Genes take Charge - identical twin studies and weight - must read article - 5/11/07

[Smartmarriages]

We know that couples fight about money, kids, sex, others, and time.
But weight can also be a point of contention - of misunderstanding, blame,
hurt feelings, and dissatisfaction.  Keep this amazing article from the NY
Times Science section for couples you work with. The identical twin studies
are compelling.  - diane


Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside
By GINA KOLATA
May 8, 2007

It was 1959. Jules Hirsch, a research physician at Rockefeller University,
had gotten curious about weight loss in the obese. He was about to start a
simple experiment that would change forever the way scientists think about
fat. 

. . . . the implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people
cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when
they force themselves to gain weight.

. . . The assumption was that environment determined weight, but Dr. Albert
Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania wondered if that was true and, if
so, to what extent. It was the early 1980s, long before obesity became what
one social scientist called a moral panic, but a time when those questions
of nature versus nurture were very much on Dr. Stunkard¹s mind.

He found the perfect tool for investigating the nature-nurture question ‹ a
Danish registry of adoptees developed to understand whether schizophrenia
was inherited. It included meticulous medical records of every Danish
adoption between 1927 and 1947, including the names of the adoptees¹
biological parents, and the heights and weights of the adoptees, their
biological parents and their adoptive parents.

Dr. Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had
been adopted when they were very young ‹ 55 percent had been adopted in the
first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life.
His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986,
were unequivocal. THE ADOPTEES WERE AS FAT AS THEIR BIOLOGICAL PARENTS, AND
HOW FAT THEY WERE HAD NO RELATION TO HOW FAT THEIR ADOPTIVE PARENTS WERE.

The scientists summarized it in their paper: ³The two major findings of this
study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of
biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that genetic
influences are important determinants of body fatness; and that there was no
relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight
class of adoptees, suggesting that childhood family environment alone has
little or no effect.²

. . . The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether
they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body
mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but
not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples¹
weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight
is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental
illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

The results did not mean that people are completely helpless to control
their weight, Dr. Stunkard said. But, he said, it did mean that those who
tend to be fat will have to constantly battle their genetic inheritance if
they want to reach and maintain a significantly lower weight.

In other words, being fat was an inherited condition.

FOR THE COMPLETE ARTICLE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/health/08fat.html


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