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The brain controls body weight and obesity by regulating intestinal fat absorption
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this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Wtf?
Yes, there's a lot involved, but excusing away obesity as genetic ignores that 99% of it is behavioural. Just look at the explosion of Type II diabetes, which is pretty much all caused by diet.
Growing up, there were exactly 2 obese kids in our school, from first grade through 12th (across all grades). Those kids had a genetic cause to their obesity.
Today we have a much higher rate - I'm not buying that genetics drastically changed over the last few decades.
The elephant in the room is a combination of bullshit from governmental agencies (the lie of the food pyramid anyone?), nonsense from the medical community (fat in our diet isn't the driver of cardiovascular disease or obesity, it's unstable glucose, something that's been well known since the early 90's), pushing a high-carb diet in the 80's, which was a lie that ran counter to what doctors advised for diabetetics since the 1930's!
Dude, go talk to a bariatric specialist. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
You ever even look into the advances in bariatric medicine the last decade? Ever help treat a bariatric patient? 99% behaviorial is utter bullshit, and does not match currer best information.
Genetics didn't likely change, but epigenetics is how our systems respond to conditions in and around us. And that absolutely can and has changed in the last fifty years, and was changing before that.
How our food is process impacts the entire endocrine system, our microbiota in not only the gut, but the entire body. We've got massive increases in environmental contamination over the same kind of timeline, which can not only directly effect systemic function, it can change epigenetics in the womb, and the actual genes themselves.
99% behaviorial my hairy ass.
Even that part is influenced by how food is processed, since there's enough shit in anything you grow, even when you're growing it yourself to play a factor. Actual processed foods are literally designed to trigger our brains and kick off addictions to the added fats and sugars.
That kind of bullshit is the same kind of brainless thing that leads to people thinking vaccines cause autism. There's a metric buttload of data pointing to both weight gain and difficulty in weight loss being heavily influenced by external factors, but you're in here like "nuh-uh, my data set of two fat kids in school says no"
It's both a behavioural issue and a complex bodily disorder with many external factors...
Biologically, weight is pretty much an effect of calories in and calories out. If you lock someone up and give them too little food, they'll generally get thin. The body can't create fat if you don't feed it and it can't work without burning energy. Physics.
But losing weight when you're not locked in a cell with someone else controlling your food availability is really hard. Not eating when you're hungry is hard. The facility of getting healthy food that makes it easier is socio-economical. etc
It's like running a marathon is "just" about starting to run and not stopping until you reach the finish line. It's trivial on one level, really hard on another. It's simple physics AND a complex web of genetic factors, motivation, knowledge, upbringing, etc
So most people are technically and biologically capable of losing weight, but most people are also practically and statistically not very successful at it.
Most popular diets work under controlled conditions, for the people who adhere to them; but most popular diets also don't work in practice, as it's too hard for people to diet for the rest of their life.
Behavioural ≠ easy