A Chemical Hunger – Part I: Mysteries

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The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.

Mystery 1: The Obesity Epidemic 

The first mystery is the obesity epidemic itself. It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human history. A century ago, the average man in the US weighed around 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195 lbs. About 1% of the population was obese back then. Now it’s about 36%.

Back in the 1890s, the federal government had a board of surgeons examine several thousand Union Army veterans who fought in the Civil War. This was several decades after the end of the war, so by this point the veterans were all in their 40’s or older. This gives us a snapshot of what middle-aged white men looked like in the 1890s. When we look at their data, we find that they had an average BMI of about 23 (overweight is a BMI of 25 and obese is a BMI of 30 or more). Only about 3% of them were obese. In comparison, middle-aged white men in the year 2000 had an average BMI of around 28. About 24% were obese in early middle age, increasing to 41% by the time the men were in their 60s.

(Most experts consider measures like body fat percentage to be better measures of adiposity than BMI, and we agree. Unfortunately, nearly every source reports BMI, and most don’t report body fat percentage. Here, we use BMI so that we can compare different sources to one another.)

It’s not just that we’re a little fatter than our great-grandparents — the entire picture is different.


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?

Our great-grandparents (and the French) were able to maintain these weights effortlessly. They weren’t all on weird starvation diets or crazy fasting routines. 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. 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.

Something seems to have changed. But surprisingly, we don’t seem to have any idea what that thing was.

Mystery 2: An Abrupt Shift 

Another thing that many people are not aware of is just how abrupt this change was. Between 1890 and 1976, people got a little heavier. The average BMI went from about 23 to about 26. This corresponds with rates of obesity going from about 3% to about 10%. The rate of obesity in most developed countries was steady at around 10% until 1980, when it suddenly began to rise.

Trends in adult overweight, obesity, and severe obesity among men and women aged 20–74: United States, 1960–1962 through 2015–2016. SOURCES: NCHS, National Health Examination Survey and National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys.

Today the rate of obesity in Italy, France, and Sweden is around 20%. In 1975, there was no country in the world that had an obesity rate higher than 15%.

This wasn’t a steady, gentle trend as food got better, or diets got worse. People had access to plenty of delicious, high-calorie foods back in 1965. Doritos were invented in 1966, Twinkies in 1930, Oreos in 1912, and Coca-Cola all the way back in 1886. So what changed in 1980?

Common wisdom today tells us that we get heavier as we get older. But historically, this wasn’t true. In the past, most people got slightly leaner as they got older. Those Civil War veterans we mentioned above had an average BMI of 23.2 in their 40s and 22.9 in their 60’s. In their 40’s, 3.7% were obese, compared to 2.9% in their 60s. We see the same pattern in data from 1976-1980: people in their 60s had slightly lower BMIs and were slightly less likely to be obese than people in their 40s (See the table below). It isn’t until the 1980s that we start to see this trend reverse. Something fundamental about the nature of obesity has changed.

Distribution of BMI and obesity prevalence, non-Hispanic white men in the US by time period and age group. Adapted from Helmchen & Henderson, 2003.

Mystery 3: The Ongoing Crisis 

Things don’t seem to be getting any better. A couple decades ago, rising obesity rates were a frequent topic of discussion, debate, and concern. But recently it has received much less attention; from the lack of press and popular coverage, you might reasonably assume that if we aren’t winning the fight against obesity, we’ve gotten at least to a stalemate.

But this simply isn’t the case. Americans have actually gotten more obese over the last decade. In fact, obesity increased more than twice as much between 2010 and 2018 than it did between 2000 and 2008.

Rates of obesity are also increasing worldwide. As The Lancet notes, “unlike other major causes of preventable death and disability, such as tobacco use, injuries, and infectious diseases, there are no exemplar populations in which the obesity epidemic has been reversed by public health measures.”

All of this is, to say the least, very mysterious.

1.1    Weird Mysteries

Then there are the weird mysteries.

