One of the great breakthroughs in understanding the upsurge of obesity in recent years has been the discovery of the so-called “fat switch” (aka. metabolic master switch). It’s a metaphor for the idea that creating fat in our bodies can be turned on, or turned off. How marvelous it would be to flip the switch to off and start burning fat, instead of accumulating fat!
Well, we’ve arrived at that point, thanks to the pioneer work of experts like professor Richard J. Johnson, at the University of Colorado, Denver. Johnson has published several papers which are quite pivotal in our understanding of why we accumulate fat and why that has been driven to happen so much in the last 50 years or so.
Johnson wanted to understand the exact mechanism. Instead of walking the orthodox path, and using limited orthodox thinking (biochemistry, genetics, cellular pathology) he decided to tackle it from a much broader perspective: history, epidemiology, biology, anthropology, paleontology and evolutionary science.
He asked himself and his team why it was that some animals go through periods of rapid fat gain and then could somehow switch to a fat-burning mode. A hibernating bear, for example, could gain hundreds of pounds in the Fall and get fat for hibernation. But then it would switch to fat-burning mode and live off it’s fat deposits while sleeping for the whole winter. The fat gain mode exactly parallels the human “disease” we call metabolic syndrome (or diabesity), even including fatty liver deposits.
Whales do the same thing: humpback whales feed and feed in northern waters around Alaska. They get fat and then swim to Hawaii, there they don’t eat for half a year and lose all the excess weight.