Why Are Thin People Not Fat? (18 of 29)

Why Are Thin People Not Fat?

The interesting question for us now is where the variability that we see in children's eating behaviour comes from.
Is it something that's learned at home in the family context, or is it something that is innate, and perhaps a genetic characteristic? So we've been doing a very similar experiment to the one that you saw here, but the children in that study, we've also tested them to see what variant they have on a gene called the FTO gene.
types of the FTO gene.
Adults who have one variant of this gene weigh on average more than everybody else.

And what we showed was that the children who ate more in this so-called eating in the absence of hunger task, tended to have the higher risk variant of the FTO gene, and the children who ate very little had what I think of as being the protective variant of the gene.
It seems that the size of our appetite has a genetic basis.
So it looks like that for some people, resisting all the foods that are available in the modern environment is actually fairly easy.
It 's kind of effortless because they don't even want to eat them, they're not having to exert willpower and self-control, whereas for other people, their brain responses to foods that they're exposed to aren't being switched off effectively as a consequence of them already having had enough.
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Professor Wardle's findings could certainly explain why some of our volunteers started off so slim.
To be honest, I don't really eat when I'm not hungry.
I mean, if I am hungry, I can eat and eat and eat, but as soon as I stop being hungry, I stop eating.
I'm not the kind of person to go for extra biscuits or sugary snacks if I'm not hungry.
I don't normally eat when I'm not hungry, I don't eat just for the sake of it.