Mystery 4: Hunter-Gatherers 

A common assumption is that humans evolved eating a highly varied diet of wild plants and animals, that our bodies still crave variety, and that we would be better off with a more varied diet. But when we look at modern hunter-gatherers, we see this isn’t true. The !Kung San of Tanzania get about 40% of their calories from a single food source, the mongongo nut, with another 40% coming from meat. But the !Kung are extremely lean (about 110lbs on average) and have excellent cardiovascular health.

Of course, variety isn’t everything. You would also expect that people need to eat the right diet. A balanced diet, with the right mix of macronutrients. But again, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Hunter-gatherer societies around the world have incredibly different diets, some of them very extreme, and almost never suffer from obesity.

Historically, different cultures had wildly different diets — some hunter-gatherers ate diets very high in sugar, some very high in fat, some very high in starch, etc. Some had diets that were extremely varied, while others survived largely off of just two or three foods. Yet all of these different groups remained lean. This is strong evidence against the idea that a high-fat, high-sugar, high-starch, low-variety, high-variety, etc. diet could cause obesity.

A Tanzanian hunter-gatherer society called the Hadza get about 15 percent of their calories from honey. Combined with all the sugar they get from eating fruit, they end up eating about the same amount of sugar as Americans do. Despite this, the Hadza do not exhibit obesity. Another group, the Mbuti of the Congo, eat almost nothing but honey during the rainy season, when honey can provide up to 80% of the calories in their diet. These are all unrefined sugars, of course, but the Kuna of Panama, though mostly hunter-gatherers, also obtain white sugar and some sugar-containing foods from trade. Their diet is 65% carbohydrate and 17% sugar, which is more sugar than the average American currently consumes. Despite this the Kuna are lean, with average BMIs around 22-23.

The Inuit, by contrast, traditionally ate a diet consisting primarily of seal meat and blubber, with approximately 50% of their calories coming from fat. This diet is quite low in fruits and vegetables, but obesity was virtually unknown until the arrival of western culture. The Maasai are an even more extreme example, subsisting on a diet composed “almost exclusively of milk, blood, and meat”. They drink “an average of 3 to 5 quarts/day of their staple: milk supplemented with cow’s blood and meat“. This adds up to about 3000 calories per day, 66% of those calories being from fat. (They also sometimes eat honey and tree bark.) But the Maasai are also quite lean, with the average BMI for both men and women being again in the range of 22-23, increasing very slightly over age.

Kitava is a Melanesian island largely isolated from the outside world. In 1990, Staffan Lindeberg went to the island to study the diet, lifestyle, and health of its people. He found a diet based on starchy tubers and roots like yam, sweet potato, and taro, supplemented by fruit, vegetables, seafood, and coconut. Food was abundant and easy to come by, and the Kitavans ate as much as they wanted. “It is obvious from our investigations,” wrote Lindeberg, “that lack of food is an unknown concept, and that the surplus of fruits and vegetables regularly rots or is eaten by dogs.”

About 70% of the calories in the Kitavan diet came from carbohydrates. For comparison, the modern American diet is about 50% carbohydrates. Despite this, none of the Kitavans were obese. Instead they were in excellent health. Below, you’ll see a photo of a Kitavan man being examined by Lindeberg.

Kitavans didn’t even seem to gain weight in middle age. In fact, BMI was found to decrease with age. Many lived into their 80s or 90s, and Lindeberg even observed one man who he estimated to be 100 years old. None of the elderly Kitavans showed signs of dementia or memory loss. The Kitavans also had no incidence of diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, or cardiovascular disease, and were unfamiliar with the symptoms of these diseases. “The only cases of sudden death they could recall,” he reports, “were accidents such as drowning or falling from a coconut tree.”

Mystery 5: Lab Animals and Wild Animals 

Humans aren’t the only ones who are growing more obese — lab animals and even wild animals are becoming more obese as well. Primates and rodents living in research colonies, feral rodents living in our cities, and domestic pets like dogs and cats are all steadily getting fatter and fatter. This can’t be attributed to changes in what they eat, because lab animals live in contained environments with highly controlled diets. They’re being fed the same foods as always, but for some reason, they’re getting fatter.

