Weight control, what is due to genetics, what is due to the environment.

What is genetic and what is due to the environment?

The argument regarding what is innate (genetics) versus affective (environment) divides scientists.

Religion provided the foundations of this duality with its inborn hierarchy while reformers came with individual interpretation of texts, the free enterprise system, and the possibility for everyone to control their own destiny.

This duality has always been endorsed through political ideology, and religion. The question “environment versus inborn” still arouses too many passions for a definitive answer. The liberal school of thought supports the side of the environment, while the conservatives think the individual is responsible for his well-being.

Many chemicals in the brain are implicated regarding individual susceptibility to store fat. Each one of these mechanisms is subject to the influence of several genes. In the brain, we know of 41 neuron transmitters, 13 of which are implicated in weight regulation.  One area has been identified as the center for hunger. Another location serves as the origin for satiety. We know of transmitters made by the fatty cells regulating total body fat but their function and activation are too rare and yet too unknown, to create a medical concern.

The capacity to make fat is in directly related to the needed capacity for survival. Currently, there is 10% obesity in France, compared to 14% in the Netherlands, 20% in the UK, 25% in Germany and 41% in the United States.

The survival capacity of Americans is highest, in spite of the similarity of the genetic inheritance. The genetic influence is so significantly entwined with the environmental one that it is doubtful that we will ever find a single, or major cause.

What we have studied here is what determines weight management common to all species.

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