Friday, 24 July 2009

Different kinds of fat in the body?

It seems to me that there must be at least three different kinds of fat in the body.

1. "Simple" fat made by the body from relatively innocuous substances such as sugar and unhydrogenated vegetable fats. "Simple" fats accummulate as a "spare tire" in the midriff or around the neck. However, they are more or less easy to work off - at least in my experience.

2. "Complex" fat made by the body from substances such as non-vegetarian and hydrogenated fats. These also settle mainly around the midriff and neck but probably more in the rest of the body. In any case, these appear to be more difficult to work off (I do not know, being a vegetarian - but it has struck me that I seem to be able to work off fats dramatically quickly compared to almost everyone else I know well, and they are all non-vegetarians).

3. "Abnormal" fats which are the result of the body storing or otherwise reacting (for example, allergically) to substances of other than those enumerated above. Abnormal fats are extremely difficult to work off as they have nothing to do with the normal mechanism that the body has for storing excess energy (carbohydrates and sugars).

My view is that most so-called "obese" people in the Western world suffer from an accummulation of abnormal fats. In other words, these people are not obese because they eat too much (as I tend to do!), but they are obese because they eat the wrong kinds of things or as a result of the exposure of the body to the wrong kinds of influences.

The hypothesis above could be tested by getting a suitably large sample of people who suffer from "abnormal fats" to keep their level of exercise and calorific intake as near their usual as possible, but to reduce (systematically, one by one and for say as many months as possible) their exposure to plastics, intensively-farmed meat, processed foods, mobile phone radiation and other "electronic smog", and other such things that may be suspected of causing the accummulation of "abnormal fats".

A statistical analysis of the medical history of people with "abnormal fats" should also reveal some interesting patterns of disease, if one excludes those diseases that are related to mere weight.