This seems to be true everywhere you look. Our pets may eat scraps from the table, but why would zoo animals, being fed by professionals, also be getting fatter? Even horses are becoming more obese. This is all very strange, and none of it fits with the normal explanations for the obesity epidemic.

Mystery 6: Palatable Human Food 

Lab rats gain some weight on high-fat diets, but they gain much more weight on a “cafeteria diet” of human foods like Froot Loops [sic] and salami (see also here).

It used to be that if researchers needed obese rats for a study, they would just add fat to normal rodent chow. But it turns out that it takes a long time for rats to become obese on this diet. A breakthrough occurred one day when a graduate student happened to put a rat onto a bench where another student had left a half-finished bowl of Froot Loops. Rats are usually cautious around new foods, but in this case the rat wandered over and began scarfing down the brightly-colored cereal. The graduate student was inspired to try putting the rats on a diet of “palatable supermarket food”; not only Froot Loops, but foods like Doritos, pork rinds, and wedding cake. Today, researchers call these “cafeteria diets”.

Sure enough, on this diet the rats gained weight at unprecedented speed. All this despite the fact that the high-fat and cafeteria diets have similar nutritional profiles, including very similar fat/kcal percentages, around 45%. In both diets, rats were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. When you give a rat a high-fat diet, it eats the right amount and then stops eating, and maintains a healthy weight. But when you give a rat the cafeteria diet, it just keeps eating, and quickly becomes overweight. Something is making them eat more. “Palatable human food is the most effective way to cause a normal rat to spontaneously overeat and become obese,” says neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet in The Hungry Brain, “and its fattening effect cannot be attributed solely to its fat or sugar content.”

Rodents eating diets that are only high in fat or only high in carbohydrates don’t gain nearly as much weight as rodents eating the cafeteria diet. And this isn’t limited to lab rats. Raccoons and monkeys quickly grow fat on human food as well.

We see a similar pattern of results in humans. With access to lots of calorie-dense, tasty foods, people reliably overeat and rapidly gain weight. But again, it’s not just the contents. For some reason, eating more fat or sugar by itself isn’t as fattening as the cafeteria diet. Why is “palatable human food” so much worse for your waistline than its fat and sugar alone would suggest?

Mystery 7: Altitude 

People who live at higher altitudes have lower rates of obesity. This is the case in the US, and also seems to be the case in other countries, for example Spain and Tibet. When US Army and Air Force service members are assigned to different geographic areas, they are more at risk of developing obesity in low-altitude areas than in high-altitude ones. Colorado is the highest-altitude US state and also has the lowest incidence of obesity.

If you look at a map of county-level obesity data in the United States, the Rockies, the Sierra Mountains, and the Appalachians stand out quite clearly: 

County-Level Estimates of Obesity among Adults aged 20 and over, 2009. Map from the CDC.

Similarly, there is a condition called “altitude anorexia” where individuals who move to a high-altitude location sometimes lose a lot of weight all at once (see also here, here, and weight loss results here). This effect also seems to apply to lab rats who are moved to labs at higher altitudes.

In addition, there is some evidence for a similar relationship between altitude and the rate of diabetes, with people living at a higher elevation having lower rates of diabetes than those living near sea level, even when statistically adjusting for variables like age, BMI, and physical activity.

We know that oxygen and carbon dioxide vary with elevation, so you might expect that this is attributable to these differences. But the evidence is pretty thin. Combined with a low-calorie diet, exercise in a low-oxygen environment does seem to reduce weight more than exercise in normal atmospheric conditions, but not by much. Submarines have CO2 levels about 10 times higher than usual, but a US Navy study didn’t find evidence of consistent weight gain. The atmosphere itself can’t explain this.

