Lose weight by controlling these hormones | Bariatric surgeon Dr. Andrew Jenkinson

**Jonathan** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Dr. Andrew Jenkinson is a highly respected bariatric surgeon, an international authority on weight regulation and metabolism, and the bestselling author of Why We Eat Too Much. With over 100 scientific publications and two decades of experience treating obesity, his insights combine cutting edge science with deep clinical expertise. Andrew, thank you for joining me today.

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (0:39)
It's a pleasure, Jonathan.

**Jonathan** (0:41)
We like to kick off our show here at ZOE with a rapid fire Q&A with questions that come from our listeners. Are you willing to give it a go?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (0:49)
Of course.

**Jonathan** (0:50)
We have some quite strict rules. We need you to say yes or no, or if you have to, a one sentence answer. Is gaining weight as we age inevitable?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (1:01)
No.

**Jonathan** (1:02)
For most people, will calorie counting work for long term weight loss?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (1:07)
No.

**Jonathan** (1:09)
Can our hormones cause us to overeat?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (1:11)
Yes.

**Jonathan** (1:13)
Should obesity be considered a disease?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (1:16)
Yes.

**Jonathan** (1:18)
If we aren't living with obesity, could many of us lose weight and keep it off without drugs?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (1:24)
Definitely.

**Jonathan** (1:25)
Does your metabolism slow down when you lose weight?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (1:29)
Yes.

**Jonathan** (1:30)
And finally, what's the most common myth about obesity that you hear?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (1:35)
That losing weight is all about calories.

**Jonathan** (1:38)
Well, I can't wait to get into this. And we have discussed weight loss on the podcast before, but it's still one of our most requested topic from listeners, which tells you how much we all feel that it's really important to us as individuals. Many of us are fighting with it, even if in fact we aren't viewing ourselves as overweight. And we're all desperate, I think, to understand what's going on inside our bodies and how to make lasting changes. When I was brought up, I was told that weight gain was all about willpower.
So it was like, eat less, move more and the problem is solved. What does the latest science say about that?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (2:16)
The popular opinion is that it is all about willpower. It still is. This is the popular opinion. And this is the opinion amongst a lot of doctors and politicians and policy leaders, which is a big problem. The sort of myth that it's all about the calories is when you look at the very, very basics of thermodynamics, i.e. how big an object is, how much energy it stores. It sort of chimes. It's okay. The first law of thermodynamics, energy in minus energy out equals energy stored. But it's a lot more complicated than that. We need to take into account negative feedback systems and what we call in medical terminology homeostasis. So the body trying to keep things on an even keel.
Now, I think I might be a little bit older than you, but when I was at school, they used to be probably in each year, one pupil living with obesity, really big, struggling, etc., etc. Now, when I took my daughters to look around secondary school a few years ago, it's now about a third of those children are living with obesity. So we've had a massive change over the last 30 years or so. And the question is, what's caused that? Is that a sudden lack of willpower amongst that population? Is the food suddenly so much tastier? It's got us addicted. These are the questions we've got to ask about, why suddenly the population is really struggling with obesity and its consequences.

**Jonathan** (3:49)
I guess when I was growing up, I think just as you described, in the schools I was in, there were very few children living with obesity, maybe one or two in a year. I had thought this was all about genes. I was also growing up in the period where we were being told that genetics explain everything. How much are genes the answer to what's going on?

**Dr. Andrew Jenkinson** (4:11)
Well, those children living with obesity, when we were children, they were the extreme because the food wasn't quite as bad then. Probably if you visited their family, their family would be struggling with their weight as well. But when you look at the actual figures, the risk of developing obesity from a genetic standpoint is about a 70% risk. Now you have to have the genetic predisposition and the environmental, the food and the stress culture together to actually trigger the obesity. So if you have a population that's living and eating home-prepared natural foods from their local area without any processed foods, even those people with the obesity genes aren't going to become obese. However, when you transfer them to a culture with Western food or the Western food comes to their culture, that triggers that time bomb as it were. And we know this from really, really eloquent identical twin experiments. So there are a number of experiments around the world where they took identical twins that had been separated at birth because whatever family problems and brought up in different households. And then they looked at them as if they were adults and they found a correlation within 10% of their weight. So one may have been in a pretty healthy eating household and one may have been put into a terrible eating household. Didn't matter. Like within 30 years, their weight was within 10%.