Gotta add weight

New research adds weight to the theory that the body absolutely needs to push fat in to cells. Those patients who had liposuction in one place found that the fat reappeared somewhere else in the body.

This makes sense to me, if you consider that a body which does not have a perfectly balanced metabolism of its various proteins, chemicals and hormones will produce an excess of some. Fat cells are a good place to put the extra.

If the body didn't then it could go downhill very quickly. I have also read that if fat cells become bloated and then a sudden event causes some to burst, releasing the toxins within, this precipitates an acute medical emergency.

I am seriously in favour of shoving the horrible current public attitude that "obese people" (however others want to categorise them, usually by appearance!) are to blame for their own poor health.

While everyone has to be sensible about limiting our modern tendency towards processed foods, it is now becoming increasingly clear that there is something wrong within the body that produces obesity. It is not just our genes or our diet.

And if you are wondering why, after liposuction, the fat doesn't go back to the same place but to some other fat cells elsewhere, one expert in the New York Times piece had this suggestion: "Maybe liposuction violently destroys the fishnet structure under the skin where fat cells live." Wrecking your body further does not seem to be a sensible answer to obesity.

Our fossilized beauty

The recent unearthing of my childhood fossils and stones collection has resonated with my belief in the gradual structuring and reinvention of our human body over time.

I do not believe that we consist only of our isolated selves, our personal lifelong genes. We are not self-contained, pure and untainted within our skins; and current developments in microbiology and genetics give me encouragement in believing this.

What if each of us, when we were tapped with a little fossil hammer, broke open to reveal complex beauty? The beauty created by additional beings within us that have gifted their pattern to our make-up.

Maybe we have many quiet contributors within us that will not be revealed for a very long time, despite how clever we think we are in scientific terms. Until the relevant patch of earth cracks and crumbles, the true face of the stone will not be exposed to examination and awe.

What I am suggesting is that we are the sum of many people - past and present - and also many other things, so that our physiology and health may get a little improved, or a little worsened over a period of our lives; or maybe both of these possible actions, in one lifelong balancing act.

The possibility that some creature could slip a few genes in to another unrelated creature simply by living with them was once thought to be extremely rare. Recent studies on intracellular bacteria and their hosts seriously question this view

When I look at the magnificent tracery of ancient fossils within my stone collection I'm excited about what we can learn in the near future about the greater complexity of our human body - if we are prepared to think inside and outside ourselves.