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

Because we never needed that. For *millions* of years, the strategy that worked was “eat all the calories you can find”. And that only became a non-ideal strategy like 50-100 years ago. So we’re all still running the programs that served the last 1000 generations of ancestors really well, up until like 2 seconds ago in evolutionary time when calories became cheap, easy, and everywhere.

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