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Darwin's Revenge Why are we getting fat? Because our genes date from the last Ice Age. By Fred Guterl Newsweek International Feb. 7 issue - Of nature's many guises, winter at the Arctic Circle would have to be one of the least subtle. It's hard to imagine that humans would have survived generations of frigid climate without some adaptation giving them a way to cope. Scientists have in fact postulated a 'thrifty genotype' that some humans acquired 30,000 or so years ago during their migration from Asia, across a land bridge at what's now the Bering Strait, to North America. These genes may have given cold warriors an ability to store fat and metabolize it sparingly, a handy trait for the dark, cold months when food is scarce. Now that the land bridge is long gone, the descendants of these first North Americans are stuck with genes optimized for life in the Ice Age. The same traits that allowed their ancestors to thrive in the Arctic wilderness may be making them uniquely vulnerable to the high-fat, high-cholesterol, sedentary American lifestyle. All told, about 1.2 billion people in the world are fat, and another 350 million are obese. Obesity-related illnesses, such as heart disease and diabetes, are rising. Scientists are beginning to appreciate the variations in how different people respond to diet. For most people—particularly Asians—eating food rich in saturated fats will generally increase the level of 'bad' cholesterol and decrease the 'good' cholesterol. 'When [Asians] move from their traditional environment to the West'—or when they start eating at their local McDonald's in Tokyo or Beijing—'they immediately get into trouble with obesity and heart disease—more than Caucasians,' says Jose Ordovas, director of the Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory at Tufts University. By the same token, Northern Europeans and Celts, and some Mediterranean populations, tend to have the same cholesterol levels no matter what they eat—the work of a gene inhe
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