Q: I’m disturbed by a report I
heard on the radio. The announcer said a study just published
shows that fatness is inherited. My father is fat. Does this
mean I’m doomed to be fat as well?
A: Hold on. Things aren’t as bad as
you might think. Let’s see what that study, published
in the January 23, 2003, issue of The New England Journal
of Medicine, actually found.
The researchers compared a sample of 540 Danish adoptees with
their natural parents and their adoptive parents. They found
a strong correlation between the fatness of the adoptees and
their biological parents, but no relation between the fatness
of the adoptees and their adoptive parents. The researchers
concluded: “Genetic influences have an important role
in determining human fatness in adults, whereas the family
environment alone has no apparent effect.”
In one way the results of this study are not surprising. An
earlier study of twins separated at birth showed that fatness
is strongly influenced by inheritance. Moreover, research
has shown that 80% of the offspring of two obese parents become
obese, as compared with no more than 14% of the offspring
of two parents of normal weight. The surprising finding was
that, as far as researchers could tell, the adoptive family
seemed to have no impact at all.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the researchers
cautioned against reading too much into their results. “These
findings do not mean that fatness, including obesity, is determined
at conception and that, as is the case of determination of
eye color, the environment has no effect,” they wrote.
“We do not know, for example,” they continued,
“how genetic predisposition to fatness may be affected
by environmental factors.”
In other words, this study doesn’t mean that there is
nothing you can do to counteract an inherited tendency to
be fat. As the study’s director, Dr. Albert J. Stuckard
of the University of Pennsylvania, noted in a subsequent interview,
lots of people with two fat parents (the ones who probably
face the highest genetic risk of obesity)take weight off and
keep it off. The study simply confirms that some people have
to work harder than others to stay lean.
If one of your parents died at an early age from a heart attack,
you wouldn’t close your eyes to the controllable risk
factors (smoking, high-fat diet, etc.) in heart disease. On
the contrary, because heart disease appears to run in your
family, you’d do everything possible to prevent having
a heart attack yourself. By the same token, if you believe
you have a genetic tendency to be fat, you should redouble
your efforts to avoid it. If you work at it, chances are that
you can become lean and stay lean; overcoming any tendency
you may have toward fatness.
To show there’s hope for those with fat genes, Dr. Stuckard
and his fellow researchers cite a study involving genetically
obese mice. Simply increasing activity, with no dietary intervention,
prevented obesity in 50% of the mice, and greatly limited
it in the other half.
Actually, this adoption study may merely demonstrate that
body mechanisms which allowed us to survive in former times
work against us in a modern world where there’s a McDonald’s
on every corner and our cupboards are almost never bare. The
fat our ancestors put on in the summer when food was comparatively
plentiful was burned off during the lean winter months. Back
then, those with the genetic tendency to store fat were the
ones that survived the hard times when food was scarce. The
others perished. Today, with an abundance of high-calorie
food and machines to do our work, our beautiful adaptive mechanisms
simply make us fat. It’s the same phenomenon that causes
animals, who stay extremely lean in the wild, to become obese
in captivity and many professional athletes to blow up like
balloons after they retire.
As you have probably guessed by now, one of the most effective
things you can do to avoid becoming like your father is to
stay physically active. As suggested by the experiment involving
obese mice, the weight of people who begin to exercise regularly
usually drops even if they make no attempt to diet. How lean
you are depends to a large extent on the amount of exercise
you do. Perhaps the best examples are endurance athletes:
marathon runners, cross-country skiers and competitive cyclists.
They are usually lean even when they eat whatever they want.
Bodybuilders also have an advantage in terms of the ability
to stay lean. That’s because your muscles burn most
of the food you eat. Your muscles burn calories even when
you’re asleep. In addition to the fact that they burn
extra calories lifting weights, bodybuilders find it easier
to stay lean because they have developed more calorie-burning
muscle tissue. In contrast, people who are inactive have less
muscle tissue and therefore burn fewer calories and have a
greater tendency to get fat. If you’ve ever had an arm
or a leg placed in a cast, you know how inactivity causes
muscles to atrophy.
The kind of food you eat also affects how well you control
a tendency to get fat. We seem to have an inclination to pig
out on high-calorie, high-fat, high-sugar foods. Again, in
the days when famines were common, this tendency protected
us against starvation. The best way to counteract it today
is to eat plenty of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and
steer clear of refined and fatty foods. Bulky whole grains,
fruits and vegetables provide lots of chewing, tasting and
stomach-filling satisfaction without giving you too many calories.
Refined and fatty foods, on the other hand, pack calories
into a small volume and give you too many calories long before
you’ve eaten your fill.
So to make a long story short, some people are born with the
right genes for our modern world of inactivity and fast foods
and don’t have to worry about their weight. Others (you
may be one of them) get fat if they don’t exercise and
eat correctly. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that most
people with fat genes can control their tendency to be overweight.
Now, stop worrying and go work out.
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