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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?