Abstract
In this paper, we aim at rethinking the concept of obesity in a way that better captures the connection between underlying medical aspects, on the one hand, and an individual’s developmental history, on the other. Our proposal rests on the idea that obesity is not to be understood as a phenotypic trait or character; rather, obesity represents one of the many possible states of a more complex phenotypic trait that we call ‘energy metabolism.’ We argue that this apparently simple conceptual shift can help solve important theoretical misconceptions regarding the genetics, epigenetics, and development of obesity. In addition, we show that our proposal can be fruitfully paired with the concept of developmental channeling of a trait, which connects to the study of the plasticity and canalization of complex traits. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of our approach on the assessment, treatment, and social narratives of obesity.
Highlights
Obesity is a major issue on a global scale in contemporary societies
The genetic basis of obesity has been investigated through a variety of methodologies, including gene knockout experiments on animal models, heritability and family studies, linkage analyses, the candidate-gene approach, and, more recently, genome-wide association studies (GWAS)
Another problem affecting GWAS on obesity is that currently identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (~ 97) together accounted for a small part of the variability of Body Mass Index (BMI) (~ 3–5%) and are poor predictors of obesity (Bogardus 2009; Herrera and Lindgren 2010; Locke et al 2015; Rohde et al 2019)
Summary
Obesity is a major issue on a global scale in contemporary societies. Since the 1990s (Hill and Peters 1998; James et al 2001; Popkin and Doak 1998), it is customary for reports and documents to talk about obesity as an epidemic or even a pandemic that—in the words of Mozzaffarian—“will decimate population health, economic productivity and healthsystem capacity worldwide” (2020, p. 38). The term seems to trade in a sort of promiscuity between several understandings and their value-laden imports It is declined within different narrative contexts and latched onto different conceptual frameworks (e.g., in terms of bodily measurements vs body appearance), parameters (e.g., health vs beauty vs group identity), and aims (e.g., efficiency vs appearance). 3, to pitch our proposal, which rests on the idea that obesity is not a phenotypic trait; rather, obesity is one of the many possible states of a phenotypic trait that we shall call energy metabolism—for a simple parallel, having blue eyes is not a phenotypic trait, but one of the ways that the phenotypic trait having a certain eye color can be realized We argue that this apparently simple conceptual shift solves some important theoretical misconceptions regarding obesity, the expectation that the biological aspects (i.e., genetic variation) involved in the development of obesity are consistent or sufficiently similar among different individuals. Our approach suggests a personalized medical assessments of obesity, which accounts for the specificities that Ahima and Lazar (2013) call for, and for the framing of energy metabolism in individual terms and for temporally, geographically, and socially located dietary and life plans
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