Gastric bypass surgery is proving to be a lifesaver for more and more people as the problem of obesity continues to sweep across much of the western world but its greatest problem is to be found in the fact that a sizeable number of people either fail to lose sufficient weight after surgery or go on to regain much of the weight that is lost.

There are naturally a number of reasons for this failure to lose weight or to put on weight again and at the top of the list in without question the fact that all too many people simply find it too difficult to make the lifestyle changes necessary after surgery and eat themselves back into obesity. However, scientists have now discovered a genetic component that might account for some individual's failure to lose weight after gastric bypass surgery.

In a study which involved in excess of seven hundred severely obese patients blood samples were tested for the presence of two single nucleotide polymorphisma (SNPs). In layman's terms a SNP is a human DNA sequence, variations in the pattern of which might indicate how people will develop diseases and respond to such things as vaccines and drugs. Without going into the details of this study which are more than a little complicated, the scientists found that just under 20% of those examined showed a combination of specific SNPs that indicate they are at risk of not merely failing to lose weight after weight loss surgery, but could in fact be at risk of gaining weight.

The difficulty we are facing now is not chiefly one of finding an answer for those people who suffer from obesity, but of preventing obesity in the first place and this is very much a question of education. There is no question that a small number of people are susceptible to obesity and genetics and similar factors could well play a part in this. Nevertheless, by far the majority of the obesity that we nowadays arises out of nothing more than bad eating habits and a failure to take sufficient exercise.

The true problem however is that when people are obese it is simple human nature to try to find any cause for their obesity that takes away that feeling of guilt brought on by the fact that they might just have created the problem themselves. What better excuse could you hand someone than to say to them that their problem is genetic.

This is not to suggest that research into SNPs is not valid or to suggest that there is not a genetic component to the failure to lose weight or to put on weight following weight loss surgery. The danger however lies in releasing this data at too early a stage in the research process and simply handing people yet another excuse for not tackling their obesity at a time when obesity is at epidemic levels and most worrying of all is increasingly being found in very young children.

Research is important and needs to be given its proper place in the overall scheme of things but we need to be careful to ensure that it does not sidetrack us from the real need to tackle the problem of obesity by educating people to alter their eating habits and to take sufficient exercise.