What 10,000 body composition measurements revealed about modern disease
In the early 2000s, as obesity rates began skyrocketing across the United States, doctors were instructed to diagnose obesity using BMI. Yet BMI measures size, not fat.
So I invested in equipment allowing me to measure body composition at every single visit. Over several decades, I collected more than 10,000 measurements—one of the largest longitudinal clinical datasets of its kind.
Then a strange pattern emerged:
Certain symptoms of brain dysfunction consistently appeared before the body began storing excess fat.
This suggested that obesity, for the majority of people, does not begin in the body—it begins in the brain.
Simultaneously, through my work with the Neuroscience Education Institute, I identified 22 hallmark symptoms that consistently appeared in patients who also showed these metabolic changes. These symptoms matched almost exactly the conditions Hudson and Pope had grouped under ASD.
Something was connecting brain symptoms and fat-storage mechanisms. But what?
To answer that question, I needed to understand what was happening biochemically inside the brain.
