I enjoyed reading them until I tried to get to the source of the 1980 data. The source appears to be from the National Center for Health Statistics, which ran surveys in 1971–1974, 1976–1980, 1988–1994, and 1999–2018.

I was disappointed that they then misunderstood this as an inflection point exactly in 1980 when that was merely the last point in a graph that inappropriately bashed several surveys together. They ask over and over "So what changed in 1980?" but the data doesn't support that year specifically. They seemed to start out from a fundamental misunderstanding and then used that to discount other data through the rest of their posts.

I participated in the SMTM study, and am totally happy to share my data if anyone is at all curious.

Results for me:

  - it was not as easy as i thought it would be
  - i lost weight
  - my appetite and satiety feedback systems were reset.  After the diet was over I ate less and got full sooner. 
  - after the diet, I noticed that I wanted to eat more even after i was mechanically full.  This was weird, since it didn't happen on the potato diet (I did overeat potatoes a few times because I tried to fill a pizza shaped hole with potato). It feels like an addiction. I know I am full.  I feel full.  I am not hungry.  I want to eat more anyway.
  - So far the weight is staying off (~2 months).

Thanks!

I'm not completely sold on the lithium hypothesis, either. But I find their arguments for some kind of environmental contaminant compelling, especially for the ways in which they refute some of the other major hypotheses for the increase in body weights (e.g. food variety, processed food, etc)

Note that the SMTM folks recently published an article responding to the TDS data referred to by "It's Probably Not Lithium": https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/05/total-diet-studies-...

This is... not promising.

Someone would write like this if they don't know anything about instrumental analysis and are just guessing as a result.

As an example, they don't seem to even understand that wet and dry weights are substantivel different measures, and speak as though Magalhães et al. (1990) is measuring wet weight; it is measuring dry weight.

I'm supportive of autodidactic study and outsider research, but this is, frankly, a mess. They should unweight their priors considerably and bring in some chemists.

Note: I am the author of "It's Probably Not Lithium."

That SMTM post only addresses 5 of the ~17 studies about food lithium concentration that I mentioned in my post. It ignores several studies that did not use ICP-MS to measure lithium and found very low concentrations of it in food.

Moreover, as samatman mentioned, the post doesn't seem to understand that wet and dry weights are substantively different measures, and cites Magalhães et al. (1990) and Hullin, Kapel, and Drinkall (1969) as if they were reporting wet weight measurements of lithium, when they're reporting dry weight measurements. This makes a huge difference, because watercress (measured in Magalhães et al. (1990)) and lettuce (measured in Hullin, Kapel, and Drinkall (1969)) are both over 90% water by weight.

So that post is largely just based on cherry-picking and misrepresentation of studies.

Moreover, as far as I could tell, only *two* of their sources *actually attempt to estimate dietary lithium intake*, whereas almost all of my ~17 sources do. This is important because the SMTM post references a lot of studies that are not available on the internet, so we don't know whether they reported lithium concentration in dry or wet weight of food. Moreover, one of those sources based its estimation on hair lithium concentration rather than actual food measurements, using a regression model whose accuracy at low levels of dietary intake is unknown.

The vast majority of studies that actually attempt to estimate dietary lithium intake based on lithium concentration in food estimate it to be lower than 100 mcg/day, regardless of methodology. The only exceptions I am aware of are two studies from Manfred Anke.

We now have FDA-approved GLP-1 receptor agonists like Semaglutide that produce sustained weight loss of a magnitude similar to the weight gain discussed in that article. So the idea that something similar could be messing with this or a similar pathway hardly seems shocking to me, even if lithium perhaps isn’t the culprit.

(As an aside: we’ve also learned that proteins produced by certain gut bacteria have a similar effect on the same pathway, so it’s not crazy to imagine that gut dysbiosis could have an effect on weight gain. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00880-5)

I wonder if PCBs play a part in it. I was reading that thanks to Monsanto pushing PCBs like they are candy has resulted in basically the whole world being exposed to them.

They're hormone disruptors that cause a lot of side effects like decrease of intelligence, weight gain, early/late puberty and it is impossible to escape them completely since even though they're no longer manufactured (at least not in the USA legally) they take a long time to break down in the environment.

https://www.clearwater.org/news/pcbhealth.html

There should be places in the 'deep' watershed that are getting their water from somewhere else.

Or how about the Great Lakes? I doubt Lake Superior has the same stuff in it as Lake Erie, should be easy enough to poke with a stick.

There could certainly be some subtle underlying factor, but the food supply has grown continuously for like 80 years at this point, maybe it's just marketing and availability.