I just watched an episode of House and he diagnosed a girl with Cushing’s – an illness that can cause obesity.
How is that possible? I was under the impression that our bodies use energy we get from food, and if it doesn’t get the food it’ll burn fat resulting in us getting slimmer – how can a disease change that?
How does it not go against some laws of thermodynamics? Maybe I’m just being silly.
In: Biology
Scientists have been searching for the “Holy Grail” of finding the right gene combinations to tell the body turn off the mechanisms that tell it to just eat and eat and “store fat for winter”. It seems to have this weird left over genetic trait from long ago in our genetic history that stubbornly tell the body to eat and store fat. If they could just find and shut off those particular switches we could solve a whole slew of medical problems for the human race. Look I know I’m hugely over simplyfying it and probably mis-stating it. But that’s the gist of it.
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