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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Obesity itself isn’t necessarily a health risk. Studies have shown that when you consider people’s healthy habits, health and risk of death is very similar between obese and average bmi, and “overweight” is the healthiest category. There is correlation between bmi and health problems but that is not causation, and it makes sense that disability could lead to weight gain. There is something called the “obesity paradox” that extra weight is protective in many kinds of health crises. The lowest bmi categories are always the most deadly. For example someone gets a terrible flu, excess weight means the body can easily sustain itself through the illness and is less likely to die.
We have millions of ancestors who survived famine. We are not past famine as humanity. A lot of weight stigma and health concern is misguided, systemic and social factors have the biggest impact on our health, concern over an obesity epidemic has spread deadly stigma. For example during the height of COVID, many hospitals had bmi restrictions for access to ventilators. But when scientists looked back on the data, there was no real difference in survival rates on ventilators by bmi. So all those people refused care because of bmi died needlessly.
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