I swear, there’s something in the air.  Or the water.  Or plastics, I can never tell.

Quick side trip. I’ve had a number of cats (and dogs, but think about cats). Most lived into old age, but a surprising number died of thyroid problems.  Thyroid glands do lots of things, but sometimes, in cats, they go wonky and pump out way too much in hormones.  Hyperthyroidism causes cat’s bodies to, effectively, run too fast.  They lose weight, and start eating and drinking like crazy, but their bodies can’t process enough calories.  Eventually their organs fail — usually their kidneys — and they die.

That’s a pretty weird thing. Cat’s didn’t routinely die of thyroid problems until the last few decades.  Now, around one in three dies of this.  So what’s causing it?

We’re not entirely sure, but one of the likely contenders is a fire-retardant we added to furniture fabric.  We already stopped using that chemical, but anyone with old furniture still has it in their homes as that old furniture sheds fibers.  Why cats?  We guess it’s because they spend a lot of time hanging around the floors, occasionally eating stuff.

There are unanswered questions, but whatever the mechanism, something is affecting our pet’s endocrine system strongly enough to kill about a third of them.

Why is that important?  Because humans have been suffering from endocrine-related issues, too.  Look at the obesity epidemic.  It’s been getting dramatically worse in the last couple of decades, and we don’t know why. Research shows that, for the majority of people, dieting doesn’t work, and exercise doesn’t work. Amazingly, people’s bodies more or less insist on getting heavier, until our organs begin to fail, and we die, too.

I spent last summer training for a marathon.  You know Doctors recommend keeping active to lose weight?  I wasn’t ‘active’, it was serious training.  (And I stopped drinking any alcohol, which especially pissed me off.)  Still, despite running dozens of miles a week, I barely lost any weight.  And I gained it all back in a month.  One data point isn’t conclusive of anything, but it surprised me.

So I can’t explain that obesity mechanism.  I’m only guessing it’s something in the environment.  It’s hardly impossible.  We know that when we banned perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, used in making Teflon), pregnancy problems like low birth weights cleared up measurably.  So we know that many modern chemicals have affected us in unlikely but critical ways.

Something in the air?  Really, it’s all I can think of that explains Trump and the modern GOP.  I mean, something is making us fat, dull, complacent, and just brutally stupid.

Just sayin’.