"On not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas" by Natália Coelho Mendonça

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-getting-contaminated-by-the-wrong-obesity-ideasA Chemical Hunger (a), a series by the authors of the blog Slime Mold Time Mold (SMTM), argues that the obesity epidemic is entirely caused (a) by environmental contaminants. In my last post, I investigated SMTM’s main suspect (lithium).[1] This post collects other observations I have made about SMTM’s work, not narrowly related to lithium, but rather focused on the broader thesis of their blog post series.I think that the environmental contamination hypothesis of the obesity epidemic is a priori plausible. After all, we know that chemicals can affect humans, and our exposure to chemicals has plausibly changed a lot over time. However, I found that several of what seem to be SMTM’s strongest arguments in favor of the contamination theory turned out to be dubious, and that nearly all of the interesting things I thought I’d learned from their blog posts turned out to actually be wrong. I’ll explain that in this post.