Bob Baker

This is a summary of a paper that I found open in a browser tab; I don't recall where I came across it. I think it's a nice paper, but it's also 63 pages long and seemed worth a synopsis for those who wouldn't otherwise tackle it. Scott concluded in For, then Against, High-saturated-fat diets that the obesity crisis seemed to imply one of three answers: 1. That weight less is really hard and people in previous centuries had really hard lives and that's why there was so little obesity back then. 2. That it's “being caused by plastics or antibiotics affecting the microbiome or something like that”. 3. That there is hysteresis—once you become overweight it's semi-permanent. This paper argues for the second answer, and against the other two. At the outset, there are reasons to be wary of this paper: neither author (who share a family name) appear to have expertise in applicable fields, and it appears to be set in Computer Modern Roman, hardly the style of a journal submission. So it's coming from outside of traditional expertise. (I don't have any expertise here either.) With that in mind, the paper starts by posing a series of challenging facts about obesity. (References in the original:) 1. It's new. One hundred years ago obesity was very rare (~1% of the population) but there were plenty of people who had enough to eat and, from our point of view, ate a lot of fattening foods. 2. It's not just new, it seemed to suddenly kick off around 1980. “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%”. 3. It's still getting worse. It's less in the news but if anything it's accelerating in the US. This is despite Americans significantly cutting back on sugars and carbs since 2000. 4. It's not just humans: lab animals and wild animals appear to be getting fatter over time too. (A surprise to me, but casual inspection seems to confirm that this is really a thing t