A Brief Tale of Obesity

WHEN BEING OBESE WAS

IN

CHAPTER 1

¿Was Venus nurturing?

Only humans could have saved the dinosaurs.

A spacecraft, with a nuclear cargo, could have veered off the enormous meteorite that supposedly put an end to the existence of these enormous animals when it crashed against our planet, but… there were no humans to do it.

It seems ironic that with the bad press mankind currently has in regards to the destruction of species, it can occur to us to plan the hypothetic salvation of the gigantic dinosaurs with the employment of mass destruction weapons. But that’s how we are. We’ll let me then narrate, in a few paragraphs, the story of how we got here.

Between six and eight million years ago, when life had a very long history and tenths of thousands of different vegetal and animal species appeared and disappeared, a small group of mammals began to move throughout regions of eastern Africa, a continent without a name yet. Once in a while, these mammals could launch a stone and perhaps stand up on their two hind legs.

Remains found of these animals are scarce and fragmented; and investigators, paleontologists, and anthropologists, have named them Ardipithecus. In reality, at least four different types of these mammals have been discovered, but the most common is the Ardipithecus.

These animals, because they were animals, began evolving, which is very confusing for our existing understanding, and they made way, on one part, to the Australopithecus (afarensis, africanus, anamensis, etc.); and on the other part, to the Paranthropus.

For some specialists, the Paranthropus make up a different lineage and have no relation to the Australophitecus, but let’s not complicate our lives right now. Almost every year, new discoveries are made and modern genetics may put order to this chaotic history. Maybe we can even clone one of these beings!

Let’s continue then. A little less than two million years ago, the first homos appear: Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo antecessor, Homo rudolfensis, and some others. They all walked straight already, they had more or less large brains, and they manufactured a variety of stone instruments; however, they’re not quite human yet, in the strict sense of the word.

Some of them left Africa, their crib, and their fossilized remains appear today throughout Asia and Europe. Some disappear forever and others evolve. The ones who evolved, gave way, approximately 200,000 years later, to two species which had to live together (we don’t know if scrambled) for thousands of years. Even the first researchers got them confused sometimes. We are talking about the Homo neanderthalensis and the Homo sapiens. The first group, which knew and used fire, manufactured primitive tools and weapons, created art, and buried the dead, completely disappeared from the face of the earth about 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. The other species… that’s us.

Whatever happened to the Neanderthals is a mystery. We do not have a satisfactory scientific explanation and we could actually be faced by a grisly thriller, since one of the theories in vogue, is by Professor Tzedakis, from the University of Leeds, who raises the possibility that the Homo sapiens, the Cro-magnum, meaning, us, ethnically cleaned out the Neanderthals completely.

If this theory is confirmed, monsters like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot would simply become no more than incompetent apprentices.

Of course, there are other explanations: melting glaciers, the disappearance of their customary food, genetic degeneration due to mating between a few of them, epidemic diseases, and others.

Professor Svante Paabo, from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, has been able to obtain long DNA sequence from a Neanderthal found in Croatia (other researchers are in progress) that may prove some reproductive relationship between the Neanderthals and the Cro-magnums, which, if true, would explain some of the advances of the latter group, probably being more intelligent, but less adaptable to cold climates.

Whatever the case, the Neanderthals were extinguished and we remained to dominate the planet.

And the fat? Those first humans, let’s say from about 25,000 years ago, had to survive in a very adverse and brutal environment, full of constant threats and crushed by constant climate changes.

Let me give you an illustrative example. A member of the special military forces of any developed country must endure a survival training program in the jungle. He is young and in excellent health; he is well nurtured and all his vaccines are up-to-date; he is equipped with a very powerful firearm, ammunition, a very sharp steel knife, matches, canned food, a water canteen and water purification tablets, night vision equipment, a compass, GPS, thermal uniform, bug spray, and a radio. If anything went wrong: a serious fall with bone fracture, being bit by a poisonous snake, the loss of equipment and guidance, he would only have to activate a MicroBeacon device and a support team would soon arrive in a helicopter to rescue him.

So, our homo sapiens from 25,000 years ago, was living in similar conditions, but with a few variants.

He had absolutely none of the aforementioned sophisticated tools, he was never nurtured, his protection from illnesses was almost null, his hands, and perhaps a pole or a stone, were most likely his defense weapons, and above all, nobody would come and rescue him, and in his whole life, from birth to death, which was quite often premature, he would remain in the same place and live under the same conditions.

Such living conditions would, little by little, prepare this man to fight for his own survival, creating neuronal connections that, in the long run, even in a geometrically increasing sequence, would turn him into a human being, endowed with intelligence, which we are today.

Abstract thinking, capacity to plan, combination of ideas about different aspects of life, symbolisms, and continual and unlimited generation of questions and answers turned that reactive brain into the human brain, computing (and spiritual) machines who no longer had any considerable rivals. And what did that translate into?

Well, in that jump, at first very, very slow, almost undetectable, and later, in increasingly fast pace, which hasn’t ended yet, they created tools, weapons, means to cover and protect themselves, fire control, increased nutrition, and above all, transmission of information to their descendents.

