I remember all the little rubber beads from the soccer field with artificial turf.
Well a Public Fellatio Announcement seems unlikely.
They're little chemicals that you get to adopt and become their Forever Home, all nestled up in your brain and glands. It's so cozy.
Our entryway was always full of those stupid rubber bits. Probably would have been better about vacuuming if I knew they were shredded tires.
Apparently a great deal of the harmful pollution in the air and the sea is invisible tire particulates. (So both switching to electric cars, and cleaning up the visible trash patches in the ocean, have limited benefit.)
Oh, I got it exactly backwards. They have tires, that's the point.
I have also been confused in the past that tiny tire bits are called microplastics in the literature ("no, they're rubber!") but I'm past that now.
Out of concern for PFAs (possibly) and PTFE (definitely, but not clearly a problem) right up against mucous membranes, we just switched away from Glide floss, even though it works very well.
It's like $5 a box. I've avoided it on the general principle that floss shouldn't cost that much.
Also it's too bad I didn't know about the OP. I would have had a better excuse for not continuing to enroll my stepdaughter in soccer.
Although the fact that she had no interest and had to be reminded continously to pay attention to the ball even when it was right in front of her seemed like a pretty good excuse to me.
The best part about youth soccer was the fifth time I forgot what Offsides was.
14: The 6th and 7th time were kind of embarrassing.
If you own any older cloths made of polar fleece (older being before 2021, so not that old), they could have PFAs in them. And when you do the laundry, its sending PFAs down the drain with all the microplastics. Thats a big part of the reason that sludge from municipal sewer plants can no longer be spread on farmland and has to be landfilled instead.
So you're saying that as an environmentalist, I need to be a new polartec alpha fleece.
No, I'm saying you should buy something nice made out of wool.
I do use wool baselayers. The problem for a wool fleece (aka a sweater) is that it doesn't pack very small and doesn't dry as fast.
Don't worry! Global warming will solve these problems soon! 64 degrees on Feb. 9 in Columbus Ohio!
I don't think you all understood the assignment.
I thought it was about layers for hiking. At least subtextually.
Also maybe PFAS exposure explains trends in obesity?
Can't tell how sensible that site is.
Is PFAS pronounced like "My urethra is partly obstructed so I can't PFAS"?
Oooh, can we have a guest post on 25? Or maybe just turn this into a discussion of the link at 25? (It's a very long argument that chemicals may be somewhat responsible for rising obesity rates.) I maybe had a similar take to Clem (though haven't read it all) -- seems interesting, plausible I guess, but it's some pseudonymous internet dudes taking on The Entire Public Health Establishment, so some warning flags there.
I have to say that "clem" gives a very different vibe than "clew."
Looking for descriptions of an effect in animals, easier to do the experiments on development there: increased mass after exposure in frogs.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32164037/
No real biochemical understanding yet, so hard to say much.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32549216/
Above from a quick search and skimming these two which looked like the most relevant of a few dozen.
There's a pair of model-organism frogs, the one they started using, X laevis tuned out to have a recently duplicated genome, which meant asking questions about their genetics was difficult. Tons of data and logistical support for working with those. Maybe not a relevant species for some reason, but looking at expression changes in treated frog embryos would be cheap and easy, given an interested lab.
I think most of the chemicals responsible for my extra 30 pounds are carbohydrates. I would love to be told its something different.
We blame fat. Eat this pile of sugar for your health.
Those bastards killed my father. A man who loved food had to go through years of his life eating things like margarine and Snackwells, only for it to contribute to his long-debilitating and ultimately fatal vascular dementia.
I am also angry that my Dad lived through and adhered those food guidelines.
I lived through them. I didn't start eating actual butter as a regular food until I was a grown adult.
I'm assuming 34 isn't written by my son.
The blog posts that led to that site were definitely interesting but came out of a weird place.
Although I don't think anyone still believes in the whole "try this LOW FAT product made of SUGAR" thing.
No problem. I don't think the kids know what a "blog" is.
I'm generally resistant to blaming things on chemicals and toxins, but I am really very puzzled by why people are so much fatter now than they were in, say, the eighties, when food was really cheap enough for most American that it doesn't seem as if that can be the difference. If it did all come down to PFAS it'd at least be an explanation.
I have a pet theory that it's some kind of infectious agent because if you look at time lapse plots of obesity in the US it looks just like the animated maps they use in scary pandemic movies, only over the course of years not weeks. The contagion starts somewhere in Appalachia.
In a pepperoni roll sold at a gas station in Fayette County.
