The decline of our education system is quite sad.

Dear Evildude,

The correct grammatical structure of your comment is either “You are all bitches!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” or more colloquially, “You’re all bitches!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I hope you will be able to correct your grammar in future posts.

DR

I don’t see your point.

Are you saying that illegitimate children grow up to be fat and on welfare?

That ‘legitimate’ children are inherently superior?

I notice you have a blog. It looks like your interests and concerns include people’s freedoms and what they do or don’t do to help or inhibit them.

Life can be the greatest teacher right?

A lot of people that end up contacting me and commenting on here are fitness trainers. Those are people that care about how people treat their body’s and are concerned that soon half of the western worlds population will be obese.

This just happens to be the topic that interests me.

Thanks for your comment.

Why do you people care???

If you say that fat people are costing you (the taxpayer) money, then why aren’t you bitching about the millions of illegitimate children and the sex that caused them?

Because it’s not acceptable to tell people to stop having promiscuous sex, right? Well, what’s the difference between that and people overeating, smoking, or cliff diving?

Why do people care so much about what other people do????

Prenatal period: While twins reared apart may not share the same environment while growing up, they do share the same womb. There are many studies that have shown that the prenatal period is extremely important in formation of many traits. This is not merely genetic, but depends on the mothers lifestyle (diet, excersice, exposure to stress, fumes, chemicals, trauma, etc.). Therefore, twins which are reared apart may have similar traits due to this prenatal period, and not genetics.

Equal environments: Many twin researchers assume that fraternal and identical twins raised in the same homes experience equally similar environments. But some research suggests that parents, teachers, peers and others may treat identical twins more similarly than fraternal twins. Further, fraternal twins may not be treated anymore alike than regular siblings. Thus, the reason why identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins may not solely due to genetics, but because they may be treated more similarly and have more similar environments.

I also want to point out some important points about the statistics and research methods involved in the above mentioned studies. It is important to rememeber that correlation does not equal causation!! It just means that there is a linear relationship between two variables. As McBloggenstein pointed out, some of the numbers above may actually be lower than the pure chance correlation.
Further, without statistical tests, these results do not tell us whether these findings indeed are statistically significant. They do not tell us whether the difference in correlations between fraternal and identical twins are statistically different from one another.

Further, how were these samples collected? Are they all from the same geographical region? Who are the birth parents? What were the reasons for giving the children up for adoption? At what age were the twins seperated? At what age were they adopted? Were they seperated at birth, or did they live together in a foster home or institution for a few months? These are all questions that could potentially influence the environment and other non-genetic factors that may affect the children’s outcomes.

So, as I have said before, I believe that twin studies are extremely insightful, but they just need to be taken with a grain of salt!

DR, I absolutely agree with you. I do not believe that these issues are as clear as “nature vs. nature”. I believe that both genetics and environment play off of one another. There are actually some studies out there that show that environment can change the expression of our genes. This is a quote from an article that was published in 2005.

“By studying 80 pairs of identical twins, ranging in age between 3 and 74, Esteller’s team found that epigenetic differences were hardly detectable in the youngest twins, but increased markedly with age. These changes had a striking effect on gene activity: the number of genes that differ in activity between 50-year-old twins was more than three times that in pairs aged 3. “So we are more than our genes,” says Esteller. “Not only is the DNA sequence important but also how gene activity is regulated in response to environment. This might explain why many identical twins have different susceptibility to disease.”

You said: “It’s funny how you seem to think that fitness experts know more about how to deal with obesity than researchers who are researching it.”

First, I never said anything close to that.

Second, I will say this: A good fitness expert and a knowledgeable nutritionist should be well versed in studies concerning their field. Their field being the human body. They would then take what they have gained from keeping up with the research, and apply it to their jobs (usually of which are to help their fellow humans become healthier). I will say that they probably know more about applying this particular type of research to the real world than the scientists do. All scientists do is look at statistics and probabilities. Trainers and nutritionists work with real people.

Researchers usually do not try and find out how to DEAL WITH the results that they come up with.

Lori, you seem to have made up your mind. By saying “researchers have concluded”……. you have clearly made a definitive decision on the subject based on things you have read that reaffirmed a belief that you already had. It’s called being biased. Research almost never difinitively “concludes” anything. This is another detail in which the correct language is key in understanding what you read. The more likely phrasing that studies usually use is “our conclusions suggest that evidence exists that our hypothesis is correct/incorrect”. Go back and read the study that you posted in your comment. The first sentence under “Discussion” says: “These findings suggest that…….”

If they have “CONCLUDED”, then why are there studies still being done? Can you explain to me what you mean by saying “genetics is the primary factor in obesity”? Again, that is extremely vague. Primary factor, doesn’t tell me anything. If you read those words, and use your bias to automatically translate them to mean “genetics causes obesity”, then there is no room for you in this discussion.

You asked me before “..why are you taking such a strong stand against science?”. Why would you think that I am? Is it because I’m not posting a bunch of numbers from a study I read? As I’ve said at least once before, I am not going to dispute the findings that these studies show that our genetics seem to heavily influence what we become. That is, after all, the definition of DNA. I have to tell you this, though, Lori. If you have ever taken a statistics class, you would know that the numbers in the study you posted are not very significant. For all we know, the margin for error in these findings could be as much as the resulting difference is from chance. By ‘chance’ I mean 50/50, or 50%, or 0.50.

What I’m trying to do with this blog is to question some things. I’m trying to point out that certain things don’t make sense in that more and more people are trying to discover the cause for the dramatic rise in obesity rates, and a large chunk of those people are willing to CONCLUDE that the cause is almost not behavioral at all.

I am here to ask the big question: How can that be? Can you explain how in the last few decades (a minuscule period in the overall timeline of human existence) the rates of obesity have increased almost 400%?? Do you know of any studies that have CONCLUDED that our DNA has changed so much in recent years to warrant such a change in our body shape?

As scientists do research, they often question their own findings and strive to get more difinitive answers. When the scientists do this, do you ask them why they are taking a stand against science?

The mark of good research is to question everything. The mark of a good, obedient consumer, is to take everything you read at face value, not to look further into anything, and buy that magic pill that makes you thin.