One paper, Hypobaric Hypoxia Causes Body Weight Reduction in Obese Subjects from Lippl et al. (2012), claims to show a reduction in weight at high altitude and suggests that this weight loss is attributable to differences in oxygen levels. However, there are a number of problems with this paper and its conclusions. To begin with, there isn’t a control group, so this isn’t an experiment. Without an appropriate control, it’s hard to infer a causal relationship. What they actually show is that people brought to 2,650 meters lost a small amount of weight and had lower blood oxygen saturation, but this is unsurprising. Obviously if you bring people to 2,650 meters they will have lower blood oxygen, and there’s no evidence linking that to the reported weight loss. They don’t even report a correlation between blood oxygen saturation and weight loss, even though that would be the relevant test given the data they have. Presumably they don’t report it because it’s not significant. In addition there are major issues with multiple comparisons, which make their few significant findings hard to interpret (for more detail, see our full analysis of the paper).

Mystery 8: Diets Don’t Work 

There’s a lot of disagreement about which diet is best for weight loss. People spend a lot of time arguing over how to diet, and about which diet is best. I’m sure people have come to blows over whether you lose more weight on keto or on the Mediterranean diet, but meta-analysis consistently finds that there is little difference between different diets.

Some people do lose weight on diets. Some of them even lose a lot of weight. But the best research finds that diets just don’t work very well in general, and that no one diet seems to be better than any other. For example, a 2013 review of 4 meta-analyses said:

Numerous randomized trials comparing diets differing in macronutrient compositions (eg, low-carbohydrate, low-fat, Mediterranean) have demonstrated differences in weight loss and metabolic risk factors that are small (ie, a mean difference of <1 kg) and inconsistent.

Most diets lead to weight loss of around 5-20 lbs, with minimal differences between them. Now, 20 lbs isn’t nothing, but it’s also not much compared to the overall size of the obesity epidemic. And even if someone does lose 20 lbs, in general they will gain most of it back within a year.

Hello! If you’re just joining us, check out achemicalhunger.com, the table of contents helps make the series easier to navigate!

[Next Time: CURRENT THEORIES ARE INADEQUATE]

84 thoughts on “A Chemical Hunger – Part I: Mysteries”

  1. anony says:

    The big change that happened in the 70s is “microwaves.” The microwave became cheap enough for normal people to buy them in the 70s. By the 80s, people were regularly eating microwaved food and the quality of pre-made microwavable dishes available in the grocery store has only increased since then. Most people do not eat Oreos or even Coca Cola every day, but about 99.9% of us have microwaves.

    If you do not have a microwave, your cooking process is simply longer, harder, and more annoying. You can’t even re-heat a bowl of leftovers without having to wait for your oven to pre-heat or using a pot on the stove–and then washing that pot. Hungry at bedtime? Well, I could spend half an hour making something from scratch, and then another 15 minutes washing the dishes… or I could zap a frozen Hot Pocket: 2 minutes.

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    2. Dave says:

      Cafeteria style foods- highly processed foods, high calorie, high simple carbohydrates and high fructose cons syrup sweeteners (what the Europeans call: American style foods) are high in everything except nutrients. That is the single biggest change.

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    3. Will says:

      I understand your point about the microwave food being faster easier to access, but wonder if there are any peer reviewed evidence that microwaved heated/cooked food is any different than stove or oven heated/cooked food. My (vegetarian) sister is part of the .01 percent who refuses to have a microwave in her home….

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      1. I think anony was suggesting it’s “caloric availability” more than the type of food. So I lost weight when I had a tiny corner of my roomates’ fridge and parked far enough away that going out was a hassle. My laziness often trumped my gluttony.

        With a stocked fridge and driving past fast food on the way to work, my laziness doesn’t get as much of a vote, seems to have an impact.

        This doesn’t explain the altitude gradient, but the mysteries might have to be addressed by the interaction of multiple factors.

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      2. Lauren says:

        My husband and I gave up our microwave two years ago and as someone who as always struggled to maintain my weight, I can say it has not positively effected my weight loss. I cook more while foods now than ever and nearly all of my meals are made from scratch in my kitchen. Even with that significant diet change, it has been difficult for me to lose weight. Not sure this comment helped at all, but as someone who doesn’t have a microwave, I don’t think that’s it. Giving it up naturally led to us having much a healthier diet, but even that didn’t significantly impact my weight.

