Obesity, or why it's so hard to lose weight (Part I)

Most people know by now that obesity can lead to all sorts of diseases... type 2 diabetes, heart disease, etc. The articles that state this are abundant in the media today. There are many different articles, but somehow they all have the same message—lose weight or else! Often present in these articles is the obligatory image of some overweight person's body from the neck down. It is as if the readers should not regard these bodies as people but rather as nameless, headless blobs.

There is a definite negative attitude toward overweight and obese people in our culture today. A particular example is the the harsh words April Branum and her husband were exposed to after the media announced her unexpected pregnancy. Branum was the 420 lb. woman who gave birth March 2nd of this year, just two days after learning she was pregnant. According to Scott Martindale of The Orange County Register, some comments posted on OCRegister.com were very negative of Branum, calling her disgusting and even making deragotory comments about her ability as a mother.

The overweight and obese are often judged harshly, and I've seen very little in the media that really shows someone's struggle to lose weight or anything that tries to explain why it's so hard to lose weight. An exception to that was a recent PBS special, FAT: WHAT NO ONE IS TELLING YOU, which gave a more human side to the obesity epidemic. By highlighting several people's lives, who either have or had weight problems, and by interviewing experts in the field, it seemed to point out that there is no magic answer to the obesity epidemic. However, I would have liked to seen more scientific explanations on that conclusion. So, the PBS special and the story of April Branum have inspired me to use my first few posts to explain obesity in more scientific detail.

It's easy to gain weight both because of our environment (lack of physical activity, high caloric foods) and because of our genes. Our ancestors had the opposite environment, higher activity days and very little food available, and therefore the hypothesis is that those who survived and reproduced often had better means of storing and conserving energy. There's evidence to support this. The Pima Native American population in Arizona has a problem with obesity. Even though their diet and exercise levels are similar to Americans, they have double the obesity rate. Working for the National Institute of Health, Dr. Eric Ravussin, who has a PhD in physiology, found that the Pima store fat very well, much better than most other ethnic groups. While this served them well when they ate a desert diet, today it leads to a population where 70% of the individuals are obese. So obviously there's a genetic component to obesity, although it's rarely as obvious as with the Pima. Researchers like Ravussin are still determining what exact genes are involved in the regulation of body weight.

I realize this first post is long, so for now, I'm stopping here. My next post is going to be on how the brain is involved in regulating your body weight. I'm also going to go into more detail on fad diets, and why they don't work. For more on what I wrote today, see the references below.



References:

April Branum's story
The website for FAT: WHAT NO ONE IS TELLING YOU
More on the Pima