Fat Genes and the obesity epidemic
Does America want an actual conversation about Fat? That burdensome thing on our thighs, bums, and well for some of us, all over? Or is it easier to blame obese people for their own fate, as we drive through, big gulp, grab and go, and super size our waistlines. Do we really want to hear that yet another gene linked with obesity has been identified? Well, we need to, because corporations are taking advantage of genetics and blaming the victims.
Having a gene, by default, does not mean it is active, or that it will be the one expressed. You can have many genes which don't express and never do anything guilty inside your body. However, certain genes express when stress hormones are introduced. A dormant gene can go to functioning, when the switch is turned on by a stressor, which, is made to preserve you.
Stress hormones are part of evolution, the trigger the fight or flight response, but they do much more, during a time of limited resources those genes would have been vital for preserving what they could, so that you could survive starvation, or limited supplies.
Enter the industrial world. Where genes have no clue that you are just having a bad hair day, that your boss just moved the deadline, or someone dumped a load of extra work on you. Add to that little down time, home life, kids, and more, and you have the perfect scenario for the expression of genes which will make you fat, because they don't know the difference between survival stress, and everyday stress. After all, it's the same hormones at play.
Now add in corporate America and the production of sugar based and fat based foods. How is your body supposed to know what to do with those things? After all, it got the signal for storing, and now you are giving it high fats and sugars. It is doing the job of packing them away, and corporate America keeps them coming. Because business is good.
We live in a low exercise, high work, high fat, high sugar, low de-stressing world, and what can the mechanics of evolution do but their natural evolved jobs. That is without ever adding factors like, other genetic of age onset disease. Our culture is literally killing millions of people, and the blame, we like to put on them.
These findings, however, show America has a culture set to kill. Obesity is on the rise, as we push kids harder and harder and they are exposed to a life time of fats, and carbs, and soda, and more. When every diet pill, program, and fad have failed and failed again to make us look like a skinny doll, what are we to do.
Well, the fix will never be an easy one, as the market floods with more and more snacks, drinks, caffeine for the consumers to choke down, hundreds of calories at a time, we see America struggling to deal with where the future is taking us.
Sure, nothing is all the fault of one simple thing, but combined you get a toxic environment for a perfectly good gene that would come to the rescue if you were starving or in need of fat stores. What we have though is a key, if we can figure out how to turn off these genes, we can at least lower the epidemic, but we can't keep the food out of the mouths of the people who it is going to find. Especially when corporations are counting on it finding them. Obesity is big money, in food, in clothes, in medicine and health.
It's time to start seeing fat as it is, it was once a solution for people trying to survive and now it is a problem of people surviving too well in a pool of stress hormones.
Having a gene, by default, does not mean it is active, or that it will be the one expressed. You can have many genes which don't express and never do anything guilty inside your body. However, certain genes express when stress hormones are introduced. A dormant gene can go to functioning, when the switch is turned on by a stressor, which, is made to preserve you.
Stress hormones are part of evolution, the trigger the fight or flight response, but they do much more, during a time of limited resources those genes would have been vital for preserving what they could, so that you could survive starvation, or limited supplies.
Enter the industrial world. Where genes have no clue that you are just having a bad hair day, that your boss just moved the deadline, or someone dumped a load of extra work on you. Add to that little down time, home life, kids, and more, and you have the perfect scenario for the expression of genes which will make you fat, because they don't know the difference between survival stress, and everyday stress. After all, it's the same hormones at play.
Now add in corporate America and the production of sugar based and fat based foods. How is your body supposed to know what to do with those things? After all, it got the signal for storing, and now you are giving it high fats and sugars. It is doing the job of packing them away, and corporate America keeps them coming. Because business is good.
We live in a low exercise, high work, high fat, high sugar, low de-stressing world, and what can the mechanics of evolution do but their natural evolved jobs. That is without ever adding factors like, other genetic of age onset disease. Our culture is literally killing millions of people, and the blame, we like to put on them.
These findings, however, show America has a culture set to kill. Obesity is on the rise, as we push kids harder and harder and they are exposed to a life time of fats, and carbs, and soda, and more. When every diet pill, program, and fad have failed and failed again to make us look like a skinny doll, what are we to do.
Well, the fix will never be an easy one, as the market floods with more and more snacks, drinks, caffeine for the consumers to choke down, hundreds of calories at a time, we see America struggling to deal with where the future is taking us.
Sure, nothing is all the fault of one simple thing, but combined you get a toxic environment for a perfectly good gene that would come to the rescue if you were starving or in need of fat stores. What we have though is a key, if we can figure out how to turn off these genes, we can at least lower the epidemic, but we can't keep the food out of the mouths of the people who it is going to find. Especially when corporations are counting on it finding them. Obesity is big money, in food, in clothes, in medicine and health.
It's time to start seeing fat as it is, it was once a solution for people trying to survive and now it is a problem of people surviving too well in a pool of stress hormones.
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