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    4. Kate says:

      Another change which occurred during the 70’s & 80’s is that obstetricians began encouraging women to gain more weight while pregnant, and birth weights went up.

      Prior to this, physicians encouraged women to limit calories & weight gain to about 15 lbs. and the target was a 6 lb. infant. ( I even found and old book published in the early 1960’s that advised expectant mothers to just have black coffee and a cigarette (!) for breakfast to help keep their weight down. ) The idea was a smaller baby made an easier passage through the pelvis.

      During the 1970’s, it was determined that larger babies were “healthier” babies, and doctors began advocating for 30 lb. weight gain for the mother, and 7-8 lb. birth weights.

      Perhaps developing more body fat in utero sets the stage for obesity later in life?

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  3. VGAMaths says:

    With these premises it seems almost obvious to attribute the obesity pandemic to an external factor – for instance, virus or bacteria. My money is on gut bacteria being altered by some bacteria/virus, of which transmission is relatively hard (but it persists), which spread like wildfire in the last forty years and which thrives on cafeteria diets (which would explain its emergence in the second half of the 20th century).

    It could be spread in the population like HPV or herpes – most people have it, but not all. Maybe it is even possible to be lucky and clear it from your body.

    Also, you probably know of fecal transplants being somewhat successful at fighting obesity https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30328245/.

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    1. Yeah, the theory that the obesity epidemic might be a virus is a really interesting one. It’s hard to square with the altitude data, though. Either way you’re right, the gut microbiome does seem to be involved!

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    2. Grant says:

      It’s probably actually just antibiotics. The map of obesity by state is extremely similar to the map of antibiotic perscription frequency by state

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    3. Victor says:

      Highly unlikely. If that were the case, you would expect high population density cities like San Francisco and New York to be fatter than rural areas and that’s not the case

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  4. toop says:

    Seems pretty unfair for these researchers to make judgements on Human diet based on animals that are widely evolutionary divergent and ancestral diets totally different (Rats). Rats have a high carb low fat diet in the wild usually, I’m not shocked diets diverging significantly from their ancestral one experience worse health outcomes It is weird that they do get more weight on “cafeteria”. But I doubt the answer for the Rats is the same answer for Humans.

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  5. George Herold says:

    Interesting thanks for the nice post. I read “The Case Against Sugar” By G. Taubes. But I think that has been mostly dismissed. So let’s agree it doesn’t look like diet is the answer. So something else from around ~1970. Wasn’t that when Nixon started a drive to make food cheaper? We got cattle feed rich food to grow fast with hormones or antibiotics? (I think the antibiotics feed to cattle make them gain weight faster.) I think they (whomever Nixon asked to do this.) also worked on making crops more productive. So maybe something new we started putting on plants? pesticides, something new in the fertilizer? We also started using more hormones and antibiotics on humans around that time. (The Pill comes to mind, but it’s hard to see how that effects men.) Is there some subtle effect from the antibiotics? Well that could certainly be the gut biome suggested by VGAMath. I liked the idea by G. Taubes that we were changing some regulatory set point in the body… but maybe it’s not sugar doing it, but some other hormone? The cafeteria food and rats is fascinating. It seems like we have fatter pets too? I wonder if the fatter pets are one’s that are fed more human table scraps? I’m not sure what to do with the altitude data. Oxygen levels (or something) is part of what changes the ‘keep more fat’ set point in our body? Women are fatter than men, (which in general I like.) so what makes for that difference? Maybe it’s the same control loop set point getting shifted by the same hormone/ chemical signal that make women fatter in general that is making us all fatter. (Sorry for all the control loop jargon, I’m an engineering type and not a biologist.)

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    1. We think you’re thinking in exactly the right direction! Stay tuned for the next posts in the series (part II should be up tomorrow) where we discuss… several of the points you just raised.

