Why Thin People Are Not Fat July 2, 2009
Posted by Dr Dan in video.Tags: fat, obese, overweight, paleo diet, thin
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Here is an interesting video I found. Watch and enjoy. It is very interesting and looks at something that isn’t usually looked at – why are thin people not fat?
I’ll have to look at that virus stuff. I generally believe that coronary heart disease is initiated by bacteria so I can believe that infection has a role in obesity. That could explain the value of avoiding linoleic acid, for example, since it’s an immune system suppressant, or wheat, since it distracts the immune system.
They should have tried to adjust for increased food mass in the gut and fluid retention by fasting the patients for a day at the end and reweighing them. That could easily be a couple of kilos, which on a small frame is a lot.
It was interesting that everyone was going for the sugar to make up the calories. I would have to too, but I know it would make me feel terrible. The glucose(insulin)/fructose (de nova lipogenesis) combo is brutal on the body.
As far as I know there was only the one rat study on mother’s diet effecting offspring body weight. I came away very skeptical after reading that study.
I think that the Spalding (2008) paper in Nature did do a good job of establishing that the total number of fat cells was largely fixed when a person is a teenager. Body composition might look to be genetic but it’s hard to separate when the family cooks the meals for children through childhood and adolescence, and trains dietary habits for the future! Does anyone know of a study comparing kids put up for adoption with their biological parents? Snacking is, I think, absolutely a learned behavior. Shedding fat cells may be possible, but it would be slow and difficult. Reducing the volume of fat cells is absolutely possible. Leptin control has to be the key.
I found this fascinating. Thanks for posting it. I wonder how habitual dieting (i.e., eating in a way that is presumably not what your body needs or wants) affects these processes. The volunteers were all presumably normal eaters before they began the experiment. I wonder if the outcome would have been different had they been chronic dieters who were also lean.
Steph
Thanks for the post. Interesting stuff. I especially liked the guy whose metabolic rate shot up by 30% and gained muscle but little fat. So what happened to his metabolic rate when he stopped eating so much I wonder. Did he reset his metabolism so he now has to eat more? It would have been interesting to follow some of these “thin” people to see how their health changed when they eventually put on visceral fat and became insulin resistant over time. This short term study stopped before they could do too much damage, but in real life, it continues for years. I think when I was younger I would have been considered one of these thin people, but it was not hard to change that by overeating, especially carbs, and once accumulated, was not so easy to change back.
very interesting study but I would have liked to have seen a dietary log to analyze the P:C:F ratio and factored that into the results. I believe that would have been very revealing.
Very interesting! Thanks for posting this!
I agree with Steph’s point about the study dealing with the “naturally lean” rather than chronically-dieting lean. None of the BBC study subjects appear to be over the age of 25, as well. I found it much more difficult to gain at that age than I do in my mid-thirties.
I’m having a hard time understanding why anyone would do something stupid like this.
It’s like studying why people without cancer don’t have cancer.
Or, like studying why people who aren’t naturally talented athletes tend to not engage in athletics.
It’s proving a negative… the absence of something doesn’t logically mean so because the individual possesses something extraordinary. Thin peopel who stay that way are genetically atypical…. growing fat is not a default state, which seems to be the assumption. People grow fat because our diets are atrocious.
There are a number of known genetic mutations which prevent diet induced obesity in mice. Recently it is found that mice who continue to overexpress leptin receptors in weight gain / hyperinsulinemia (normally leptin receptors are downregulated) find it impossible to store fat in fat cells and gain weight. There are many others.
Thin people who are not restrictive fall into two categories.
1) Appetite reduced (they don’t eat much because their brain does not desire food much, for any number of reasons i.e. neurotransmitter related and/or as a side effect of metabolic resistance)
2) Metabolically resistant (they won’t/cant gain much weight even if they pig out on cookies and cakes and sandwiches and eat the entire plate at chain restaurants etc.) Metabolic resistance to obesity often causes appetite reduction (which may appear to be the primary reason for thinness but is actually a symptom and not the driving cause).
Yea, it is important to note all of these people are college students. Metabolically resistant types are very hard to find after 25 or so.
Oh and, the whole “we are driven to be fat because of evolutionary selection” is partially correct. This explains why we can store fat at all, but it doesn’t even begin to explain the MODERN phenomenon of obesity epidemic. As in, the past 30-40 years. We have has plentiful food for decades, centuries, but only recently are we this big.