Dr. Yaw Osafo, a clinical biochemistry specialist, has identified roughly five factors that contribute to obesity in humans.
During his appearance on the Joy Super Morning Show, he said that people frequently believe that people who are overweight or obese are only that way because of their poor eating habits.
He said such assumptions are not always true as there are several causative factors that lead to obesity.
He listed drugs, trauma to the brain, reduced energy expenditure and genetics as other factors that can cause obesity.
Speaking on drug-induced obesity, he said some drugs have weight gain as a side effect.
“So I’ll have a patient I’m treating for epilepsy, and then I’ll put the person on some anti-epilepsy medication it will give the person the side effect of carrying too much weight. I’m treating a patient with depression, some of the medicines we use to treat the depression can let you put on.
“We’re treating a patient for a number of conditions like asthma for which we use steroids and the person can put on too much weight as a result of that. So there are a number of medicines that have that side effect of getting you to put on too much,” he said.
He also spoke about how traumatic injuries to the head could lead to weight gain complications.
He explained that when people are involved in road accidents and acquire severe head injuries it affects their hypoythalamus which disrupts their body functions leading to weight gain.
“Sometimes some disease conditions or even trauma from a road traffic accident and you bang your head terribly and you get a severe head injury and that part of the brain gets traumatised then it’s very, very possible that you’ll develop obesity because that part of the brain is now dysfunctional,” he said.
Lack of regular exercise is also a cause for obesity, Dr. Osafo stated.
He noted that when people fail to exercise frequently and regularly, it reduces energy expenditure and causes weight gain.
“The first and most common one is lack of exercise, regular exercise, not the weekend warriors, those that come to climb the Peduase Mountain only on Saturdays and then there’s an Omotuo joint up there, they get there then they condemn everything they’ve done on the Omotuo,” he said.
He noted that reduced energy expenditure is also often associated with age.
He explained that as people age, they tend to exercise less frequently, thus explaining the rate of obesity getting higher the older the demographic.
“When we’re growing older…you buy a car or you call an uber everywhere you go, you don’t walk as much, you don’t play football again with the boys in your area and so on because now you’re a ‘respectable big man’ or ‘big woman’,” he said.
He added that as people age, their ability to burn calories while they are at rest also reduces.
“When we’re at rest, doing nothing, lying in your sofa, reading a book, your body is functioning so you’re burning some calories. Some things like breathing, the movement of your intestines, heartbeat, functions of the kidney and so on and so forth, all those things go on.
“So on the average we burn between 1,300 and 1,700kilo calories every day. But as we grow older, this resting energy expenditure drops significantly,” he said.
And finally, he blamed some people’s genetics for their obesity.
“They’re born that way and they have a big, big problem,” he said.
He urged obese people to work out frequently and regularly to lose weight, and urged them to watch their diet to avoid ingesting high calorie foods.
