Can’t resist that extra cream bun? Now you CAN blame your genes
New word of the day, and you should slip this into every conversation where possible, is ‘obesogenic’. It’s a medical term that means, ‘This will make you fat,’ like carcinogenic means, ‘This will give you cancer’.
Chocolate cake with ice cream isn’t just fattening, it’s lethally obesogenic. And if that doesn’t put you off a second portion of pudding, nothing will.
Dr Giles Yeo’s Horizon special, Why Are We Getting So Fat? (BBC2), was a healthy buffet of factlets like that, served piping hot. Thanks to rapid editing, he provided a feast of information that made us pay attention for a full hour — a rare achievement for any science documentary, let alone one that is trying to break us of bad habits.
His self-deprecating sense of humour helped, starting when he confidently stepped on to a weighing machine and then hopped off, so he could remove his jacket and shoes. we’ve all done that, to bamboozle the scales. when he saw how overweight he actually was, he wondered whether standing on one leg might help.
Instead of battering us with statistics, the show offered a succession of thought-provoking ideas. Dr Giles is a geneticist at Cambridge University, who believes that some people eat more than others because their DNA gives them bigger appetites.
For eight years he’s been studying a genetic variant labelled FTO, which affects about a sixth of the population. These people are biologically programmed to eat more than everyone else — a huge survival advantage for cavemen but a killer in our modern ‘obesogenic environment’ with ten takeaways on every High Street.
The FTO variant is his passion but, before it got boring for the rest of us, Dr Giles was exploring other theories. That takes discipline — the knack of being a good TV presenter must be in his genes.
He met coach driver Philip, who used to put away two steak-and-kidney puds with a double portion of chips, and then two platefuls of cream cakes, every lunchtime. Gastric band surgery helped Phil cut down to a fried-egg-and-bacon buttie on his break, which still looked like a substantial repast.
The really interesting finding was not that 12 cream buns a day will make you a porker. It was that Phil’s stomach hormones had altered after his op. Now his digestive juices were telling his brain that he was full after a mere 560 calories.
Isolate those hormones, turn them into a pill and we could have a wonder drug that stops us getting fat.
The only drawback to Dr Giles’s high-speed approach to science is that occasional details get missed. He visited 35st Les Price in South wales, who explained how depression can trigger eating binges.
But sharp-eyed viewers will have spotted that Les is a telly regular, who appeared last year on Channel 5’s Supersized... when he confessed that he had converted his garage into a private clubhouse, complete with five draught beers on tap. That might just have something to do with his girth.
Another familiar TV face was estate agent Gary Hersham, who specialises in deluxe properties for your overseas billionaire.
He’s such an old hand that, when the interviewer flubbed his questions on Lagos To London: Britain’s New Super-Rich (C4), Gary grabbed the microphone and cross-examined himself.
we met wealthy Nigerians, the sons and daughters of oil barons and bankers, who are in London to buy truckloads of the flashiest tat they can find. One crass idiot with more petrodollars than brain cells even had diamonds on the soles of his shoes, which must have played havoc with the lino.
Two party-mad twins gave us a tour of their mansion back in Nigeria, where the walls are hung with portraits of their illustrious grandfather, a politician who happened to own a few goldmines.
One photo showed him with Cherie Blair, who was playing up to the camera by trying on grandpa’s hat. Fancy that, Cherie cosying up to a foreign moneybags. who’d have thought it?