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

From an evolutionary perspective, it likely just never came up, or was rare enough to not be selected for.

We absolutely survived by holding on to calories from more abundant times, so our bodies adjusted to do that. We just (on an evolutionary scale) never has SO much abundance that we’d get morbidly obese, so we never lost the ability to do that, since we never did it!

Would be interesting to see if we do evolve at some point further, such that our appetites or some other mechanism is selected for to keep our weight down.

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