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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Because the cases of being fat to death are so rare in our evolutionary history they have always been outweighed by selection against not storing enough to death. Regular famine was always a common threat. We just crossed the over abundance threshold for most in the last century. Having said that, if we eliminated concentrated industrial fat and sugar sources and made processed food illegal, you would have to work a lot harder at getting fat. So that’s another factor.
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