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MIT Researchers Discover "Metabolic Master Switch" To Control Obesity
New submitter ahbond writes: The meme of the chubby nerd alone in the basement may be a thing of the past. Well, at least the chubby part, if recent work at MIT pans out and we're able to use a biological "master switch" to "dial-in" a persons metabolic rate. “Obesity has traditionally been seen as the result of an imbalance between the amount of food we eat and how much we exercise, but this view ignores the contribution of genetics to each individual’s metabolism,” said senior author Manolis Kellis, a professor of computer science and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and of the Broad Institute.
TFA is not really about metabolic rate - did you actually read it?
Soooo... Fat people are fat because deserve to be fat... very scientific of you to call a constant something that actually is a variable.
I know many strength trainers, dieticians, and physical therapists that would disagree with you. BMR can vary widely from person to person, whether healthy or sick, and especially between genders. There are tons of medical conditions that will actually mess with BMR as a side effect, as well as definite genetic problems. BMR also changes with age, and various age related conditions. Contrary to the gospel you just tried to spew out, all of these is being researched and tested on a wide variety of populations.
If this research is correct, "what you use" does change if this gene is expressed. So while the x/y equation might not change, both the values of x and y can.
Why is parent modded down? He made a good point, one that most people have seen with their own eyes.
Next door to me lives a sixty-year old man who is rail thin despite living the good life (especially with food) and never exercising. I'm not talking about merely not overweight, this guy is really skinny. His twenty-something daughter is already pretty hefty, not fat yet but will be by the time she's thirty. Same lifestyle, half of the same genes, different results.
Why is parent modded down?
Because it is anecdotal. No matter how true it may be, it is terrible science.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Weird, because you clearly don't know when to stop making sounds out of it when you want to control stupidity.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Eat Less.
Yeah, that's what all those with an above average metabolism say.
Learn to love Alaska
This is flat out wrong. The whole point of a regression is to determine the correlation in noisy data. We're not talking about random points here like paint thrown at a piece of graph paper, but rather a correlation between indep. variables vs. dep. variables which have a distribution. That in no way negates the possibility that the mean values of the samples can be tightly correlated to the indep. vars.
Now what might be the physical basis for high variance in basal metabolism vs. low variance? Well, there are about a zillion parameters in the human body with complex interactions, genetic & epigenetic dependencies, etc. that we barely understand! Yet we assume that everyone is the same?
I'll tell you where this unscientific belief comes from--the "soul" model of human consciousness. Most discussions of obesity have a heavy bias toward the view that people simply choose to be pigs. Evidence that this is false is steadily accumulating, as it is clear that simply turning a few knobs on your hormone regulation, or other parameters, could turn you into a completely different person--an obese compulsive eater, a drug addict, etc. Note that it is easier to perturb a well optimized body so as to degrade health and behavioral regulation vs. bringing one from non-optimum to optimum.
You have cause and effect reversed. You are going to eat more if you are gaining weight. We understand this relationship correctly when children are growing, when women are pregnant, and when we breed some cattle to be thin and produce milk while others are bred to be heavy so we can harvest more meat off of them.
In evolutionary terms, we eat when we are hungry. We certainly are not the offspring of organisms that failed to observe this simple rule. Those organisms are dead, and if they had any offspring, the offspring are dead too.
And don't forget that people tend to gain or lose weight after poop transplants, tending usually towards the donor's BMI.
There is more, if you care to go do some research. Science is poking holes in the "fat people are lazy and/or stupid" myth almost daily now.
See that "Preview" button?
The internet is flooded with shitposts like yours in every article about weight loss. Diet and exercise, in the real world, appear to cure obesity about 2% of the time. That's like... shamanism cure rates. So yes, we'll need a real solution, and no, shitposts like yours won't bring it to fruition any faster.
No, parent is modded down because a bunch of fat hate ppls swarm around all these stories and downvote. Make no mistake, parent isn't modded down- he's downvoted.
No, they cure it 100% of the time. The problem is few people actually follow a proper regimen.
