The lesson is clear: Once we enter a specific range of strenuous exercise, the body kicks in to lose fat, no matter what our genes want.

Obesity & Genes: But perhaps there are better ways to control our propensity to gain weight than to take up such strenuous exercise. Exercise is a must, but if coupled with a proper diet as recommended herein, it becomes effective at much less strenuous levels.

Recent research has found that individuals with variations in a gene called FTO tend to desire high calorie food more often and have more fat as a result. One particular FTO variation causes more of the fat to go into White Adipose Tissue (WAT) than into the Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT) that when activated by exercise burn more energy. Dr. Ruth Loos, Director of the Genetics of Obesity and Related Metabolic Tracts Program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New Yark, found that fitness in addition to being linked to variations in the FTO genes, was also linked to variations in a gene called IRSI.

One variation of IRSI caused lower fat in men, in their arms, legs and trunk, but they also had higher triglyceride levels and lower good cholesterol in their blood and increased insulin resistance, all signs of ill-health, even as they were thinner than men without the variant, and even as thinner is expected to lead to better health not worse. More puzzlingly this variant doesn’t seem to affect women in the same way, perhaps because it was linked to how fat was distributed. Men with this IRSI variant had lower sub­cutaneous fat and more visceral fat that those without the variant. However, men with another variant were fatter but also healthier. Loos and her team determined that IRSI contains the code for a protein that’s involved in mediating cells sensitivity to insulin, a hormone that helps the body use glucose and store fat, and this variant, by controlling the expression of this protein in say the arms and legs, reduced the sensitivity of cells there to insulin and hence reduced the cells ability to internalize glucose and fat. This occurred more in men than in women.

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