Op-Ed: Do we really know what makes us fat?

We’re familiar with the pattern by now: Every few years, a new study emerges with new obesity statistics. The numbers seem shockingly high, almost impossibly high, until the next study comes along with. In the 1970s, approximately 15% of American adults met the obesity criteria. By the end of the 1980s, that 15% had grown to more than 20%. By the year 2000, we had reached 30%. Today, 42% of American adults are classified as obese, and an additional 30% are considered overweight.

The prevailing wisdom on obesity has not gone entirely unchallenged. Over the last two decades, a small but growing number of doctors, scientists and journalists have argued that we have, in fact, fundamentally misunderstood the science of what makes us fat. These challengers have long seemed like underdogs, rebels hurling rocks at a well-fortified scientific dogma.But that perception may now be changing.

Specifically, the model doesn’t tell us why our fat cells are holding on to the calories we consume rather than releasing the energy to fuel the body. After all, our body fat evolved precisely so that we could take in large quantities of food and then release that energy to fuel ourselves when we are not eating. That we are not moving enough doesn’t seem to be the answer.

In place of the energy-balance model, the Clinical Nutrition article proposes a carbohydrate-insulin model because the pancreas releases more insulin in response to processed carbohydrates than to any other foods. Our obesity epidemic took off in the 1980s, it follows, not simply because we started to eat more calories in the form of processed food, but because we began to replace the healthy fats in our diet with refined sugars and grains.

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