And by the way, this is the same reason why dietary science gets it wrong all the time: It's largely based on studies and surveys where people don't actually eat what they say they eat, and they exercise less than they claim they do, making these studies that draw "a link between x and y" completely fucking meaningless.
This, by the way, is exactly why the FDA held the nonsensical position that eating dietary cholesterol causes your blood cholesterol to go up, so they did silly things like telling people to eat less eggs and more cereal grains in order to lower their cholesterol (in reality, following that recommendation raises cholesterol rather than lowers it.)
No you are wrong, almost certainly because you are addicted and in denial.
Sensible diet and exercise WILL reduce weight in someone who is obese. By definition. It cannot not work.
There are a few factors however that damage such perceptions.
1) a persons metabolic rate determines what is 'enough' food. person A may be able to eat twice as much as person B for the same effect, but people now
expect to be able to eat until they feel full. In fact they practically demand it.
2) people expect to undo YEARS of overeating with a month or twos diet - that is not going to happen (at least not in a healthy way)
3) people lie - mostly to themselves. They convince themselves that today is a special day, so they can eat more - or that today they dont need to
exercise because of something or other.. but of course they forget that.. human nature.
4) food is habit forming and addictive in many forms. exercise is hard, especially if obese. People are getting less and less willing to make the effort.
your 2% figure, which of course we understand is pulled out of your arse, is of course a silly form of self denial.
> No, they cure it 100% of the time. The problem is few people actually follow a proper regimen.
If 98% of people can't "follow the proper regimen", then it's not a proper regimen, and it's quite obviously not at all what thin people are doing. That's the fucking point.
Hey, side question- you know that study where the poop transplants make people skinny, or fat? How about you round up your "proper regiment" bros- people who agree with your general side of this coin- and get the poop transplant from the really fat dudes? Put your body where your mouth is. If it's all about diet and exercise, I imagine 100% of the diet-and-exercise-is-panacea team will stay their original weight, no prob at all.
Call me when that happens. Until then... lolzors bro.
> No you are wrong, almost certainly because you are addicted and in denial.
0- Ad hominem. Off to a strong start I see.
> Sensible diet and exercise WILL reduce weight in someone who is obese.
1- Moving the goal posts. The cure rate is negligible. I didn't say "reduce weight". Don't move the fucking goal posts to something you CAN get a weak kick in. That's not the fucking topic.
> your 2% figure, which of course we understand is pulled out of your arse,
2- I think it's 2% for some groups, I'm pretty sure it can get that high. It's 1% in general.
Article:
http://www.seattletimes.com/ne...
Based on study:
http://ajph.aphapublications.o...
> is of course a silly form of self denial.
3- Second ad hominem. I guess if you don't have evidence on your side, you need that sort of scintillating distraction!
> It is still a proper regimen, but the fat lazy bastards dont follow it correctly
Do you hear yourself?
No, if it doesn't cure obesity, it's not at all that thing. And obesity is so common now that it clearly can't be some edge case.
Anyway, why does every one of these weight loss or obesity topics have a mile of shitposters like you, instead of just a few people who:
> Put on a bunch of weight, like 80 pounds, with diet (poor) and exercise (little)
> Lose all that
> Repeat the first two steps to show it's totes just that
> With proof
Why is it all the talkers, and none of the experimenters? At *best* it's "guy who actually lost weight and kept it off for awhile". It's never anything really interesting.
It's also hardly ever links, and mostly ad hominem. Did all you guys brew outta reddit or something? Does some Shitposter Factory in China stamp you out wholesale?
> On top of that, our society is getting fatter and fatter. It's not because BMR is changing.
Without a survey of BMRs from 50 years ago and today, or other evidence, that's a bold claim. Many things affect gene expression and perhaps eating some foods (e.g. cabbage, for sake of argument) can cause an expression of genes in an individual that raises BMR. If the consumption of cabbage has fallen then BMRs could have changed. We can't go back in time to check BMRs of 50 years ago, but can test such theories via diet modification today. I don't know what the state or research is, but just wanted to point out that unless you check to see if BMR can change then you can't make the assertion that it has not.
