It is clear that the cause of obesity is a result of eating more than you burn. What is more complex to answer is why some people eat more than others? Differences in our genetic make-up mean some of us are, for a myriad of different reasons, driven to eat more than others. We now know that the genetics of body-weight, on which obesity sits on one end of the spectrum, is in actuality the genetics of how the brain regulates appetite. In this talk, I will discuss the use of different studies, ranging from large population based cohorts, to smaller consanguineous groups of individuals with extreme phenotypes, coupled with ‘omics technologies, to identify novel genes linked to obesity.
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