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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Millions of years of evolution and very little evolutionary pressure in the gene pool because these genes that limit fat storage don’t give a huge benefit with regards to the rate of reproduction
> 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.
You’re assuming the body has logic. It doesn’t have any logic. It just “is” and it does what it does.
In theory, if this became a huge problem to the survival of the species, then one of two things would happen: either (a) some random mutation in a few thousand or millions years would “let the calories pass” or (b) we’d die out.
Fortunately, I don’t think that the number of obese people is enough to kill off the species, and as far as evolution goes, obesity would have to kill them (or enough of us) *before* we procreate. All biology “requires” of us is that we live long enough to make more humans.
Caloric density is a thing, and a reminder that evolution only requires us to reproduce. After we are done reproducing almost all “survival” aspects are irrelevant.
The only reason we have to live quite a bit longer than other species is because our young take a really long time to become self-sufficient.
It’s just not a problem evolution has ever had to solve. Things just don’t “overachieve” that much in nature, so our bodies never developed a mechanism to pump the brakes once we reached the obesity threshold.
It is a breakdown of communication and the output is a contradiction expressed as fatness. It is the body receiving instructions to look left and right at the same time.
Obesity itself isn’t necessarily a health risk. Studies have shown that when you consider people’s healthy habits, health and risk of death is very similar between obese and average bmi, and “overweight” is the healthiest category. There is correlation between bmi and health problems but that is not causation, and it makes sense that disability could lead to weight gain. There is something called the “obesity paradox” that extra weight is protective in many kinds of health crises. The lowest bmi categories are always the most deadly. For example someone gets a terrible flu, excess weight means the body can easily sustain itself through the illness and is less likely to die.
We have millions of ancestors who survived famine. We are not past famine as humanity. A lot of weight stigma and health concern is misguided, systemic and social factors have the biggest impact on our health, concern over an obesity epidemic has spread deadly stigma. For example during the height of COVID, many hospitals had bmi restrictions for access to ventilators. But when scientists looked back on the data, there was no real difference in survival rates on ventilators by bmi. So all those people refused care because of bmi died needlessly.
Because our body is not perfect, just good enough.
And for most of our evolutionary history, this was good enough trait to ensure the survival of species. Morbid obesity was anomaly, so there was no evolutionary pressure to protect against it.
Because the body doesn’t know the difference. You don’t have a secondary conscious brain that can go ‘THIS is survival, this is not’
Brain doesn’t know when to stop, basically.
It is a biological mechanism: store fat for food.
Brain doesn’t know what overweight is. Brain isn’t a computer like we say. It’s a biological mechanism.
That’s why you can suffer brain damage that kills your personality or ability to speak or be functional but body will keep processing nutrients.
That’s it. Brain has no way of differentiating. If YOU, consciousness, the Ego, etc, eats food, body stores fat.
Caveman body evolved to be hoarders of fat so it has energy incase of no food days. Caveman innovations in technology is happening fast. In just around 100 years caveman technology advanced that food became abundant. Caveman evolution got outpaced by this so caveman body still thinks it needs to hoard fat incase of no food days because caveman’s evolution is slow as snail. So caveman’s body still hoard fat even though there is relatively an abundance of food compared to preindustrial age
Not sure if this is helpful, and it’s not a great analogy, but this makes me think of succulents. They have adapted to desert conditions and drought by storing water in their leaves and stems. But if you keep them as a houseplant and you water them too much, they will absorb so much water that their cells explode and die. Their survival instinct is to store water because, in their natural environment, water is scarce. But that instinct doesn’t go away even if it’s getting too much.
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