Obesity And The Challenges That It Poses To Our Health.

What are the biochemical implications of being obese?

We tend to associate obesity with excess weight gain. Very true. That happens externally. We can see the buildup of the paunch. The fleshiness. The excess weight. That happens.

Some of the key statistics of obesity, as indicated by the World Health Organisation, is presented below:

• In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese.

• 39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese.

• Most of the world’s population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight.

• 38 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2019.

• Over 340 million children and adolescents aged 5–19 were overweight or obese in 2016.

We have 650 million obese people in the world, which suggests that roughly 10% of the global population is obese.

Is that a problem?

It is, especially for those who are classified as obese.

I was part of those statistics a while back, and it did take quite a fair bit of a mindset change to shed some weight permanently.

The National Institute of Health indicates that obese people are at a higher risk of developing various health problems, a full list of which can be found here.

In fact, obesity also provides a much higher risk to suffering the severe symptoms of a COVID-19 infection, if one were to be infected.

But what is happening on the When we’re living in an age of instant gratification, we demand to see instant results. People dream of a pill that can provide instant weight loss. Skincare products that can instantly eliminate wrinkles. A pill that can instantly eliminate diabetes.

Instant. We must SEE those results ASAP. STAT!

Putting on the weight, though, does provide visible results. We look fatter. We can’t fit into our clothes.

Let’s think of the last time we were in a supermarket buying “fresh” apples.

Was the unseen nutritional content of the apple more important than the surface of the apple, which can be seen?

Most of us would tend to zoom in on the shiny, undamaged apples. The aesthetics of the apple would cause us to overlook what’s really inside in the apple.

In the same way, we tend to think of weight gain as more of an aesthetics problem than it is of a health problem. “I can’t fit into my clothes anymore!” is a more pressing issue because it is seen.

But the biochemical signalling pathways in the cells in our body are slowly being modified, and that is unseen.

Leave a tap to fill a bucket, and the bucket will be filled over time. Leave the tap running unmonitored, and the bucket will eventually overflow.

That’s how it is with our cells too. Unpleasant things are bound to happen when we leave their biochemical signalling pathways modified for the worse but not make any efforts to change it back to what it once was.

But isn’t obesity just about the accumulation of fat cells in the body? Yes and no.

Obesity does present itself in the accumulation of fat cells (scientifically termed as adipocytes).

But what we do need to understand here is that our cells are living biological organisms that take in biochemical nutrients and produce biochemical products/waste.

Of course, according to this article,

Adipocytes themselves produce IL-1β. This initial event may then lead to IL-1β-induced chemokines, resulting in the recruitment of macrophages. Subsequently, macrophage influx and activation within fat tissue may act as a prominent source of IL-1β secretion, triggering insulin resistance.

Interleukin 1-beta (IL-1β) is a pro-inflammatory cytokine that is a significant player in various situations. As per the quote above, IL-1β is one of the major contributors to insulin resistance, and insulin resistance can eventually lead to Type 2 diabetes.

In fact, IL-1β also disrupts the equilibrium between bone formation and bone resorption in favour of resorption, which causes bone minerals to dissolve back into the blood faster than it is being formed.

When that happens chronically, we’d see the subsequent development of osteoporosis and a likely weakening of the teeth as well.

IL-1β can also signal the synovial cells in our joints to produce more matrix metalloproteinase enzymes, which digest collagen and eventually leads to joint degradation, or osteoarthritis.

Of course, IL-1β also weakens the blood brain barrier and allows more noxious biochemicals to permeate into our brain, which contributes to brain inflammation. Would that mean, eventually… Hello, Alzheimer’s? Or Parkinson’s?

Would it then take a rocket scientist to understand why obese people are at higher risks of developing these health issues?

Nope, not when we can tie it back down to all these adipocytes producing all that excess IL-1β that can then biochemically signal different pathways to go awry.

In fact, too much IL-1β in our lungs can also lead on into acute lung injury. A research paper published way back in 2008 provided a grim foreshadowing of it.

If an obese person is producing more IL-1β, then their inflammatory response from a viral infection would be worsened. Wasn’t it the case that obesity increased the likelihood of death or severe illness from a COVID-19 infection during the height of the pandemic?

What’s the problem here, then? The problem is that the regulation of the IL-1β production mechanisms in the obese person’s body has gone awry, hence they’d be at higher risk of suffering all these severe health issues.

It’s not about what is seen; it’s about what remains unseen.

At the end of the day, we do need to be conscious of what remains unseen.

We do need to understand that obesity is not just an aesthetic issue. There are so many biochemical signalling pathways going on within our body.

I have only touched on ONE biochemical cytokine here (IL-1β), which already can have many different ramifications on our body as it gets overproduced in obese people.

There are, of course, many other different factors involved, such as the NLRP3 inflammasome and the nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) transcription pathway, which all link back to the pro-inflammatory signalling mechanisms in the body.

The solution is not to reduce inflammation, as many people think it ought to be, but it would be to get a proper regulation of the signalling mechanisms.

Maintaining a healthy weight with a healthy proportion of fat and muscle mass would help to regulate the signalling mechanisms much better.

But unfortunately, having a one-way increase or decrease in a process is much easier than having to constantly compensate for an increase or a decrease in a proper balance.

When the inflammatory signalling is affected, we can expect the immune system functions to be affected too. Hence, while the risk of developing all these problems is related, and the obese are at a higher chance of developing it… people with relatively healthy weights can also be affected!

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