Weight Maven

Or as usual, it’s more the reporting than the study itself.

Here’s today’s entry from the American Society of Bariatric Physicians: New Weight Loss Discovery Moves Us Closer to ‘the Pill’ for Obesity:

An important discovery in mice may make a big difference in people’s waistlines thanks to a team of Harvard scientists who found that reducing the function of a transmembrane protein, called Klotho, in obese mice with high blood sugar levels produced lean mice with reduced blood sugar levels. This protein also exists in humans, suggesting that selectively targeting Klotho could lead to a new class of drugs to reduce obesity and possibly Type 2 diabetes for people.

I’m all for these studies, but the idea that there’s really a magic ‘pill’ at the end of this research is, IMO, very misguided.

For one, obesity, like cancer, is really a collection of conditions, not a specific, single entity. This means that at best, looking at obesity is like the blind men & the elephant, and more likely, a wicked problem that changes the more that we look at it.

A useful model of obesity

As a general model, I like Chris Kresser’s autoimmune-inflammatory model of diabesity, which implicates our lifestyle, especially our diet:

• dietary toxins (primarily refined wheat, fructose and industrial seed oils)
• environmental toxins
• micronutrient deficiencies
• chronic stress
• altered gut microbiota
• sedentary lifestyle

Now you don’t have to buy this model, but really. What are the odds that selectively targeting a transmembrane protein is the answer? Or even if it is, what are the odds that we’ll see a useful pharmacological agent in our lifetimes that isn’t worse than the cure? (See Fen-phen.)