The philosophy of obesity in simple language

Obesity can be defined as an evolutionary and chronic disease such as diabetes or hypertension which is not cured, it is only controlled.

It is a condition that does not depend on the will of the patient who suffers from it, for which we were not prepared as a species, let us take into account that the human being and all species have gone through periods of famine, these episodes in our history have provided us with means Genetics necessary to endure to some degree in starvation.

However, the human being is not genetically prepared for obesity, the body suffering from obesity does not have the necessary mechanisms to cope with it.

Without a doubt, it is a disease that had been brewing for several previous generations and that today emerges as the pandemic of the century and as the disease that kills the most patients in the world. Due to its close link with the main causes of mortality, which generates unaffordable costs for governments, it is a multifactorial phenomenon with serious consequences.

Multicausality in the origin of obesity.

It is very important to take into account that obesity is a multifactorial disease and the sum of all these factors makes it a very difficult disease to treat, there are factors that depend on the environment in which the patient lives and others that only depend on the patient himself,

Obesity is the product of an imbalance between two very simple factors, the first of which is the intake of food and the other is the burning of calories.

To understand this I will give the following example: 

Let's keep in mind that our body is a complex system that works with a fuel that is what we eat and as I already mentioned our body is genetically prepared for famine.

In such a way that a person who eats their food is destined to be the fuel that allows them to carry out all their vital functions and their daily activities.

In this system that is the organism maintains a balance between the fuel it eats and the energy it spends using this fuel to carry out its functions. When the amount of food that enters is balanced with the amount of energy that food is converted into, the patient maintains weight and there is no obesity.

Now imagine what would happen if the contribution of fuel or food increases and the physical activity or calorie burning does not change. Under this situation, the organism, as part of its genetic code, will resort to the mechanisms that prepare it for famine and will store all the excess food. First as carbohydrate, then as protein, and finally as fat.

How the body stores fat.

The human organism is limited in the amount of energy that it can store as carbohydrates in the muscle and liver and the amount of protein that it can also store.

What has no limit is the amount of excess energy that the human being can store as fat, the excess energy that a patient has as a result of an abundant diet is first stored as fat in the fat cells that already exist in the body. , that is, the body fills them with fat, puts all the fat that is possible and once this is not possible, the body has the ability to recruit new fat cells to fill them with fat again, that is, the body forms cells called adipocytes from other cells to store more and more fat, this phenomenon has no limit, so the more fat the patient stores, the greater the weight he will have.

The crushing of cells.

Based on the previous mechanism of excessive fat storage, let's imagine what happens to the cells that are around these fat cells, what happens is:

• The cells that are between the fat cells are crushed, and the body does not have the ability to differentiate what it is crushing.
• Their pressure receptors only perceive that they are being pressed, to this fact of crushing the cells of the whole body respond as if they were injured by secreting substances that are secreted when there is infection and inflammation.

Es por este hecho que los pacientes obesos se comportan como si estuvieran infectados, pero esta inflamación es 20 veces más potente que la que se observa en los pacientes infectados de tuberculosis, por este hecho los pacientes obesos cursan mientras estén obesos con un estado de inmunosupresión o baja de sus defensas lo que los predispone a todo tipo de infecciones, ya que su sistema inmunológico está siendo continuamente estimulado por las sustancias que las células que están siendo presionadas liberan, esto quiere decir que el sistema inmunológico está ocupado combatiendo una agresión.

It is for this fact that obese patients behave as if they were infected, but this inflammation is 20 times more powerful than that observed in patients infected with tuberculosis, for this fact obese patients present while they are obese with a state of immunosuppression or lowering of their defenses, which predisposes them to all kinds of infections since their immune system is continuously being stimulated by the substances that the cells that are being pressed release, this means that the immune system is busy fighting an attack.

For this reason, the most vulnerable patients in epidemics such as the AH1N1 virus were obese patients. Obese patients have a situation that we call abdominal compartment syndrome, which means that the pressure they handle inside their abdomen is very high and it limits them when it comes to breathing, generates partial obstruction to adequate blood flow, and causes immunosuppression.

Obesity kills.

As data, obesity kills 600 thousand Mexicans annually in our country and generates costs of more than 80 billion pesos a year.

Other repercussions of obesity in the body:

-The difficulty for your blood to circulate properly is that your central nervous system does not receive adequate oxygenation, which results in the so-called sleep apnea, which means that the patient falls asleep frequently during the day doing activities as common as work or more dangerous like driving.
-Typically, patients snore during the night when they sleep and experience brief periods without breathing until they recover their breathing and it resumes in a very noisy way, curiously it is the wives or husbands who tell us “Dr. My husband stops breathing during the night and I have to nudge him to get him to breathe again.” This sleep apnea is what is most associated with sudden death.

I have always believed that the obese patient is a patient whose obesity affects every part of his body, it is enough to think of somebody's structure to realize that it is affected in the obese patient.