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Women get fat faster than men? You may have heard this often. As people get older, many adults become overweight, especially in women. You may often find middle-aged women have a body that is fatter than men their age. However, do you know why this can happen?
Women's bodies store more fat than men
WHO has reported that obesity rates are higher in women than men, even up to twice as high as men. This may be due to food intake and activity levels. But more than that, it turns out that this is due to the regulation in the woman's body itself. One of them may be because the female body is able to store more fat than men.
In fact, the female body consists of more fat, while the male body consists of more muscle. This happens because men have more testosterone than women. This is a genetic factor.
Because men have more muscle mass, men need more calories than women. This makes men less of a problem if they eat too much. In contrast to women who need fewer calories. So, if women eat just a little bit more, this can make women gain weight quickly.
In addition, research has also found that there are parts of the brain that contribute to weight gain in women who are easier. There is a part of the brain that regulates how the body uses the calories from the food we eat and this area differs between women and men. Cells in this part of the brain make an important brain hormone called proopyomelanocortin peptide (POMC). These peptides are responsible for regulating appetite, physical activity, energy expenditure and body weight.
The older a woman gets, the faster she gets fat
Another study published in the journal Diabetes also helps explain why women gain weight more easily than men. Research involving mice showed that female mice with a high fat diet had higher aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 (aldh1a1) enzyme activity, so they could store more fat around the stomach (visceral fat), compared to male mice with a high fat diet. You need to know that visceral fat is associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus and heart disease.
The enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 is an enzyme involved in the production of fat and is found in mice as well as humans. The presence of an increase in the enzyme aldh1a1 makes women fat faster than men, even though they both have high-fat diets.
Levels of the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 (especially) increase in postmenopausal women because estrogen levels decrease. Yes, high levels of the hormone estrogen can block this enzyme from working. Thus, young women with high levels of the hormone estrogen may find it more difficult to gain weight than women who are menopausal.
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