I'm gonna drop this here for anybody interested in a deep dive into the mystery of obesity (What causes it, and how to overcome it - spoiler: calories eaten and burnt doesn't explain everything). I enjoyed the read, hope it's insightful to some others.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/tag/a-chemical-hunger/
I never understand what people mean by calories eaten and burned doesn't explain everything. How can it not?
Many things influence how many calories we eat, and many things influence how those calories are burned, but at the end of the day, it's the net that determines weight gain or weight loss.
What isn't true is that a diet of 1500 calories of nutrient dense food will produce the same results as a diet of 1500 calories of donuts. How calories are consumed, what nutrients they contain, when they are eaten, all of these things will affect how they are processed.
Also, what that article talks about is lithium as an obesogens, and there are countless more obesogens in the environment than just lithium.
Even if obesogens are enormously responsible for obesity, there still needs to be a net excess of calories to build the fat. Whether this is done by driving appetite, lowering metabolism, and preferentially storing calories as fat, at the end of the day, it still represents a net excess of intake over energy spent.
I went through a phase where I couldn't lose weight, even eating way too little food. This didn't mean that I defied the CICO balance, it means that the CO part of the equation had dropped so dramatically that I couldn't lower my intake enough, because as I kept lowering it, my metabolism would lower right along with it. As I ate less, I burned less, and I became exhausted and lethargic. My body just wouldn't burn enough to create a net loss of fat, at least not much of one.
As for understanding hunger, I wouldn't consider this a deep dive. If you have never learned about obesogens, then it's interesting to see stats about lithium, but it's a pretty limited view.
Also, the current state of neuroscience research on hunger is pretty interesting. The working theory right now is that hunger has nothing to do with the need for food. That eating is a traumatic experience for the body and the sensations that people perceive as "hunger" are actually just the body preparing it's system to receive and digest the noxious food it's expecting to receive.
Ironically, this can create a feedback loop that generates intense, constant hunger sensations in people who over eat. It's not a need, it's an anticipation, a bracing for the feed.
Which is why it feels like a need to eat. If the system preps itself and doesn't get the food, it's uncomfortable.
This is just a working theory, but my source is Pinel and Barnes 2021, who are pretty much the go to authorities on the current state of neuroscience research.
It would also account for why so many of us who do intermittent fasting experience so little "hunger" once we adapt to rarely eating. I even move my eating time constantly so that my body never overly anticipates food.
On the flip side, it also explains why so many fasters have to be careful what they first eat. There are countless stories of bad bathroom situations for someone breaking a fast with too much of the wrong kind of food. Without the system prepped for the trauma of food, it can react kind of violently.
I have a condition called MCAS, which is basically just an enhanced reaction to foreign substances. So for me, this food as a traumatic insult to the body has always been obvious. I basically mount an allergic-type reaction to all food, with milder reactions to some foods and harsher reactions to others.
But over my years of studying this kind of thing, I've come to realize that most people have some degree of suboptimal response to most foods. Eating floods people with happy brain chemicals, but their actual digestive sensations after eating are rarely great, unless they've eaten exactly the right kind of minimally challenging foods for their particular bodies.
Basically, most people feel kind of crappy after eating, to some degree.
So understanding that the urge to eat has little to nothing to do with a need for calories is a HUGE paradigm shift in the compendium of scientific knowledge, it's just not one that disseminating very well because it's so counter intuitive.
Now, understanding how obesogens modulate the urge to eat AND the processing of calories??? THAT is a big ol' monster of a challenge to tackle. Not least of which because it's virtually impossible to study effectively... we're not allowed to do that kind of research on people anymore thanks to the Nazis.
The more I deep dive into obesity, the more I conclude that it's simultaneously very difficult to understand and very simple to understand.
What's simple is that industrial processes have altered the food we eat and the way out bodies process it in ways that promote obesity, and are very difficult to stop.
What's also simple is that, like your link showed, the way to not be obese is to eat nutrient dense foods, be active, and expose yourself to as little industrial processing chemicals as possible. It's impossible to know all of the sources of these obesogens, but your article pointed to a pretty decent strategy: live where the lean people are.
What's complicated is how the fuck to change any of this on a populational scale.
