kind of a bold claim without evidence, but sedentary lifestyle does seem to play a role. what does not matter for most people is nebulous objectives like "mobility" or "good posture".

but yea, everyone should lift weights for various reasons, not just to reduce the chance of random pain.

Of course there are reasons to do surgery, it's not all make believe. The point is more that it is overprescribed and that most nonspecific back pain does not correlate well with imaging "abnormalities" and surgery may be the wrong treatment.

Labral tears however are also commonly asymptomatic and occur in a large fraction of athletes and people who train. I don't think surgerizing those is usually indicated.

Yeah, fortunately went away. For me it would always appear after like 30s of being on the page, meaning I would have to reload all the time while reading comments. Effective way for me to break out of the mindless scrolling though. I'm almost said they unfucked it.

It seems rather obvious that skipping breakfast is not causally related to obesity, rather it maybe correlates with other behaviors that are.

nope

> in place of animal protein

makes it sound like this is unrelated to soy specifically and more about displacing less healthful things (like higher saturated fat and caloric animal sources)

That’s fair. Re-reading the citation: tofu and soy milk contains very low amount of fibers so it’s probably not a greet exemple to illustrate "soy protein" if the fibers are at play. Or they aren’t. A dive into the source seems reasonable.

Note that saturated fat is also present in plants based food like peanut butter, although that one also contains tons of fibers (absent in animal sources). Coconut oil on the other hand is a tasty evil.

Read further research, there are some meta reviews. Soy protein yields results that other plant proteins don't.

> Everyone's back is screwed up

its bad framing to label this as "degenerative" and "screwed up" as nowadays we learn that there are probably more age-related. As you say, they correlate very poorly with pain.

Most people don't exercise to preserve muscle mass and function and especially don't do full range of motion resistance training, most of this is probably preventable.

This is well known for spine issues in general: MRI is super unspecific, and the older you get, the more interesting things you can find on the scans. Even if you're fully asymptomatic. So such findings are now better reframed as age-related changed rather than pathologies. The fact that every radiologist will highlight different things also doesn't help.

This is in fact one reason why you don't want an MRI if the outcome does not change what you do (i.e. sports related injuries or non specific low back pain). You will just nocebo yourself into thinking you have problems that are not real, because the belief in the answer donut is so strong.

That makes perfect sense to me.

One nit: this happened to me maybe 20 years ago. It wasn’t even an age-related change. I think it was more like a changing idea of the range of normal human anatomy.