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Beyond Blue, Depression, fat, FTO gene, genes, happy, Obesity
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Fat And Happy
Genetic Challenge to the Common Perception of A Link Between Depression and Obesity
Ever wondered why some of your friends are happier than others? Ever wondered whether there might be a genetic basis for their happiness? Got any fat friends? Do they seem happier than your thin friends?
These and similar questions occurred to researchers at McMaster University in Canada. They’ve discovered genetic evidence relating to why some people are happier than others, and they found it in an unusual place; the fat mass and obesity-associated protein also known as alpha-ketoglutarate-dependent dioxygenase, or the FTO gene
This gene, which substantially controls and contributes to obesity, has the serendipitous effect of also contributing to an eight percent reduction in the risk of serious depression. So this “fat” gene is also a “happy” gene.
The research appears in a study recently published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. The paper was produced by senior author David Meyre, associate professor in clinical epidemiology and biostatistics at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine and a Canada Research Chair in genetic epidemiology; first author Dr. Zena Samaan, assistant professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, and members of the Population Health Research Institute of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences.
“The difference of eight per cent is modest and it won’t make a big difference in the day-to-day care of patients,” Meyre said. “But, we have discovered a novel molecular basis for depression.”
Previous studies have shown a statistical correlation suggesting a forty percent genetic component to depression but so far there has been little success in actually identifying the genes involved. Researchers have been “surprisingly unsuccessful” in this search and produced no convincing evidence so far, Samaan said.
The McMaster discovery challenges the common perception of a reciprocal link between depression and obesity: That obese people become depressed because of their appearance and social and economic discrimination; depressed individuals may lead less active lifestyles and change eating habits to cope with depression that causes them to become obese.
“We set out to follow a different path, starting from the hypothesis that both depression and obesity deal with brain activity. We hypothesized that obesity genes may be linked to depression,” Meyre said.
The McMaster researchers investigated the genetic and psychiatric status of patients enrolled in the EpiDREAM study led by the Population Health Research Institute, which analysed 17,200 DNA samples from participants in 21 countries.
In these patients, they found the previously identified obesity predisposing genetic variant in FTO was associated with an eight per cent reduction in the risk of depression. They confirmed this finding by analysing the genetic status of patients in three additional large international studies.
Meyre said the fact the obesity gene’s same protective trend on depression was found in four different studies supports their conclusion. It is the “first evidence” that an FTO obesity gene is associated with protection against major depression, independent of its effect on body mass index, he said.
Now a word of caution from your correspondent; this discovery and its implications do not, I repeat DO NOT mean that if you’re unhappy it makes sense to get on the blower and order up ten family buckets of KFC. That will just make you fat.
Happy is a different state of mind altogether.
For help with depression contact “Beyondblue”:
http://www.beyondblue.org.au/index.aspx?
Story Source: The above story is edited from materials provided by McMaster University
Journal Reference:
1. Z Samaan, S Anand, X Zhang, D Desai, M Rivera, G Pare, L Thabane, C Xie, H Gerstein, J C Engert, I Craig, S Cohen-Woods, V Mohan, R Diaz, X Wang, L Liu, T Corre, M Preisig, Z Kutalik, S Bergmann, P Vollenweider, G Waeber, S Yusuf, D Meyre. The protective effect of the obesity-associated rs9939609 A variant in fat mass- and obesity-associated gene on depression. Molecular Psychiatry, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/mp.2012.160
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here are opinion only.
Keywords: McMaster University, D Meyre, Z Samaan, FTO gene, obesity and depression, happy gene
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I mean THINK about it. How good is it for you thin people that the medical profession has got us to practice on? IMAGINE if we weren’t around, they’d be tempted to try all sorts of stupid-making stuff on you guys.
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The sudden disappearance of fat and sad people from doctors surgeries? And all those medicines sitting around wasted? They’d find a diabetes for thin people. They’d find a depression for happy people. And voila, off you’d go.
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I mean, look at autism. They found aspergers. Shizophrenia. They found bipolar. Fat. They found cholesterol. I tell you, you’d be sitting ducks.
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And don’t get me STARTED on blood pressure.
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It’s a pokies epiDEMIC.
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And the OUTsourcing! Surprised they weren’t offering urine tests at Starnevermind.
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In the END, I thought I should just get the Thanksgiving Sandwich. Takeaway.
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But I confess. I was tempted to ask for a TV vaccination. Just to see if my brain would go zap when someone hit the remote.
