Columbia University Medical Center will present the 2008 Naomi Berrie Awards this Saturday to a nationally recognized diabetes and obesity researcher, and a promising young investigator, for their outstanding achievements in diabetes research.

Dr. Rudolph Leibel Talks to FitTV About Childhood Obesity

ELLEN CLEGHORNE, host:

“So, there you have it. Our junk-food-eating, fast-food-ordering, Gameboy-playing, Lay-Z-Boy-TV-watching lifestyle has gotten us into trouble. But why is that some of us glide effortlessly through life, looking like J.J. from “Good Times,” and others of us seem to gain weight breathing air?

Well, it’s because, like other diseases, obesity is not caused only by what we do. There are some factors that we just can’t control.

Dr. RUDOLPH LEIBEL (Geneticist, Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center, Columbia University Medical Center): There are very powerful genetic and metabolic and biochemical aspects to this, some of which we understand, many of which we don’t. And that makes the very important point that people who are obese should not blame themselves for being obese, and certainly, people around them should not blame them for being obese, any more than one would blame somebody for having a certain eye color, or hair color, or being bald or not bald, or being 6’5”, or 5’8”.

CLEGHORNE: But we can’t go overboard here. Genes may make it tougher for some of us to be trim, but they don’t let any of us off the hook.

Dr. LEIBEL: What people tend to assume is that they have to make radical changes in their lifestyle in order to have any impact on this, and so what they do is they delay doing anything, because, again, they have to hit a lifestyle at a run, and it’s much better if they start slowly.

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CLEGHORNE: Remember, our bodies crave the things that got us through the lean times when food was scarce: namely, fat and sugar.

Dr. LEIBEL: What we actually like are the things that got us through millions of years of evolution, and it just has turned out now that we’ve become so good at producing them for ourselves at such low costs that we can have them without any additional effort to get them. There may be 10 or 15 of these hormones, at least, that are produced by fat that get out into the blood and do various things in terms of signaling the brain, affecting liver function, metabolism, affecting the way the body responds to insulin.

Partial transcript of broadcast that originally aired 8/10/2008 on Discovery Channel’s FitTV.