Is obesity an oral bacterial disease?

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/07/08/is.obesity.oral.bacterial.disease

by ph0rque • 17 years ago

12 30 17 years ago

siukwai• 17 years ago

I question whether or not this is causality or correlation. It may just be that overweight females have a higher concentrtion of that oral bacteria; not that the oral bacteria in higher concentrations is -causing- obesity.

xiaoma• 17 years ago

The article raised exactly that question in the last paragraph.

seldo• 17 years ago

No.

By which I mean: this is much more likely to be effect than cause, e.g. overweight people might have more sugary diets, so sugar-loving bacteria would be favoured.

vaksel• 17 years ago

no its the I am too lazy to workout disease

being fat is not even about overeating, as long as you put in the effort to workout to burn those calories, you can eat whatever you want and still remain in shape.

You won't get a sixpack, since that requires a proper diet, but you should still be in decent shape.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

"being fat is not even about overeating, as long as you put in the effort to workout to burn those calories, you can eat whatever you want and still remain in shape."

Do the math. It's not too difficult to snack along, have three meals a day, and end up with 6000-8000 calories. Assuming you're a big guy, you might have a 2500-calorie base metabolism, and burn maybe another (being generous) 1500 calories a day in normal movement. That means you have to exercise specifically to burn 1000-3000 calories a day. If you run for 800 calories an hour, you'll have to run for hours every day just to burn off what you're eating.

It's completely impractical to try to burn as much as you could eat.

travisjeffery2• 17 years ago

I have not once, and I am not exaggerating once seen a person who logically should be fit as they ate healthily and exercised an adequate amount and was still obese, ever.

Every obese person I've ever known ate crap and didn't exercise at all. And when they tried to get thin they would either half-ass it or do the latest fad diet for 2 weeks or something and get right back to where they were later.

fatdog7894• 17 years ago

How in the hell do you eat 6000 calories a day? That's the equivalent of 6 double-patty burgers, plus 3 large fries and a 3 large sodas, at most fast food restaurants.

You burn roughly 10 x (your weight in pounds) calories at rest, plus an additional 10% (of that number) for each activity level (office/couch potato = 10%, moderate exercise 4 times a week/average (1 hour each session) = 20%, strenuous exercise 4 times a week/average = 30%, dedicated athlete = 40%. The percentages increase with muscle mass, but not by much. These numbers are for base calorie burn; calories actually expended through physical activity are in addition to these numbers.

Hell, you'd have to be an Olympic or professional athlete to come even close to needing more than 5000 calories in a single day.

thras5• 17 years ago

After being fat from early childhood, I lost 160 pounds by eating 900 calories a day. Eventually I got down to the weight I wanted (normal weight for my height) and was running 5 miles a day. I couldn't take the diet any more. I'm a fellow with tremendous willpower. But it was the strangest thing -- I couldn't force myself to stay on an easy 2100 calorie a day diet even though that was what I thought about every day, nearly every moment of the day. Even though I had managed 900 a day for more than a year.

Anyway, while running 5 miles a day still, I immediately began gaining 15 pounds a month. Eventually I couldn't run anymore.

I'm sorry, but the argument from thermodynamics is as bankrupt at explaining fat gain as it is in explaining height gain for adolescents. For height gain, the fact that energy in equals energy out is a true statement, but the explanation is growth hormone. If you calorie limit a growing child, the child will be somewhat (not very though) stunted, but will make up the energy difference through lethargy and by consuming all sorts of internal tissues.

For obesity, the explanation is insulin. I cut carbohydrates almost completely from my diet in January. Otherwise I ate what I wanted when I wanted (I measure my consumption in pounds of red meat per day). I'm amazingly healthier. I've lost 50 pounds. I've gained so much muscle that I can do pull-ups. Fucking pull-ups at my weight. With low-calorie dieting, I couldn't do pull-ups until I had lost another 70 pounds past that point. I'm putting on muscle and losing fat, and I'm eating huge quantities at every meal. Plus I have a desk job and barely exercise.

The argument from thermodynamics assumes that the fat tissue is a trash can and that weight homeostasis doesn't exist. It's a bankrupt theory that can't explain diseases like progressive lipodystrophy (a disease which makes people obese and emaciated at the same time). It can't explain why people who starve the calories off are not the same at the end as normal thin people and almost inevitably gain the pounds back. It can't explain why 1950s treatment to get anorexics to gain weight was through injecting them with insulin and not feeding them any more than they had been (during treatment).

In summary, you're seeking a psychological explanation of a physiological problem. Kind of like the discredited quack Sigmund Freud often did, eh? A physiological explanation might lead to the suggestion that we eat the way we evolved to eat -- no refined carbohydrate.

ericb• 17 years ago

On the same token, do you know anyone who breathes too much air? Could the average person use willpower to cut their air intake for a year?

fatdog7894• 17 years ago

Actually, the theory explains both: it is well-documented that starving the body induces inherent fat-retention mechanisms, in reaction to perceived famine conditions, which results in fat buildup in some parts of the body (usually the torso, the primary fat deposit region), while emaciation in other parts (usually the limbs, due to muscle loss). Once the famine conditions end, the body craves excess food in an effort to repair the damage caused during the "famine." It does not explain the 1950s treatment, but then again, in the 1950s, they did lots of crazy stuff which wouldn't make sense today, like electroshock and lobotomies.

nova• 17 years ago

Yes. The book "Good calories, bad calories" is the standard recommendation. It will however destroy your trust in the medical authorities.

dflock• 17 years ago

I agree with you about the refined carbohydrates but the underlying facts about the thermodynamics are also important, but in a slightly more subtle way.

People almost always underestimate just how incredibly - almost unbelievably - efficient the human body is. We're used to being impressed by cars that can do 60 mpg, but the human body can easily manage 300 mpg, even for an unfit hacker like me; fitter people will be slightly more efficient, maybe up to 400 mpg (http://health.howstuffworks.com/health-illness/wellness/phys...).

What this means is that you have to run an enormous distance to burn off even a tiny amount of food - about 1 mile for every 100 calories. So you can run a mile on one banana (http://www90.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=banana), or 1.5 average cookies (http://www90.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.5+cookies), or just over one rasher of bacon. You can run a entire marathon (26.2 miles) on 2,600 calories - or one big mac and a packet of cookies.

A scary number of people in the western world eat enough to run a marathon every single day and still have enough calories left over of keep themselves ticking over (~1500 calories) - without changing their diet at all. This wouldn't be physiologically supportable for wear and tear reasons, but calorie wise a lot of us could support it.

These two facts in combination: the abundance of high quality, high calorie food in the developed world, and the incredible efficiency of the human body are a virtually guaranteed recipe for obesity, whatever other factors come into play. The fact that almost all of the easily available junk calories people consume come from highly refined carbohydrates (because these are so cheap to produce), massively compounds the problem.

Obviously there isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between calories in and weight gain and everyone is slightly different and most food isn't just converted into glycogen and then to fat, etc, etc... but as far as I can see, most people will not reasonably be able to burn off the calories from an average western diet, no matter how hard they try - there just isn't enough time to run that far and hold down a job. Trying to do that much exercise, on top of trying to diet and do everything else is just too much mental strain. On the whole, I think people are better off just not eating the carbohydrate in the first place - cutting it off at source is much easier than trying to get rid of it later, and only requires you to do one thing, rather than two.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

This is just the kind of news report about a new research study that should be examined with Peter Norvig's checklist of issues to consider in scientific research:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

haseman• 17 years ago

Misleading headline. The article posits the existence of a bacteria in obese women, it does not go into the issue of causality as the headline suggests.

Is obesity an oral bacterial disease?

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