Their genetic was also subjected to changes. Let’s take a closer look at these facts.

Let’s start with genetics. The nutrition of those creatures, who were not yet familiarized with agriculture, farming, and means of storage, was completely random.

It depended on scavenging or the discovery of a source of nourishment—a large and edible animal—that could be hunted. When this happened, a feast would occur! A quick and large banquet of meats and fats that had to be quickly eaten before it went bad or before other beasts or rivals discovered where the smell was coming from.

Those who had the capacity to store excessive fat in their own bodies, today we know in cells called adipocytes, could rely on some nutritional protection during times of abstinence, which would customarily come later. Those who did not have this capacity (having less fatty cells) were frankly at a disadvantage, and at the end, they would have to pay dearly for that.

Of course, this description is very graphic. Those men also ate produce, insects, some birds, roots, and leafs, which provided them with fiber and vitamins; some low-quality proteins and carbohydrates, which was quickly consumed due to the constant physical efforts of those days. However, and quite often, these foods could not be found in sufficient quantities and dentures and digestive enzymatic systems were not appropriate, in general, to process most of the vegetables.

In time, cooking changed this situation, and soup emerged, which was a gigantic gastronomic advance throughout the long road to human development.

But the ability to store fat continued to be quite important, and genetic lattice, not a single gene, but a bacteria of acting genes, facilitating genes, and inactive spaces of genome, which favored the accumulation of reserves, were becoming more common in men and women, of course, primitive humans.

This hypothetical mechanism that we’ve described here was proposed in 1962, by professor of Genetics James Neel, from the School of Medicine of the University of Michigan.

He called it thrifty genotype. Ironically, Dr. Neel, who dedicated most of his life studying genetic changes produced by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stated just before he died (in the year 2000) that he no longer was quite sure of his theory anymore, and that he believed that today’s high consumption of empty calories is what brought about the high increase in obesity these days.

Maybe he’s right, or perhaps his death, which occurred before the success of the decoding of the complete human genome (2001), prevented him from clearly seeing the complicated systems of the genetic-hormonal interaction.

In this day and age, many researchers believe that obesity is due to the association of a genomic strategy, a new way of identifying the old thrifty gene, as well as current bad eating habits and lifestyles. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

And what do we know about the art and culture of those humans? Well, we do know something, not everything we would like to, but we have found sufficient evidence of their paint and sculpture skills in caves and burial sites. We are now confronted with humans who already have a symbolic structure, a purely practical way of viewing life and of explaining it. We are dealing now with the beginning of what would later become philosophy, religious ideas, and art.

By definition, prehistoric art must include all forms of creations from primitive communities: Africans, Mesoamericans, Asians, etc., but this goes beyond what we want to emphasize in this book. Therefore, we will only briefly refer to the cave paintings and the famous European Venus.

Upper Paleolithic pictorial art (between 30,000 and 10,000 BCE) is basically found in caves of the Spanish Cantabria region: Altamira, El Castillo, and Bustillo, and in the South of France: Lascaux, Font de Gaume.

It is an art considered appeasing for hunting, and thus, to attract food. Hunting scenes, where animals are fundamental (future food) and the hunter is secondary.

But what’s truly impressive about their work, is the small statuettes baptized in modern times as Venus.

These are figures carved in calcite, serpentine stone, coal, ruminant antlers, mammoth fangs, hematite, clay, and other relatively common materials. They are small, almost always between 7 and 25 centimeters, even though some have been found, like the Fish Goddess (at the Belgrade University) that measures 51 centimeters. Invariably, they are all women. Three hundred of them have been found so far, although it may be possible that some private collectors have in their possession a few out of circulation.

They are not particularly from a specific region, and they’re still being discovered, which demonstrates that their use, whatever it was, was of great value to that entire population. The most famous are the ones by Willendorf (11 centimeters, at the Museum of Vienna), Dolni Vestonice (11 centimeters, at the Museum de Brno), Grimaldi or Polichinela (8.1 centimeters, at the Saint Germain Museum), Lespugue (14.7 centimeter at the Museum of Man in Paris) and the Bajorrelieve by Laussel (48 centimeters at the Bordeaux Museum).

All, or almost all of them, make an explicit tribute to genocide obesity. Women with relatively small heads, without a face, many times without arms, with enormous hanging breasts, large buttocks (steatopigia), stunning hips, large bellies (they almost look pregnant), and very denoted and disproportionately big genitals.

Cellulite, even though not specifically represented, is there. A very interesting detail: they are never found in burial sites but in ruins of cabins and caves where people resided.

What are we describing? What were theses statuettes used for? We really don’t know. Explanations are many and diverse.

Let’s see: For many years, they were considered fertility goddesses, for human maternity as well as to attract abundant food, but we can’t find any single scientific or historic proof that supports this. In 1996, anthropologist McDermott speculated with the possibility that they were sculpted by women as a way of self-portraying themselves; but he also couldn’t provide evidence for this.

It has also been said that they were a tribute from men to their women’s fertility, which is also pure speculation. What if