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WEIGHT LOSS
The American researcher who found the gene linked to
obesity in mice argues people can do very little to change their body weight.We
are getting fatter and fatter. Advertising campaigns say they are. So do
officials and the scientists they rely on. But Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity
researcher at Rockefeller University, argues that contrary to popular opinion,
national data do not show Americans growing uniformly fatter. Instead, he says,
the statistics demonstrate clearly that while the very fat are getting fatter,
thinner people have remained pretty much the same. As an obesity researcher, he
might be expected to endorse the prevailing view that obesity in the United
States is out of control. But Friedman says he is outraged by the acceptance of
what he sees as a hurtful myth, one that encourages people to believe that
if you are fat, it is your fault. The obesity arena "is so political,so rife
with misinformation and disinformation", he
says. Friedman points to careful statistical analyses of the changes in body weights from
1991. At the lower end of the weight distribution, nothing has
changed. As you move up the scale, a few additional kilograms start to show up,
but even at midrange, people today are just two or three kilograms heavier than
they were in 1991. Only with the massively obese, the very top of the
distribution, is there a substantial increase in weight, about 11 to 13
kilograms. As a result, the curve of body weight has been pulled slightly to the
right, with more people shifting up a few kilograms to cross the line that
experts use to divide normal from obese. In 1991, 23% of Americans fell into the
obese category: now 31% do, a more than 30% increase. But the average weight of
the population has just increased by just three to four kilograms since
1991. Jeffrey Friedman left clinical medicine in 1980 after
discovering that his true passion was the laboratory. By 1981, he had begun his
scientific carer and within a few years he was taking on what
seemed like an onerus task, finding a gene whose absense made mice grow massively
obese. Body weight he says, is genetically
determined, as tightly regulated as height. Genes control not only the metabolic
rate at which you burn food. When it comes to eating, free will is an illusion.
People can exert a level of control over their weight within perhaps a four to
seven kilogram range. But expecting an obese person to decide to simply eat less
and exercise more to get below the obesity range, the overweight range? It
virtually never happens, any weight that is lost almost invariably comes
right back. The same goes for gaining weight in general. A person who has the
genes to be thin is not going to get fat because portion sizes increase. It
makes no scientific sense. But isn't it true that we can decide to eat or not,
choosing to skip dinner, say, or pass up dessert? Isn't that free will? Not
really, Friedman says. The control mechanisms for body weight operate over
months, even years not day by day or meal by meal."People live in the moment,
they lose weight over the short term and say that they have exercised
willpower,"he says. But over the long term, the body's intrinsic controls win
out. And just as willpower cannot make fat people thin, a lack of it does not
make thin people fat. No one he says, can consciously calibrate their food
intake as precisely as the body does naturally. Most peoples weight remains
steady, within about seven kilograms, year in year out. But when people count
calories they typically err by about 10%. For someone who eats 750000 calories
in a year, that 10 % error would add up to 75000 calories, or about
11 kg.
Obesity Friedman says is a problem; fat
people are derided and they have health risks like diabetes and heart disease.
But it does no one any good to exaggerate the extent of obesity or to blame the
obese for being fat. "Before calling it an epidemic, people really need to
understand what the numbers do and don't say,"he says.
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