fat - 3 Quarks Daily

by Carol A. Westbrook

Are you pleasantly plump? Rubinesque? Chubby? Weight-challenged? Or, to state it bluntly, just plain fat? Have you spent a lifetime being nagged to stop eating, start exercising and lose some weight? Have you been accused of lack of willpower, laziness, watching too much TV, overeating and compulsive behavior? If you are among the 55% of Americans who are overweight, take heart. You now have an excuse: blame it on your genes.

Fatkids It seems obvious that obesity runs in families; fat people have fat children, who produce fat grandchildren. Scientific studies as early as the 1980's suggested that there was more to it than merely being overfed by fat, over-eating parents; the work suggested that fat families may be that way because they have genes in common. Dr. Albert J Stunkard, a pioneering researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who died this year, did much of this early work. Stunkard showed that the weight of adopted children was closer to that of their biologic parents than of their adoptive parents. Another of his studies investigated twins, and found that identical twins–those that had the same genes–had very similar levels of obesity, whereas the similarity between non-identical twins was no greater than that between their non-twin siblings. It was pretty clear to scientists by this time that there was likely to be one or more genes that determined your level of obesity.

In spite of the compelling evidence, it has been difficult to identify the actual genes that cause us to be overweight. This is due partly to the fact that lifestyle and environment are such strong influences on our weight that they can obscure the genetic effects, making it difficult to dissociate genetic from environmental effects. But the main reason it has been difficult to find the fat gene is because there is probably not just one gene for obesity, as is the case for other diseases such as ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). There seem to be many forms of obesity, determined by an as yet unknown number of genes, so finding an individual gene is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

by Tara* Kaushal

Some thoughts on diet and exercise, food and drink, and health. Conceptual image by Sahil Mane Photography.

I've been on one diet or the other since I was in my teens. Most have been the very definition of crash (cigarettes and Diet Coke for a week, anyone?) and, later, I've tried more wholesome, longer-term lifestyle ones (that I would soon abandon and revert to my yoyo crash-trash diet cycle). First, it was only for aesthetic reasons, to lose weight; the lifestyle diets, Eat More Weigh Less and the like, started when I started to encompass health and fitness as a goal for my body (duh)!

Diet vs. Exercise: A Gendered Choice?

While all of us recognise that the key to a healthy body is a combination of good-for-you food and exercise (and not smoking, limited drinking, etc, and the absence of genetic and birth defects) most people fall in to one or the other category—some preferring exercise, unable to control their need to eat, drink and be merry; others preferring to diet or at least practice diet control, unable or unwilling to exercise. There are the some that do both, as we all should, and those, of course, that do neither.

I've realised that the choice, whether to diet or exercise, both or neither, is quite personality driven. Dieting is passive, to not eat; exercise is active, to get off your butt… And, in light of this fact, I hate to admit that my observation, that more women choose to diet, more men choose to exercise, falls in to gender stereotypes. Though there are exceptions all around, and my casual survey, of friends and boyfriends, and numbers from my local gym, has a small sample size, one could analyse my observation to bits. Is it because women are more driven by aesthetics, we are judged on them from an early age; and power, muscle, sports are traditionally male? Then there are the questions of time, priorities and lifestyle factors, and socioeconomic and cultural positioning. (More about the question of genderism in sports.) Also, men or women, individuals negotiate a complex social, familial, ethical, religious, consumerist, emotional, psychological and gendered relationship with food and drink.

Tag: fat

Do I Look Fat in These Genes?

Monday, March 10, 2014

The Body Complex