Do we get fat because we no longer get sick?

[Mr Skeptic]

Back in the day, every so often you'd get a good bout of diarrhea, and lose quite a bit of weight. For the most part we no longer get seriously sick, not nearly as often anyhow. One of the things that happens when you are really sick is that you lose weight, no?

 

Sure, we still get sick once in a while, but not nearly as often as before, and much less of the diarrhea based sicknesses.

 

If we factored in the amount of weight we "should" have lost due to sickness, does that account for our weight gain?

[Fuzzwood]

Your body loses a lot of water, not necessarily fat.

[Phi for All]

I could see that being an explanation if gastrointestinal illness was on the decline, simply because you eat less when you're nauseated.

[BrainWasher]

I believe that the illnesses were avoided much more than you appear to assume. Consider the learning mechanisms that we have developed to avoid foods that we have eaten and gotten sick.

 

Are you considering the time when we started transitioning from nomads to hunter gatherers to farmers? I'm sure the transitions have had many bad experiences with food poisoning and hygiene issues.

 

Each of these lifestyles have had there downfalls. Yet I'm sure there were many localities that were over weight in current standards. Most likely from availability of the foods, lack of competition, etc...

 

Maybe our higher standards in hygiene is changing our gastric microflora. Maybe this is changing our tolerance to food poisoning.

 

I believe it is our processed foods, sugar drinks, lack of exercise from gathering and huntng, etc... that is causing our weight gains.

 

I imagine we could consider the automobile a major contributer even more than sickness in many cases.

 

I know where I gain most of my weight... STARBUCKS... hahaha.... I sit there and read for hours at a time while drinking hundreds upon hundreds of calories. I can't wait until New York bans Caramal Macchiatos... hahahaha

 

What do you think?

Edited January 22, 2010 by BrainWasher

[Mr Skeptic]

Well, I was mostly thinking of water-borne illnesses and fecal contamination, but now that you mention it, food poisoning would also have been that much more common before refrigeration and hygiene.

 

And yes, the diseases may cause water loss as well but it is quite evident that they also cause loss of appetite and weight loss (eg the energy of maintaining a fever, must be fairly high). Nausea and vomiting of course also would account for some.

 

And might as well remember intestinal parasites like tapeworms, mmm, weight loss worms.

[Rickdog]

In the case of internal parasites as tapeworms, you don`t loose weight as a whole, since as the parasite is in you, each time you weigh your self, you are also weighing the parasite, and your loss is the parasites gain. Also since your needs increase due to the fact that you are not absorving all the nutrients necessary from your regular diet, you increase your intake of food in order to feed yourself and "your internal parasite", so the most probable is that you gain weight than loosing it, specially in the case of tapeworms, who in its simplicity once established in your bowel, feeds from your food intake and reproduces itself very fast.

 

[CharonY]

Extremely unlikely unless people would suffer from constant diarrhea. In the long go this would kill them off, eventually. Once the person recovers they usually rapidly regain weight.

[Darkpassenger]

not sure what time period you are referring to but before the invention of cars and maybe a few decades after that people were generally skinner. Humans are/were hunter gathers so walking and running was an everyday necessity. Even before motor vehicles we had to walk, bike, or ride a horse to get to the food stores or other general good stores. with all of that said we still had to do most of daily chores walking or some sort of required daily exercise. Also were were not as plugged in to our homes as we were even just 2 decades ago. I remember as a kid never spending more then a few hours in the house after school. This may explain the rapid weight gain of humans of the past few decades.

 

TO your original question i would say refer to this.

 

Extremely unlikely unless people would suffer from constant diarrhea. In the long go this would kill them off, eventually. Once the person recovers they usually rapidly regain weight.

[Rickdog]

Extremely unlikely unless people would suffer from constant diarrhea. In the long go this would kill them off, eventually. Once the person recovers they usually rapidly regain weight.

 

The type of diarrhea associated with tapeworm infestations is not so obvious, so the loose of water is not so manifest. For the host, all the digestive syntoms are not so different than any digestive illment, such as indigestion, so it`s more probable that the host finds out that he has tapeworms infestation, once the tapeworm has reached full maturity, moment in which pieces of the tapeworm (proglotids) comes out through the faeces, which is one of the forms that this creatures have for reproducing itself, if he looks at them in the toilet.

All parasitic diseases, depend on the survival of its hosts, cause the death of the host implies their own death (that`s the reason why mortality due to parasitic infestations is not so common as in other diseases), specially in adult forms of the parasites, such as tapeworms. Larval states of parasites are usually the opposite, since they depend on the death of its intermediate host in order that the host gets eaten my the definitive host, by which the parasite can complete its life cycle.

 

:-)

[CharonY]

Mild tapeworm infections do not result in weight loss either. If it is bad enough for you to lose weight, worse things are going to happen soon.

Also, while co-evolution often favours the survival of the host in the long run, it is not necessarily so. For quite some parasites the death of the host is necessary for them to spread.

[Rickdog]

Very true, my friend. I forgot to say what you brilliantly said in your last sentence, thinking only in adult forms of tapeworms, refering myself to "all" parasites ().

Edited January 25, 2010 by Rickdog

[Blakelyneal]

I believe that could be considered a factor but for the most part the ease of access to food and no exercise is the weight gain issue in today's culture, at least here in the U.S.

 

There has been a pretty heavy decrease in manual labor for the masses of obese individuals.