes of obesity there isn't much evidence for it right now.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-causes/

Genes Are Not Destiny
Heredity plays a role in obesity but generally to a much lesser degree than many people might believe. Rather than being obesity’s sole cause, genes seem to increase the risk of weight gain and interact with other risk factors in the environment, such as unhealthy diets and inactive lifestyles. And healthy lifestyles can counteract these genetic effects.

More info: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-causes/genes-and-obesity/

shannashannabobana

seem to increase the risk of weight gain and interact with other risk factors in the environment,

Yes, see that makes sense. I think there are some factors that may not be well understood that explain WHY person X has an increased risk, but certainly a genetic predisposition is not destiny.

bcattoes

seem to increase the risk of weight gain and interact with other risk factors in the environment,

Yes, see that makes sense. I think there are some factors that may not be well understood that explain WHY person X has an increased risk, but certainly a genetic predisposition is not destiny.

Yeah, you should check out that second link I posted above. It's pretty interesting stuff. It's not destiny and not the scapegoat some make it out to be. But it also may play a bigger role than others who poo-poo genetics altogether.

allshebe

Replying mostly to watch the video later. But if this is about genetic causes of obesity there isn't much evidence for it right now.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-causes/

Genes Are Not Destiny
Heredity plays a role in obesity but generally to a much lesser degree than many people might believe. Rather than being obesity’s sole cause, genes seem to increase the risk of weight gain and interact with other risk factors in the environment, such as unhealthy diets and inactive lifestyles. And healthy lifestyles can counteract these genetic effects.

More info: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-causes/genes-and-obesity/

I think genes result in a tendency (or not) to be "calorie efficient". The "human air ferns" (to steal a description from the equine world) must eat less and/or exercise more to maintain a "healthy weight" compared to those who seem to stay thin no matter how much they eat. The good news is that if there is ever a world-wide famine, the "air ferns" will probably be more likely to survive :>)

myofibril

I absolutely do not believe it is simply an increase in laziness or lack of willpower, I think there is some specific trigger in our foods that makes people have problems/increased hunger/increased fat storage/some other mechanism. What that is precisely is still up for debate.

Agreed. It strikes me unlikely that there has been a massive erosion in the moral fibre or character of people in the last 30 years or so and as such there must be something else going on, to some degree at least.

There is talk of the obesogenic environment and there is some validity to that in my opinion.

What seems also clear is that we must consider different avenues to supplement the "eat less, move more" message which seems to be failing dismally in addressing the issue of obesity.

etoiles_argentees

Thought I just answered this.

Eliminating water and driving up sugar levels to deal with cold. Coincidence that those most likely to have the propensity (genetic) for diabetes are people descended from the places most ravaged by the sudden onset of the ace age? Might be that diabetes helped them survive the Younger Dryas. Who knows.

Sorry, not listening. "Gary Taubes and Peter Attia, the co-founders of the non-profit organization Nutrition Science Initiative"

and answered it here too.

He asks the question, "What if becoming obese is the better option that the body pursues rather than succumbing to Type II diabetes?"

I heard somebody mention this the other day. I think this is a very interesting line of study and I like that somebody is looking at things a different way. We'll see what the studies show...

The studies will show whatever Taubes and crew want them to show.
Too many $ to go any other way.

Billionaires Fund A 'Manhattan Project' For Nutrition And Obesity
by ELIZA BARCLAY
September 20, 2012 2:16 PM

Why would a billionaire energy trader-turned-philanthropist throw his foundation's dough behind a new think tank that wants to challenge scientific assumptions about obesity?

John Arnold, 38, whose move from Enron to a spectacularly successful hedge fund got him on the list of wealthiest Americans, isn't crazy about talking to the press. But certainly his decision with his wife Laura to back a newly launched operation called the Nutrition Science Initiative, or NuSI, is an intriguing one.

Obesity, and all the dietary confusion that swirls around it, is clearly a problem that isn't going away. But NuSI says large-scale scientific studies that tackle fundamental questions — like how food really affects fat, hormones and the brain — are what's needed to solve it more than anything else.

We're told by NuSI's president, Peter Attia, a Stanford and Johns Hopkins-trained doctor, that Arnold's interest in the cause started with a podcast featuring science journalist and NuSI co-founder, Gary Taubes.

Taubes has been arguing for the last several years in books and articles in the New York Times Magazine that current dietary guidelines and beliefs about what has caused the obesity epidemic are wrong and based on poor science. Attia says Arnold approached Taubes after Arnold realized he could bring resources to bear on the problem — $5 million in seed money to fund "good" studies that are usually prohibitively expensive.

"In ... nutrition science, the research is inadequate, so our guiding information is not based on rigorous science," Meredith Johnson, a spokeswoman for the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, told The Salt in an email.

One reason Attia agrees it's inadequate is that "it's really quite difficult to study nutrition in humans at the level of precision that scientists in other fields can get."

Ideally, researchers could control everything their subjects eat over weeks and months, and monitor the effects of different foods or diets on the body. But that's the kind of research that's very costly. In the absence of it, researchers often rely on the subjects to self-report what they ate — which ultimately can be misleading because people's memory of their exact food intake is notoriously bad.

With Arnold's contributions, NuSI says it will be able to give money to the "best nutrition researchers in the country" doing the most cutting edge research. The hope is to enable these researchers do much bigger, nuanced studies than what they can currently afford to do with the five-year, $2.5 million National Institutes of Health grants most of them rely on.

"We want to get to the moon; in other words, we want to discover the perfect set of rules and understand what controls obesity and the metabolic syndrome," he says.

When they get there, NuSI claims, they'll have the tools to lower the obesity prevalence rate in the U.S. from 35 percent to 15 percent, and the diabetes rate from 8 percent to 2 percent. Their goal is to do this by 2020. That would translate into billions in health care savings, too.

NuSI has attracted some big names to its board of advisers, ranging from James Lambright, of the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Export-Import Bank to "4-hour" lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss. In his typically hyperbolic prose, Ferriss called NuSi "an X-men-like group of the world's best scientists, independently funded and uninfluenced by industry, tackling the most important questions in nutrition."