eBusiness Weekly
- Genetics
Obesity has a strong genetic component. Children of obese parents are much more likely to become obese than children of lean parents.
That doesn’t mean that obesity is completely predetermined. What you eat can have a major effect on which genes are expressed and which are not.
- Engineered junk foods
Heavily processed foods are often little more than refined ingredients mixed with additives. These products are designed to be cheap, last long on the shelf and taste so incredibly good that they are hard to resist.
By making foods as tasty as possible, food manufacturers are trying to increase sales. But they also promote overeating.
- Food addiction
Many sugar-sweetened, high-fat junk foods stimulate the reward centres in your brain (3, 4). In fact, these foods are often compared to commonly abused drugs like alcohol, cocaine, nicotine and cannabis.
Junk foods can cause addiction in susceptible individuals.
- Aggressive marketing
Junk food producers are very aggressive marketers. Their tactics can get unethical at times and they sometimes try to market very unhealthy products as healthy foods.
- Insulin
Insulin is a very important hormone that regulates energy storage, among other things. One of its functions is to tell fat cells to store fat and to hold on to the fat they already carry.
The Western diet promotes insulin resistance in many overweight and obese individuals. This elevates insulin levels all over the body, causing energy to get stored in fat cells instead of being available for use.
- Certain medications
Many pharmaceutical drugs can cause weight gain as a side effect.
For example, antidepressants have been linked to modest weight gain over time. Other examples include diabetes medication and antipsychotics.
- Leptin resistance
Leptin is another hormone that plays an important role in obesity.
It is produced by fat cells and its blood levels increase with higher fat mass. For this reason, leptin levels are especially high in people with obesity.
In healthy people, high leptin levels are linked to reduced appetite. When working properly, it should tell your brain how high your fat stores are.
- Food availability
Another factor that dramatically influences people’s waistline is food availability, which has increased massively in the past few centuries.
Food, especially junk food, is everywhere now. Shops display tempting foods where they are most likely to gain your attention.
- Sugar
Added sugar may be the single worst aspect of the modern diet.
That’s because sugar changes the hormones and biochemistry of your body when consumed in excess. This, in turn, contributes to weight gain.
Added sugar is half glucose, half fructose. People get glucose from a variety of foods, including starches, but the majority of fructose comes from added sugar.
- Misinformation
People all over the world are being misinformed about health and nutrition.
There are many reasons for this, but the problem largely depends on where people get their information from.
Many websites, for example, spread inaccurate or even incorrect information about health and nutrition.
Some news outlets also oversimplify or misinterpret the results of scientific studies and the results are frequently taken out of context.
