Why We Get Fat and Stay Fat! Understanding Weight Gain and Loss
By Paul D. Tortland, DO I US parents
• $147 Billion/year is spent by Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers on obesity related healthcare
• Obese people consume an estimated 40% more health care dollars compared to non-obese people
“Houston, we have a problem.” We’re fat and getting fatter. In
just over 20 years, we’ve gone from 29 states having obesity rates so low that they couldn’t be measured, and no state with a rate greater than 10-14%, to nine states with a rate greater than 30%, and only one state—Colorado—the lowest at 15-19%. (See illustration below)
Why We Get Fat & Stay Fat So what happened in 1985 that marked the beginning of this
dramatic trend? In an effort to rein in heart disease, the American Medical Association, in concert with the US government, launched
f the magazines on display at the supermar- ket checkout are any indication, we have an infatuation with weight. More accurately— and sadly—we have a real epidemic.
Here are the sobering statistics:
• 2 of 3 Americans are overweight • 1 in 3 US children are overweight or obese and
are expected to develop diabetes by
age 20 • 1 in 4 Americans between 17-24 years old are unfit for military duty due to obesity
• The current generation of children is the first in history not expected to live longer than their
a campaign to reduce dietary fat. The reasoning went like this: Heart disease is caused by high cholesterol. High choles- terol is caused by dietary fat. Reduce fat intake and you will reduce heart disease. Some of you will recall the sudden explo- sion of low fat and fat-free foods appearing on store shelves in the mid to late ‘80’s. But here’s the rub—what does food taste
like when you remove the fat? Like cardboard! So to make food more palatable, food processors added sugar. And not just any sugar; they added high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Why? Econom- ics—it’s twice as sweet and half the price. We’ll discuss HFCS later on. As the charts clearly show, not only did reducing the fat not make us leaner, we actually got fatter faster! (Oh, and the cholesterol problem also got worse.)
In order to understand why we gain weight, and why it’s so hard to lose it, we need to understand how our bodies use and store food. There are 3 fuel sources that we can use for energy—carbohydrates (CHO), protein (PRO), and fat. We can store up to about 3 days worth of CHO, mainly in the liver and muscles, in the form of gly- cogen. Our fat storage capacity, however, is unlimited! Mind you, we don’t increase the number of fat cells. Except for a small increase during puberty, we have the same number of fat cells when we die as when we’re born. We simply stuff them bigger and bigger! Once the glycogen storage tanks are full, excess CHO gets stored as fat. How does this happen? The key is the hormone insu- lin. Insulin is secreted by the pancreas gland in response to a CHO meal. Its main function is to reduce blood sugar and get the sugar into the cells where it can be used for energy or stored. However, insulin is also our main FAT storage hormone! Every excess sugar molecule gets combined with 3 free fatty acid molecules in the
Consider the charts below, showing obesity rates in the US, by state, in 1985 compared to 2009.
U.S. Obesity Rates, 1985(Source:
www.cdc.gov) 12 Natural Nutmeg January 2012
U.S. Obesity Rates, 2009(Source:
www.cdc.gov)
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