Obesity is a rapid growing problem among people everywhere. There are more people today than ever before who are searching for reasonable answers as to why this may be. Just ask yourself, are you pleased with your weight? If so, you are a unique individual. Most people in our society think they should weigh more or less than they do. Usually the primary concern is physical appearance; however some often realize that physical health is also somehow related to the body.
There are more and more people each day wasting there money on dietary supplements that contain ingredients that when taken in insufficient quantities can have adverse or harmful effects. An Estimated 35 to 45 percent of all U.S. women (and 20 to 30 percent of U.S. men) are trying to lose weight at any given time. These people are spending upwards of $40 billion each year to do so. When you really look at these people, you will find that a large part of them do not even need to lose the weight in the first place. At the same time, there are many more people that accumulate excess body fat, and DO need to do something about it. The number of people that fall into this category is growing rapidly, and most of them do not even know what causes this trend.
So why do people accumulate this excess body fat? The natural answer would be because they do not spend as much food energy as they take in. That has a bit of truth to it, but if you think about it, it falls short of answering the question, why? Obesity has many interrelated causes including behavioral, socioeconomic, environmental, cultural, psychological, metabolic, and even genetic. Even though most cases of obesity do not stem from a genetic mutation, genetic influences are still involved.
There is research that shows that adopted children tend to have the same physical makeup as their biological parents rather than their adopted parents. There is also research that reveals similar findings when comparing the traits of identical twins to fraternal twins. The conclusion that one could make from these research examples could be that your genes do in fact play a role in your weight. Even though your genes do not directly cause obesity, there are genetic factors that may influence the food intake and the activity patterns that lead to what does.
Ever notice how some people just seem to gain more weight than others that have comparable energy intakes? If you were to give a pair of identical twins an increase of 1000 calories a day for 100 days, some pairs of identical twins would gain less than 10 pounds, while others could gain up to 30 pounds. Within each pair of twins, the amounts of weight gained, the body fat percentage, and the locations of fat deposits would be similar.
In summary, obesity has many causes and different combinations of causes in different people. Some causes, such as physical inactivity, may be within a persons control, and some as genetics, may be beyond it; until now.
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