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

For tens of thousands of years. Humans lived without a lot of food security, fat and sugar wasn’t a staple of our diets.

Storing a lot of fat for when you don’t have food was essential to survival. The ones that couldn’t store a lot of energy for when they didn’t have food died off. There was never a need for the body to cut off excess fat, because having excess fat was never an issue to our survival.

It’s only in the modern era, where we have an abundance of fatty foods and not needing a lot of physical activity where obesity is a huge issue. In the grand scheme of things, we’ve only been in this state for a few generations. Our diet and the work that we do has massively shifted from a hundred years ago.

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