Ok. Fair enough. Allow me to clarify.

I was speaking of norm for the body, not norm of what most people do. In any case, my point was "restriction" isn't a restriction if you're over-consuming to begin with. It's a language/communication issue. Telling people to reduce (when they think they're normal") is, imho, the wrong message. We've normalized obesity by, to some extent, allowing people to believe obesity is perfectly normal.

As for sedentary lifestyle and obesity...those are symptoms. What happens in the body is, often, inflammation. Inflammation in turn gets manifested as various diseases. Obesity is not what kills you per se. But it does trigger various things (often rooted in inflammation) that will.

Regardless, in the context of the original article, I was simply taking a stand at why CR increases lifespan.

I hear ya. We're on the same page, mostly. I just wanted to clarify my particular thoughts.

Thanks

> I was speaking of norm for the body, not norm of what most people do. In any case, my point was "restriction" isn't a restriction if you're over-consuming to begin with. It's a language/communication issue. Telling people to reduce (when they think they're normal") is, imho, the wrong message. We've normalized obesity by, to some extent, allowing people to believe obesity is perfectly normal.

Almost no one actually thinks obesity is normal. a very small set of people argue it's healthy, but that is a tiny minority.

As for "norm", caloric restriction is not about being normal weight. Caloric restriction is about cutting calories significantly below the level needed to maintain a normal weight. I don't see any way to argue that this is "normal".

> As for sedentary lifestyle and obesity...those are symptoms. What happens in the body is, often, inflammation. Inflammation in turn gets manifested as various diseases. Obesity is not what kills you per se. But it does trigger various things (often rooted in inflammation) that will.

All indications are that sedentary lifestyle is a root cause, not a symptom. Obesity is perhaps a symptom, but sedentary lifestyle is a step before that.

I don't believe there's actually any evidence for the claim that inflammation is the root issue for most disease. I get the distinct impression that this is a pseudoscience claim made by people who are selling quick fixes (as opposed to the diet and exercise people already know they need). "Inflammation" is almost a magical claim. It sounds scientific but there doesn't generally seem to be any actual science behind claims of inflammation causing arbitrary health issues.

Causations are not necessarily one way. Inflammation causes disease, disease causes obesity (unhealthy people tend to move less), obesity causes more inflammation. Start anywhere in the circle.

  I don't believe there's actually any evidence for the 
  claim that inflammation is the root issue for most disease

I quote from a seven year old issue of Nature insight (http://www.nature.com/nature/supplements/insights/inflammati...):

  Inflammation forms the basis of many physiological and 
  pathological processes. Much is known about how 
  inflammation is initiated, develops and resolves over the 
  short term. But less is known about the causes and 
  consequences of chronic inflammation, which underlies many 
  human diseases. Recent studies have extended our 
  understanding of chronic inflammation and the cross-talk 
  that occurs between inflammatory responses and other 
  physiological and pathological 
 

This is common knowledge and has been for a long time.

I criticized referring to inflammation as the root of most diseases. I did not say inflammation does not play a factor in many diseases.

Re: inflammation

Perhaps. But do you have a better term for "completely fucking over your normal body processes"?

I was using inflammation as a generic term for "disrupting the baseline." Sorry. You're correct. I'll try to be more particular next time.

Thanks.

> I was using inflammation as a generic term for "disrupting the baseline."

You've lumped literally all illnesses together (anything that disrupts the baseline) and referred to them as "inflammation". This is exactly what I'm criticizing. Inflammation in this context is a meaningless term used to give an appearance of medicine to pseudoscience.

Inflammation go hand in hand with 'a disrupted baseline'. It is usually the cause of part of the disruption and the symptom of another part of the disruption. So it really isn't that unwarranted to use it as a synonym.

It is unwarranted. To use "inflammation" as a synonym for "disease" is to willfully imply that inflammation is the root of every disease. This is inaccurate and it misguides people. If you have type 2 diabetes, you probably have some inflammation. But that's unlikely the root cause or the thing to worry about. Obesity and sedentary lifestyle are better causes to attack.

> I don't believe there's actually any evidence for the claim that inflammation is the root issue for most disease.

There is growing evidence that it is in the chain of causality for lots of diseases where it has previously not been thought of, and that lots of inflammatory conditions seem to be linked manifestations of common systemic causes rather than localised inflammation with unrelated causes.

This does get overplayed sometimes into “everything starts with inflammation”.

"Almost no one actually thinks obesity is normal. a very small set of people argue it's healthy, but that is a tiny minority."

Tiny? Lol

Jokes aside, I see it differently. Much.

First, look around. Obesity is normalized. Those less so, look around and think "I'm okay...Look at that guy/gal..." We (speaking for the USA) got here because humans do what they do. In this case, they define norm by what they see.

I'm not concerned about those who argue it's healty. My concern is those who do not. Think of the current politics and healthcare. NO ONE brings up the fact that if we prevented what we could prevent, there'd be money for real illness.

As it is, we have fat people eating donuts, drinking milk by the gallon, and complaining about their premiums. That would be funny, if it wasn't so absurd.