Link: Genes that beat cold blamed for obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.
I have long joked about my physical build being the result of evolutionary impacts on my Eastern European Jewish ancestors--my people self-selected, so I quip, for the genetic traits of being squat and low-slung, all the better to avoid being blown off the Russian steppes by the wintry winds while digging potatoes out of the frozen ground.
Now obviously evolutionary selection doesn't work over quite that short a timeframe (i.e. mere centuries), but it always seemed plausible to me that it was indeed influencing our species shape over the long-term--and here is a report of a study implying exactly that.
Nevermind that the story misses the full implications of this point by still referring to obesity as a "disease"--nope, folks, your own study is implying that obesity is simply another evolutionary adaptation, like the massive amounts of fat carried by polar bears to survive in their native habitat. The fact that our environment has changed such that our evolutionary adaptations are now backfiring on us does make it a health problem, but disease-ifying a natural variation in human physiognomy is not helping the heads of people trying to cope with that variation one bit.
(In fact, it smacks of similar language I've seen used by certain plastic surgeons, who define small breast size in women as a "disease" for which breast augmentation surgery is the "cure".)
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