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Obesity – Is it Genes or Lifestyle?
Is obesity genetic, or is lifestyle is a bigger factor? Over thousands of years, human genetics haven’t changed much; yet over the past couple of decades there’s been an exponential increase in obesity and its related problems like metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that leads to heart disease and diabetes.1 So, even though it may seem that some people are hard wired to be overweight, the sudden increase in obesity indicates that something more than genetics is playing out.
As it turns out, our genetics can be steered toward obesity, but it is guided by something called our epigenetics, certain behavioral or environmental influences that tell our genes what to do. And guess what? Our epigenetics are heavily influenced by our nutritional intake, including what we eat too much of and what we don’t get enough of.
Let me explain. Everybody is born with a unique set of genes, your hardwired DNA. (That’s called our genome.) Your genes lie there and wait to see if they will be turned on or not as directed by tagging systems that sit on top of genes, called the epigenome. Our genes and epigenetics have been compared to a computer and its software.2 Our genes are the hard drive; the epigenetics are the software telling the hard drive what to do.
