Causes of Obesity Dallas - Dallas North Texas Bariatric & General Surgery, P.A.

There are several factors that lead to weight gain in people. We help patients throughout the greater Dallas area understand the causes of obesity at Dallas North Texas Bariatric & General Surgery, P.A.

DR. FRANK VENINGA: One of the most interesting things about obesity and about our difficulty in maintaining our weight is to ask ourselves, why someone who is rather overweight, someone who is obese, actually gets hungry at all. The issue is that our ancestors, prior to the advent of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago, were all hunter/gatherers. Getting enough food, staying alive was a serious, life and death issue every day. For that reason, they were always concerned about starving to death, never becoming obese to death. We simply don't receive much signal from our excess fat stores to our brain telling us we don't need to eat. Therefore individuals who are overweight, individuals who are normal weight, individuals who are thin, we all get hungry and we all want to eat. We have the same signalling whether we're heavy or whether we're thin and therefore bariatric surgery, at least the lap band procedure and possibly the others, are trying to augment the signal to the hypothalamus so that we can choose to stop eating sooner.