Abstract
Because obesity is associated with diverse chronic diseases, little attention has been directed to the multiple beneficial functions of adipose tissue. Adipose tissue not only provides energy for growth, reproduction and immune function, but also secretes and receives diverse signaling molecules that coordinate energy allocation between these functions in response to ecological conditions. Importantly, many relevant ecological cues act on growth and physique, with adiposity responding as a counterbalancing risk management strategy. The large number of individual alleles associated with adipose tissue illustrates its integration with diverse metabolic pathways. However, phenotypic variation in age, sex, ethnicity and social status is further associated with different strategies for storing and using energy. Adiposity therefore represents a key means of phenotypic flexibility within and across generations, enabling a coherent life-history strategy in the face of ecological stochasticity. The sensitivity of numerous metabolic pathways to ecological cues makes our species vulnerable to manipulative globalized economic forces. The aim of this article is to understand how human adipose tissue biology interacts with modern environmental pressures to generate excess weight gain and obesity. The disease component of obesity might lie not in adipose tissue itself, but in its perturbation by our modern industrialized niche. Efforts to combat obesity could be more effective if they prioritized ‘external’ environmental change rather than attempting to manipulate ‘internal’ biology through pharmaceutical or behavioral means.
Footnotes
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This article is part of a special issue on obesity: see related articles in Vol. 5, issue 5 of Dis. Model. Mech. at http://dmm.biologists.org/content/5/5.toc.
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COMPETING INTERESTS
The author declares that he does not have any competing or financial interests.
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FUNDING
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
- © 2012. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly cited and all further distributions of the work or adaptation are subject to the same Creative Commons License terms.
Article navigation
- Top
- Article
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Influential but insufficient approaches
- Adiposity and risk management
- The genetics of adiposity
- What environment shaped human adiposity?
- Adipose tissue as a strategy
- Fitness functions of fat
- Risk management in operation: the long view
- Risk management in operation: the short view
- Where is the disease of obesity located?
- Risk management meets political economy
- Conclusion
- Footnotes
- REFERENCES
- Figures & tables
- Info & metrics
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