Empowered Health Course · Lesson 6 · 3:18
Welcome back. I want to talk about what a disease is. Most diseases have four components: physical signs, symptoms, health complications, and a causal organ.
Some of this is straightforward. We often think of the body like a clock — if something's wrong, you open it up, find the broken gear, and fix it. Setting a broken bone works that way. Other diseases are far more complex, and many are in between. Take congestive heart failure: the signs might be swelling in the legs or fluid in the lungs on a chest X-ray; a symptom might be shortness of breath; a health complication might be hospital admission; and the causal organ can be evaluated with an ultrasound of the heart.
Obesity is more complex and less intuitive. The sign is excess body fat. The symptoms vary. The health complications come from either the mechanical pressures of excess weight or the impaired storage of energy. And the causal organ has eluded us, which has caused a lot of heartache, because the location of obesity isn't something you'd guess just by observing society.
So obesity is often wrongly seen as a moral failing, a character flaw, eating too much and moving too little. But the science is clear: the causal organ of obesity is a deep structure in the brain — one we can't consciously control. That speaks overwhelmingly to the fact that obesity is not an individual's fault, even though that runs counter to almost everything society, movies, and even some clinician visits have told us. Obesity is a chronic disease, and we'll keep exploring it.
This transcript has been lightly edited from the video for readability. For the complete experience, please watch the video above.