What if we could cure obesity?
What to make of the intractable, growing problem of obesity? According to The Lancet:
“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.”
What if the reason obesity is proving so hard to counter is that we don’t have a good model of what’s causing it? It would hardly be the first time. And there are some odd data points that don’t fit with a model that focuses on willpower, exercise and our changing diets, such as the great fattening of lab animals under tightly-controlled conditions, and a number of other mysteries.
The last in a remarkable series of online essays lays out the possibility that the obesity epidemic is the result of environmental contamination, and proposes an experimental program to assess if this hypothesis is true. The best way to prove it? Remove contaminants and see if that cuts obesity.
“The contamination theory of obesity has to be possible, in the sense that we know chemicals can cause weight gain and we know various chemicals are in the environment. […] If this theory is correct, then we have a good shot at doing what we really want to do — actually curing obesity — and no result could be more convincing than that.”
This is a crazy idea, and it might well be wrong. But curing obesity is an enormous prize. In the face of a big problem no one knows how to solve, maybe a crazy idea can break the deadlock.
What to make of the intractable, growing problem of obesity? According to The Lancet:
“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.”
What if the reason obesity is proving so hard to counter is that we don’t have a good model of what’s causing it? It would hardly be the first time. And there are some odd data points that don’t fit with a model that focuses on willpower, exercise and our changing diets, such as the great fattening of lab animals under tightly-controlled conditions, and a number of other mysteries.
The last in a remarkable series of online essays lays out the possibility that the obesity epidemic is the result of environmental contamination, and proposes an experimental program to assess if this hypothesis is true. The best way to prove it? Remove contaminants and see if that cuts obesity.
“The contamination theory of obesity has to be possible, in the sense that we know chemicals can cause weight gain and we know various chemicals are in the environment. […] If this theory is correct, then we have a good shot at doing what we really want to do — actually curing obesity — and no result could be more convincing than that.”
This is a crazy idea, and it might well be wrong. But curing obesity is an enormous prize. In the face of a big problem no one knows how to solve, maybe a crazy idea can break the deadlock.