Survival traits that are not currently socially acceptable*.
Survival traits that are not currently socially acceptable*. Exercise is still good for you, but for some people, no matter how hard they work out, they will never be tiny.
"In fact, while women who had low- and intermediate-levels of obesity-related genetic variants lost weight and fat mass and increased their lean mass, women with the highest levels of those variants gained weight and lean mass, while their fat mass stayed steady."
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-sn-obesity-genetics-resistance-exercise-leaner-20150430-story.html
*Being able to keep fat stores is probably an evolutionary adaptation to the fact that for the overwhelming majority of humanity's existence, you would have to endure periods of food scarcity or starvation. Still true in many parts of the world. Plus, fat functions both calorically and metabolically to reproduce or raise young.
"In fact, while women who had low- and intermediate-levels of obesity-related genetic variants lost weight and fat mass and increased their lean mass, women with the highest levels of those variants gained weight and lean mass, while their fat mass stayed steady."
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-sn-obesity-genetics-resistance-exercise-leaner-20150430-story.html
*Being able to keep fat stores is probably an evolutionary adaptation to the fact that for the overwhelming majority of humanity's existence, you would have to endure periods of food scarcity or starvation. Still true in many parts of the world. Plus, fat functions both calorically and metabolically to reproduce or raise young.
Yeah, what these ladies are going through certainly sounds familiar. I'd love to see the next step of this study. I'm not really interested in just blaming everything on my genes, but if there was something that I could do to counter-act said genes, I would certainly be interested in considering it.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to see an approach that didn't focus on appearance, and stopped relying on simple actuarial tables of age, height, weight, and associations. Instead, we could look at things like exercise capacity, endurance, metabolic efficiency, lean muscle mass, visceral fat measurements, body fat percentage, or a bunch of other things that we could explore and validate as measures of health. What we do now is look for measures of not health, and that, I think, is part of why everything is about how wrong you are and what's wrong with you and what you do that is bad and you're a bad person, etc. Also, we seem to think that we should never have any disease, dysfunction, or disability. That's ridiculous. Maximizing ability and function is a far more sensible approach.
ReplyDeleteThe tables are incredibly frustrating, especially when, like me, you gain lean mass for a long time without losing fat. But ultimately, when you have been following all the "rules" of healthy living for years and continued to move down all those tables, there has got to be something diagnosable and treatable to improve your chances, rather than being dismissed as a failure. So far, the only things I've actually seen work for people short of lap band surgery are those Medical Weight Loss places, which I find highly suspect and not a long-term solution, either - especially if it is a genetic issue.
ReplyDeleteI would say the point of better understanding the genetics is to address our incredibly poor understanding of weight and its relationship with health. Other than the obvious outliers, of course.
ReplyDeleteThe recommendations that drove the last 30+ years of no eggs, no butter, no fat, no cholesterol turn out to be not based on any reproducible scientific evidence that this would decrease the incidence or prevalence of heart disease, nor that it would decrease the morbidity or deaths from heart disease. And that was what was driving all of that. Heart disease was the number one killer and they wanted to do something about that.
Unfortunately, guess what? It's still number one. That whole sense of failure, and believe me, I am familiar with it, both as its subject and being taught how to "counsel" others is one of the major manifestations of what is so wrong about our whole approach and mind set toward this. Moreover, the health industry, the insurance industry, and the government are looking at tying your access to care to whether you meet their guidelines, however valid they may or may not be.* (Sick people cost money, and the goal is to decrease the spending of money.)
Fat people could be charged more money for their insurance, for example, because obviously they are only fat because they are lazy, immoral, and self-indulgent and would have no serious health problems if they'd just lose all that weight. Interestingly, they don't seem to be looking at charging anorexics more, even though they, too, have multiple chronic health problems related to disordered eating and extreme weight status.
That sounds horrible, but it is the opposite side of the coin, and it shows just how screwed up our attitudes toward weight and health and appearance are. Those attitudes even influence researchers.
*They are also looking at tying how much they pay your care providers, primarily doctors at the moment, to their "outcomes". That is a great incentive to psychologically and emotionally abuse your patients into whatever it takes, no matter the other effects it has, to lose weight, since that's an outcome. (If you call it BMI, that's still weight based, so please, give me a break.) All the patients with high blood pressure, diabetes, statistical obesity - one of the quality measures they will judge doctors on is if they get on each patient's case every time they see them about their weight.
We don't actually have an idea of how to determine what is a healthy weight for each person. We don't even know, except, again, at extreme highs and lows, exactly what is or isn't good, or maybe meaningless about weight. We do not have good substitute measures for health and longevity and function. Right now, one of the primary ones we use is weight. We need more scientifically, reproducibly validated measures for health and function. And we need to abstract the moral and popularity judgments and just look at health and function.
That better understanding can't happen quick enough for me, I'm afraid.
ReplyDelete