What causes obesity?
Everyone is wondering why what is causing us all to gain so much weight and looking for THE cause. The truth is that there is no single cause for obesity, despite what some would have you believe. While sugar consumption and obesity rates climbed at roughly the same rate, so did usage of plastics, the size of the company Nike and the number of pieces of home exercise equipment towel holders. But we don’t blame them for our weight gain.
So is it our genes. Not by themselves. After all we have had the same genes for tens of thousands of years. Yet our obesity rates only started seriously climbing about 50 years ago. Wait a second, I was born around that time - maybe that’s it! Could I be the cause of obesity? Hang on let me check with my wife…phew, she says it wasn’t me. Apparently I may be - in her words - ‘stupid’ but I’m no obesity fairy.
But hopefully you see my point. Just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one necessarily leads to the other. Lots of things have changed in our environments. We are sitting more, moving less and have more food available to us than ever before. Add on that we are stressed in different ways than our anscestors were and we may be closer to the answer.
Our genetics obviously play a role. We couldn’t become obese unless we had the genetic potential. Think of it in this way. I won’t ever be able to dunk a basketball — because I don’t have the genetic profile to be able to. I grew to a whopping 5 foot 6 inches tall and don’t have the ability to ‘bounce’ more than a couple of inches off of the ground. Apparently jumping wasn’t important to survive in my family’s native area, but male pattern baldness was.
But as a species, we have hundreds of genes that have been discovered that allow us to be overweight. The more copies each one of us have, the easier it is to become overweight. We all know some really annoying people that can eat whatever they want and never gain any weight. Just like I don’t have the genetic ability to jump, they don’t have a serious genetic ability to gain weight. For the rest of us it took the current environment combined with our genes to get us there. And likely a number of factors, rather than just a single cause.