In due time, we will learn to reverse aging, cure cancer, cure diabetes, and do all kind of freaky things with lab rats.
Then we will create a new rat species that is biologically immortal, smarter, stronger, and faster than any before. They will escape the NIH and establish their own society.
In other forums, I have proposed to use DNP as a treatment for my condition (mitochondrial myopathy) and I am happy to see that there are lines of research looking into this. Using DNP to treat disease is scary with a reason; due to its narrow therapeutic index[1], it is very easy to overdose. However, its mechanism of action is clearly understood[2]: It decouples the electron transport chain, causing a signalling cascade that results in the activation of mitochondrial biogenesis.
In this particular case, it is sad to see that we need a pill for everything; in many cases, T2D is easily controlled [3], even reversed, with aerobic exercise (note also that the mitochondrial biogenesis pathway is activated with exercise[4])
I has always amazed me how much effort goes into technological attempts to reverse a condition that can be reliably prevented and even reversed in the overwhelming majority of sufferers up until fairly late stages by simply eating less. Eating less is so amazingly unpopular that people would rather suffer and die waiting on therapies than do the one thing already known to work.
In people with Type 2 diabetes of more than 8 years' duration, a therapeutic trial of a very-low-calorie diet may be undertaken with a 50% chance of achieving non-diabetic fasting glucose levels, with all other antidiabetic therapies discontinued.
The debilitating effects of alcoholism can be prevented by 'simply' not consuming alcohol. The fact that the physical actions necessary to achieve an outcome are simple does not mean that enacting them is.
If humans had perfect control of their actions we would have far fewer problems, type 2 diabetes being the least of them.
You're body tries very hard to make sure you have enough nutrition. It increases hunger and reduces will power, and most long term research on diet based obesity/diabetes intervention shows that they have terrible effectiveness rates.
Our ancestors were on the brink of starvation for most of history; only for a small slice of time have we* had caloric abundance. Humans turn to eating when facing all kinds of physical and emotional stressors; "simply eating less" is simplistic logic that doesn't hold water in practice.
Eating healthy is incredibly difficult in western society, and if you are suffering from Type 2 diabetes caused by lifestyle , chances are you already suffering from some kind of food addiction.
"Just eat less" is not a very helpful answer, it's incredibly frustrating to hear, believe me.
When your blood sugar is in the 60s or 50s range from trying like hell to do your diet all day, reason goes out the window and 'mere' will power is not enough.
It takes a lot of effort, lots of planning (preparing food, planning what, where and when to eat, snacks, etc) and a LOT of information (nutrition, insulin effects on the body, pros and cons of current 'fad' diets, etc) which takes a while to collect, also, lots of trial an error.
It doesn't help that most doctors, are clueless regarding healthy eating.
>Eating healthy is incredibly difficult in western society,
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read on this site. Fresh, healthy, affordable food has never been more accessible to any society.
>"Just eat less" is not a very helpful answer, it's incredibly frustrating to hear, believe me.
Eating less is the only thing that works. You only find this advice unhelpful because it's hard. But the reason it's hard is because you've trained yourself to overeat and now you have to break that habit, a habit that has its psychological and physiological meathooks in you. People who haven't lived their entire lives stuffing themselves to the bursting point have no problems autoregulating. I mean, shit, my cat can manage it.
>It takes a lot of effort, lots of planning (preparing food, planning what, where and when to eat, snacks, etc) and a LOT of information (nutrition, insulin effects on the body, pros and cons of current 'fad' diets, etc) which takes a while to collect, also, lots of trial an error.
You sound like a pathetic whiny snot who has embraced a life of learned helplessness.
But this is a well-trod path. There is no need to reinvent or rediscover anything. In fact, belaboring the "how" is really just a diversion that prevents success. Anyone who is successful at body transformation does two things: 1) Permanently changes their diet 2) Permanently changes their activity level. The particulars vary in any number of ways but the one constant is that the person moves from thinking to action. The process becomes not something that they "try" or "work on" but an imperative.
