This seems like just another way to blame fat people for being fat.
Drink a milkshake and the pleasure center in your brain gets a hit of happy — unless you're overweight. It sounds counterintuitive. But scientists who watched young women savor milkshakes inside a brain scanner concluded that when the brain doesn't sense enough gratification from food, people may overeat to compensate.
FAIL
Yep, that surely has to be the reason. Food doesn't taste as good to some people, so they have to be eating more in order to enjoy it and that makes them fat (but what about thin people who gorge themselves on food on a daily basis and never gain a pound? What's the excuse for them, I want to know, dammit).
A healthy diet and plenty of exercise are the main factors in whether someone is overweight.
FAIL
Oh yeah, tell that to the fat people who eat a healthy diet and exercise on a daily basis and are still fat. Healthy diet and exercise don't do jack shit to keep you thin or make you thin if you're genetically predisposed to be fat.
But scientists have long known that genetics also play a major role in obesity — and one big culprit is thought to be dopamine, the brain chemical that's key to sensing pleasure.
FAIL again.
Gee, ya think? But that's not the only gene related to fat, so you can't blame it all on that one gene.
"This paper takes it one step farther," said Dr. Nora Volkow of the National Institutes of Health, a dopamine specialist who has long studied the obesity link. "It takes the gene associated with greater vulnerability for obesity and asks the question why. What is it doing to the way the brain is functioning that would make a person more vulnerable to compulsively eat food and become obese?"
MASSIVE FAIL
This assumes that everyone who has this gene is a compulsive eater who automatically gets fat from eating too much food. This could be true of a very small number of fat people, but it certainly is not true of all fat people.
Still, it could have important implications. Volkow, who heads NIH's National Institute of Drug Abuse, notes that "dopamine is not just about pleasure." It also plays a role in conditioning — dopamine levels affect drug addiction — and the ability to control impulses.
So now you're saying that fat people have no ability to control impulses, otherwise they wouldn't over-eat and they therefore wouldn't be fat? Yeah, right. As Miss Conduct said "if you think fat people have no self-discipline, consider the fact that they haven’t killed you yet."
But if doctors could determine who carries the at-risk gene, children especially could be steered toward "recreational sports or other things that give them satisfaction and pleasure and dopamine that aren't food ... and not get their brains used to having crappy food," said Stice, a clinical psychologist who has long studied obesity.
"Don't get your brain used to it," he said of non-nutritious food. "I would not buy Ho Hos for lunch every day because the more you eat, the more you crave." FAIL again
This is ONE gene related to being fat, what about all the other genes that are related to being fat? And I'm sorry, but forcing children to play recreational sports if they aren't interested in them is just going to make them hate the idea of any kind of exercise, which sorta kinda defeats the purpose, don't ya think? Not to mention that no amount of exercise is going to permanently make a naturally fat child thin, ain't happening, people.
And as for non-nutritious food, I don't think there is such a thing. Every food out there has some nutrition to it, even if it's minimal. I also don't know anyone who eats HoHo's for lunch every damned day (boring, if you ask me, to eat the same thing every day, day in and day out). How do you get used to eating crappy food? I don't care how often you eat crappy food (and by that, I mean food that doesn't taste very good, I don't know what Stice considers crappy food), just because you eat it all the time doesn't mean you ever get used to it, or come to like it or enjoy eating it (I know I NEVER EVER got used to eating my mom's breaded tomatoes, no matter how often she forced me to eat them, nasty slimy things they were, and to this day, I refuse to eat them).
So this is one fucking gene out of how many that are related to being fat? And fixing this one gene is going to end the "obesity epi-panic"? I don't think so. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Mother Nature made us a diverse species for a reason, and it's not nice to fuck with Mother Nature (she'll get you in the end if you do).
No comments:
Post a Comment