A lot of research and study has been conducted to determine as to what makes some people hold on to their weight despite all their efforts against it and what makes some people keep their weight off despite all their efforts to gain some weight. In this article, we will discuss some of the reasons for the same. According to a recent research, easy weight gain or easy weight loss seem to be driven by hereditary factors. The exact gene that seems to be responsible for some people not being able to keep their weight off and for some people being able to keep their weight off, is attributed to the presence or absence of the FTO gene in a person.

According to this study, when experiments were conducted on rodents, mice to be precise (because they are mammals like humans and have very analogous anatomy and body processes to that of humans), it was found that mice which possessed the FTO genes, even if subjected to lot of activity seemed to retain their body weight, whereas mice that lacked the FTO gene, even when subjected to heavy eating, rest and inactivity seemed to stay thin and not gain weight. This suggests that the presence of the FTO gene causes mice to hold on to their body weight no matter how much they were made to run, while the absence of the functioning gene ensured accelerated hindrance free burning of energy, despite physical inactivity.

The study naturally concludes from what seems apparent that the presence of the FTO gene, seems to conserve the energy of the body, and does not allow the body to lose it through body heat, whereas the absence of this gene seems to freely allow the body to lose energy through unhindered creation of body heat. Hence, the presence of the FTO gene has been concluded to be directly linked to the problem of the obesity in mice that possess the FTO gene, and the absence of the gene has been linked to spontaneous burning of enormous amounts of body energy.

Now humans do not possess exactly an FTO gene like the one that the mice possess, but humans possess a variant of the FTO gene, that is to say only some humans possess this variant. For all humans who possess the variant of FTO gene, the presence of this variant seems to create an increase in their level of appetite and also an increase in their amount of food intake. Now increase in appetite and food intake on a consistent basis does put a human being to risk from obesity, but this FTO variant has not yet been proved to be directly responsible for stopping the spontaneous burning of food energy. However, the study of how the FTO gene in mice causes obesity by directly stopping the burning of food energy to a great extent, can help scientists to conduct further studies on the human variant of the FTO gene to see, if it creates a similar side-effect in humans.

If the human variant of FTO gene is proved to be associated with different genetic variants of body fat and how these different variants of body fat burn, then such a study can be used to create drugs that can help humans modulate or control, the functioning of their human variant of FTO gene (for those humans who possess such a variant of the FTO gene.