Obesity and Genetics

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There is much controversy over whether obesity is a genetic disease. Many people think that genetics is just an excuse for obese people to be lazy. But the evidence suggests that the idea of all obese people being lazy is not well founded (though it does a have a little merritt). People can't come to an agreement on how many genes affect obesity - mostly because we haven't discovered them all - but we do know that there are at least 5. These differences are usually caused by genetic switches, or the differing of one pair of genes to another. The side effects of these genetic switches include, but are not limited to, the inability of your body to regulate how much fat its body has and the dictation of someone's work ethic. The later symptom I listed points to a major environmental variable in someone's obesity, and indeed these variable exists. In fact, it is almost a larger contributing factor to the dictation of obesity than genes are.  A gene might stop your body from burning off fat, but if you don't gain the fat from eating too much in the first place there will never be a problem. This brings up a major question. Do obese people have the power to get the better of their genes by leading a healthy lifestyle? The answer seems to be yes and no. It is possible, but at the same time much harder for an obese person to lose weight and then maintain the loss. In conclusion, obesity is a disease dictated by both genes and environment.