Causes of obesity

Causes of obesity are important to know and avoid, in order to achieve perfect health.

1. Overeating - the positive energy balance for an extended period of time, combined with a strong tendency among obese individuals to under-report their food intake or to underestimate the energy intake. In order to understand overeating, we need to study the factors leading to this. They can be psychological, social, environmental and genetic factors.

Psychological - we are talking about comfort eating or emotional eating, when eating temporarily take away the negative emotion (anger, stress, loneliness). Overeating will lead to guilt and extra-stress, which will create a vicious cycle leading to emotional or comfort eating. Smelling or seeing food increase impulsivity, increasing tendency to attend food cues, those are external factors which are extremely difficult to avoid, there is no single strategy to work for every problem, and the search and resolve are found individually.

Environmental factors - we are living in an obesogenic environment, with easy access to unhealthy food. Just think about the cinema pressure of watching a movie with popcorn and soda, or a memorable event leading to dining out and having that double fudge brownie gellato with mini marshmallows. Christmas and other major holidays are becoming a contest to create lost of expensive, over the top meals. The industrial processing is increased, we have less natural farming, we improve food shelf life by adding salt, sugar, chemicals or removing dietary fibers. Certain dietary habits lead slowly to a positive energy balance (higher usage of sugar, alcoholic drinks, high fat/high sugar meals known as energy dense meals, low fiber intake, low fruit and veg consumption, not having a proper time schedule of our meals). Add to this your sedentary lifestyle (work behind a desk, car use, watching TV or computer play for long intervals of time, car used to take children to school instead of walking or bike, online shopping instead of going the the physical place to buy it, even electric toothbrushes). Some people started to exercise to offset the decrease in energy expediture, but the ones needing it the most are the one less likely inclined to change their lifestyle and do more exercise.

Genetic factors (Thanks God for twin studies) - the genetic influence is larger than you think, even larger than some external factors, and after overfeeding and underfeeding trials, researchers observed that it is important to know how much fat we store and where we store it. Leptin hormone, as we learned already in previous posts, increase when we are fasting, creating a sensation of hunger, There are some rare cases where the leptin is absent (MC4A inactive gene), and the individual is always hungry. We are talking about 5% of all the obesity cases that exists due to this mutation. People with unfavorable genetics are more prone to overeat and environmental factors explain the overall increase in obesity prevalence, while the genetic factors explain the inter-individual differences.

But you need to know that heritability is not destiny, and can be improved by adopting healthy habits. Creating habits that are long lasting is a skill and can be improved through learning. 

Next post: possible solutions for obesity.