Genetics:
When fat people blame their fatness on genetics we see this as an excuse. Sure there genetic diseases cause you to get that no matter what. However, these are relatively uncommon. What about all those people who work hard to lose their weight cause in the end while we accept genetics as being somewhat limiting the golden rule stands. You only get out what put in. as you see we vastly underestimated the role of genetics in obesity. Just as a warning following studies aren’t easy to swallow. To start off let’s look at the study of thirty seven thousand pairs of twins. The aim o the study was to figure out why some people end up fatter than others. These are the effects of genetics. Researchers compared identical twins who share 100% of their DNA and fraternal twins who shared 50% of their DNA. Now if their living environment was to blame we should expect similar I fraternal and identical twins. The fact that identical twins share more of their DNA doesn’t make a difference in this because genetics don’t impact your weight. However, if genetics did have an impact we should expect identical twins to be more alike than fraternal twins. Overall genetics accounted for somewhere between 45-85% percent of the reason of why some people are fatter than the others which is huge. Using the same measure depression’s hereditability is only 50%.
Effectiveness of
Exercising:
You can say that the being born with bad genes isn’t the end. Ultimately it’s about whether you are disciplined enough to eat healthy and exercise right? Well, genetics play a role here too. One of the experiments to show this involves 14 pairs of obese identical twins. For four weeks researchers carefully controlled their diets and exercise. For diet everyone was allowed to only have 400 calories of diet milkshake. In terms of exercise everyone performed the same daily amount as we’ve seen by exercise physiologist. Then came the result. It showed that in the first pair both lost six kilograms. Now there is a lot of variations. Some twins lost six kilo, some lost twelve. The important thing here is, the amount of weight loss was same between twins’. This means genetics to a large extent determine how your body responds to diet and exercise.
Psychology:
Other behaviors such as your level of self control, your level of metabolism and even how big your appetite is have all been led back to genetics using that same twin study technique. These genetic studies have some of the strongest effects within psychology. And yet they are rarely mentioned and you know why. If we accept this as fact then it means that a significant part of obesity is dictated by something we have no control over. So how should we react to this? Perhaps the situation of obesity can be compared to mental illness. Both are health related issues yet when it comes to mental illness, we accept that it is largely hereditable and acknowledge hoe hard it can be to work for such problems. We are more sympathetic to the mentally ill. However, in obesity many times genetic is mentioned but every time it swept away as a weak excuse. As a result we are more critical of them when they fail to lose weight.
Transcripted By Benazir Elahee Munni