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GT: The assumption that fat tissue isn't regulated at all is almost naive beyond belief. Every other part of the human body is well regulated, but fat tissue is just this garbage can that all these empty extra calories get dumped into. And it just happily expands, despite having these deleterious effects all over your body.
The idea of homeostasis, where you want to keep the internal environment stable regardless of what else is happening, was first discussed in the 1860s by a French scientist named Claude Bernard. Are our fat cells somehow exempt from this?
As you get fatter, homeostasis gets thrown out of whack, because among other things, fat is a good insulator. So your body starts getting hotter. Now you have to cool it down in ways you didn't have to before. You start sweating, and when you lose body fluids, the salt content in the blood gets higher. All kinds of things start going awry when you start getting fatter.
It makes absolutely no sense that your fat tissue wouldn't be regulated, and yet these people believe that obesity is all about calories.
If you look at animals, all animals regulate their fat tissue very carefully. You can't just force animals to overeat and make them fat.
TM: Really?
GT: They won't do it. The only animals that will get fat by dietary means are very carefully bred rats in laboratories, and house pets that don't eat the foods they evolved to eat.
If you've ever looked at cat food, it's packed with carbohydrates. And yet cats are carnivores in the wild. Felines don't eat carbohydrates. They eat meat. That's what they do. And yet we take then into our homes, we feed them carbohydrates, and lo and behold, they get fat.
The argument I'm making is that [obesity is] a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not of sloth and gluttony. Overeating is the side effect of the disorder, not the cause. What you want to know is, what regulates fat accumulation?
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Lots of problems with the logic in this. Homeostasis mechanisms that help keep the body regulated function against the backdrop that the species they are working in evolved. In the environment that humans evolved we had limited amounts of food and high energy expenditures as do all species in the wild. If you provide a novel environment with limitless food, a low exercise condition, and low levels of muscle tissue (due to sedentary lifestyles), then thats not a condition that the body evolved to self regulate in.
It's also problematic comparing humans to other species because compared to other primates we have higher bodyfat levels, probably to provide backup energy during growth when our brains require large amounts of energy (ratio of the energy budget for brain tissue compared to total energy budget is much higher in humans).