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

LessWrong Curated Podcast

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.