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Brillyant comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 2: Atkins Redux - Less Wrong
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I'm ignorant as to why that happens, and I'll assume it is true.
Why does it happen?
And what percentage of the general population do circumstances like this (or other such examples) apply to?
Well that's what insulin does. It's the hormone that mediates growth in adipose cells. If a person has broken insulin regulation (aka diabetes) and then you start injecting them with the stuff there is a good chance they'll get fat (the effect of insulin is a little more complicated than that, such that people react differently-- obesity has a significant genetic component).
There are a lot of known hormonal and metabolic disorders that can cause obesity. They don't make up a very significant fraction of people who are obese in the modern, western world-- but it in some societies it's probably the only way some people ever get /got fat.
Examples?
Basically all hunter-gatherer societies, as far as I know.
Ah, that's reasonable, but could be just because food is more difficult to get, and exercise isn't optional.
The issue's a bit more complicated than that. Skeletal evidence shows us that overall nutrition is usually worse after the agricultural transition, with average heights (a decent proxy for nutrition) usually dropping by several inches after a region switches to an agrarian lifestyle.
This doesn't necessarily mean that agrarians are making fewer calories per unit effort, though. They may be limited in protein or micronutrients but not in calories, with stunting thanks to deficiency issues; actually that's rather plausible. Alternately agrarian methods might by limited by expenditure of effort during some limited season (plowing, say, or harvest -- I don't know exactly how bronze-age agriculture worked), which could give you higher peak effort but lower average effort. Or the aristocratic classes that usually come with an agrarian transition might be confiscating all the good stuff for their own use.
(Agrarians are making more calories per unit land no matter how you slice it, but that's more historically than nutritionally significant.)
The question was whether there were any non-hormonally obese people, not what the average person looked like. I'm pretty sure agriculture made it much easier for high status people to overeat. In fact, obesity was probably a status symbol.
What's weird is that agriculture-- or at least the modern food system apparently also makes it much easier for low-status people to get fat, even when their children are starving -- pdf.
Having children is not about reproduction, it's about locally high status ;)
Thanks for the paper.
The example is hunter-gatherers, not agriculturists. The point of discussing farmers is to address your suggestion that food is hard for hunter-gatherers to get. By many measures, it appears easier for hunter-gatherers than for farmers. In particular, hunter-gatherers appear to eat more and work less.
That's a harder question to answer, partly because fat doesn't preserve well in the archaeological record.
A quick trawl through Google Scholar isn't picking much up for the archaeological side of the question, although I've found a surprisingly large number of cites discussing the proportions of the apparently-obese "Venus" figurines sometimes found in Upper Paleolithic sites. This paper on the other hand seems to suggest that the answer is "no" for at least one group of modern foragers, at least to a first approximation (the sample size is rather small) and modulo the usual caveats re: modern foraging cultures.
I would agree this is true. From my recall and simple research, something like ~17% of individual metabolism is dependent on factors that are suspected to be genetic, and this, as a result of simple arithmetic, can lead to obesity fairly easily. (e.g. we eat and exercise identically and end up at very, very different weights).
I still don't understand what the mechanism by which -- apart from simple caloric arithmetic -- Atkins works? Are you saying it is a result of its effect on insulin in the body?
Since, like you, I don't suspect (though we may be wrong) insulin-caused obesity is a significant % of the western world, it still is my view that the Atkins diet is primarily nothing more than an "eat less" diet disguised as pseudoscience.
The genetic component could also affect hunger and eating behavior.
It seems to me reasonable (and likely) that it does. Of course we have individual differences in appetite and metabolism.
The crux is what Atkins, or any diet, does besides improve caloric arithmetic. I'd say it does primarily nothing in the majority of people. I'd love to hear a suitable counterproposal.