The Fat Drug

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-drug.html

by snewman • 12 years ago

159 64 12 years ago

mobile.nytimes.com

spingsprong• 12 years ago

No, the amount we're eating is making us fat.

odonnellryan• 12 years ago

I think it's more lifestyle, which includes consumption, than it is just eating.

guruz• 12 years ago

And you're eating more because something tricks your body into not feeling full earlier. Be it sugar, your gut bacteria, drinking liquid calories, hormons, [...] Many reasons I'm sure.

bluedino• 12 years ago

Small soft drinks are now 20oz, restaurants give you triple what a serving size should be for most meals, buffets reign supreme, and snacks and high-calorie drinks are part of our daily routines and culture.

jimrandomh• 12 years ago

Alas, I have but one downvote to give for this empty dismissal.

DanBC6• 12 years ago

There is a remarkable variety of gut flora.

Some is known to help people put on weight. Some is known to help people stay at a normal weight.

It's an interesting extra method to tackle obesity, because what society is trying so far doesn't seem to be working.

pizza2343• 12 years ago

"Society" has not been really trying anything; when we'll see it educating people in having a healthier lifestyle, that is, eating less junk food and doing sports, then it's possible to state that something is being tried.

The problem is that in a culture where junk food is cheap and pushed 24/7, there is no tradition of healthy nutrition, and there is much unbalance work/life, such education is clearly impossible.

rosser• 12 years ago

Did you miss the bit where they used mice fed a calorie-rich diet as the control, and calorie-rich plus antibiotics as the experiment group? The latter got fatter.

Yes, yes, animal models != human results. But what about the experiments that were done on humans? The kids in Guatemala, or in Florida? The Navy sailors? I'm willing to bet they controlled for amount of food in those cases, and yet they all saw increased weight gain on antibiotics.

Net, that seems pretty indicative that it may not just be how much we're eating, and I think that's worth exploring further.

Tohhou2• 12 years ago

~ nope ~

An overweight person can be eating caloric diet equal to a skinny person and not only not lose any fat, but also be painfully constantly hungry, and be technically starving themselves as their body leeches what it needs to run from their vital organs.

Meanwhile a fit person can be eating excess amounts of calories, but because they eat minimal carbs/sugars their body doesn't hold onto the extra calories they are eating (mostly eating fats, veg, meat) and they more easily lose body fat, and not only that but be constantly feeling full and never have hunger on their mind.

Obesity is an inflammatory disease. It's not as simple as the amount of food you eat irregardless of what you eat. What you eat is extremely important, and when you eat right portion size is less important because your body won't allow you to eat more than what you need.

dublinben• 12 years ago

Eating at 75-80% of your TDEE will cause a person to lose weight. It's as simple as that. Only in an extreme case (very small, sedentary person) would that amount be lower than the 1200 Calorie starvation level.

philliphaydon• 12 years ago

We should go back to cooking with lard. Animal fat is far better than Sugar.

anon4• 12 years ago

anti-antibiotics

Wouldn't you call that simply "biotics"? Or maybe "pro-biotics"?

windsurfer• 12 years ago

An anti-antibiotic would work against antibiotics instead of promoting biotics. Perhaps it would have a similar effect in the end, but the means are different.

amiramir• 12 years ago

For your consideration: http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/pro-vs-ant...

kens• 12 years ago

This article handwaves over a few key things. The first half of the article discusses how antibiotics in feed make animals grow bigger. However, the whole point of feed supplements is to give animals more muscle and less fat [1], since that's what customers pay for. So antibiotics in animals go the exact opposite direction from obesity in humans.

Second, antibiotics in feed are pretty much constant, while humans hardly ever take antibiotics. The article mentions children take antibiotics once a year on average, but the median must be very different from the mean. (I expect a few children take antibiotics very often, and most children take them very rarely.) In addition, if taking antibiotics once a year had the same increased growth rate effects as putting them in feed constantly, farmers would do that for the cost saving.

Overall, this article seems to pad out a hugely speculative idea to try to make it seem more plausible.

(I should know better than to get involved in a nutrition discussion on HN.)

[1] A random reference explaning how antibiotics improve meat quality by causing more protein and less fat: http://animalsmart.org/feeding-the-world/growth-promotant-us...

secstate• 12 years ago

Your random reference is funded by the ASAS which has every reason to promote industry practices that keep costs down: https://www.asas.org/membership-services/member-information/...

However, you're right. This is a poorly written and researched article, and uses a fair number of unsubstantiated "radical" discovery claims to make the article more exciting than it would have been had an actual scientist been tasked to write it. But it's the NY Times ... they've got an agenda too right? (i.e. make money off subscribers and advertisers)

tmoertel• 12 years ago

The take-away, however, is that the commonly understood models for relating microorganisms to health, such as the ones that guide doctors' decisions and health policy, do not predict that antibiotics would cause animals to grow more muscle and less fat -- or have any similar effect -- and are therefore likely to be incomplete or wrong in important ways. Most plausible amendments to the models that would cause them to predict the effects we observe in farm animals would also cause them to predict that antibiotics given to humans could have similarly complex and large effects.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

Correct, also saying "antibiotics fatten animals" is kind of a stretch, since Antibiotics mean a very large number of substances, divided by families.