Maybe further south if you look at this animation.
I ate a much smaller dinner tonight than I was planning because of a new appetite suppressant we discovered, finding a screw baked into the crust of a pizza.
Is that like the Pittsburgh version of king cake?
finding a screw baked into the crust of a pizza
A truly novel sex act!
pti bleg!
anyone here (including lurkers!) a native welsh speaker or know any native welsh speakers? my kiddo is looking for same as consultants for elicitation & judgment interviews in support of a linguistics project, not a big time commitment, done remotely & paid (modestly).
don't be shy! help out a grad student!
heebie has my email address. huge thanks in advance!
46: Next year, we have to bring the machine tools.
You start talking about wool and someone comes in to mention Wales. Always happens.
OT: Does Chinese New Year involve fireworks going off at midnight?
Some of my people came from Wales about 4 generations back but we didn't keep the language.
41: My theory is snacking between meals. I think there's a benefit to fasting overnight and not constantly having sugars in your bloodstream. If you don't always have food, you learn to use fat for fuel. I notice that snacks and eating later at night are what make me gain weight.
Social acceptability of snacking in between meals, the boomers being old, plus less smoking. It doesn't take much of a calorie excess to make a population heavier.
I was thinking maybe I should start smoking.
52: yes, this is a common situation that he is running into, alas.
ahoy vast pool of lurkers!
re: nutrition, i am lately feeling very let down by my hippie upbringing. it turns out that the food habits one feels most comfortable with having been raised by nor cal hippies (very little to no animal products, many many many veggies and fruits, including legumes) result in a very small daily consumption of protein that turns out not to be great! since consciously attempting to increase the protein in my diet it turns out that i don't actually have to be exhausted for much of each day and paradoxically sleep better too.
the other thing i've recently discovered is that if you live in sf and apply sunscreen every day, then taking vitamin d means you heal so much amazingly faster from minor bruises and paper cuts etc. i tried to take vitamin d after breaking my wrist a couple of years ago, but it just fouled up my stomach horribly, but if you take it via drops rather than pills/capsules it is so much easier to tolerate.
re pfas - if at all possible avoid non stick cookware. manufacturers are using "new generation" compounds that surprise surprise they swear won't be an issue, but i sure would not like to work in one of the manufacturing plants, lor live anywhere near one.
DQ- what do you think of enameled iron? I am particularly intrigued by the pricey Vermicular oven-safe skillet?
love it! have both creuset bits & bobs & a vintage littala pot in red with a wooden carved handle that is particularly sexy for the solyenka i make for xmas eve & other hot sour spicy phwoar soups & stews. & cast iron works in induction so you aren't shooting yourself in the foot if you are eventually lucky to move to induction. downsides - it's heavy but no fear there if you are eating enough protein & engaging in fun strength training activities as you should to keep yourself in good nick, & it isn't as responsive as copper but alas copper doesn't work on induction (sob).
vermicular is very pricey but if you can afford it why not & not gonna lie, their set up that controls v low temps v precisely is tempting tempting tempting.
59: I've seen some pieces that have copper layers with with ferromagnetic bases that ares supposed to be induction-based. We have electric now, but our next oven will be induction. First priority is a newer, more energy-efficient fridge.
30: Good summary. I have two things to add: I think for PTFE/PFAS to be realistic as a cause of obesity, you need to have some model of what it might be doing biologically, a mechanism of action. All the correlations laid out are interesting, but it's hard for me to understand why PTFE/PFAS might do that. (The lead hypothesis for crime makes a lot more biological sense to me.)
I went to a talk several years ago where researchers made a radioactive variant of PFAS, dosed it IV, and got a scan of GI tract. The uptake was rapid, and (as expected), it didn't wash out. At all. (So yeah, forever chemical, clearly imaged.) That was when I started getting rid of non-stick cooking implements, myself. It seems vaguely plausible that there might be accumulation over time that has some effect on nutrient absorption or something. I'm pretty willing to believe it's BAD, just not sure it's a contributor to obesity.
For anyone confused, PFAS is basically shorthand for chemicals used to make (and byproducts of) PTFE (Teflon).
As for the rubber turf thing, I buy it, but probably because of well developed personal prejudice. Seems totally likely to me, although I would be more convinced if it was all "goalies get the same rare type of blood cancer" and not "tire turf gives you all sorts of cancer."
In that case, we have a pretty good mechanism of action - cuts and scrapes and exposure via mucous membranes to fine particulates with high surface area? Yeah, that's not good. Also, inflammation? Also, they release carcinogens? No thanks.
