When the American Medical Association voted to recognize obesity as a disease By 2013, most doctors had paved the way for the condition to finally be taken seriously.
At the time, and even now, there was a lot of controversy surrounding the decision . But little by little, the scenario is changing, moving from the assumption that obesity is the fault of those who have it (they are lazy and have no willpower), to be a chronic condition that puts health at risk and may require long-term medical monitoring.
Still, many people, including those in the fat acceptance movement, don't believe there should be a pathologization.
By now, the statistics are familiar: About 42 percent of American adults are obese, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and another 31 percent are overweight. The health conditions linked to obesity – high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease and stroke, to name a few – are well documented.
But what exactly makes obesity a disease?
“One of the important things we've learned is that obesity is a brain condition, for lack of a better term,” Giles Yeo, a world-renowned geneticist at the University of Cambridge and a pioneer in the field of obesity research, told Sanjay Gupta, Correspondent Chief Doctor of CNN on the “Chasing Life” podcast.
“It is now clear – transparent, evident – that [a obesidade] it’s a brain problem: it’s our brain influencing hunger,” Yeo said. “So even though the feeling comes from your stomach, we now know that obesity is just your brain suggesting what you eat and how you eat it.”
While carrying extra pounds can lead to inconveniences (like arthritis and sleep apnea), Yeo said that alone won't kill you. But it's dangerous to carry excess weight, because once your fat cells fill up – Yeo calls them “professional fat storage organs” – they spill out to other parts of the body, like internal organs and muscles, that don't. are designed to store it. And that's when metabolic problems start to take root, which can eventually lead to conditions like cardiovascular disease.
However, not every person with extra weight is necessarily living with a disease, Yeo said.
“If you redefine the term obesity – perhaps I'm doing some verbal acrobatics here, but I think it's an important nuance – the moment we begin to understand that it's not just high body weight, but rather a state in which it begins to influence your health, then it is a disease,” he said.
Genetics plays a big role in how much fat your cells can store, and it also affects how often and how strongly our brain sends the hunger signal.
What can you do if nature is playing against you? Yeo has these five tips — which he calls “Yeo's truths” in his first book, “Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth about Dieting” — to help you eat healthily. to lose weight.
Yeo Truth #1: Losing weight “shouldn’t be easy”
Losing weight goes against our self-preservation mechanisms.
“Anyone who tells you that losing weight is easy is lying to you – trust me: lying to you,” said Yeo. “It's not, because your brain makes it difficult. So when you lose weight, he will hate it and try to get you to gain the weight back.”
Yeo said that if you're having trouble losing weight, “understand that it's not because you're bad, it's because it's not supposed to be easy.”
Yeo's Truth #2: Try to moderate your diet
Reduce your food intake overall – just a little.
“Eat a little less of everything,” Yeo said. “It is otherwise called moderation, but it is also true.”
He doesn't recommend trying to completely eliminate often-maligned food groups like carbs or fats.
“If you can drink dairy, then dairy is not poisonous to you,” he said. “Eat a little less of everything if you want to lose weight.”
Yeo's Truth #3: Slowly Digesting Foods Are Your Allies
Choose foods that last longer.
“Foods that take longer to digest make you feel fuller,” said Yeo.
One example is protein.
“You don't want to overeat, but a higher protein diet actually makes you feel fuller,” he said.
“Eating foods high in fiber also tends to make you feel fuller.”
Yeo's Truth #4: Quality Over Calories
Consider the value of the food as a whole, not just one aspect of it.
“Don’t count calories blindly,” said Yeo. “Why? Because calories only tell you about the amount of food; they do not inform about the nutritional quality of the food. [O valor calórico] it doesn’t tell you how much protein, how much fiber, how much salt, how much micronutrients are present.”
Yeo Truth #5: Food is not the enemy
Whenever discussing diets, Yeo said, people unnecessarily talk about excluding so-called “bad foods” instead of understanding how they interact with food.
“Do not fear food,” he said. “I think we need to fix our food environment; I think some people need to eat less. But if you're afraid of food… you start to think, 'Oh, I need to cut out this, I need to cut out that.'”
“I think we need to eat a little less. But also that we need to love our food.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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