People don't follow a "proper regimen" because attempting to adjust your body weight outside of it's desired setpoint is very difficult to do day after day. This goes not just for people trying to lose weight, but people trying to gain weight (like me). It requires either being hungry and miserable all the time, or forcing yourself to eat when you can barely stand the sight of food. Doing this for a lifetime is extremely difficult, and can crowd out your other priorities. Even if you have the willpower, you end up structuring your life around food. Eating when you feel like eating until you feel full gives allows you to focus on things other than food.
The internet is flooded with shitposts like yours in every article about weight loss. Diet and exercise, in the real world, appear to cure obesity about 2% of the time. That's like... shamanism cure rates. So yes, we'll need a real solution, and no, shitposts like yours won't bring it to fruition any faster.
If there was a pill that cured a disease if you took at every day, but 98% of the people with the disease couldn't manage that would you say the pill didn't work?
There are no fat starving people, when people in general eat less, there was less obesity. Almost nobody gets fat without eating too much and exercising too little even many of the metabolic disorders trotted out as excuses won't make you obese by themselves.
Sure some people get lucky through genes and/or gut flora can eat more and not put on weight but it can't be that every thin person has this because the obesity problem is relatively recent and limited to certain countries. So there have to be plenty of people out there who are not obese but it isn't just luck.
There are other things that could help, regulating and/or taxing fat and sugar in food for example. Looking for a medical solution for a cultural problem seems like a problematic idea to me though.
Most people find it hard to give up smoking. It's addictive, and stopping with aids is difficult. Some people argue that they are pussys and weak minded, with no self control, unable to stop crapping fags into their gobs and lighting up. Most people recognize that addictive substances are hard to beat by force of will alone.
Somehow when it comes to food though, it's really easy to just eat less and exercise more and anyone who fails to do really just wants to be fat. Because people like being fat, and getting diabetes and all the other health benefits of being obese, obviously. Who wants a sexy summer body when they can have rolls of flab instead?
Yep, obviously people who find that diet and exercising is hard for them just don't really want to be thin.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah, but just look at the responses here. Suggesting that people have different metabolic rates is a weird 3rd rail on the Internet. If you say, "Two people of the same age, weight, height, and sex can have different metabolic rates," you're pretty much inviting a flame war where people accuse you of being fat, and just trying to defend your lazy, overeating habits.
I'm not always sure why people get so angry about it, but my guess is that some of those people must be clinging on really tightly to their superiority over fat people, and saying that their other factors threatens their self-esteem. Like they're thinking, "I'm a total piece of shit, but at least I'm not fat! I'm better than everyone who weighs more than me!" so if you suggest that their low weight might be at least partially due to genetics, it really freaks them out. That's my only guess.
Because otherwise, why get so angry about what's basically settled science? The statement "Some people have a harder time controlling their weight than others," shouldn't be so upsetting.
Try this, breathe less. No, I didn't make an oblique reference to suicide, I mean breathe less. Just wait a little bit after you start feeling the breathing urge. Each time. For the rest of your life.
That is, make everything all about your breathing, or the lack thereof. Be sure to measure the amount of each breath. You wouldn't want to be a weak willed overbreather, would you?
> No, they cure it 100% of the time. The problem is few people actually follow a proper regimen.
If 98% of people can't "follow the proper regimen", then it's not a proper regimen, and it's quite obviously not at all what thin people are doing. That's the fucking point.
This! Thin people pretty much happen to be........wait for it........Thin!
Acting like something that comes naturally to you makes you somehow superior regarding body style is exactly like telling people that everyone is a genius, they are only too lazy to use their mind if they have a lower IQ.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I don't know about him but I did. 6 months of 3 weekly weight lifting sessions and 4 weekly cardio sessions, 1800 calories per day. No fat lost, no thinner waist, no chance in anything whatsoever, no weight loss. But then the idiots here say things like "oh I bet you weren't really following it" and dismiss the millions of cases just like this all over the nation as purely anecdotal or made up or something like that. Or maybe it is more complicated than you give it credit for.
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