More Metabolism Hype
As we'll discuss in class this week, there is a lot of hype around the concept of metabolism. There is plenty we don't know about metabolism, but what little we do know tends to get sensationalized and exploited. There are always folks claiming that they have the secret to "unlocking" your metabolism (if you'll just pay them for access to their website!)
About a month or so ago, some new research about metabolism was published and the headlines generated from it looked a lot like this one:
At first blush, this sounds pretty impressive and promising, right? But a cursory overview of the research quickly reveals that the headline is full of hype. Yes, scientists did find that people missing a specific blood group due to a genetic variant may be genetically predisposed to having obesity or overweight. But here are kickers:
- Women with the variant weighed an average of 10 pounds more than those without the variant (the difference was about 5 pounds for men). I hate to be the downer here, but I don't think that those 5-10 pounds, in most instances, are making the difference as to whether someone is categorized as having a BMI that is normal, overweight, or obese. Sure, 10 pounds is not insiginifcant in most people's minds, but from a medical and health population perspective, this seems fairly trivial.
- The variant is present in 1 out of 5,000 people (0.02% of the population), which means it probably won't apply to the vast majority of folks who are overweight or obese. Maybe the mechanism that was discovered has potential for future research but, in and of itself, I don't see how this research lives up to the hype of the headline.
Add this to my list of "let's wait and see."