Metabolism: The thrifty gene and what has nitrogen got to do with it?, By Mukaila Kareem

Given that life evolved from environments of food scarcity, obesity would have been very advantageous in challenging environments where the next meal was not certain. However, this would probably not be a sound survival strategy in hunting and gathering societies, where physical fitness was the norm. Obviously, obesity would have been an unachievable goal and probably not even be an envisioned longshot plan in a meagre milieu.

Apart from exposure to these pockets of hostile environments with varying cellular and biochemical adaptations, there is a common experience of austere environments by all humans, and how we have survived has been a long-standing debate since James Neel proposed the thrifty genes hypothesis in 1962. However, of all the macronutrients, fructose is the only seasonal nutrient and it can only be found plentiful in fruits during the summer or rainy season and, unlike grains and tubers, fruits cannot be stored in the natural environments. Since fruits cannot be stored externally in tents, human bodies have adapted to breaking fructose down exclusively for fat storage.

The high consumption of fructose from refined sugar and other processed foods has been linked to high levels of serum uric acid and gout. Obesity, kidney stones, type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, hypertension and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, have been linked to high levels of uric acid. Generally, in metabolism, more is not better.

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