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The genetics of relatively healthy obesity:
In general, obesity is linked with a large range of health problems—for most people, at least. But for a substantial minority of those who are overweight, obesity is accompanied by indications of decent health, with no signs of impending diabetes or cardiovascular disease. These cases have probably received unwarranted attention[1]; who doesn't want to convince themselves that they're an exception to an unfortunate rule, after all?
[...] a large international team of researchers has looked into whether some of these cases might be the product of genetic influences[2]. And simply by using existing data, the team found 61 instances where a location in our genomes is associated with both elevated obesity and signs of good health, cardiovascular or otherwise.
[...] Combining all the past studies in these areas, the researchers were able to leverage a sample of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
To find the sorts of genes the team was interested in, the researchers had a simple criterion: the same area of the genome has to be associated with both one of the measures of obesity and one of the measures of metabolic or cardiovascular health. After doing the pairwise comparisons, the researchers checked whether any of the areas that came out of the analysis was associated with more than one measure (so, for example, health levels of both cholesterol and glucose).
[...] Overall, the researchers suggest these [sites] affect a variety of relevant processes. Some are upstream of fat deposition, such as insulin signaling and glucose control, and others seem to regulate the process of breaking fats back down. Still others seem to control how adipose tissue develops, the switch between white and brown fat, and the location where fat forms. None of those factors are especially surprising, but it's not necessarily predictable that they would influence things in a way that seems to limit the damage that is associated with fat accumulation.
[...] The value of this sort of study really lies elsewhere. While we know obesity is linked with a variety of health risks, those links are complex and poorly understood at the moment. Research like this could cut back on the unknowns and help us figure out ways in which we might separate obesity, which doesn't seem to be going away, from some of its consequences.
Journal References:
[1] Gordon I. Smith, Bettina Mittendorfer, Samuel Klein. Metabolically healthy obesity: facts and fantasies [open], The Journal of Clinical Investigation (DOI: 10.1172/JCI129186)
[2] Lam O. Huang, Alexander Rauch, Eugenia Mazzaferro, et al. Genome-wide discovery of genetic loci that uncouple excess adiposity from its comorbidities, Nature Metabolism (DOI: 10.1038/s42255-021-00346-2)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2021, @08:09PM
That's not out of whack though. That is exactly what your body should do. Your body is basically an engine. And millions of years of evolution have turned it into an incredibly efficient and accepting engine. Dump pretty much anything, within reason, into it - and it'll give you as much energy as you request (and it can muster), and convert anything that's left over into storage available for later emergency usage. I mean how cool is that when you think about it? Or how about the fact that we can go weeks without eating? The human body is awesome.