A guy I went to high school with was an all-star center on our (American) football team at six feet tall and 294 lbs. He had always been "the fat guy" from the time we were children. Between the end of one football season and the start of the next school year, he dropped to 160 lbs. When he spoke on the topic of his change, he always first answered the "how" question with this response: "I just decided I was tired of being fat." For him, the particulars involved introducing heaping servings of fibrous vegetables (to help satiety) and running. But those things were of secondary importance.
45 years and old and resigned to being dumpy and hypertensive. Then he decided "fuck this" and changed his life. This is how it always works. You have to become sufficiently fed up to no longer accept the status quo. No one can do that for you nor will it appear in any study, book, or other "how-to-be-fit" advice.
This is why I no longer talk to people in real life about this topic. I can give them an endless supply of information on nutrition & programming but not the one thing without which they are doomed to failure.
Being unchallenged can also give the illusion of having fantastic self control. My wife stays slender, in large part because she has no desire to eat to excess, and is sated by small quantities of sweet food. By contrast, staying thin same costs me a monumental effort. How can you possibly know whether you have superior self control or are simply lucky?
What is challenging is dealing with the finiteness of time. Having to prioritize my list of what I want to do/learn and slowly progress through it. Sometimes new things suddenly come up and move their way to a high priority. Other things will, at times, be moved down the list according to changes in my interest level or circumstances. But what is an entirely foreign experience to me is having something I want to do, arriving at the time to do it, and just... not doing it.
I can only think that people who have this kind of experience must be suffering from self-deception or dissonance between what they believe they want and what they really do want. Like the student who tries his damnedest on exam day but has not spent any time familiarizing himself with the course material. What we want is revealed by our behavior, not what we think. What I actually am is what I do.
As to the particular topic at hand, it is a core value of mine to keep my body as able as possible for as long as possible. My body is the vessel that conveys my existence through time-space and getting the most out of that existence requires optimizing my fitness. If I were to wake up one day twenty pounds overweight and pre-hypertensive, remedying that situation would shoot up my priority list. It would become an emergency situation that would simply have to be dealt with as expeditiously as possible. So when I hear people talk about how much they "really want" to lose weight but then present no behavioral evidence to support that statement, I can only conclude they they are either simply lying for the sake of garnering social approval or are deluding themselves as to their true desires.
I'm absolutely sure they're deluding themselves or lying. What i rationally want and what my lower systems want are fundamentally at odds. My inner passion for overeating threatens to overwhelm my logical mind every day.
I think when people say they want to lose weight, they mean that they wish they didn't have that extreme compulsion to eat that overwhelms their rational processes. Or that they could overcome it.
What bugs me is that people view it as a simple matter of self control, when it's actually about self control versus strength of desire. If your desires aren't that strong, it's easy to look like you have an iron will.
I do as I please. Whether others consider the goals I set for myself sufficiently challenging or making the most of my "potential" does not concern me in the least.
Learning new things is fun. Lifting twice my bodyweight for reps is hard work. You sound like a typical fatty harboring the delusion that fit people are incapable of excelling at anything other than being fit. This is a particularly laughable notion given the clear evidence that low IQ is positively correlated with obesity [1] (and, likewise, physical fitness is positively correlated with higher IQ and cognitive function).
If you want to base your life around the results of single, small scale studies, that's your choice. But I've seen too many studies that seemed impressive, but when people set out to replicate the the study, they failed to get the same results. This is not rare, it happens frequently.
Before I went into medicine, I too might have missed the point I was making, which is that eating less almost certainly reverses the vast, vast majority of type 2 diabetes. I mean, within a day.
Americans eat so much they think overeating is normal. Bariatric patients (morbidly obese people getting their stomach essentially amputated, see Roux-en-Y) are generally told to fast for 24 hours prior to surgery. Their glucose levels before surgery are often normal, for the first time in decades.
The association between food intake and obesity is far, far stronger than cigarettes and lung cancer, even stronger than Hep B and hepatocellular carcinoma.
Asserting that eating less (and I do mean significantly less) needs to be studied more is like saying we should hold off on parachute use until more studies are done.
Not overweight, but I was obese ten years ago. Not overeating remains overwhelmingly the biggest challenge in my life - one that I struggle with every day, and that I fail at as often as I succeed. On the other hand, I'm good at stuff that many other people find difficult.
