alexandraerin: (Default)
alexandraerin ([personal profile] alexandraerin) wrote2010-02-18 02:44 pm

Read this and other stories in the pages of the medical journal Duh.

So, there's this crazy study out that says that obese teenagers' metabolisms aren't affected by moderate amounts of aerobic exercise in the same way that thin teenagers' metabolisms are... that while the obese teenagers gain important health benefits from exercising, their metabolisms don't kick into high fat-burning gear and thus they don't tend to lose weight from it.

It's almost like two people could eat the same things, exercise the same, and have the same habits and yet have entirely differently shaped bodies based on uncontrollable inherited conditions! And to get even crazier, it's almost as though those habits have a bigger impact on one's health than what size and shape one's skin is in!

Crazy!

Usually when somebody brings up the immutability of obesity in a conversation like this, someone chimes in with "Maybe there are some people who are fat because of a gland problem or something but that's super rare and it doesn't account for most people who are fat." That's a Conversation We Won't Be Having Here, but just to be clear: I'm not saying that most fat people have a problem. I'm saying most fat people have a different metabolism than skinny people do.

Not a worse metabolism. A different one.

One that seems to be shared by a large proportion of the population, which suggests that it's not entirely inimical to the survival of individuals or the species as a whole.

What a world, what a world.

[identity profile] kartusch.livejournal.com 2010-02-18 11:53 pm (UTC)(link)
When my laptop crashed I lost my links to all the studies I had compiled that showed weight was pretty much as genetic as height.

[identity profile] alexandraerin.livejournal.com 2010-02-19 12:03 am (UTC)(link)
I feel your pain. My blog posts about this would have a lot more links/citations if I still had my old bookmarks. I know I could find all of them by digging around on Kate Harding's site long enough, but... meh. People have Google, and most of them will believe what they want to believe regardless.