Thanks so much for posting about the article - I read it on Sunday and posting about it was on my 'to-do' list.
It's definitely worth a read! Unfortunately, due to copyright laws, we can't copy the whole article here, but you can read it on the NYT site:
Fat Factors. I think you have to register in order to read it, but registration is free.
What I took from the article is that obesity is a multifaceted problem, with multiple causes. The article focuses on the possibility of viruses being responsible for obesity to some extent, along with the usual culprits of genes and environment.
A few things that really jumped out at me:
Quote:
Gordon likes to explain his hypothesis of what gut microbes do by talking about Cheerios. The cereal box says that a one-cup serving contains 110 calories. But it may be that not everyone will extract 110 calories from a cup of Cheerios. Some may extract more, some less, depending on the particular combination of microbes in their guts. “A diet has a certain amount of absolute energy,” he said. “But the amount that can be extracted from that diet may vary between individuals — not in a huge way, but if the energy balance is affected by just a few calories a day, over time that can make a big difference in body weight.”
I guess a calories ISN'T a calorie for some of us. I've always known that calorie
expenditure is highly individual (which is why metabolic calculators are so inaccurate) but I hadn't realized that the effect of calorie
input can also vary from person to person:
Quote:
Current public-health messages ... make losing weight sound easy, just a simple matter of doing the math and applying some willpower. A pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, government documents say, and if you cut down a week’s worth of food intake or increase exercise by a total of 3,500 calories, then, voilà — you lose a pound ... (But) for some people 3,500 calories might not equal a pound of fat, and 150 fewer calories a day might not mean they’ll lose 10 pounds in a year.
Perhaps this is why the 'math' of weight loss just doesn't work for some of us? And theoretically we should have faded away years ago - but we're still here?
And of interest for maintainers:
Quote:
According to Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University who was involved in the discovery of the first human gene implicated in obesity, if you take two nonobese people of the same weight, they will require different amounts of food depending on whether or not they were once obese. It goes in precisely the maddening direction you might expect: formerly fat people need to eat less than never-fat people to maintain exactly the same weight. In other words, a 150-pound woman who has always weighed 150 might be able to get away with eating, say, 2,500 calories a day, but a 150-pound woman who once weighed more — 20 pounds more, 200 pounds more, the exact amount doesn’t matter — would have to consume about 15 percent fewer calories to keep from regaining the weight. The change occurs as soon as the person starts reducing, Leibel said, and it “is not proportional to amount of weight lost, and persists over time.”
(my emphasis added)
This is something I talk about all the time ... our bodies are different and the cards are biologically stacked against us keeping weight off. Which is not to say it can't be done - look at all of us who are doing it! - but it's hard and takes thought, effort, and planning. Fact: we have to eat less and move more than 'normal' (never overweight) people in order to maintain. Members of the National Weight Control Registry (male and female) average between 1400 and 1700 calories per day, with an hour of exercise. You KNOW that's less food and more exercise than that of the average normal weight person!
Biology sets the context but obesity still boils down to whether a person eats too much or exercises enough:
Quote:
But where does this leave us, exactly? Whatever the reason for any one individual’s tendency to gain weight, the only way to lose the weight is to eat less and exercise more. Behavioral interventions are all we’ve got right now. Even the supposedly biological approach to weight loss — that is, diet drugs — still works (or, more often, fails to work) by affecting eating behavior, through chemicals instead of through willpower. If it turns out that microbes are implicated in obesity, this biological approach will become more direct, in the form of an antiviral agent or a microbial supplement. But the truth is, this isn’t going to happen any time soon.
On an individual level and for the foreseeable future, if you want to lose weight, you still have to fiddle with the energy equation. Weight still boils down to the balance between how much a particular body needs to maintain a certain weight and how much it is fed. What complicates things is that in some people, for reasons still not fully understood, what their bodies need is set unfairly low. It could be genes; it could be microbes; it could be something else entirely.
The bottom line is that this is fascinating research into the CAUSES of obesity but the CURE still lies our hands. Perhaps someday the reserach will lead to new treatments, but we're not there yet.
Check out the article - it's quite worthwhile.
