People don’t eat less to compensate for overeating
I’ve written about obesity in the past, and I couldn’t pass up this particular article I just came across. The basic premise is that if one eats more than usual and gains some weight over the course of, say, a week, one is not inclined to eat less to make up for it. The possible reason cited:
“The study suggests that eating behavior does not normally respond to internal cues, such as physiological mechanisms involved in the regulation of body weight, but to external cues,” said David Levitsky, professor of nutritional sciences and of psychology at Cornell. “In other words, when the subjects returned to the same environment — in this case our eating lab — they returned to their same eating patterns, regardless of any biological signals.”
The results add to the growing evidence that environmental cues, especially portion size, appear to be a major determinant of how much we eat, he said. This finding runs counter to the current view that food intake is largely determined by biological mechanisms.
However, I would posit a more built-in mechanism: evolutionary history. In the past, when humans were primarily hunter-gatherers, a boom time would often be followed by a period of less bounty. It would seem, then, that evolution would select for eating more now and not being worried about eating less later. Gaining a little girth temporarily would allow one to be held over on less, later.
I emailed the author of the report asking for their opinion on the matter, and I am anxiously awaiting their reply.
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I just hope this won’t lead to an upsurge of overweight people suddenly blaming their environment, and not their eating habits, on their size. There’s only so much blame for obesity that can be laid at the door of physiological/environmental/situational causes. As someone who struggles with their weight and has to both watch what I eat and regularly exercise, I resent it when people with a pure lack of willpower and/or inability to connect what they’re eating with their size start to go on about environmental and evolutionary factors. They exist, but they don’t rule us.
Comment by Alex — August 16, 2005 @ 6:43 am
I absolutely agree, and it wasn’t my intention to imply that this shifts any responsibility from the individual involved. That’s one of the joys of being human: being self-aware and congnizant of our shortcomings and working around them. Anyone who thinks that we’re ruled entirely by genetics and biology is sorely mistaken. I don’t know of anyone that actually thinks otherwise.
Comment by Rian — August 16, 2005 @ 9:02 am
[...] I have noticed a disturbing trend while writing about science. Many scientists seem to write in this really narrow range, never thinking about what is outside their little bubble: sociologists that don’t stop to ask if there’re biological reasons for certain behaviors; doctors who don’t think outside their field. I understand that it takes many years to get to the point where one can write scientific papers in one’s chosen field, but not thinking about what ramifications it might have on other fields, or how other fields might have an impact on one’s own field, makes little sense to me. It seems as though some people don’t stop, raise their heads, and look around to see what’s going on in the world, and in other fields. It’s like there’s no information sharing between biologists and sociologists and doctors and chemists. It’s the same problem that law enforcement faces, only the solution to this information sharing problem seems much more complicated than does a system which only deals with criminology. I almost wish someone could come along and build a sophisticated database that would catalog every scientific paper, no matter how trivial, and that some abstract logic engine would come along and hit a sociologist over the head when he submits a paper saying that people don’t eat less to compensate after a slight eating binge with a paper from evolutionary biology that states the obvious: that people used to be hunter-gatherers, and this lack of a compensatory mechanism makes sense in the light of evolution. It’s stupid that that sociologist would merely look to sociology for the answers when the answer might well come from the field of biology. [...]
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