Eli5:What prevents our bodies to get rid of excess food/calories that are not necessary, and instead turns it into fat?

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Eli5:What prevents our bodies to get rid of excess food/calories that are not necessary, and instead turns it into fat?

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8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Interestingly evolutionary, fat used to be something to desire and gather as much as you can, but now the societal norms have shifted so far from that that people wonder what the hell our bodies are doing, storing all this fat.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Millions of years of evolution where we never knew when/if our next meal would be coming, versus the last 3/4 of a century or so where sugar-laden fruits are easily accessible year-round and eating a pound of fatty meat at every meal is just one quick stop at the supermarket away.

Our bodies simply weren’t built to eat this way this much, and evolution is a sllooowwww process.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A few billion years of evolution, during which starvation was a very real danger, and food was often available infrequently, but in large amounts.
Every single one of your ancestors managed to NOT STARVE (at least not before reproducing), often by stuffing themselves on the rare occasions when they could, so they could survive the other 90% of the time when there wasn’t much food available.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Fat is what keeps us alive when we have no access to food. It’s a built-in survival storage system for many, if not all, animals. Including humans. We view fat as bad, but it’s not. Too much of it is bad. But then too much of anything is bad. That’s why it’s “too much”.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Why would our bodies waste such useful resources???

Anonymous 0 Comments

Evolution. At some point in our history our species had times when food was sparse. Those that could efficiently store calories as fat lived and those that couldn’t, starved. It’s pretty recent that many of us lived in a situation without food scarcity.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your body has no way of knowing that it is excess calories that are not needed. We evolved in a state where starvation was an almost constant threat. As such it stores excess calories as fat for use when food is not available.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Through most of human history and that of our evolutionary ancestry, storing energy was beneficial to survival since food was more difficult to come by. As a result, we evolved to store excess calories for future energy. But now we live in a society of abundance where it is not as useful.