You can’t argue with science….
A new study suggests that people are are overweight tend to be less intelligent than those who are not.
According to the study, people who are overweight have less grey and white matter in key parts of the brain, meaning their brain develops an “altered reward processing,” effectively meaning they lack the ability to control their eating.
The results were extracted from “very thorough” brain scans of 32 people from Baltimore.
It does explain Trigglypuff. Never before has hunger been so thoroughly eradicated for so long, and look at the stupidity all around us.
Again, dopamine shuts off the amygdala, and the amygdala is the part of the brain that flags stimuli as significant, focuses you on them, and drives you to engage in cognitive processes designed to solve a mental conundrum.
If you are starving, you will spend a lot of time thinking very hard about how to take the factors at your disposal, and manipulate them all together to fix your problem. You will be arraying the assets at your disposal in your mind, you will be wracking your brain to perceive interconnections, you will be mixing and matching them in your mind in different configurations, and you will be trying to extrapolate out different outcomes of each option. You will be, in a mental sense, “hungry.”
Now imagine how your brain would light on fire if you were a general commanding multiple units of armed men with different capabilities and weaknesses against a similar force of diverse units. Imagine that the cost of loss would be death, perhaps preceded by torture – for you and all your friends.
Intelligence, weapons, various warriors, weaknesses, strengths, vulnerabilities, scams, deception, the terrain, the weather, and so on, would all flow through your brain at high velocity, driven by a panic we can barely imagine. Suddenly you are diverting a river to erode the soil under a castle wall to bring a siege to an end.
That exercise develops the brain like mental powerlifting. Before long, everyone who has undergone it is thinking more clearly, more strongly, and their intelligence is higher – because the stressed state their brain was put in developed it.
If, however, you are fat and happy in a hammock on a beach, your brain will turn off, and the sum of your thoughts would be, “Look how fluffy that cloud is…” You can imagine how quickly your mental faculties would atrophy compared to being a starving General in the midst of a war.
r-selection is nice, the way sitting on a couch with a warm fluffy blanket around you is nice. But it weakens you in so many ways.
What is coming will be tough, like lifting weights and running is tough. But if you embrace it, it will make you great. And in the process it will make our civilizations great as well.
[…] Fat People More Likely To Be Stupid […]
I sometimes think that my greatest blessing was growing as a poor white boy in a black neighborhood.
That’ll do it.
I love your blog AC but I think in this case the opposite is true. I would say stress is the greatest cause of obesity in modern America (and also our mental health crisis), not “too much ease”. Ever heard of a book called “The Gabriel Method” by Jon Gabriel? Basically the gold standard for weight loss. Poor people are also more likely to be fat and the poor are the ones who experience the most stress over not having enough to make ends meet. I agree that the less intelligent are more likely to be fat, but I’d attribute this to the correlation between greater intelligence and greater financial wealth, hence they’re less likely to have this stress placed upon them.
Interesting. When I encounter stress, I seem to trigger something that greatly reduces my appetite, to the point I could not eat for days if I wanted to – literally. When I eat less, my brain goes on fire and I get super sharp mentally. I have always assumed that is some sort of mechanism designed to confront stress with physical and mental optimization by eating just enough to run your systems, but not enough to blunt adrenaline and growth hormone.
Maybe it is lots of dopamine with stress, as in tons of sugar and deliciousness, combined with stress? Maybe dietary variation would jibe with the Firmicutes – bacteroides balance thing.
The symptoms you described are entirely in-line with eustress. It seems like your body is treating the stressor entirely differently than distress because it is.
“When I eat less, my brain goes on fire and I get super sharp mentally.”
When this happens you have probably entered ketosis. Take a look at the mental effects of a ketogenic diet and see how it matches your experience.
Definitely.
Stress is not in and of itself bad. In fact, a certain level of stress is necessary and vital. This is called eustress, and it causes you to perform better than your baseline.
The problem is the failure to acclimate to stress. Stress that you have not acclimated to is distress (in opposition to eustress) and it is what causes health problems. What is a vital step in turning social and mental distress into eustress? Amygdala development. (Genetics helps, too.)
[…] Fat people have lower IQs then skinny people. […]
Great article–I found it because Matt Forney ironically linked to it. Love this blog though and will read.
I’m guessing that you have never been to a Mensa meeting.
I wish I was never sired/conceived. Consider yourselves luckier you never received concussions, & never need to buy/use insulin, & never need to buy/drink psychiatric medicines.
t. concussed obese insomniac type-1-diabetic mentally-ill person