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"Obesity,
Present and Future Therapies."
I'm Steve Bloom
and I'm a physician
who looks after patients
with diabetes
at Hammersmith Hospital
in North London,
but I'm also an academic
and my research area
in Imperial College, London,
is the mechanisms
by which we control our appetite
with a view
to trying to cure obesity.
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So one of the first questions
to ask is why do we over eat?
Well, in a nutshell,
it's summer all the time.
So mankind tends to have
more children than the parents,
so an average set of parents
will have six, seven,
eight, nine children.
During evolution,
there wasn't of course
a constant increase of food
and so these children
had to fight
for the food source.
In a good year,
they would all survive,
but when the rains
failed for a few years,
they were subject
to chronic starvation.
And only those
who conserved energy
and grabbed all the food
they could, survived
and passed on their genes
to the current
Homo sapiens populations,
so we are the inheritors of,
shall we say, sloth and greed,
but this is
a natural circumstance
to make the energy go further.
We've now changed
the environment.
There's delicious,
high calorie food available
24 hours a day
and absolutely
no need for exercise.
You go up in the elevator,
et cetera.
So the consequences are
that we're all becoming obese.
We haven't evolved to be obese.
We evolved
to be fighting for food
and everybody very thin.
Unfortunately, our metabolism
is suited for this thin habitus.
And we now, therefore,
have a metabolic disequilibrium
which causes early death
due to obesity.
