the advantage of tending to overweight

[miriam_e]

It is not a simple thing that determines whether someone is thin or overweight. I've always been very skinny and had felt the explanation was simple, but the more I learn, the more I understand how complicated it is.

Of course if you eat less you get thinner. That's inescapeable. But the same amount of food doesn't equal the same end-weight for different people.

Exercise burns off calories, but it is sometimes not obvious how subtle that can be. I read of an experiment years ago where the researchers were trying to find out whether it was true that two sets of people could eat the same thing, and one group would put weight on while the other didn't, regardless of exercise. They looked at people's metabolism as the commonly accused culprit. Surprisingly, they found that one group did put weight on, and the other group didn't, while exercise and metabolism seemed constant. At first they were at a loss to explain it, until one of the researchers noticed that the low weight group jiggled and fidgetted a lot. It seemed they were burning up more energy that way.

More recently other findings indicate that you can control for all external factors, and some people still put on weight while others don't. It turns out that some people have more efficient gut bacteria than the rest of us. If they eat the same volume as others then their more efficient bacteria convert more of the food for them and they more easily get fat. These people have a major advantage over thin people like me. Unfortunately society has turned that into a disadvantage by duping them into eating too much so their great asset becomes a health risk, shortening their lives instead of letting them live more cheaply and efficiently.

Weird huh?

I hate having to eat. I truly wish I could get away with eating just once a day instead of the twice I currently do. It would be very cool to have super-efficient gut bacteria.

Comments

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

Not enjoying eating would certainly explain why you're so thin. Most people enjoy eating, which is part of why it's easy to do too much of it. Another part is that as adults we lose the ability to tell whether we are full or not, even though we have it as babies.

It's perhaps not too surprising how little is said about some of the differences between people, probably because most finance goes into diets and drugs and those industries want to pretend that their product will work for everyone.

Apart from digestive differences, there are also issues such as nonshivering thermogenesis. Adults who've retained brown adipose tissue along their spines can burn energy off that way, but it's hard to find any actual studies about it.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I rarely feel hungry, but my satiety alarm rings fairly easily.

The brown fat thing is a neat point. Young animals have it to protect against cold, to generate heat. I wonder what sort of variability there is among humans in retaining it into adulthood.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm wondering. Various papers say it is (or is thought to be) insignificant in adults, but don't say whether this is universally true or just true enough for their purposes.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

And I wonder if it can be altered. I recall some work a while back done by researchers in the Antarctic, where they exposed themselves to extreme cold for short times each day (10 minutes I think). They found that after some weeks of this, their body changed in the way it dealt with cold, and they were able to be more comfortable in cold environments than their colleages. I seem to remember the effect lasting about 6 months. I always thought this sounded like a physiological change rather than a metabolic one. I wonder if the type of fat had any bearing. And I wonder how you'd find out. It's kinda impractical to cut someone open to check out their fat. Biopsies are not a great solution either, because it may change preferentially in certain places in the body. The poor subject would end up feeling like a pin-cushion.