You know that girlfriend who can eat anything she wants and not gain weight? In the meantime, you eat all the right things and it seems like you never lose weight, at least not for long? Sometimes you think: I feel like the deck is stacked against me, and it’s not my fault. I have a slow metabolism. I was born that way. Well, now it seems you may be it right! There is a so-called fat gene – or a mutation on one of the important chromosomes – that partially determines who burns calories like a torch and who burns like a candle, and some unhappy people are born with it. But that does not mean you have to give up. On the contrary, there are ways to eat a short circuit, and one doctor has advice on how to beat it, and you can too.
“Your genes load the gun. Lifestyle pulls the trigger,” says Dr. Joel Kahn, who found out for himself that he has the genetic trait that makes it easier to put on weight and lose it harder. Kahn is a vegan cardiologist and has been eating a plant-based diet since he was 18 and acknowledges the healthy plant-based approach (long on vegetables, short fats and sugars) by keeping his weight under control. “I would never be sly like some of my colleagues who eat like that, but I wore a husky suit to my bar mitzvah, and I knew I would have to change my diet.” He was plant-based at 18, but by what time had he figured out how to manage his portion control and stay fine. But eating plant-based foods for 40 years has been the key to lifelong health and maintaining a healthy weight.
Joel Kahn not only learned how to eat healthily in person, but made it his life’s work to help others as well. He is the founder of the Kahn Center for Cardiac Longevity in Bingham Farms, Michigan, a clinical professor of medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine, and a bestseller of The whole heart solution.
What does the “fat gene” variant do, and can you counteract it?
“The proper name of the gene is the FTO gene, a small fragment on chromosome 16, which stands for Fat Mass and Obesity,” Kahn explained. A study among school children found that it does not affect how your body handles calories, but it does increase how much you are likely to eat.
They identified children who had the FTO gene and offered meals that were measured and weighed to see if they ate more. Indeed, the students with the gene would probably consume more calories at each meal than those without it. This is good news for anyone who has the FTO variant, as it does not affect your metabolism, but is linked to eating more food, especially calories, the study found.
“The FTO variant was apparently involved in calorie consumption, not how the body handles the calories,” according to the study’s authors.
It looks like the FTO gene regulates ghreline, a hormone that tells your body to eat more. if you eat a meal and ghrelin is still present, the brain never gets the signal to stop eating. FTO can make ghrelin stick longer for people who have the variant, than people for those without it. Because this is something they have had since their birth, they teach most people to take a closer look at their saturation indicators and need to teach themselves when to stop.
How can you determine if you have the fat gene, or the FTO variant?
To find out if you have the FTO variant on chromosome 16, you can pay for a genetic test profile like 23andMe or MaxGen, Kahn explains. He found out because he is in a genetic testing group, which has told him more about his health than most people learn without it.
If you have the variant, do not yell at your parents because they are the ones who passed it on to you (chances are at least one of them has struggled with their weight in their lives). The good news is, you can do something about it. If you spend more time in the product path, shopping whole plant foods and eating a nutrient-dense diet, it’s easier not to do too much with calorie-dense foods. If you do not have the hunger that you say to put off, it will be easier to control your weight and still be satisfied if you choose foods high in fiber, filling, nutrients and healthy foods. And since most people with FTO tend to overdo the high-calorie foods, researchers may eventually suppress their runaway appetite. Choosing a plant-based diet will also help you stay away from processed foods, Kahn explains.
DNA is the one thing you can not change. Lifestyle habits have a greater impact
Instead of crying over the fact that you may have this lack of switch when you sit down to eat, think of all the good things in your DNA: your creativity and intelligence, sense of humor, your strong arms, loving smile, good hair. And instead of trying a fad diet after a fad diet, you should skip the diet (which generally does not work) and simply eat a clean, vegetable diet with a full diet, rich in vegetables and grains, fruits and nuts, seeds, and anything that would normally grow in the soil. Ultimately, you eat healthier than 90 percent of the rest of Americans, who do not get their portions of fruits and vegetables a day.
In a study by the Early Growth Genetics Consortium (EGGC) that looked at 20,000 individuals of European descent, infants under two with the gene show no significant difference in BMI relative to the rest of the population, but once a child old enough to feed themselves and not have the normal modes of satiety, their BMI rises, so by six years there is a difference in BMI compared to those who do not have the variant. The study showed that it can affect their ability to maintain a healthy weight unless they learn to limit their appetite and listen to the subtle satiety directions. This is also good news for all of us, because it shows that if we can teach teens with the genetic variant to limit their appetite for high-calorie foods, so can we.
Eating a plant-based diet can be a game changer because it makes you feel full
“I was never the kid who could win the 50-meter shift,” he explains. He jokes that he was so slow that some people think he is still driving it. If you can identify something with this, it may be the right choice to go plant. “For some people, your BMI will never be that low. But I kept mine to the normal extent by eating like that all my life.” It does help to know your genetics and your family history, he explains. He found out he got the FTO gene from both parents, so it was a life to eat right to prevent the variant from winning.
“People who eat plant-based will tell you that a diet without oil, no sugar will be bullet-free,” says Kahn. But even then, you may also be unhappy with a gene for high cholesterol, so even though it is a healthy way to eat, you should still go to your doctor if you do not know your family history. “If you eat a plant nutrition diet, you will be almost bulletproof.” He adds.
Even if you are plant-based, you need to keep an eye on your food choices, Kahn adds, since “vegan” in itself is not synonymous with healthy. “You can eat vegan and still eat too much or add sugar. The environment has also changed since I was a child, and there are now plastic phthalates and other chemicals in food that simply were not there when I was a child. ” On top of that, he says that our stressors keep us from sleeping well, which pushes ghrelin up further. So if you have this genetic variant, try to sleep more. “There is data on how we slept less than 30 or 40 years ago. All the pressure is having an effect on our diet and our health. And that’s why genetics can be more important.”
The term precision medicine or personalized medicine is moving toward healthcare, Kahn says. ‘We are still a bit away from practicing it, medicine based on genetics’, so doctors can treat patients differently depending on their DNA. Until then, eat healthy, sleep and be nice to your parents.