Obesity

[Aractus]

I saw a family today, parents and 2 pre-teen children, all of them shockingly obese. They were walking, or rather waddling, along the road stuffing their mouths with yet more food. They were British, too.

Now, I'm a believer that adults are entitled to do pretty much what they want with their bodies: drink, smoke, extreme sports etc. I post on a rugby forum and some of the injury anecdotes there are pretty bad. But that's adults. (Who pays for it is a different issue.)

But it seems to me that allowing your children to get that obese, in the knowledge - if they understand it - that the child will likely have multiple health problems, and die young, represents child abuse. If it wasn't for the fact that the care system in Britain is terrible, with very poor outcomes, I'd suggest that the children should be taken into care. As it is, I guess there's not very much that can be done. Maybe social services could intervene.

Very disturbing.

I'd like to point out that you have the pre-conceived belief that people do know how to eat healthily and how to to this for their children.

This is not necessarily true, or not 100% true anyway. Especially with very strong external influences with a vested interest in selling you as much food as possible and maximising profits.

Also there's the perspective of addiction to consider. Our bodies excrete the leptin hormone to regulate our fat storage - part of our bodies homoeostasis, and breaking it - what's termed as "leptin resistance" is the true cause of obesity. Now we can't consciously choose to break any internal conditions of our bodies, especially ones that are held in dynamic equilibrium. If your internal body temperature isn't within 0.5 or so degrees of 37 degrees it would usually indicate illness. Same basic principle with leptin - not producing the correct amount, or not responding the correct way to the hormone is not how our bodies are supposed to behave.

There are theories on how this happens, but no one knows for sure why. What is true, however, is that the same western countries pre-1970's did not have the problem that we do now.

It's also true for animals - if you look at say horses you keep on your farm, and you let them eat as much grass as they want most of them will not become overweight - only a small number will. I don't know what the expected number might be, but let's say it's 5% is what you'd normally expect to see. If however there were 60% instead of 5% overweight then it would mean that this population has something very different about it to the base population. Assuming that it is caused by leptin resistance, you could then look to find out what is causing the problem - now it might be something as simple as a defective gene in that particular breed - that, however, is not a possible explination for humans, because as I just said you could take 1960's USA and compare it directly to 2010's USA - there may be some differences in demographics, etc, but everyone still has the same basic genes and so you wouldn't expect it to be genetic.

With that said, it appears that the body may not respond to refined sugar - so for instance, if you drink a litre of orange juice or coke or anything that's basically sugar-water, your body doesn't produce the correct amount of extra leptin to tell you when you're full, thus you're consuming true empty calories since your body still tells you to eat just as much as if you didn't have any sugar. It may also be true for foods with added sugar. In other words, if you have the same meal with added refined sugar your body doesn't see or count the extra calories when excreting leptin.

The reason why this appears to be the case is that just like ethanol, fructose is only metabolised by the liver, and leptin is excreted by the fat cells so they can only respond to glucose and don't see the fructose.

So, as you can see, most people firstly don't know how to eat better, and also we do not know how to effectively address the problem. Your assertion, also fails to address the problem of overweight 6-month, 9-month and 2-year olds (see this for instance). The theory that parents are over-feeding their children does not explain overweight babies - they don't get over-fed or under-fed, they get fed what they require.