Weight gain occurs after metabolic syndrome
Everyone thinks that first you gain weight, and then you get sick. Yet, 80 percent of the time, it’s actually the other way around. First you get sick, then you gain weight. How do we know this? Because only 80 percent of obese people are metabolically ill. The other 20 percent of obese people are metabolically healthy. We even have a name for them—metabolically healthy obese (MHO). They will live a completely normal life, die at a completely normal age and have normal-length telomeres. The key is that these people have lots of subcutaneous fat, very little ectopic fat, normal metabolic function, and low insulin levels.
How about the other 80 percent who are overweight and sick? They were sick first—they had metabolic syndrome—and that caused insulin resistance, which led to high insulin levels. But because their fat cells still responded to insulin, and that extra insulin allowed the fat cells to accumulate more energy, they got bigger. Therefore, their weight is a biomarker for their metabolic dysfunction. Doctors are still targeting obesity, which they think is the disease. Rather, it’s just another symptom. This is because modern medicine tends to target the pathology of an illness rather than preventing it.
References
- Lustig, Robert. (2021). Metabolical Chapter 2. “Modern Medicine” Treats Symptoms, Not Disease (p. 40). New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.