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I am fat, I am HUUUUGE! I just don’t understand it.
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I think the scientific reason at the MOMENT for my huuuuugeness may be “No Dogs”. As to what MY reason for it is, I really wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. But I think there may be a reason. There are times, when I read about obesity, that I can think of MANY reasons! But then there are times when I can’t think of any, really.
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Partly I think it’s because leprosy is so hard to come by these days.
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It’s TRUE! There is a part of me that would have hung around outside leper colonies smoking cigarettes if I could have found one. But regrets, why have them? I like to think of it as a kind of deep annoyance with fundamental societal mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. But that’s just me, and I have a lot of frivolous ideas. My latest one being that fat – which is what we used to call it before we went all margarine – has some benefit to neural transmitters. And that fat people are being – in the sweetest most caring way possible – duped.
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Still. What are we punishing here? My leprosy? Or my desire.
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What would be encouraging, Warrigal, would be some news that depression and eating are overrated. Nothing else is gonna budge me.
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And then there’s contempt. Not just contempt for the lack of discipline, or, if you favour the other side, the genetic inferiority of me the fat person. But also the contempt of the fat person toward you; that it should matter so much to you, or, if you favour the other side, that what you feel and what you think should so affect my life, take away from my freedom. It’s suicide, it’s kamikaze, it’s self-abuse, it’s a howl of rage. Or it’s living, it’s life, it’s care, it’s a song of love. Depends what’s on the menu, really.
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You could let the fat people die out; perhaps that’s a solution. Not a bad one, probably better than the others. Better than trying to make all the fat people thin.
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Certainly our environment is getting worse, it will take a great deal of fitness to survive it, and resources will become scarce. So it makes sense to do that.
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One thing does confuse me though. Why do you want to make all the unhappy people fat?
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It was very helpful to the researchers that the drugs they fed depressed people made them crave sugar. This led them to the hypothesis that “obesity genes may be linked to depression”. Lucky for the researchers, but not for the fat people, as their fatness made them feel stupid. How could I have made that mistake? they said to themselves. Even I knew that eating crazy amounts of sugar would make me crazy fat. And yet – I felt so good about it.
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Who’d have thought, thought the researchers. Obesity isn’t my field, so I no longer have a problem. Sugar. Huh. I wonder what those chemicals are doing in there.
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What we need NEXT is a good solid study of stupidity. Like – how to tell when feeling stupid is caused by being engineered.
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An insufficiency of dogs. It’s really a bummer.
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He Lehan, get a dog, I believe that 100000 dogs/month meet their maker in Japan!
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Oh M, I have a dog, I just yet can’t find a way to him. Some things take time.
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I dunno though. 100000 dogs a month? That’s a big number.
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The lady downstairs has eight.
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But then that’s the problem isn’t it? You have one, you want another one.
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You think; just one more, I’ll just have one more.
Oh my GOODNESS!
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Sandwiches. So delicious.
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Lehan I sometime feel like you are a part of my alter ego (make that a cathedral) in another part of our universe and that’s being women, doing it hard, our ages, and goodness me we would be a mountain it sounds as if we were any closer in proximity. We might be a complete mountain range. I’d be a tableland. That means someone would be laying out all the food on me. I’ve taken up food again since i got back to my Ground Zero. It’s very satisfying, the food part. “)
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That was supposed to sport a brave smile after it. 🙂
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qP4Ye15J0Y
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This what often happens in our family. Gez can’t find his watch, I casually tell him to trace his steps…He doesn’t, he stands there and says, it was my favourite watch, you know the one my mum gave me when I turned fifteen, you know it was very expensive, it was actually a Tag Heuer one….he’s not sad anymore, he is getting very upset, he is getting angry, he’s feeding it, he’s raging by now, he is more than unhappy…
I walk to the bathroom, I pick up his “Tag Heuer ” watch and pass it on to him, he mumbles ‘thank you’, it’s hardly audible…is this what’s called catastrophizing in the shrink language?
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It is also called , being emotionally dysfunctional, neurotically selfish, but…I am getting a bit better at it….and have now several watches or pens or bits of paper where I write little reminders sa…telephone numbers of the AGL, must pay the gas bill…etc marinate chicken wings..,why don’t we have fresh coriander? Life goes on.
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My dear friend who I’ve spoken of before here, departed this earth as I had said, suffered seriously from obesity. He had suffered a life time of depression that was as large as his body mass. I wonder larger.
