Do These Genes Make Me Look Fat?

Have you ever wondered why some people can eat as much as they want and never exercise, yet manage to stay thin? Or why other people eat healthy and are always at the gym but seem to put on the pounds anyway? The answer may be in our genes. An article in the Wall Street Journal states that a study involving 250,000 people, made up of more than 400 scientists at 280 different institutions in countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Iceland, Finland, and the United States, is being undertaken to identify the genes linked to obesity. So far, 18 genes have been found to be directly related to obesity and 13 associated with how fat is distributed in the body. This totals to 32 gene sites being identified (1 gene was already identified before this study), meaning that there are 64 gene variants that can affect a person's risk for becoming obese. The study found that "people with more than 38 variants associated with increasing body mass index were 15 to 20 pounds heavier than those who had fewer than 22 such variants", thus helping to prove that a person may be predispositioned to becoming obese because of genetics.

Knowledge of these gene sites could create many new possibilities for those in the healthcare field and the general population. According to Joel Hirschhorn, a physician and researcher at Children's Hospital Boston, "If we could understand a lot more about why people are resistant to our environment and stay lean despite all the pressures there are to gain weight, we'd have a better shot at getting better therapies than we have now". Those involved in the study realize, however, that they are still a long way off from being able to make a real difference in therapies based on this genetic information; much more research (and, therefore, much more money) is needed before these differences can be made.

I found this article to be very interesting because of the growing problem of obesity in our society. I do think that knowledge of these gene sites could be very beneficial towards this problem, however, I do feel that obesity is very largely dependent on environment and lifestyle (although I am not the most qualified person to be making this statement). Also, as with most things, there are potential downsides to the outcome of this study. One that was pointed out to me was the possibility of people screening their embryos for this gene and aborting the ones with a large number of gene variants because their children could potentially become obese in the future. There are, however, many possible outcomes for this study and more can be said when more research is done and more experiments are performed.