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In the middle of the January slope, now that, who more and who less, is looking for how to remove those extra kilos, many people ask themselves: why do I suffer so much to lose weight while I see how my office partner has a coffee with three cheers every day and is like a noodle?

We have always been told that to lose weight one has to eat little and move a lot.

A kind of infallible dogma, with no margin for error, which leads us to the (erroneous) conclusion that if you don't lose weight, it's because you lose weight.

and does not want

And I say wrong because the reality is that this

losing weight is not math

.

Along with everything that your mountain body is capable of ingesting and burning, there are other factors that are part of the equation.

And among the multiple agents that intervene in weight loss (both internal and external factors), today we focus on two of them: genetics and the microbiota.

Genetics: our heredity can influence

It is estimated that heredity may be responsible for between 20% and 40% of the causes of obesity.

The problem is that although there are many genes and polymorphisms that are involved in eating behavior and energy expenditure, we still do not know how to give names and surnames to all of them, nor what is their specific role in our body.

The good news is that there are many studies being carried out in this regard with encouraging results.

For example, it has been found that

there is a variant of a gene capable of predisposing to thinness.

This variant makes whoever wears it tend to accumulate less fat.

Studies in mice show that introducing this genetic variant was able to decrease the percentage of body fat by between 10 and 15%.

If these and other experiments were confirmed in humans, we would find new therapeutic alternatives.

How to get it?

We need a greater investment in research so that these therapies end up being a reality in clinical practice.

In addition to gene therapy, which can foreseeably bring us much joy in the future, we also know that the expression of certain genes can be regulated with precision nutrition strategies.

An individualized nutritional strategy in subjects with a certain predisposition could not only help us curb obesity, but also other types of metabolic diseases

such as diabetes or even some types of tumors.

Microbiota: when being very efficient is a problem

In recent years, numerous papers have been published that point to the

important role of the gut microbiota

in the development of metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity.

The key would be in the different proportion and diversity of the

good bacteria

that is in the guts of people depending on whether or not they are obese.

There are many studies that show how obese people experience many changes in the type of bacteria that inhabit their digestive system (and therefore receive different benefits or harms depending on the functions that these bacteria perform).

One of the most studied examples is in the

firmicute bacteria

.

These are very efficient bacteria capable of sinking their teeth into food compounds (a type of polysaccharide) that are not, in principle, digestible and that, in theory, should pass out through the feces just as they entered.

In this way, people who have a higher proportion of firmicutes bacteria would be

able to extract more energy from some foods than people who have another composition in their intestinal microbiota

.

This "superpower" of the firmicutes bacteria would be very useful if we lived in countries where there is famine, but in our current society in which we generally have a surplus of calories, it is a chore since it makes us optimize digestion more than we need .

In summary:

It's not as easy as "eat less and spend more".

Although the caloric deficit is crucial in weight loss, there are many factors that put sticks in the wheels to get to spend more than what is ingested.

Knowing these mechanisms and how to address them will be key in the coming years so that we can stop this silent epidemic that is obesity.

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