      No need to apologize for the control loop jargon, that’s our opinion too, and we talk about homeostatic systems in Part II. We also have some other control system posts planned for the near-future, we’d be curious to hear what you think of those when they roll around! (We’re not biologists either.)

      (Also yes, somehow it always seems to be Nixon.)

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    2. Water! What about water? Because you mention the pill, and that it wouldn’t have an effect on men, I’m thinking it must be in the water. All of these antibiotics, pesticides, hormones are leaking into the water system.
      Fluoride was introduced into the water system when? I don’t mean to be a Dr Strangelove character, but could that play a part? Or a cocktail of all of these things.

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  7. SomeGuy says:

    Another hypothesis: modern ultraprocessed food destroy either gut microbiome or becomes sticky and starts lining up the walls of the colon, thus preventing nutrient absorbtion.
    So the food goes in, but it fails to get absorbed, so the body is still in the “hey I have no micronutrients bro, eat!”.

    Eg see Norman Walker, people reported their health being restored after enema/colonics, which might point that something in the colon gets messed up.

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  8. Nick says:

    Thank you for the interesting and well-researched article. An angle that I suspect might offer part of the answer to this mystery has to do with generally decreasing quantities of nutrients in the foods we’re consuming. Here’s some research which discusses this topic, specifically around Magnesium levels in food (and deficiency in the general population): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/. According to these claims, produce grown seems to be far less rich in certain metals (magnesium, iron, zinc, and so on) than at any point in the past. Perhaps the soil itself is simply not as rich as it used to be, or our modern farming methods are less effective than we think? More ominously, perhaps this is related to the alarming rate at which insect populations are decreasing (although I couldn’t hazard which way the causality flows). In general though I’d place my money on decreasing biodiversity being involved somehow.

    Running with this idea a bit, we can easily imagine how the effects would be visible amongst wild animals that are close enough to human populations to have their diets similarly disrupted. Anyways – all very thought provoking!

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  9. Peter Nichols says:

    To do all this work and not take a look at seed oils — soybean, corn, canola, safflower, etc — shows just how much room for errors and flaws is inherent in all this. Do the work on seed oils and update this. You’ll be shocked.

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  11. chernavsky says:

    I’m curious about the graph that’s titled, “Trends in adult overweight, obesity, and extreme obesity…”.
    I’m confused about the two green lines (“Overweight, men” and “Overweight, women”). Those two lines look to be reasonably flat, while the other four lines are all increasing post 1976-1980. This seems strange to me. Wouldn’t you expect all six lines to slope upwards at about the same time?

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    1. Yeah, we agree that seems weird. We assume what must be happening is people are moving from overweight to obese at about the same rate that they’re moving from “normal” weight to overweight.

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      1. Taj says:

        I got very confused by that graph! It seems to treat extreme obesity as a subset of obesity, but obesity as disjoint from overweightness. Might be worth replotting with consistent categories, or even as a stack chart?

        (I’d also be very interested to see the trend in “underweightness”.)

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        1. Yeah, the CDC did not exactly pick a winning format with that graph. Presumably you can find the raw data for it somewhere, we think this graph is largely or entirely based off of NHANES data, which is publicly available. Also very perceptive thought about underweightness, we have a few sections about that coming up later on in the series.

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  12. anon says:

    I feel like the altitude mystery can still be linked to diet and might put people on the wrong track. Mountainous regions are often much further away from population centers and have less supermarkets and fast food chains in the area. I’m sure if you overlapped elevation maps with supermarket density or fast food density you’ll see a correlation. I’m sure most people living in these areas would prefer to use fresh locally sourced whole foods over a 3 hour drive to the supermarket for processed foods.

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    1. Rick says:

      I think your on the wrong track there anon. Having been to many mountain towns including many in CO as mentioned in this post, there are plenty of grocery stores within under 10 minutes to the vast majority of the population in those areas vs. the 3 hours that you suggest.

      It could be diet, but not for lack of access. That does not explain the world wide distribution of the stats though.