Runoff chemicals from car tires have just been implicated in salmon die-offs.
I guess that's why you never seen salmon play soccer.
Anyway, our pan for frying two eggs used to be teflon and last week we replaced with the some kind of gray non-stick ceramic thing.
I mean, it's still a metal pan. The coating is ceramic, I think. I know it is gray.
Personally, I don't see what the big deal is -- you get 6 or 8 legs to the frog and they don't stick to the bottom of the pan -- everybody wins!
I am currently experiencing nightlife for pretty much the first time in forever. It's alright. Queer club night run by an old friend and colleague of mine at the diviest dive bar left in South Minneapolis.
Re weight gain: accumulation of many labor-saving devices? Leaf-blowers, powered screwdrivers, etc etc etc.
powered screwdrivers
No one has buff hands anymore
69: I do, because lab work, but I don't think it's what a lot of folks are looking for in laydeez.
Well, the show was pretty fun. Not really my type of music per se, but the crowd are it up. Sure made me miss the triple rock though.
||
Actually, Colby was drawing on traditions older than the Catholic one. Before he went to testify before the Church committee, he went to a lecture by an old wartime friend of his,the classical scholar Bernard Knox, Director of Washington's Center for Hellenic Studies. Knox was lecturing on Sophocles at George Washington University that term, and Colby deliberately went to his lecture on Antigone, the play whose heroine defies a ruler in order to serve a deeper loyalty.|>
64: Serious Eats said that the Copper pan was the best, affordable ceramic non-stick.
My godmother bought some green pan that was intended for omelets that was "As Seen in TV" once. She said it was inexpensive and one of the best egg pans she'd ever bought.
I found a youtube comparing the orgreenic (not the Green pan) and the copper pan. This one youtuber liked the copper pan better.
I'm not prepared for the responsibilities of owning copper pans.
I'm fond of the hypothesis that high CO2 is part of expanding weight-gainyness, but mostly in the interest of Surely This. There's a little experimental evidence afaik BUT ALSO there's a little experimental evidence for anything causing weight gain afaik.
68, labor-saving devices; a whole lot of the "it's not a change in energy use" arguments I see have traced back to either the lab-animal example, or one paper: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.orcp.2015.08.007
Most relevant bits:
for a given amount of caloric intake, macronutrient intake or leisure time physical activity, the predicted BMI was up to 2.3 kg/m2 higher in 2006 that in 1988 in the mutually adjusted model
Physical activity assessment Self-reported physical activity was assessed using questionnaires. In NHANES I and NHANES II, the frequency of physical activity was not reported, and therefore these survey years were excluded from the physical activity and fully adjusted analy- ses. NHANES III assessed if participants engaged in physical activity in the past month, and if so, the frequency of their participation in select moderate and vigorous intensity activities (including walk- ing, jogging, bicycling, swimming, aerobics or other forms of dancing, callisthenics, gardening or yard work, and weight lifting) during their leisure time. Individuals also had the option of listing up to four additional activities. In the NHANES continuous sur- veys, respondents provided additional information on the frequency of moderate and vigorous inten- sity activities, reported as times per day, week, or month. Participants were also asked: (i) about walk- ing or biking as transportation to work, school or to run errands; (ii) if they had performed home or yard work that lasted at least 10 min and was at a moder- ate or vigorous effort, and (iii) if they had engaged in any moderate or vigorous leisure time activity. For the purpose of this analysis, physical activity from all surveys was converted to weekly bouts of physical activity. All activities were assigned a metabolic equivalent value (MET) [17], and only activities that were of at least moderate intensity (MET ≥3) were included in our definition of physical activity. To determine the magnitude of difference between self-reported energy intake from NHANES over time, we compared self-reported energy intake to predicted daily caloric needs of each participant using the sex-specific Harris--Benedict equations [18], assuming a physical activity level of sedentary and moderately active (3--5 days/week) to obtain a reasonable upper and lower range for predicted daily energy needs.
Walking, biking, 10 min of vigorous housework -- I find this kind of ambiguous about whether it would "see" changes in how energetic daily life is. What I think of as "easy housework" is considered old fashioned and way too hard by the, hm, Swiffer generations; but I'm sessile compared to various farm-raised grannies I've known. Needs heart rate monitors or something, but then you have only tiny data sets.
I like Chester Copperpot for these sorts of things. He was a grown up and he never made it this far.
NHANES data is a pain. But not nearly as bad as some.