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
So, lots of answers revolve around evolution and how our ancestors never needed to burn excess. Is it possible that some point in the very distant futre we will evolve to do that?
Because the human body doesn’t understand the concept of excess fat. That has literally never been an evolutionary pressure we’ve had to deal with before now. Evolution generally doesn’t create countermeasures for never before seen problems.
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.
Evolution isn’t ‘done’ with any animal including humans. We’ve developed methods and technologies that enable us to produce and distribute more calories for everyone to consume than ever before. It’s not a failure of evolution.
Those humans who can adapt best to this environment (whether it be consume lots of calories and metabolize it all quickly before it’s unhealthy, or mentally resist the urge to consume excessive calories, etc) will then produce more people who are more advantageous to a calorie-surplus world.
Because our body expects our brain to say “Hey stupid, eat less food.”
On a more serious note, if we are moving as much as we are designed to do it is almost impossible to gain much fat. You need to understand our body is not designed to be sitting around all day. We are designed to be in constant motion while we are awake. We can run for ridiculous distances, we can train our bodies to do incredible things and produce quite a bit of strength. But the one thing we are not designed to deal with is sitting around on our ass eating an over abundance of food.
It Takes a loooong time for our evolution to catch up, we’ve only had an abundance of food for a very short time.
Your body treats the problem of too much energy the way you handle the problem of too much money — it’s just not a concept you’re equipped to deal with so you just stash as much of it away as possible in case you need it later.
And if your supply of money gets cut off – because say you lost your job – your first move isn’t to empty out your savings. You don’t know how long it’s going to be until you get paid again, so your first move is to cut spending and try to get more money so your reserves last as long as possible. Your body does the same thing — it doesn’t know your last meal wasn’t the last one for a very long time, so if you get hungry it cuts energy spending (you get tired and slow down) and you start looking for more energy (you get hungry). That’s why you can’t just stop eating until you burn off your fat reserves — your body is trying to keep you alive by making those reserves last as long as possible.
A famous quote (with my additions in parentheses): “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions (eat as much as possible), medieval institutions (three meals a day) and godlike technology (DoorDash).”
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.
Because the food only became abundant in the last like 30 years. Evolution just hasn’t caught up with this. And this kind of thing was never ever an issue before.
Latest Answers