Sometimes I find it amazing how far we miss the mark in modern medicine.

One of my favorite examples is the one that famed futurist Ray Kurzweil often gives when talking about diet pills. He bemoans the fact that much of the pharmaceutical industry has geared its treatment of weight loss on medications that focus on appetite suppression. He points out that this makes about as much sense as a pharmaceutical company creating oral contraceptive pills that work by reducing a persons desire for sex. He points to work being done on altering genes and their expressed proteins that are responsible for turning food into fat to store between meals. In the past this was vital for humans because we needed to maintain accessible to stored calories in the form of fat due to significant periods in between our access to food. Now in our modern society with its daily high calorie consumption we end up storing large excesses of our meals in the form of fat and have created an epidemic of obesity. He would argue that things like a fat insulin receptor gene that triggers this storage are things that will likely be far more successful in treating obesity in the future as new drugs are developed.

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