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What Is Obesity?
Obesity is not so much a disease or disease condition, but more a symptom of a more serious disease, which is dysfunction of your metabolic system. When your metabolic system is damaged, either from brain damage or from toxins that prevent normal function, your loss of energy-control results in fat (stored energy) building up in your fat cells, liver and arteries. Having excess weight (obesity) puts a little more strain on your bones, but otherwise does not cause serious illness. It is metabolic dysfunction that causes liver damage, diabetes, high blood pressure, hyperlipidemia, heart disease and stroke. These problems are of course "associated with" obesity, but not caused by it. Obesity is just another symptom.
Why should we fight childhood obesity, then? Because obesity is a very visible symptom of metabolic dysfunction that is easy to measure. Unfortunately, it does not always show up in everyone who has metabolic dysfunction. Many adults progress to type 2 diabetes or fatty liver disease without becoming obese. Presumably, the same is happening in children, but not yet causing enough disability to be noticed.
Also, genetics has a role, since some children develop fatty liver that corresponds to excess weight, while others (in a different gene pool) do not get fatty liver at the same weight. However, even those children are getting damage from the metabolic dysfunction in other ways, such as hypertension and heart disease.
Is monitoring the weight of a child a useful thing to do? At this point, yes, because it can indicate overall how well we are doing at reducing the amount of toxins in our diet. And for the majority of children, there is a good correlation between BMI and metabolic dysfunction.
What causes metabolic dysfunction? In
our current environment, fructose in our food supply is the major toxin. Other
factors include a diet low in fiber and high in saturated fats, sedentary
lifestyle, and poor sleep habits. Other possible causes include thyroid disease
and other hormonal diseases but these are much less common. Poor lifestyle and
diet account for 99% of metabolic dysfunction associated with obesity.
Why not just call the problem "metabolic dysfunction" and take the stigma away from outward appearances (your weight)? Mostly for economic and political reasons. Gigantic amounts of government funding has been allotted to the study of "obesity". And most research is centered on obesity and its associations rather than on the causes of it. Most doctors think only in terms of obesity and not the underlying problem of metabolic dysfunction. Another difficulty is that there is already a disease entity called "Metabolic Syndrome" that is easily confused with metabolic dysfunction. Metabolic Syndrome is a collection of symptoms that represent the end stages of damage from long-term metabolic dysfunction, such as type 2 diabetes with insulin resistance, hypertension, high levels of lipids (like cholesterol and triglycerides) in the blood, and cardiovascular disease. Other symptoms include polycystic ovary disease and a skin rash on the neck called acanthosis nigricans. Of course, we do not want to wait for these late stages of the damage, when early prevention can save lives.
So for now we are stuck with the terms "obesity" and "overweight" to stand as symbols for the more serious problem of metabolic dysfunction.
If Fructose is Toxic, Why is it Legal?
Like other toxic products, such as tobacco, important industrial profits are protected by the government. For example, even though 53,000 Americans die every year from secondhand smoke, OSHA ignores the importance of clean air for workers, and refuses to require smoke-free workplaces. This blatant lack of action, in the face of nearly 20 years of strong recommendations from OSHA's twin arm of the CDC, NIOSH, can only be due to government corruption due to the lobbying influence of the tobacco industry. We can expect far worse from the food industry.
The food industry dwarfs the tobacco industry, and exerts a huge lobbying influence on our government. Also consider the immense influence it exerts on the American people through advertising. As with tobacco, medical science will have to educate people gradually about the dangerous effects of sugar. Educated Americans can live healthy by striving to be both tobacco-free and sugar-free. As with quitting tobacco, it's never too late to quit eating and drinking sugar.
