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Comment by Htsthbjig | Hacker News Reader

This article is full of BS.

40 years ago the majority of the population of the US or North Europe was thin. This has been so for the entire evolution of the human species.

People 40 years ago did not starve. They just ate things that refrigerators and mass industrial production do not preserve well, like vitamins, or fiber, or natural fat(like butter).

Now, when most people eat mass-processed foods, odd things happen, and unless people change their food habits, nothing is going to change, but that is not "impossible".

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The article is about difficulty of reversing obesity, once you become fat. Different problem.

It is not about reversing obesity, it is about long term weight reduction. Different problem.

40 years ago people were born from thin parents, today they're born from obese parents. This has to have an effect on the genetic makeup of the children.

My biology is pretty terrible, but I'd argue that it takes more than just one or two generations to permanently change the genetic makeup of a population.

To be more precise: I know there are animal species that changed their natural colors to grey-ish tones nearby the cities in less than 100 years, but that seems to me more a result of selective breeding: the non-grey individuals were eaten/killed, so in a relatively short span only those with the grey gene survived. However, given that we are not killing those that are born without the obesity gene, there shouldn't be any reason for such change at a genetic level in such a short timespan at a big scale (unless the obese were over-breeding the non-obese by at least one order of magnitude, which is nonsense).

I think (or hope) he meant epigenetics. There's increasing evidence that epigenetic changes in parents can be passed to, or at least cause other epigenetic changes in, children, in an almost Lamarkian way.

However, I think the article is saying, "In the long run, for whatever reason, statistically speaking, 95% of people revert to their high water mark of weight, nullifying their previous efforts at weight loss." This strikes me as utterly uncontroversial, aside from our widespread want to be among the 5%.

And my personal take: willpower can win battles, but our central tendencies usually win the war.

There is more than just DNA. The state of a pregnant mother can have an important impact on the offspring even if it doesn't affect its DNA. The same DNA can create different persons because of different gene expression. This is what epigenetics is all about.

Mother obesity affects The brain and metabolism of the baby. This includes the way fat is managed. This is even before birth.

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