Rather than being some kind of disorder or a lack of willpower, weight gain is largely a normal response of normal people to an abnormal situation.
It has been said that “Nothing in biology brands “It doesn’t make sense, except in the light of evolution.” The known genetic contribution to obesity may be small, but in a sense, you could argue that it’s all in our genes. Overconsumption of available calories may be programmed into our DNA. We were born to eat.
Throughout human history and beyond, we have lived in survival mode, in unpredictable scarcity. We have been programmed with a powerful drive to eat as much as we can while we can and simply store the rest for later. Food availability can never be taken for granted, so those who ate more in the moment and were better able to store more fat for the future might better survive subsequent shortages to pass on their genes. Thus, generation after generation, millennium after millennium, those with less appetite may have died off, while those who gorged themselves may have selectively lived long enough to pass on their genetic predisposition to eat and store more calories. This may be how we evolved into such voracious calorie-conserving machines. Now that we no longer live in such hard times, however, we ourselves are no longer so thin.
What I just described is the concept of the “thrifty gene” proposed in 1962. As I explain in my video The thrifty gene theory: survival of the fattesthe suggests that obesity is the result of a “mismatch between the environment in which humans evolved and our modern environment,” as be A polar bear in the jungle. All that fur and fat may have given polar bears an advantage in the Arctic, but they would be decidedly disadvantageous in the Congo. Similarly, the propensity to put on weight may have been an advantage in prehistoric times, but it can become a disadvantage when our scarcity-sculpted biology is dropped into the land of plenty. So it’s not about gluttony or laziness. Obesity may simply be be “a normal response to an abnormal environment.”
Much of our physiology is finely tuned to stay within a narrow range of upper and lower limits. If we are too hot, we sweat; if we are too cold, we shiver. Our body has mechanisms to keep us in balance. In contrast, our bodies have had little reason to evolve an upper limit to the accumulation of body fat. Early on, there may have been evolutionary pressures to keep us agile and flexible in the face of predation, but thanks to things like guns and fire, we haven’t had to. outrun For roughly two million years, we have lived with so many saber-toothed tigers in our species that we may have placed a one-sided selective pressure on our genes that forces us to eat every morsel in front of us and store as many calories as possible in our bodies.
What was once adaptive is now a problem, or at least that’s all there is to it. says The thrifty gene hypothesis, which originated more than half a century ago, is…provides a simple and elegant explanation for the modern obesity epidemic and was quickly accepted by both scientists and laypeople.” Although researcher James Neel later distanced from the original proposal, the basic premise, despite remaining Although largely theoretical, it is still “widely accepted” by the scientific community and its implications are profound.
In 2013, the American Medical Association voted classify obesity as a disease (going (against the advice of their own Science and Public Health Council). Not that it necessarily matters what we call it, but disease implies dysfunction. Drugs and bariatric surgery are not correcting an abnormality in human physiology. Our bodies are simply doing what they were designed to do in the face of excess calories. Rather than being some kind of disorder, weight gain is To a large extent, it is a “normal response of normal people to an abnormal environment.” As you can see below and at minute 4:12 of my video, More than 70 percent of Americans are I am overweight now. It’s normal.
“A body winning Body weight when there is an excess of calories available for consumption behaves normally. Efforts to reduce this weight gain with medications [or surgery] “They are not efforts to correct an anomaly in human physiology, but rather to deconstruct and reconstruct its normal operations at their core.”
If weight gain is largely a normal response by normal people to an abnormal situation, what exactly is that abnormal situation? Processed, high-calorie foods (I’ll let you figure out the acronym). That’s the topic we’ll address next.
This is the third in a series of 11 videos on the history of the obesity epidemic. If you missed the first two, check out The role of diet versus exercise in the obesity epidemic and The role of genes in the obesity epidemic.
There are eight more to come. See related posts below.