So, yeah, in the article they mention which ones are used but to stretch that to "antibiotics" is a little too much.

Symmetry• 12 years ago

I assumed that the article was going to talk about the antibiotics still being present in the meat of the farm animals that were given them, which would tie everything together. But if that was there I missed it.

corin_• 12 years ago

It was mentioned, just the opposite of your assumption.

"By the time most meat reaches our table, it contains little or no antibiotics. So we receive our greatest exposure in the pills we take, rather than the food we eat."

wobbleblob2• 12 years ago

There's another thing the article hand waves over: there is no actual evidence that antibiotics in feed have an effect on the animals' growth. [1]

It is yet another piece of farmer folklore, like hail cannons and routine castration. They are believed to work, without any scientific basis.

The thing is, farmers believe so strongly in this myth, that even in places where antibiotics are banned as a feed additive, they bribe vets to prescribe their livestock antibiotics for a variety of fictitious ailments, so they can keep giving it.

[1] http://www.tufts.edu/med/apua/news/newsletter_33_3555326098....

wazoox• 12 years ago

This is even more serious: these morons are making the most revolutionary tool of modern medicine useless for no gain at all? It's crazy.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

The article explores hypotheses about what antibiotics might be doing to human health. A quotation from one of the expert sources sums up the conclusion: "'It’s still too early to draw definitive conclusions,' Dr. Cho said. 'And antibiotics remain a valuable resource that physicians use to fight infections.'" A couple years ago, a participant here shared a data chart from Scientific American that appears to no longer be at the original source but which has been mirrored[1] at the website of the journal Nature. The data chart points out that all-cause mortality has been steadily decreasing at all ages during my lifetime throughout the developed world. This is roughly the time span covered by the interesting article kindly submitted here. If human intake of antibiotics (which, after all, in many cases are "natural" substances emitted by fungi to guard against being destroyed by bacteria) has increased, as surely must be the case, it doesn't seem to be hurting us much.

On the specific issue of body weight, "normal" weight ranges for a given height were defined years ago on the basis of statistics on weight distributions in the general population. Oddly, current mortality and morbidity statistics tend to show that the persons with longest expected lifespans are not persons with "normal" weight as defined by body mass index but rather persons who are (slightly) "overweight." (This is however, most true for "overweight" persons who have good cardiovascular fitness.[2]) So if today's population in developed countries weighs more than populations a generation ago, the issue to look at is how many people have shifted from underweight to normal weight, how many from normal weight to overweight, and how many from overweight to obsesity. Obesity is definitely harmful to health. Moderate physical exercise, the kind I get by substituting walking or bicycling to do errands for driving, is surely good for pretty nearly everyone, independent of other lifestyle factors. But it has yet to be shown that antibiotic intake in the current amounts experienced by human beings in the developed world is harmful. There has been investigation in the last decade or so of the hypothesis that some antiobiotics may be protective against heart disease,[3] for instance, although maybe not all antibiotics have the same risk-benefit profile.

[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/195977021257786739/

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20118386

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387430/

glaugh• 12 years ago

RE your first point: I think everyone would agree that antibiotics are a net good, that their use should cause and correlate with declining mortality. But that wouldn't make it any less true that there could be second-order negative effects that are worth understanding and mitigating.

Was not aware of that "slightly overweight" finding, good stuff.

alecdbrooks• 12 years ago

Oddly, current mortality and morbidity statistics tend to show that the persons with longest expected lifespans are not persons with "normal" weight as defined by body mass index but rather persons who are (slightly) "overweight."

Does that mean "overweight" is a misnomer? Or are people wrong when they conflate a normal weight with a healthy weight?

crazygringo• 12 years ago

drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat
Trash, it turned out, could be transformed into meat.
pumping them with food and antibiotics. And yes, this did make the pigs fatter
particularly in female mice: They gained about twice as much body fat as the control-group mice

This article is infuriating sloppy, as it starts out talking about meat (muscle), and then slides into talking about fat, as if they were the same thing, and it's not clear at all that the author is talking about the same things, using the wrong words, or talking about things that can be connected at all.

tgb2• 12 years ago

Agreed but the mice study also included a higher fat diet as well as antibiotics. Presumably farm animals are not being fed donuts and so that explains the implicit difference between the two situations adequately. Nonetheless, I agree that the distinction should be made more clear.

I'm wondering whether body builders are already dosing themselves on antibiotics? It seems like someone would have tried that a while ago and then built a minor religion out of it had it worked. A quick google search suggests that body builders tend to think that antibiotics will reduce muscle gain due to inhibiting digestion through killing off bacteria.

brownbat• 12 years ago

I thought recent research was struggling to reproduce the same growth promotion effects in low dose antibiotics...