The article recalls for me other discussion had at another time in another life of mine. Out of the text leapt
“The McMaster discovery challenges the common perception of a reciprocal link between depression and obesity…”
It will depend on who the author is surely and at what level in which hierarchy whether we begin at the common idea of obesity being its link with depression or with obesity. The once common perception of a reciprocal link with obesity was good humour, not depression,, someone who was jolly. My one-time husband and I talked about the idea seeming hard to fathom in reality. I was studying some of the social history of medicine and he was writing his Ph.D in epidemiology. The discussion originally arose out of the context of discussing the then “common” idea that candidates for gallstones were “female, fair, fat and forty”.
Looks like the research outlined in the paper original to this article is investigating genes not the status of being depressed per se and/or being obese per se. I need to know more about the trial to understand “reduced risk”. How is that measured if not only by comparing genetic evidence.
I dunno much about this but I reckon this much that sitting as a large number of the population do for relentless hours on end staring at computer screens, television screens, game box screens, wi-fi screens is pretty well tantamount to F-A-T.
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I think it’s in your genes, my father was a happy man but not a fat man, he had his fair share misfortunes but it was in his nature to look at the bright side of the life, mum was more serious but not a unhappy or a depressive type; out of their nine children I would count six cheerful optimists and three of more serious ala mum, but none gloomy or unhappy , no one suffering from depression…. Nothing to do with life experiences, as every one has had their fair share of life’s ups and downs….none of us are fat, let alone obese.
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i don’t know what happened here, this was meant be a reply to BigM…never mind, it got here….
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To tell the truth, the obesity is not a sign of happiness, it is a sign of our doctors over prescribing anti depressants….those anti depressants make you fat and at best morose, and especially when it comes to women who want to be attractive, sexy and vivacious, but when the tummies are expanding they became , well, depressed, and then the only solace is to eat cake or chocolate…and hey presto, you are bigger than before…happier, oh, no….
To hide fatness the obese wear black, all black, add few nose rings and paint finger nails black, act nonchalant, but happy, I don’t think so.
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How right you are about anti-depressants, Helvi! And if weight was an issue at the root of her depression, even anti-depressants are likely to make her even more depressed! And of course, all this ignores the real causes: the media manipulation (not to say ‘usurpation’!) of public aesthetics and sensibilities.
It is the media who teach us that what we do when we’re hurt/angry/upset/jealous/insecure is eat a tub of Ben’n’Jerry’s ice-cream! Or a whole cheesecake… or somethingsimilar (this, sadly, often in the attempt to be funny…) It is the media who (socially) construct our behaviour so that, above all, we will all be good little consumers!
(I’ve been a ‘good little consumer’ this week! My dsp came through so I bought a new guitar and amplifier! But these are ‘needs’… honestly! And I’m told I saved $300… and got a coupla free sets of strings into the bargain! That’s why I haven’t been here much either yesterday or today; too busy playing with my new ‘toys’!)
🙂
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Then why are so many fat women depressed? There IS a link between fat and depression which is mediated by perceptions of worth regarding fatness generated by media stereotypes of ‘beauty’… by the public ‘valuing’ of certain body shapes, colorings etc and not others… and it is evident to me that this perception-driven self-loathing which is fed to women (and nowadays also men, though to a lesser extent!) by their own ‘sistas’ in their own ‘womens’ magazines, is a remarkably effective form of propaganda as it is evidently powerful enough to override the ‘happiness gene’…
Seems to me like the worst enemy to ‘happiness’ is the advertizing industry and the popular media… and maybe the news… which is always constructed to make us ‘…afraid… very afraid!’ Sigh! Where have all the desert islands gone when you want one? I’d even learn to use the ‘steel finger’ to give it the right atmosphere… hula dancers in the background… pig roasting on a spit… No, happiness doesn’t take very much, does it…
😉
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Asty:
You are so right. Advertising and the visual pollution displayed in our urban environment would have to be about the worst in the OECD. How anyone with even the slightest claim to sensitivity can remain not depressed is beyond my comprehension. And why? Why the need to visual assault the passer by and pummel him or her knee deep into depression? Just so that some ends up with a sordid penny in their pockets, that’s why.
There is a blog on the ABC Drum about wind farms. Amazingly there are those that complain about the visual aspect of wind farms. They find them ugly. What about the billowing smoke stacks of coal fired power stations? Those stupid grinning KFC chicken colonels or the Big M golden arches? The string of power poles at crazy angles, the snaking bitumen roads spoiling those verdant hills.
