Dr. Ben Bikman

But for someone who's trying to offset the consequences of their sleep deprivation, you may have some increased alertness, yes.

But the metabolic consequences of the sleep have now just been added on.

Super, yeah, super question and really fair of you to state it that way because as much as I found that work and still do really, really cool and we're doing more of it.

So to articulate what we've done so far, we've published reports looking at PM2.5 diesel exhaust particles, and we published another report looking at cigarette smoke.

With the cigarette smoke particles, that was purely in the context of ceramides, forced mitochondrial fission, and insulin resistance, and the cigarette smoke did all of those things.

The newer paper that we published about a year or two ago was, I think, the first to find that

If you just have increased diesel exhaust particles, even when we calorie clamped these, we pair fed these animals, and the animals that were inhaling more of the diesel particles at physiological levels, like at a level that a human could be exposed to, they had much fatter fat cells.

So they had much more adipocyte hypertrophy, which accounted for a higher body fat mass.

Even though they were eating the exact same amount of calories.

Again, we pair-fed them.

We only let them eat as much calories as the other group was eating, and they still had more fat.

So it does suggest that there are non-nutritive stimuli.

You'd mentioned some others.

We've not done work on microplastics or the plasticizers, those...

like diethylstilbestrol and BPA, but those also have been shown to promote greater fat expansion in the absence of calorie changes.

That's another reason why I think that we don't do ourselves any favors when we only have a calorie-centric view of obesity, because there are more variables that come into play here.

Now, to answer that last part of your question, which is to what degree should the average person be worried about that, I...

pains me to say this because it's my own work I think that's a that's a lower tier concern it's also one that some people may not literally be able to do anything about you know like if you are simply living in an inner city area and there's just pollution

There's nothing you can really do.

Maybe you can replace your in-home air filter more frequently and get one.