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  14. Cyclical Trend says:

    Was “Why Diet and Exercise Fail: How Current Research Contradicts Conventional Wisdom About Weight Loss” part of the source material for this article? The book seems very similar to this, including similar examples and language, but I don’t see a citation.

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    1. No, never heard of it before! In fact, pretty sure that more than half the sources we cite are from the 2010s, so after that book was published. But very impressive that they were on the same track in 2009!

      Probably we read pieces by people who read that book, I bet that’s the source of the similarity.

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  15. David Henderson says:

    The advent of soybeans, soybean oil etc has changed the nature of our diet. What used to be saturated fats (lard etc.) has been replaced by Omega-6 oils, gradually since 1975 or so.

    Metabolizing these oils lead to more visceral fat, liver fat etc. Some references:

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31912136/
    Dysregulation of Hypothalamic Gene Expression and the Oxytocinergic System by Soybean Oil Diets in Male Mice

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12442909/
    The importance of the ratio of omega-6/omega-3 essential fatty acids

    Approx 25% of the U.S. population has non alcoholic fatty liver, and I believe the change in diet over the past 50 years is why.

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  17. Michael says:

    There are clearly a confluence of factors, but I am surprised to see no mention of sedentary lifestyle. TV ownership exploded in the 1970s and many people (especially as they age) watch hours and snack endlessly each night. Further, the brain uses a good 20%+ of the body’s energy each day but when we live in a comfortable environment where we can zone out for large portions of the day, of course the energy in – energy out equation will become misbalanced. The stark differences between the lives of any of the discussed groups of people and our modern, Westernized lifestyle should be obvious (when was the last time you fell out of a tree, let alone climbed one?).
    Lab rats, zoo animals, and pets all have one thing in common: that they rely on us for their well-being. So, of course they don’t get the exercise they need because they (mostly) live in small cages or isolated habitats that are completely divorced from the reality of the world that their ancestors evolved in.

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  19. Michael, I think your comment has one major gap in its logic. Lab animals and pets did not, in the 1970s, suddenly start watching lots of TV. That everything about their lives, including diet and exercise, back then and now is controlled and known and they still gained weight dramatically means that it cannot be a matter of exercise.

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  24. frankschmitt says:

    Is there a good way to rule out some kind of novel infection (probably gut bacteria)? It would tend to be more common in downstream areas and people whose occupation involves exposure to poop (cleaning, health care, firefighting—which involves a lot of EMT work in the US). Of course it doesn’t suggest why truck drivers would be obese.

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  25. Curious Candor says:

    Have any studies controlled for demographics? Racial makeup of the US population has changed a lot since the early 1980s.

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    1. Carl Johnson says:

      Not so much demographics, but an interesting study is the Pima Indians of southern Arizona/Northern Mexico.

      Same people been living there for centuries, but in the last (50? 100?) years the ones on one side of the international border have developed vastly different statures in health.

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  26. Julius says:

    Are there any studies about weight loss/gain and filtered or bottled water? I couldn’t easily find any but that could be a place to start. Anecdotally I’ve significantly lost weight every time I’ve drunk from bottled/filtered water and gained it back when drinking from tap water.

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    1. Not that we know of, but obviously we’re very interested. We think that drinking water isn’t the only or even the main source of exposure for most people, so it might not make a consistent difference on average.

      That’s interesting to hear, do you mind if we ask where abouts you live?

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      1. Julius says:

        I currently live in Seattle but have moved around a lot. I’ve made 6 separate moves between places where I drank the tap water (mostly USA/UK/Hungary) and places I haven’t (South East Asia, India, Middle East). Whenever I’ve spent significant time in bottled water countries I lost weight (up to 50 lbs), and each time, save one 3 month stretch in Western Europe, I gained it back in tap water countries. I also lost weight for the first time in the States (20 lbs) this year around the time I switched to filtered water.

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    2. Joan Carsey says:

      Remember the study of antipsychotic medication levels in the ground water? Estrogen levels from urine reclaimable water treatment plants.

