You know that friend who can eat anything she wants and doesn’t gain weight? In the meantime, are you eating the right things and can it seem like you never lose weight, at least not for long? Sometimes you think, I feel like the deck is right against me, and it’s not my fault. I have a slow metabolism. I was born that way. Well, now it turns out you might be Turn right! There’s a so-called fat gene – or mutation on one of the important chromosomes – that controls in part who burns calories like a torch and who burns like a candle, and some unfortunate people are born with it. But that doesn’t mean you should give up desperately. On the contrary, there are ways to eat food to short out that wiring and a doctor has advice on how to beat it and you too.
“Your genes are loading the gun. Lifestyle pulls the trigger,” says Dr. Joel Kahn, who himself discovered that he has the genetic trait that makes it easier to gain weight and harder to lose. A vegan cardiologist, Kahn has been eating a plant-based diet since age 18 and says this healthy, plant-based approach (long on vegetables, deficient on fats and sugars) keeps his weight in check. “I’ll never be skinny like some of my colleagues who eat this way, but I wore a husky suit for my bar mitzvah, and I knew I would have to change my diet.” He went on a vegetable-based basis at age 18, but that time said he’d already figured out how to manage and trim his portion control. But eating plant-based foods for 40 years has been the key to lifelong health and maintaining a healthy weight.
Joel Kahn has not only learned to personally eat healthy, but has also made it his life’s work to help others do so. 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 best-selling author of The Whole Heart Solution.
What does the variant of the “fat gene” do and can you counteract it?
“The correct name of the gene is the FTO gene, a small fragment on chromosome 16 that stands for fat mass and obesity,” explains Kahn. In a study of school kids, it found that it doesn’t affect how your body handles calories, but it does increase how much you’re likely to eat.
They identified children with the FTO gene and offered their meals that had been measured and weighed to see if they were eating more. Indeed, the students with the gene are said to consume more calories at each meal than those without the gene. This is good news for anyone who has the FTO variant, as it doesn’t affect your metabolism, but is linked to eating more foods, especially high-calorie foods, the study found.
“The FTO variant appeared to be involved in the consumption of calories, not how the body deals with those calories,” said the study authors.
The FTO gene appears to regulate ghrelin, 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 cause ghrelin to linger longer for people who have the variant than for people without it. For most people, since this is something they’ve had since birth, they learn to pay more attention to their satiety signals and teach themselves when to stop.
How do you find out if you have the fat gene, also called the FTO variant?
To find out if you have the FTO variant on chromosome 16, you can pay for a genetic testing profile such as 23andMe or MaxGen, Kahn explains. He found out because he’s in a genetic testing group, which has told him more about his health than most people without that learn.
If you have the variant, don’t yell at your parents for being the ones who passed this on to you (after all, chances are at least one of them has struggled with their weight in their life). The good news is you can do something about it. When you spend more time in the production aisle, shopping for whole plant foods, and following a nutrient-dense diet, it’s easier not to overdo it with calorie-dense foods. If you’re not hungry to stop eating, choosing high-fiber, filling, nutritious and healthy foods will make it easier to control your weight while still being satisfied. And since most people with FTO tend to overdo the high-calorie foods, researchers think this may ultimately suppress their runaway appetites. So choosing a whole food plant-based diet will also help you stay away from processed foods, Kahn explains.
DNA is the one thing you cannot change. Lifestyle habits have a greater impact
Instead of crying about having this lack of an off button when you sit down to eat, think about all the good things in your DNA: your creativity and intelligence, sense of humor, your strong arms, loving smile, great her. And instead of trying fad diet after fad diet, just quit the diet (which generally doesn’t work) and just start eating a clean, plant-based diet, rich in vegetables and grains, fruits and vegetables. nuts, seeds, and anything that would normally grow in the ground. You’ll end up eating healthier than 90 percent of the rest of Americans, who don’t get their five servings 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, babies under two years of age with the gene do not show a significant difference in BMI from the rest of the population, but once a child is old enough In order to feed themselves and not have the normal satiety characteristics, their BMI goes up, so that by the age of six there is a difference in BMI compared to those who do not have the variant. The study showed that this can have an effect on their ability to maintain a healthy weight unless they learn to curb their appetite and listen for the subtle cues of satiety. That’s good news for all of us, too, as it shows that if teens with the genetic variant can learn to curb their appetite for high-calorie foods, so can we.
Eating a plant-based diet can be a game changer as it makes you feel full
“I was never the kid who could win the 50-meter line at school,” he explains. He jokes that he was so slow that some people think he still manages it. If this is something you can relate to, then going vegetable may be the way to go. “For some people, your BMI will never be that low. But I’ve kept mine in the normal range by eating this way all my life.” Still, it helps to know your genetics and family history, he explains. He found that he got the FTO gene from both parents, so it’s been a lifetime of eating right to keep that variant from winning.
“Plant-based people will tell you that a diet without oil and sugar will be bulletproof,” says Kahn. But even then, you could get unlucky with a gene for high cholesterol, so while this is a healthy way to eat, he adds, see your doctor if you don’t know your family history. “When you eat a completely plant-based diet, you are ALMOST bulletproof,” he adds.
Even if you’re going plant-based, keep an eye on your food choices, Kahn adds, since “ vegan ” in itself isn’t synonymous with healthy. “You can eat vegan and still eat too much or eat a lot of sugar. The environment has also changed since I was a kid, and now there are plastic phthalates and other chemicals in foods that just weren’t there when I was little.” Plus, he says our stressors keep us from sleeping well, further boosting ghrelin. So if you have this genetic variant, try to get more sleep. “There is data on how we sleep less than 30 or 40 years ago. All that pressure has an effect on our diet and our health. And that’s why genetics is perhaps more important.”
The term precision medicine or personalized medicine is making its way into healthcare, Kahn says. “We’re still a little bit away from that, genetics-based medicine,” so doctors can treat patients differently depending on their DNA. Until then, eat healthy, go to sleep, and be nice to your parents.