eli5: Why will the body continue to store excess fat to the point where it jeopardizes the person’s health?

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I understand food wasn’t always so abundant, and humans were well served to store excess consumed energy as fat for later use. What I don’t understand is why the body keeps storing fat to the point where a person becomes morbidly obese and it puts their entire health at risk. Why isn’t there a point where the body just let’s the extra calories pass through without saving for later?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Humans didn’t evolve in an environment where abundant food was a threat to reproduction. So long as humans are able to reproduce before the storage of excess fat becomes a problem, there isn’t really any evolutionary advantage to not storing fat. Even after the rise of agriculture, famine and nutritional scarcity have been relatively common until about 200 years ago.

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