Some of those changes include the following:. Having a better understanding of the genetic contributions to obesity-especially common obesity-and gene-environment interactions will generate a better understanding of the causal pathways that lead to obesity.

Such information could someday yield promising strategies for obesity prevention and treatment. Genetic predictors of obesity. In: Hu F, ed. Obesity Epidemiology. New York City: Oxford University Press, ; Genetics of obesity in humans.

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Nat Genet. Frayling TM, Timpson NJ, Weedon MN, et al. A common variant in the FTO gene is associated with body mass index and predisposes to childhood and adult obesity. Loos RJ, Lindgren CM, Li S, et al. Common variants near MC4R are associated with fat mass, weight and risk of obesity.

Qi L, Kraft P, Hunter DJ, Hu FB. The common obesity variant near MC4R gene is associated with higher intakes of total energy and dietary fat, weight change and diabetes risk in women. Hum Mol Genet. Human genetics illuminates the paths to metabolic disease. Speliotes EK, Willer CJ, Berndt SI, et al.

Association analyses of , individuals reveal eighteen new loci associated with body mass index. Heid IM, Jackson AU, Randall JC. Meta-analysis identifies 13 novel loci associated with waist-hip ratio and reveals sexual dimorphism in the genetic basis of fat distribution.

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Rampersaud E, Mitchell BD, Pollin TI, et al. Physical activity and the association of common FTO gene variants with body mass index and obesity. Arch Intern Med. Ruiz JR, Labayen I, Ortega FB, et al. Attenuation of the effect of the FTO rs polymorphism on total and central body fat by physical activity in adolescents: the HELENA study.

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KilpelinenTO, Qi L, Brage S, et al. Physical activity attenuates the influence of FTO variants on obesity risk: a meta-analysis of , adults and 19, children. PLoS Med. Epub Nov 1. Veerman JL. Genes contribute to the causes of obesity in many ways, by affecting appetite, satiety the sense of fullness , metabolism, food cravings, body-fat distribution, and the tendency to use eating as a way to cope with stress.

The strength of the genetic influence on weight disorders varies quite a bit from person to person. Having a rough idea of how large a role genes play in your weight may be helpful in terms of treating your weight problems. Genes are probably a significant contributor to your obesity if you have most or all of the following characteristics:.

Genes are probably a lower contributor for you if you have most or all of the following characteristics:. These circumstances suggest that you have a genetic predisposition to be heavy, but it's not so great that you can't overcome it with some effort.

At the other end of the spectrum, you can assume that your genetic predisposition to obesity is modest if your weight is normal and doesn't increase even when you regularly indulge in high-calorie foods and rarely exercise. People with only a moderate genetic predisposition to be overweight have a good chance of losing weight on their own by eating fewer calories and getting more vigorous exercise more often.

These people are more likely to be able to maintain this lower weight. When the prey escaped or the crops failed, how did our ancestors survive? Those who could store body fat to live off during the lean times lived, and those who couldn't, perished.

Today, of course, these thrifty genes are a curse rather than a blessing. Not only is food readily available to us nearly around the clock, we don't even have to hunt or harvest it!

In contrast, people with a strong genetic predisposition to obesity may not be able to lose weight with the usual forms of diet and exercise therapy.

Even if they lose weight, they are less likely to maintain the weight loss. For people with a very strong genetic predisposition, sheer willpower is ineffective in counteracting their tendency to be overweight. Typically, these people can maintain weight loss only under a doctor's guidance.

They are also the most likely to require weight-loss drugs or surgery. The prevalence of obesity among adults in the United States has been rising since the s. Genes alone cannot possibly explain such a rapid rise. Although the genetic predisposition to be overweight varies widely from person to person, the rise in body mass index appears to be nearly universal, cutting across all demographic groups.

These findings underscore the importance of changes in our environment that contribute to the epidemic of overweight and obesity. Genetic factors are the forces inside you that help you gain weight and stay overweight; environmental factors are the outside forces that contribute to these problems.