My money's on "neither harmful, nor especially useful" for the long term scientific consensus here... but I admittedly have a natural inclination towards positions that alienate both sides in any dispute.

Here's one discussion for poultry, though still digging for the economic analysis for swine and cattle: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804117/

spikels• 12 years ago

This is almost certainly bullshit. The poor quality of information in even the best newspapers is astounding! And it seems to almost always be at it's worst when it comes to medical issues.

How about some actual evidence? Not even a single peer reviewed study is mentioned. There are so many ways that this "idea" could be disproven with a simple study or even analysis of existing longitudinal studies. Or what about cross country comparisons, etc. And which of the dozens of popular antibiotics has this effect? Is it dosage relate? C'mon people at least do the minimal basic analysis before you suggest suggesting cause and effect.

This is exactly how all kinds of stupid ideas get into our heads. Not only do they waste our time but they can have real effects such as the continuing vaccine scare. Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare?

bequanna2• 12 years ago

How about some actual evidence? Not even a single peer reviewed study is mentioned.

I agree. Some interesting points are made-- but it does all seem like a bit of handwaving.

Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare?

Given the expanding prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria coupled with the shrinking pipeline of new antibiotic drugs, I think we should be at least a little worried. At this point, additional restraint in antibiotic use (especially agricultural) would be prudent.

markdown• 12 years ago

Will this be the beginning of an antibiotics scare?

One would hope so.

ef47d35620c1• 12 years ago

Coke, that used to come in 6 ounce bottles, now comes in 24 and 32 ounce bottles. And rather than one once a week as a treat, we can have one or two each day. That's at least part of the problem.

bequanna2• 12 years ago

If you are referring to causes of obesity, caloric excess is certainly part of the problem. I think the author is attempting to make the point that 'it's complicated'.

I think the question the author raises is a good one. We don't have a very good handle on what bacteria live in our bodies, much less what they all do. If we are destroying certain bacteria with antibiotics inside us, what does that mean for our bodies? There appears to be a long observed correlation between ingesting antibiotics and weight gain.

lukasm• 12 years ago

God I love the mobile version of nytimes. Please always post these.

fractalsea• 12 years ago

This is so true.

News sites tend to be so "busy" and messy. I love the clean look of the mobile version. I really get what people mean by "mobile first design" now...

graycat2• 12 years ago

The discussion here is terrific. With high irony, this discussion misses the larger point: The NYt is part of old media. As for all old media, they are in the ad business. As has long been common in old media, the purpose of a 'story' is to grab the readers by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears.

In particular, the NYT wants story 'themes' so that they will 'condition' their readers to accept that 'stories' in these themes can be realistic. Then the NYT can write silly stories in the themes, have their readers take the stories seriously, and, thus, have some special and especially effective ways to grab their readers by the heart, the gut, and below the belt.

One of the themes is the 'environment' and a morality play of evil humans destroying the environment. That story goes back to the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a rock to keep the sun moving across the sky. Old religions of nature worship were similar. It's a special case of good versus evil, of sin, transgression, retribution, and, maybe, redemption, likely via sacrifice. Kill a lamb. Give up cars and walk. Etc.

In this story it's the evil, and dumb and greedy, farmers 'messing around with powerful, dangerous, hostile forces of nature with consequences they can't possibly understand' and, thus, being a threat to all of us.

So, the NYT pumps this stuff out. They have some conditioned, devoted readers who lap up this swill.

It's not science, news, reporting, or investigative journalism. Instead it's just a nasty manipulation.

Here at HN we would be fools to take such swill at face value and argue against its logic and science. The NYT doesn't care a hoot about logic or science but just the NYT manipulation and, then, their ad revenue.

tgb2• 12 years ago

What article were you reading? The entire point of this was to connect the fact that antibiotics enable unusual animal growth to the possibility that antibiotics were enabling the unusual human growth that has been occurring these past few decades. This is a reasonably hypothesis that I, at least, had never considered but in retrospect seems like something that obviously should be investigated further. There is nothing moralistic about this. Sure, the article mentions in passing about drug-resistant strains but this was not about painting farmers as greedy dumb and evil. If this is a click-bait link it's one that feeds on our self-image issues and on passing the blame to others and things like that, not on some morality play environmentalism. You can find that in other articles if you want.

graycat2• 12 years ago

You are very carefully, rationally, and objectively taking the article at face value; I'm not granting that the article deserves to be taken at face value. One reason is, the article is from the NYT which has burned me too often in the past. Another reason is that this thread did a really good job showing some of the severe rational weaknesses in the article -- the writing and thought here were much better than from the NYT.

So, I reject that the article from tbe NYT was just an effort at rationalism and information. That hypothesis rejected, I look for another explanation -- the NYT is trying to jerk me around. Do I have solid proof? No, but doing some beautiful rationalism in the face of some low grade rationalism from the NYT begins to look like here at HN we are being manipulated and are being foolish.

The Fat Drug

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