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?
In: 1194
There isn’t really a way for food to “pass through”. If your body doesn’t burn it or store it then you’ll have sugar and fat building up in your blood to the point where it kills you very quickly.
There is a circumstance in type one diabetics who don’t take their insulin where fat builds up to the point where their blood gets so thick that it’s like custard and often times their sugar levels reach over 1000. This is essentially what would happen if you didn’t store or burn your food.
Another interesting point that is slowly being worked on is inhibiting an enzyme that processes sugar. This method has been used in mice successfully but not humans yet. The enzyme “fructokinase” breaks down sugar so your body can use it as fuel and inhibiting this enzyme in mice caused them to pee out the sugar and they lost weight as a result. The implication of this in humans,if they can pull it off, is it would be very helpful for diabetics in managing their blood sugar, but could also reduce non alcoholic fatty liver disease considerably in people with a high sugar diet as well as contributing to weight loss. Like I said, this isn’t possible yet, but it’s the closest thing to what you’re asking about.
The problem at the moment is that it is in your body’s best interest to accept all calories because it evolved in a time when food was hard to find and it takes a long time for evolution to take effect. The better solution would be for people to stop eating processed food but that’s just not going to happen. And if the body did evolve to let your food “pass through” and a famine hit, a shitload of people would die because they wouldn’t be storing food as fat anymore and it would be much easier to starve to death
Latest Answers