so, do i think that weight regulation is determined by genetic factors? that is, do i think that obese people are "born that way"?

no. not at all.

well, not really.

what does the science actually say? it's not what the media wants you to think, but that's normal - the media almost never gets the science right. generally, when you read a report about science at the cbc or cnn, it's been so distorted by the obscene religious censors that you essentially have to run through every clause with a giant not operation. their journalistic integrity is beyond atrocious.

so, forget about the nonsense you've read in the news - it's just that. nonsense.

so, let's ask a question we've asked a few times, now. what is a gene? and the answer is that a gene is a protein that regulates the production of hormones. so, in order to demonstrate that an issue is genetic, you have to show that it's regulated entirely or at least dominantly by hormone production. so, is obesity determined solely or even dominantly by hormone production? if it is, then you've found a genetic defect that should be targeted for elimination from the genome. if it's not, then you can't blame obesity on genetics.

so, is weight determined by hormones? this is the actual debate here underlying the media obfuscation, and the answer is sort of. two people standing side by side can eat the same meal and metabolize it differently, and that difference in metabolism will be caused by different levels of hormonal regulation (which, remember, is all that genes do), but at the end of the day they consumed the same amount of mass, and it's conservation of energy that is going to predominate in the end.

so, these news reports (which are designed to ensure nobody has their feelings hurt, first and foremost, and not as the cold, rationalist scientific explorations that they should be designed as, to discard emotions as meaningless subjective opinions) constantly want to bring up genes as this kind of black box explanation. our understanding of genetics is slowly pushing past the point where you can get away with this kind of lazy journalism, but for right now you can still throw just about anything in this pile of magic called "genetics" using tricks like "studies suggest" or "scientists estimate", and get the answer you expected out of it by designing the question that way. to call that a perversion of science would be an understatement. but, if you want to understand this properly, you're better off starting not from the assumption (and that is still all it actually is) that genetics are paramount and unalterable (as though god decided, right?), but rather from the conservation of energy, which we can use newtonian approximations for, in context.

energy stored = energy consumed - energy burned

so, if you're fat it's because you eat more than you need, and it's the most basic physics in the world to understand it as much.

it is consequently the case that if your fancy genetic model contradicts that simple equation then you can throw it in the trash - it's garbage. genetic/hormonal complications may affect the amount of energy your body burns, but the issue of stored weight is ultimately determined by how much one consumes and not by how much one burns and you simply can't store more energy than you've consumed. that's not biology; that's physics. you can't gain weight by not eating, and if you burn calories you will always lose some weight, even if your hormonal regulation is particularly defective and prevents you from burning fat like a healthy person in a particularly invasive way.

given that truth, hormonal regulation brought on by gene expression can at most be an annoyance. it's friction. it's a complicating factor. but, to say that you can't lose weight because of your genes is wrong. rather, people with poor hormone regulation due to defective genes will simply need to work harder and eat less to maintain healthy vital statistics.

that means that the issue is not genetic, at it's core - and that people with defective genes should be paying more attention to lifestyle, not giving into fatalistic assumptions, or giving up on life because god.

as an aside, do we want to conclude that obesity is a genetic defect? because, i can tell you that i'll never accept it. the unavoidable conclusion of trying to clinicize an issue that is in actual truth almost entirely about lifestyle would be that we need to find a way to eliminate the genetic disease/defect of obesity from the genome. i mean, we can't be walking around talking about accepting inferiority as normal. actual diseases need to be targeted and expunged. so, this intelligent design recast as liberalism thing only gets the religious people to the end point they want if it's rooted in religious assumptions in the first place; if you find the fatalism of these religious arguments laughable, i'm talking about the "god made me the way i am" crowd, you're just going to take the knowledge as an argument for eugenics. the idea that being fat is a choice and can be reversed is consequently a lot better than the alternative, which is that fat people have a genetic disease that cannot be cured and should be prevented from breeding.