According to NPR article “French-Fry Conspiracy: Genes Can Make Fried Foods MoreFattening” Doctors from Harvard Medical School reported that people with obesity genes gain more weight when they eat fried foods than people with lower genetic risk for obesity.
One of my friends has been trying to lose her weight. She focuses on eating healthy food. Although she sometimes eats sweet desserts or fried foods, overall she is on healthy way. However, it seems she has to take lots of effort to lose just a few pounds. Genes may be her big obstacles. Fortunately, I think I don’t have obesity genes because I hardly gain weight. I can eat french-fries, cheese, pizza, ice cream, and many unhealthy kinds of food without worrying about gain much weight. Especially when I was a child, I had struggling to gain weight and always thought that being obese is quite difficult. I remember that when my sister and I had to see a doctor for annual health check up, we put few coins in our pockets and stepped onto the scales.
In my opinion, parents are also a common factor to make people obese, but not parents’ genes. It is behavioral patterns of parents. Young children of overweight parents are likely to be obese. It is difficult to change eating habits that we are used to. However, I believe that everyone can lose weight if they eat smaller healthy food and increase activities. It’s not important to try to find out that we have these obesity genes. Whether or not we have high genetic risk for obesity, it is more important to watch out our eating habits. If we know that we have a genetic problem, we should pay more attention to our lifestyle. Don’t just blame mom and dad. If we want to lose or maintain our weight, we should reduce eating fried food. There is no evidence to prove that these genes make it impossible to lose weight. There is nothing to stop us from losing weight.
__________
Reference
Doucleff,M. (2014, March 20). French-Fry Conspiracy: Genes Can Make Fried Foods More
Fattening. NPR.
Retrieved March 25, 2014 from http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/03/20/291412227/french-fry-conspiracy-genes-can-make-fried-foods-more-fattening
I think people who don't have these obesity genes, including you, are very lucky. As you said, you had a problem with gaining weight, but I have a problem with losing weight. I agree with you that parents are one of the factors that make children obese. When I was young, I didn't like eating. At that time, my parents and my teachers had to find the way to make me eat more. They were successful, but now there is new problem, I'm too fat.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, genes is one of the reason that causing the obesity, I also think that the main reason of gaining weight is the habit. I think even though you eat a lot of unhealthy food such as ice-cream, candy, chips, and so on, you will still be healthy and not be obesity if you exercise daily and always control your calories consumption.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the parents' genes cause them to behave in ways that create habits likely to lead to obesity in their children?
ReplyDeleteThere is strong evidence that the children of homes with lots of books do better at school than the children from homes with few books - even if those books just sit unread on shelves. In contrast, there is equally strong evidence that parents reading to their children regularly does not affect how well the children do at school.
It seems highly unlikely that simply having lots of books on shelves at home, as my family did, magically causes the children to be more intelligent. And when I first heard it, I was a surprised that parents reading to their children, something that my parents also did, is irrelevant to academic performance, but that is what the statistics say (Levitt and Dubner, 2005, "Perfect Parents"). The answer suggested by the economists who did the research and analysis is that the explanation is genetic - intelligence is largely hereditary, determined by genes, and the homes with lots of books are likely to be those of intelligent parents, whereas reading to children is something that anyone can, and hopefully does, do. But reading to children is not a marker for intelligence in the way that books on shelves are.
The field of behavioural economics, exploring what people really do, which is often very, very different to what they think and say, has fascinated me for a while now.
What do you think? Are most people honest or dishonest?
Which is larger and far more serious for national economies: the amount stolen by all home robberies, car thefts and bank robberies, or the amount stolen by people lying on their tax returns? And the amount stolen by employees from companies when they take home company property or tell a lie on their expense account?
What percentage of students at, say, Harvard University, cheat when they can? (That is, does high education have any correlation with honesty or being a "good" person?)
Reference
Levitt, S. & Dubner, S. (2005). Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden side of Everything. New York: William Morrow.
(Note: Levitt's analysis is based on a very large survey of hundreds of thousands of students and their families in the US education system - it seems solid.)
Interestingly, Levitt and Dubner found that several factors are related to children doing well and that several are not. All of the related factors use verbs which report not an action but a situation or state (there are lots of books in the home), whereas all of the unrelated factors use verbs that report actions (parents read to their children).
DeleteAnother pair of factors are:
"The child's mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child's birth" (Levitt & Dubner, 2006, p. 166).
and
"The child's mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten" (p. 166).
Which of these do you think correlates with academic performance in school and which does not?
Reference
Levitt, S. & Dubner, S. (2006). Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden side of Everything. London: Penguin Books.
(I have two copies of this book - when I paraphrased in the previous comment, it didn't matter which I cited for the ideas, but it matters very much for this comment, because I've quoted the exact words. I copied the words above from the source in this reference citation. Had I known I was going to write this second comment, where I quote the exact words from my source, I would have used this citation for both.)
I believe genetic is an explanation of why some people get fat easily ,but some are not. I'm one kind of a later one which gain weight quite hard even I eat a lot. Although, I'm not sure that a good metabolism is involve in this theory or not. Because a person with great metabolism is unlikely to get fat same as people who has lower genetic risk for obesity.
ReplyDelete