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

Cause there’s never been a point in human history where food was so abundant that we could eat enough to jeopardize our health, at least not on a macro scale. Thus, there was no selective pressure to develop any mechanisms that “limited” the amount of fat our bodies could store. Fat was only ever a *good* thing for us and so we only ever evolved to store as much fat as we could. Fat has only become a detriment to a significant portion of our population in the last 100 years or so which is not nearly enough time to select against traits that cause fat to grow.

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