🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE The most likely reason for our obesity epidemic is the one we don’t want to hear.
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“It’s the Wild, Wild West of opinion,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.tell us something. If there were no particular food — or component of food, or combination of foods, or virus, or habit, or assortment of gut bacteria — wreaking biochemical havoc, inconclusive research would be exactly what we’d expect to see.
That exception is soda. Or, more broadly, the entire category of sugar-sweetened beverages . In December, the journalpublished the latest indictment of SSBs: a review of 30 recent studies involving nearly 250,000 participants from around the world. According to the review, 93 percent of the research showed a link between SSB consumption and obesity, bolstering the field’s consensus.
A vicious cycle sets in: An individual eats more to satisfy that increased hunger, but the body hoards the fuel in fat cells instead of spending it, leading to fewer calories burned, but more hunger. “As long as you reduce energy [by consuming fewer calories], you lose weight. If you could manipulate the macronutrient content [of fats, carbs and proteins] to gain or lose weight significantly, we would have discovered it by now,” says Alice Lichtenstein, a nutrition science and policy professor at Tufts’ Friedman School.Tools that allow scientists to map the human genome quickly and cheaply have made it much easier to hunt for a connection between genes and obesity.
But people aren’t mice, says University of Michigan microbiologist Pat Schloss, author of a 2016 meta-analysis of multiple studies investigating the gut bacteria-obesity connection. Lab mice, for example, are bred specifically for sameness and are kept in highly controlled environments. Humans, by contrast, are nothing but chaos, and no two people are alike.
Think of it more like this: Let’s say you play Serena Williams at tennis. And you lose, because of course you lose. Is it because your tennis game isn’t good enough? At some level, sure. But the real reason is that you’re wildly overmatched, and you have no business being on the court with Serena Williams in the first place.
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