Nonsense. Utter rubbish. People are fat because they eat more calories than they burn.
The only reason that studies do not reflect this is that they rely largely upon self-reporting and people lie.
The only reason that studies do not reflect this is that they rely largely upon self-reporting and people lie.
Furthermore, there’s a large question as to why people eat so many calories. After all, we don’t typically see people drink water until they die. What biological process makes food different, that people are willing to overeat?
Saying “people are fat because they eat too many calories” is like saying “that building collapsed because of gravity” - true, but not particularly useful when trying to get to the root of things.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-lab-rats-are-...
That's like saying a building is full because more people entered than exited. True but uninformative.
There are massive incentives to keep looking for explanations that are politically convenient, like “it is absolutely not your fault at all that you are fat, we finally found the cause and it’s this environmental factor / pollutant”. Great, I hope we get there, but in the mean while it doesn’t seem crazy to suggest that people are getting fat because high calory foods, alcohol, and snacks have become common, at the same time as everything became automated and lives became mostly sedentary.
No one is going to research the correlation between obesity, IQ and impulse control, or publish that “people are getting fat because modern humans are weak willed comfort addicts unable to deal with even the slightest discomfort like not being completely stuffed 24/7”.
Maybe it is just that people are eating more calories than they burn, and that’s it? Maybe we should be teaching people that that should eat 1500 calories per day, and if you’re still hungry then deal with it, it’s a slight discomfort that you’ll get used to over a few weeks, not some insurmountable urge that is impossible to control. Maybe people are fat because we’ve made the concept of personal responsibility into a taboo?
Just think about a theoretical scenario where you take medicine to kill all your gut bacteria. Those bacteria no longer burn calories from the food you eat.