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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So there are a lot of good answers in this thread already, but I want to add one thing that no one is mentioning: we don’t know that excess fat in and of itself is actually unhealthy.
We know that the things that *lead* to excess fat are unhealthy: lack of exercise, overeating sugary or extremely fatty foods, etc. And we know that people who are fat tend to be less healthy and at higher risk of certain health problems. But we don’t know that the “being fat” is actually the cause of their unhealthiness or just a by product of it.
The reality may be that our bodies don’t have a mechanism in place to stop excess fat from accumulating because excess fat isn’t actually that big of a deal.
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