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

To quote the excellent HBO show Chrenobyl. “We’re dealing with something that has never occured on this planet before.” There simply is no evolved mechanism to do this because it involves something being true that has only been true for 100 years: an abundance of easily accessible food. For billions of years the opposite has been true.

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