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Obesity and Industrial Pollution?
Jul. 27th, 2021 02:47 pm
Just yesterday I encountered and read a preprint of a research article that suggests that the environmental crisis of our time may have a dimension few people realize. The article is by Ethan and Sarah Ludwin-Peery, it's published by the Open Science Foundation, and you can download and read it here. The title? "A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic."The authors point out that obesity in the developed world follows patterns that make no sense in terms of any of the standard theories. It was relatively uncommon until quite recently -- ads like the one I've posted on the left, which you can find in many old magazines, make it clear that too little weight was as common as too much just three quarters of a century ago. The increase in average body weight doesn't correlate to increasing consumption of sugar, carbohydrates, or any of the other usual suspects, nor do studies support the usual theories about why it's prevalent.
There are also strange details about the distribution of obesity that can't be explained by any of the standard theories. Did you know, for example, that pet animals in the US have been becoming obese at roughly the same rate as human beings? Or that obesity inversely correlates with altitude? Check out a map of the United States showing obesity rates by county -- the paper gives this on p. 5 -- and you can see the mountain and upland regions clearly as regions of relative thinness. Look closely and you'll see that it's not just altitude. Obesity concentrates in river valleys, and the larger the watershed, the higher the obesity rate in the lower reaches of the river.
Fat doesn't flow downhill in continent-sized watersheds, and neither do sugar or carbohydrates -- but industrial pollution does.
That's the possibility that this paper proposes: that some common, persistent industrial pollutant which is present in groundwater has, as a side effect, weight gain in human and animal subjects. The Ludwin-Peerys have done a fine job of investigative epidemiology in their paper, and show that a link between obesity and industrial pollution is the one theory that accounts for the facts. If they're right, the habit of treating the biosphere as a dumpster for chemical wastes may have imposed a cost on society as a whole that nobody's yet taken into account. (Unless -- and whisper this -- the corporations in question have known about this all along, as they knew about the health consequences of tobacco smoking, and kept it secret...)
I expect this paper and the theory it presents to be deep-sixed if the corporate establishment can possibly do so, and denounced in the most shrill tones possible if that effort fails. That being the case, dear reader, you might consider downloading a copy, stashing it somewhere, and taking its ideas into account in your assessments of the future.
I've mentioned before that being a satirist is one of the toughest jobs in existence just now. Day after day, the world parodies itself ever more outrageously, and somehow you have to keep on topping it! Well, the satirists of the world now have another good reason to hang their heads in despair, thanks to UNESCO and a clutch of scientific institutions. On May 16 of this year these latter launched a new project -- they're trying to get people to sign a pledge to trust science. 
The reason so many people no longer trust scientists to tell them the truth is that too many times, scientists haven't told them the truth. A glossy and impressively vacuous website isn't going to change that. A shortage of scientists willing to say whatever corporate and political interests tell them to say might help, but I'm not holding my breath. It's an appalling situation: one of the half dozen or so greatest intellectual creations of our species, the scientific method, is facing a rising wall of distrust because too many people who claim to speak for science have told too many lies. 