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  27. ;____; says:

    a little surprised not to see thyroids not at all mentioned here. untreated or poorly treated hypothyroidism is well known for causing weight gain. thyroid cancer rates have gone up in the past few decades and it’s a really common issue as well. 12% of americans develop thyroid issues and synthyroid (a thyroid replacement medication) is the most commonly prescribed medication. there is however a large sex difference in hypothyroidism rates where as obesity does not have that disparity so there’s obviously more factors at play, but i feel there’s a connection between rising obesity rates and thyroid issues.

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  31. Flying Dutchman says:

    Oher possible influences on % obese people:
    – Shift from physical to sedentary work
    – The inversion of the population-pyramid in the developed world during the 20th century

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  32. Steve says:

    (Un) fortunately I had to have gastric sleeve surgery, to drop 110 pounds and get my life back. Now at 201 lbs 6 ft tall. I’m worried about gaining it back. I love these articles thank you. I started struggling with weight in the late 1980s early 1990s. I went from Indiana to San Diego, then weight stabilized then steroids messed me up and I ballooned from 235-245 to 315 after steroid abuse. I wonder if steroids sped up my own demise?

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  38. Tommy DeLonico says:

    Mistake here:

    “All this despite the fact that the high-fat and cafeteria diets have similar nutritional profiles, including very similar fat/kcal percentages, around 45%.”

    I think you mean “… including very similar percentages of calories from fat, around 45 percent.”

    Fat/kcal is a known constant, one divided by nine. It’s not a variable that can be changed in a diet.

    There are three sources of calories, the three macronutrients, fat, protein, and carbs (ignoring alcohol, 7 calories per gram). A 45 percent fat diet, with say 30 percent protein and 25 percent carbs, is a reasonable, high-fat diet that one could eat. I think something like that is what you mean.

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    1. Nice catch. Fixed the second one but can’t seem to fix the first one for weird hyperlink reasons? Anyways first citation should be:

      Ho, K. J., Biss, K., Mikkelson, B., Lewis, L. A., & Taylor, C. B. (1971). The Masai of East Africa: some unique biological characteristics. Archives of pathology, 91(5), 387-410.

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  45. About those Civil War veterans-Maybe they became trimmer as they got older because those who tended towards obesity died off at a higher rate. I imagine outcomes from heart attacks, strokes, and other weight/cardiovascular-related problems were much worse than they are today, and would have tended to eliminate the least healthy from a cohort as that cohort aged.

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    1. An Old Man’s Opinion says:

      Int is highly doubtful that the Civil War veterans BMI statistics took into account the insanely high number of veterans that were alcoholics and opium drug addicted due to war wounds, amputations, long term pain and PTSD. Alcoholics and addicts are more often underweight for numerous reasons.

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  49. […] A Chemical Hunger – Part I: Mysteries – Slime Mold Time Mold. “Veering away from artificial life, I’m sharing two things on humans this week. First up: Obesity is an epidemic. 100 years ago, 1% of the US population was obese, and it ate ‘more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today’ as well as ‘more cream, milk, and lard.’ Today, about 36% of the population is obese. The question is: Why? Most of what you think about the causes of obesity are wrong. This series of posts debunks many of the usual talking point, and offers some surprising ones: Did you know obesity goes down as altitude increases? Or that something suddenly happened in the 1980s to make levels climb? Or that obesity has increased as carb consumption has declined? The best current theory is that an environmental trigger — such as antibiotics, drugs, fast food, or additives like phthalates — found in our food or groundwater is causing our bodies to mis-regulate fat levels. They (spoiler alert) suggest a few things, including antibiotics, food marketing, PFAs (teflon, etc.), and lithium. I learned a lot from this series of posts; it leaves me thinking we’ll discover some trigger in the coming decades that’s similar to discoveries about leaded gasoline or smoking.” (Alistair for Hugh). […]

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  50. Padmanabha says:

    Could be the lungs and brain not being utilized as much. Breathing and thinking are Us (and animals.) And mix it with bad water for a trifecta.

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