They encompass anything in our environment that makes us more likely to eat too much or exercise too little. Taken together, experts think that environmental factors are the driving force for the causes of obesity and its dramatic rise. Environmental influences come into play very early, even before you're born.

Researchers sometimes call these in-utero exposures "fetal programming. The same is true for babies born to mothers who had diabetes. Researchers believe these conditions may somehow alter the growing baby's metabolism in ways that show up later in life.

After birth, babies who are breast-fed for more than three months are less likely to have obesity as adolescents compared with infants who are breast-fed for less than three months. Childhood habits often stick with people for the rest of their lives.

Kids who drink sugary sodas and eat high-calorie, processed foods develop a taste for these products and continue eating them as adults, which tends to promote weight gain. Likewise, kids who watch television and play video games instead of being active may be programming themselves for a sedentary future.

Many features of modern life promote weight gain. In short, today's "obesogenic" environment encourages us to eat more and exercise less. And there's growing evidence that broader aspects of the way we live — such as how much we sleep, our stress levels, and other psychological factors — can affect weight as well.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC , Americans are eating more calories on average than they did in the s. Between and , the average man added calories to his daily fare, while the average woman added calories a day.

What's driving this trend? Experts say it's a combination of increased availability, bigger portions, and more high-calorie foods. Practically everywhere we go — shopping centers, sports stadiums, movie theaters — food is readily available.

You can buy snacks or meals at roadside rest stops, hour convenience stores, even gyms and health clubs. In the s, fast-food restaurants offered one portion size. Today, portion sizes have ballooned, a trend that has spilled over into many other foods, from cookies and popcorn to sandwiches and steaks.

A typical serving of French fries from McDonald's contains three times more calories than when the franchise began. A single "super-sized" meal may contain 1,—2, calories — all the calories that most people need for an entire day.

And research shows that people will often eat what's in front of them, even if they're already full. Not surprisingly, we're also eating more high-calorie foods especially salty snacks, soft drinks, and pizza , which are much more readily available than lower-calorie choices like salads and whole fruits.

Fat isn't necessarily the problem; in fact, research shows that the fat content of our diet has actually gone down since the early s. But many low-fat foods are very high in calories because they contain large amounts of sugar to improve their taste and palatability.

In fact, many low-fat foods are actually higher in calories than foods that are not low fat. The government's current recommendations for exercise call for an hour of moderate to vigorous exercise a day. Our daily lives don't offer many opportunities for activity. Children don't exercise as much in school, often because of cutbacks in physical education classes.

Many people drive to work and spend much of the day sitting at a computer terminal. Because we work long hours, we have trouble finding the time to go to the gym, play a sport, or exercise in other ways.

Instead of walking to local shops and toting shopping bags, we drive to one-stop megastores, where we park close to the entrance, wheel our purchases in a shopping cart, and drive home.

The widespread use of vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, leaf blowers, and a host of other appliances takes nearly all the physical effort out of daily chores and can contribute as one of the causes of obesity. The average American watches about four hours of television per day, a habit that's been linked to overweight or obesity in a number of studies.

Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a long-term study monitoring the health of American adults, revealed that people with overweight and obesity spend more time watching television and playing video games than people of normal weight.

Watching television more than two hours a day also raises the risk of overweight in children, even in those as young as three years old. Part of the problem may be that people are watching television instead of exercising or doing other activities that burn more calories watching TV burns only slightly more calories than sleeping, and less than other sedentary pursuits such as sewing or reading.

But food advertisements also may play a significant role. The average hour-long TV show features about 11 food and beverage commercials, which encourage people to eat. And studies show that eating food in front of the TV stimulates people to eat more calories, and particularly more calories from fat.

In fact, a study that limited the amount of TV kids watched demonstrated that this practice helped them lose weight — but not because they became more active when they weren't watching TV.

The difference was that the children ate more snacks when they were watching television than when doing other activities, even sedentary ones. Obesity experts now believe that a number of different aspects of American society may conspire to promote weight gain.

