Obesity: To eat or not to eat?

Heidi Klum

Images portraying what bodies should and should not look like daily inundate people in the United States. Only a person trying to avoid the outside world and being completely reclusive could escape this societal influence. Busty Kate Upton, thin and waif-like Coco Rochas, and toned and tanned Heidi Klums barrage us, and all three individuals share a common characteristic - being skinny. Yet, America faces an obesity epidemic that grows proportionally each year. Obesity is becoming a massive national and international issue, the facts don’t lie, and we have to start paying attention and attempting to get results! Although scientists and nutritionists claim that the solution can simply be a matter of physics or physiology, it can’t be one or the other. No, both must be implemented to find a solution. Considering the hormonal influences of the body, correcting exercise and diet, and improving the modern population’s wellness overall can help us battle the overwhelming epidemic the world faces - obesity and its affiliated diseases.

Obesity in United States

Recent debates have recaptured and evoked the old ideas on handling obesity and diseases caused by this condition, and questioned whether the old ways are better than our modern understanding of this bodily condition. Nature Magazine’s Gary Taubes directly challenges the medical world in his article “Treat Obesity as Physiology, not Physics”,1 which outlines historical ideas on obesity, and argues that the current one is flawed. Gustav von Bergmann, a German scientist, stated that obesity was a regulatory disorder, or having to do with the hormonal workings of the body. American scientists discarded this idea following the war, when the fear of all things Germanic took over, and the modern idea of too little exercise and too many calories surfaced, and is still prevalent presently. Taubes supports a return to the Germanic ideas, treating the imbalances within the body to reduce fat, instead of working off the fat through exercise and diet regulation. Is Taubes’ assessment of this huge issue correct? Can the medical world effectively address obesity by only regulating the body’s hormonal productions and diseases?

While the body’s genetic or hormonal imbalances do not account for the entirety of the world’s weight crisis, physiology has a bearing on some portion of this issue. Physiology is the overall attempt of science to understand the body’s inner workings – the way each system interacts with each other, to form a wholly sufficient organism – a human being. People like Taubes use physiology to understand the endocrine system, which designates the effect of hormones on things like menstruation, the secretion of insulin, and even our modern food production (steroids used to beef up young cattle). Because the endocrine system involves the production of insulin, which regulates a person’s metabolism, the process of turning food to fuel and/or fat, it can lead to cases of diabetes, which is directly linked to obesity. 

Insulin Injections

The increase of our national obesity rates, calculated via Body Mass Index, lead to a large increase in diabetic cases. Common treatments, used to negate or diminish the chance of harm via diabetes, are taking insulin shots, diabetes type II, and exercise and diet regulation for both diabetes type I and II. Patients often take vitamins and essential nutrients in pill form, as a supplement to fuel the body receives from food. Burning off the fat is the best way to correct diabetes type II. Research has shown that even losing 5 to 10 percent of your weight (i.e. 13 pounds for a 250 pound person) could decrease the chance of contracting diabetes. Regulating food intake, maintaining regular exercise, as well as reaping the benefits of regular insulin injections, which would cause the cells of the body to metabolise food at a much more accelerated rate, leading to less fat storage, can help in achieving this weight loss.

Green Breakfast Shakes

The physiology approach is applicable for those who have an endocrine system impairment, but it cannot account for the growing BMI of those who do not have a deficiency or hormonal imbalance, a large portion of our present population. While treating the hormonal imbalances does work, it can only mend the effects of obesity to a certain extent. Exercise, the physics of the matter, and getting enough nutrients and vitamins, but not too many calories, is necessary to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Most people, nowadays, overeat, though some have eating disorders that cause a lack of valuable and essential nutrients. Under-eating is discouraged just as much as overeating is advised against. Neither will give the body what it needs to function at it’s highest level. Various methods are used to suppress overactive appetites. Modern medicine uses things as small as pills and nutritious shakes, to even go so far as to perform a surgery, such as gastric bypass, which causes the stomach to ‘shrink.’ These things, in addition to regular and consistent exercise (recommended at least a half hour per day; a total of 2.5 hours per week), will keep the body fit and active, providing the essentials and keeping the body away from obesity, diabetes type II and the other diseases associated with the two (heart disease, metabolic conditions, hypertension).

Warrior's Pose

Obesity is a crisis in our nation and our modern world. It is linked to multiple other diseases and recognized as the backing cause of a multitude of deaths. Heart disease and diabetes, two leading diseases linked to obesity, currently rank among the top ten leading causes of death. We cannot address this issue through one or the other, physiology or physics, hormonal regulation or exercise and dietary regulation. We must address it through merging the two - physiology and physics coinciding to create an effective cure. If the causes of obesity are both hormonal and related to human activity, then the treatment must also relate to both. Only then will we see results.

1 Taubes, Gary. "Treat Obesity as Physiology, Not Physics." Nature 492.7428 (2012): n. pag. Nature.com. Nature Publishing Group, 12 Dec. 2012. Web. 04 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nature.com/news/treat-obesity-as-physiology-not-physics-1.12014>.