"It’s Probably Not Lithium" by Natália Coelho Mendonça

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Chapters
1:18
(Preamble) A brief summary of their hypotheses
2:13
Lithium exposure in the general population is extremely low, even at the tails, in the majority of countries for which we have data
3:03
The studies in SMTM’s literature review of lithium levels in food are pretty much all outliers
4:33
Histogram: Lithium Content in Food
5:16
(Text Continues)
6:58
Endnote 2
9:51
(Text resumes)
10:10
Table: Literature on daily Li intake
12:30
(Text resumes)
13:28
Endnote 3
14:09
(Text resumes)
16:30
Endnote 4
17:46
(Text Resumes)
18:24
30 mg/day is not a relevant cutoff
21:49
Endnote 5
22:26
(Briefly) Lithium in air and water
23:55
Graph: Lithium Concentration Groundwater
24:39
Lithium Maps
25:54
Serum lithium concentration data, just like food data, is strong evidence against the hypothesis that people are exposed to high doses of lithium
29:02
Histogram: Serum Li Concentration
32:03
Clinical doses of lithium cause a lot more side effects than just weight gain
35:38
Meme: Lithium
36:42
Weight gain is associated with other lithium side-effects
37:11
Weight gain table 1
37:45
(Text Resumes)
37:51
Weight gain table 2
38:48
(Text resumes)
39:20
Even therapeutic doses of lithium don’t cause enough weight gain to explain the obesity epidemic
39:52
Weight Gain Table 3
41:44
Graph 1
42:07
Graph 2
42:53
(Text resumes)
48:58
Lithium weight gain seems to (perhaps) be dose-dependent even at therapeutic doses
51:42
Genes that influence BMI do not tend to be expressed in the kidneys (which govern lithium secretion)
52:09
Genes Graph
53:11
The evidence that trace doses of lithium exert significant effects is actually pretty weak
53:47
Mysteries that lithium cannot explain
57:35
Conclusion, bets and bounties
1:00:48
Acknowledgments
1:01:06
Addenda
1:02:02
Graph: Lithium Content
1:02:59
Table: Vegan foods
1:04:28
We *do* have data on the lithium content of processed food
1:05:48
Factual inaccuracies and misrepresentation of sources in SMTM’s posts about lithium
1:06:59
Map: Louisiana border
1:10:34
Errata
LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
"It’s Probably Not Lithium" by Natália Coelho Mendonça
Jul 05, 2022
LessWrong

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium

A Chemical Hunger (a), a series by the authors of the blog Slime Mold Time Mold (SMTM) that has been received positively on LessWrong, argues that the obesity epidemic is entirely caused (a) by environmental contaminants. The authors’ top suspect is lithium (a)[1], primarily because it is known to cause weight gain at the doses used to treat bipolar disorder.

After doing some research, however, I found that it is not plausible that lithium plays a major role in the obesity epidemic, and that a lot of the claims the SMTM authors make about the topic are misleading, flat-out wrong, or based on extremely cherry-picked evidence. I have the impression that reading what they have to say about this often leaves the reader with a worse model of reality than they started with, and I’ll explain why I have that impression in this post.