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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There are a few reasons.
The main one is that there was no evolutionary advantage to having an upper limit on fat storage until very recently, and evolution is not survival of the “fittest”, it is survival of the “good enough to pump out at least one round of kids.”
Secondly, the cells that make up fat tissue have their own survival drive. A human is just a collection of single cellular colonies. Each one of those colonies has a survival drive of its own.
The body overrides those survival drives with chemical signals and occasionally direct intervention from the immune system, but if resources are abundant cells will do what cells do and replicate.
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