Stress is a common thread intertwining these factors. For example, these days it's commonplace to work long hours and take shorter or less frequent vacations. In many families, both parents work, which makes it harder to find time for families to shop, prepare, and eat healthy foods together.

Round-the-clock TV news means we hear more frequent reports of child abductions and random violent acts. This does more than increase stress levels; it also makes parents more reluctant to allow children to ride their bikes to the park to play. Parents end up driving kids to play dates and structured activities, which means less activity for the kids and more stress for parents.

Time pressures — whether for school, work, or family obligations — often lead people to eat on the run and to sacrifice sleep, both of which can contribute to weight gain.

Some researchers also think that the very act of eating irregularly and on the run may be another one of the causes of obesity. Neurological evidence indicates that the brain's biological clock — the pacemaker that controls numerous other daily rhythms in our bodies — may also help to regulate hunger and satiety signals.

Ideally, these signals should keep our weight steady. They should prompt us to eat when our body fat falls below a certain level or when we need more body fat during pregnancy, for example , and they should tell us when we feel satiated and should stop eating.

Close connections between the brain's pacemaker and the appetite control center in the hypothalamus suggest that hunger and satiety are affected by temporal cues.

Irregular eating patterns may disrupt the effectiveness of these cues in a way that promotes obesity. Similarly, research shows that the less you sleep, the more likely you are to gain weight.

Most health care practitioners use the Body Mass Index BMI to determine whether a person is overweight. Check your Body Mass Index with a BMI calculator. Skip directly to site content Skip directly to search. Español Other Languages. Behavior, environment, and genetic factors all have a role in causing people to be overweight and obese.

Minus Related Pages. Last Reviewed: January 19, Source: National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities , Public Health Genomics Branch in the Division of Blood Disorders and Public Health Genomics.

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Metab Clin Exp. Hunter DJ. Gene-environment interactions in human diseases. Nat Rev Genet. Heianza Y, Qi L. Impact of genes and environment on obesity and cardiovascular disease. Download references. The study was supported by grants from the Peking University Start-up Grant BMUYJ , High-performance Computing Platform of Peking University.

The funding organization had no role in the preparation of the manuscript. Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.

Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Rockville, MD, USA. Center for Intelligent Public Health, Academy for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing, , China. Key Laboratory of Molecular Cardiovascular Sciences Peking University , Ministry of Education, Beijing, , China.

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. ZZ, MY, ZL, and TH designed the research. ZL and TH had full access to all the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

ZZ and MY performed the data analysis. ZZ, MY, and JW wrote the paper. All authors contributed to the statistical analysis, critically reviewed the manuscript during the writing process, and approved the final version to be published.

ZL and TH are the guarantors for the study. Correspondence to Zhonghua Liu or Tao Huang. All authors declare: no support from companies for the submitted work; no relationships with companies that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous 3 years; no spouses, partners, or children have no financial relationships that may be relevant to the submitted work; no non-financial interests that may be relevant to the submitted work.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Summary of GWAS data. Table S2. SNP based heritability estimated by LDSC.

Table S3. Table S4. Novel loci in MTAG for single trait compared with GWAS. Table S5. Table S6. Table S7. Table S8. Table S9.

List of credible set SNPs in each locus from fine mapping. Table S Figure S2. Figure S3. Figure S4. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. What is new about our study is that we are the first to show a direct genetic link between body fat percentage and fitness.

Schnurr, the lead author of the study and a PhD student at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen. The researchers thoroughly analysed the height, weight and body fat percentage of the members of 55 families in Denmark.

The researchers measured the maximal oxygen uptake of all family members to determine their physical fitness. Lastly, all the data were examined to determine whether genes, body fat percentage and physical fitness were correlated. In contrast, their body fat percentage, physical fitness and genes were very clearly correlated.

How fitness and fatness interact in the human body is not yet known with certainty. However, the Danish researchers have theories on how fatty tissue can influence physical fitness.

Shedding the extra weight immediately enabled him to cycle faster. Although the researchers still have far to go to prove their theory, the new study is an important step.