What I learned from those many years of being fat is that my experience is not the same as everyone else's. Just because I find it simple to not drink doesn't mean it's the same for an alcoholic. Just because I'm a completer-finisher type doesn't mean it's easy for someone else to slog through writing their thesis. Just because being happy is a default state of mind for me, doesn't mean a depressive can just flip a switch like that.
I might, if asked, tell an alcoholic that they need to stop drinking, or a fat person that they need to lose weight, or a procrastinator that they need to finish their work - but I'll try not to be arrogant enough to tell them that the solution is obvious, that it's easy. How the hell would I know what's easy for them?
A few studies showed caffeine can achieve the same results than DNP. And I know a few people who reversed fatty liver with caffeine alone in just 2 weeks. The only problem is to have enough caffeine tolerance to get to 800mg through the day.
"Ah, so that's why the study found an association with sugary drinks?"
"Possibly. The study found that girls who drink more than 1.5 sugar-sweetened beverages a day started their periods 2.7 months earlier on average than girls who consumed them twice a week or less. The finding didn't apply to fruit juice – which contains a sugar called fructose – only to drinks sweetened with sucrose."
"What is the mechanism then?"
"That's one of the problems: we simply don't know. Karin Michels at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, who supervised the study, says that sucrose in sugary drinks causes a spike in the hormone insulin, which controls blood sugar levels. Over time this may make the body's tissues less sensitive to the hormone, with consequences for metabolism. Quite why this would lower the age of menstruation isn't understood, but a drug called metformin, which makes the body more sensitive to insulin, has been shown to reverse early puberty in clinical trials."
While the other guy mentioned fructose, I'll mention the ethanol thing. The fatty liver disease mentioned has nothing to do with ethanol, in fact it is called Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease or NAFLD.
There are no confirmed causes for it but it varies. In certain population, it's a generic mutation, for some it's from fructose, and so on.
DNP is still somewhat popular with bodybuilders looking to cut weight.
It has some very powerful side-effects though, like insomnia, sweating non-stop, and death if you take a few extra mcg than you should have. Ephedrine and caffeine are a lot safer.
Most who have done DNP say it is one of the worst experiences of their life.
Not that I've ever taken it, because that would be illegal and wrong because drugs are bad and wrong, but if I did, it's pretty miserable at 500mg/day for multiple days.
It's like suffering through a bad flu. Hot, sweaty, lethargic, gastrointestinal upset…it's unpleasant. The worst thing is the insomnia brought on by the night sweats. I live in a cold, cold Midwestern city, and I was sleeping with the windows open.
But, 15 pounds down in 2 weeks. While eating like 2200cal/day.
The overheating leading to death if you dose it wrong is at the top of the list.
The difference between this DNP and the DNP you can buy on the blackmarket is that the DNP used in these modern fatty-liver studies is time released in smaller doses.
Users can expect to lose about ~1lb/day. But, it is very hard on you. You want to learn how to lose weight on a caloric deficit and macronutrient partitioning, about 1lb/week, and stick to a diet for at least a year before you even consider this. Otherwise, you don't have the right habits.
Calories in calories out is physics nothing can override or circumvent. It's a basic plausibility test. Fructose obeys the same laws as everything else. It might be harder to hit a calorie target if you eat fructose but if you do, that's it. It has to work.
Anyone who disputes this is scientifically illiterate.
Well, speaking of illiterate, no one actually disputed that.
It still is, however a gross oversimplification. Fructose is dense in calories, easily absorbed (which is calories in, not necessarily the food you swallow), contributes heavily to lipogenesis, and does not inhibit leptin, a hormone that controls hunger.
The core idea he is trying to get across is that diets shifting to significantly more fructose and significantly less fiber has created the rapid rise in obesity in the US. Is that up for dispute?
> Anyone who disputes this is scientifically illiterate.
Well, those who possess a lower IQ are more likely to become obese. So perhaps not understanding the way the universe works is how they wind up obese in the first place. Not too surprising, then, that they would be unable to comprehend how to get themselves out of that state. And there is certainly no shortage of charlatans and mountebanks out there all too ready to lead them astray.
Then we will create a new rat species that is biologically immortal, smarter, stronger, and faster than any before. They will escape the NIH and establish their own society.