BBC: Brain 'may trigger over-eating'

MEMO TO THE BBC: Get the loading dock ready. There’s a big truckload of “Duh!” coming your way.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m always glad when stories appear in the press pointing out that obesity is not simply a product of gluttony. I just get annoyed when this is portrayed as a revolutionary new discovery. It isn’t. We’ve know it for a long time. It’s simply that the news media (of which the BBC news service is at least ostensibly a part) has not done an effective job communicating the fact. Instead of doing real investigative journalism into the subject, they have been content to pass off to the public the expostulations of countless diet and exercise quacks, including that people are obese because they simply and irresponsibly eat too much.

Wrong.

Eating more calories than the body requires is part of the obesity phenomenon, but the situation is way more complicated than that, and it isn’t hard to tell why. Let’s do a little math:

1) Suppose that a particular 20-year old person needs to consume 2500 calories a day given his metabolism and level of exercise. (This is not at all unreasonable. The “2000-calorie recommended daily intake” that you read about on food labels is–for some unexplained reason–based on the calories consumed by the average post-menopausal woman. It is not representative of what a younger person or a male person needs to eat.)

2) Now suppose that the person actually eats 10% too many calories, or an extra 250 calories per day. Know how much weight the person will gain in a year?

3) 250 calories x 365 days = 91,250 calories. Since there are about 3550 calories per pound of body fat, the person would gain 25.7 lbs. in the course of a year.

4) Now let’s suppose that we project the trend into the future. Suppose that the person continues to eat 250 too many calories per day for a decade. At the end of ten years, when the person is 30, he will have gained 257 lbs. and can be expected to weigh between 400 and 500 lbs.

Know very many 30-year old people who weigh between 400 and 500 lbs?

Didn’t think so.

Even people who give no attention at all to their caloric intake (such people being legion) do not usually gain 26 pounds a year or end up weighing between 400 and 500 pounds by the time they are thirty.

The only possible explanation for this is that the great majority of people–even overweight people–are not overeating more than 250 calories a day.

Now let’s flip the situation around:

5) Suppose that the same 20-year old person underate by 250 calories per day? How many pounds would he lose in a year? That’s right 25.7.

6) And what would happen in a decade? He’d be dead.

If he were magically able to continue losing weight evenly throughout the decade, he would have exhausted his entire body mass before the decade was up. In reality, though, unless you are The Incredible Shrinking Man, you can’t continue to lose body mass indefinitely. You’d probably die around the time you hit 70-90 lbs.

This means that people do not undereat by more than 250 calories per day, either.

Except for a the rare cases of a few individuals who starve themselves to death or who gain 250 pounds in a decade, most people consistently stay within an average of 250 calories of where the number they need to metabolize each day or within about 10% of the needed amount.

Further, even people who give no attention at all to their diet do this. The only conclusion is that there is a mechanism in the human body that pushes us to stay within that range of our needed caloric intake. (In actuality, the range is narrower than I have indicated, but I wanted to use simple obvious numbers to make the point.) Our bodies have a “weight regulator” fuction that works like a thermostat, keeping our caloric intake within a modest range of the number of calories we need per day.

From a phenomenological perspective, the tools the body uses to keep us in that range are feelings of hunger and satiety. When the body wants to jack up our calorie intake, it hits us with feelings of hunger. When it wants to tamp down our calorie intake, it hits us with feelings of satiety.

This means that the great majority of overweight people are not simply gluttonously sucking down food. If they were, their weight would quickly spiral out of control and keep going up until they died. Instead, they are simply eating when their body tells them to eat and not eating when it tells them to stop. In other words, they are responding to the biological imperative that is implanted in them.

Now, for obese people something has obviously gone wrong with the situation or they wouldn’t be overweight, but for most the problem is not the vice of gluttony. They are simply doing what their body is telling them to do.

I don’t have space in this blog entry to talk about what has gone wrong or how it can be fixed, but I’ll be happy to do so if folks want me to.

For now, we need to bear the above in mind when we are tempted to look down on people who are overweight–or who are more simply overweight than we are. Unless they’re experiencing rapid weight gain at the moment, they’re not eating beyond what their bodies are asking them to.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

8 thoughts on “BBC: Brain 'may trigger over-eating'”

  1. Jimmy,

    Great blog and interesting article. However, your theory on obesity assumes that people’s actions are essentially subordinate to what their body tells them to do. First, I think you better need to define what you mean by “body.” Seconnd, the definition of body that you are working from probably seperates it, aritificially I would add, from our capacity to think and override what our “body” tells us to do. Let’s face it, when I see a pretty girl walk by, my “body” tells me to do certain things, but I can’t plead innocence simply because I am “simply doing what my body tells me to do.” In fact I have to override this urge daily, maybe even as often as people have to eat. The connection between mind and body (and soul) is well documented, but you seem to be operating from the assumption that eating is simply a function of what our body tells us to do. To borrow your own phrase, “the situation is way more complicated than that.”

    God Bless,

    Robert

  2. I agree that much more needs to be said here, which is why I said I’d be willing to discuss the subject more in the future. This blog entry, though, was getting too long.

    I think that you may not have fully attended to the major point being made: People *DO* confine their eating to a fairly narrow range of calories, which on average is less than plus or minus ten percent of what they need to eat every day for system matinenance.

    If they didn’t stay within this range, their weight would go up and *KEEP GOING UP* until they died or go down and *KEEP GOING DOWN* until they died. The point is that the body treats weight in a homeostatic manner.

    A secondary conclusion that may be drawn from this is that people who are overweight are much less at fault for their weight than is often supposed. Their bodies simply have the homeostatic weight point set too high, like have a thermostat turned up too much.

    How their body’s homoeostatic weight point got that high and what can be done about it is a separte issue–and one that does involve some exercise of the will.

    However, comparisons between the urge to eat and the urge to engage in sex are not very apt because the two drives are not analogous beyond the fact that they both involve a biological urge of some kind.

    The profound differences between the two is illustrated by the fact that it is perfectly possible to go without sex INDEFINITELY but it is not remotely possible to go without eating INDEFINITELY. The two drives work VERY differently.

  3. I agree that just because someone is overweight doesn’t necessarily mean they eat to much…however it does mean they don’t exercise

  4. Don’t forget that as a person ages, his or her metabolism “slows down.” I know some middle-aged fitness buffs who lament that they have to start increasing their workouts nowadays.

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