Obesity As the Body's Protector?

It's no news that fatty foods are bad for you. But scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that, paradoxically, "obesity protects the body from the effects of overeating by providing somewhere safe to deposit the dietary deluge of fat and sugar, which in excess is toxic to many body tissues."

Strange that the disorder so closely linked to diabetes and heart disease may actually be a biologically protective mechanism. Essentially, the study states, the body's response to over-consumption of fat is to store it in fat cells. The body's storage of fat is somewhat benign. But when such cells reach maximum capacity, they begin to leak into the blood stream and accumulate in important organs like the liver and heart — it's this accumulation that leads to the diseases and death associated with obesity.

As Gökhan Hotamisligil, a diabetes and obesity researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, puts it, "When fat cells break, it's like an oil tanker being hit," he says. "It unloads this toxic cargo, almost like an oil slick."

As it turns out, it's actually the body's immune response when it's flooded with fat in the bloodstream that cause some of the most disastrous effects of eating fatty foods. But a diet of high-fat, processed foods is one that will eventually cause those cells to burst. So how do we adopt low-fat diets?

Another study provides interesting, if cringe-worthy, insight on consumption patterns. As Katherine Gustafson wrote, researchers at SUNY Buffalo found that junk food taxes are more effective than healthy food subsidies. Sort of a harsh reality check, but it turns out that mothers who saved money with subsidies on health foods went ahead and spent those savings on junk. But perhaps the mothers aren't entirely to blame: Still another study found that although 80 percent of the population knows that trans-fats are unhealthy, nearly half of the studies participants could not name a single trans-fat source. Yikes! If you're reading this blog, you're probably not in that camp. But check out this list of best and worst foods just in case—not surprisingly, it's the pre-packaged fast foods that top the "worst" list, and raw foods like broccoli and citrus fruits that dominate the best.

Photo credit: Combined Media