I am constantly amazed people don’t sit on the side of roads just sobbing.
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Sometimes we do, Gerard… sometimes we do! All other values in our so-called ‘value-system’ have become subordinated to the value of the dollar… All other values, friendship, sportsmanship, appreciation, respect (and self-respect!), honesty, trust, reliability, loyalty and even ‘love’ (whatever that means!) are now obliged to bow to economic pressures…
Man created money to serve him and is now entirely enslaved by it!
I sometimes wish I could do a ‘Tarzan’ or a ‘Robinson Crusoe’; and think those noble gentlemen both insane for ever wishing to return to ‘society’… but I realise it’s not really healthy or helpful to wish to return to the caves… or the trees; regardless of how attractive a proposition it might appear! Trouble is homo sapiens sapiens has been shaping his own evolution and that of the entire planet for the past few hundred thousand to maybe a few million years… we can’t stop now; we can only hope that as we become more conscious of the fact that we do indeed shape our own evolution, that we might aim it at becoming something a little bit more than the ‘competitive consumers’ our society has shaped us as… just ‘stomachs on legs’, really!
(It was my turn to have a rant! 😉 )
😐
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I think people reacting to other people who seem so much more ‘happy’ is fraught with danger or misconstruction. The boundless cheerfulness of people fills me with suspicion. I am not taken in by it, mainly because I think no matter what. ,happiness in in our world is vastly over-rated.I think a lot of our own sense of feelings is genetic and I for one would miss my bouts of depression, without them, would I have painted some reasonable pictures or written a couple of words in right order?
Why fight against nature.?The chubby person with his raucous laughter is as likely to be deeply envious of the more serious lanky types than we might be of theirs. We are all orphans in this world and we all struggle, try and make sense of it all. I would not want to be different and have learnt to accept failure, pessimism, insecurity and uncertainty as well as those moments of exultation after a couple of pork chops or a nice fleeting thought. Trying to be positive is the problem not the solution.
Still, I might be hypocritical because I live with a very stable and positive person, without whom I might never have made it. I was perhaps just a very lucky person.
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Gez, just wondering…. do you think that people have natural dispositions towards optimism or pessimism ? I used to think I was optimistic – more so when I was young. The older I get the more history I live through, the more I suspect that I was not so much optimistic as I was oblivious to the potential / probability for pain. Death of my father, collapse of a marriage, dementia of my mother, the GFM and the dearth of meaningful work…. and now the fucking permafrost is melting – and at 59, I am one year younger than my Dad was when he kicked the bucket (fortunately I have never smoked).
Optimism comes at a pretty steep price these days.
Thank the Goddess for my girls and for FM and our dear mates at the pub.
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Boundless optimism might well be related to age. Who did not believe in monsters deep in the sea or riches for the picking, with the brute strength to conquer mountains? As the years went by I was pleased that it turned out a bit different and I did not have to climb steep mountains or look for submarine monsters.
The things that make for happiness are fleeting and elusive which makes them far more precious when they do arrive just like that and unannounced. It is thoroughly liberating to accept negativity and despair as part of the journey, but…I have a lovely Helvi who is cheerful, has an irresistible pealing laughter, is positive and …she reckons I can make her laugh… so perhaps that’s the secret.. a give and take in the pestle and mortar of life.
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I have to admit to being a melancholic sort of chap, even from childhood, I can remember being slightly down, and wondering about the finality of life. It seems to run in the family, my dad is prone to depression, as was his. On the flip side is the fact that some of us don’t expect to be ‘happy’ all of the time, yet find small joys, in seeing a flower, or a bird, or the companionship of a small dog.
A good root seems to help!
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Yes good roots are essential… South American Shamans are particularly fond of ayahuasca or yage! But I’m told the Amazon basin is full of hallucinagenic roots…
😉
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Astyages, always on the lookout for an exotic root. I’m just happy with the local variety!
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It’s quite interesting to look at the way neurotransmitters work in the central nervous system, vs the peripheries. Likewise similar molecules may work as cellular migration chemicals in embryonic life, and then work completely differently in post natal life.
having said that, I’m not sure that fat people are necessarily happier, or less prone to depression.
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As I’ve suggested elsewhere, professor M, perhaps the sociological and environmental factors outweigh any small advantage any ‘happy gene’ might provide…
😉
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