Layer 0 · Substrate
The Thrifty Engine
An efficient engine built for a different world.
The idea
South Asian mitochondria are not weak. They are efficient, tuned by millennia of ancestral environments to extract every calorie and waste nothing as heat. In a world of scarcity that engine was an advantage. In a world of abundance, the same efficiency means less capacity to burn off surplus, less brown fat to disperse it, and energy that has nowhere to go except storage. Nothing broke. The world changed around the engine.
How the evidence grades it
Every study is labeled by what it does to this concept. Counting the counterevidence is the point.
+9 ungraded
Support 28Neutral 6Qualify 1Reframe 4Contradict 0
Key studies
- Differential Pathophysiological Drivers of Susceptibility to Type 2 Diabetes and Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease: Ethnic Differences in Insulin Dynamics, Whole-Body Fat Metabolism, and Organ-Specific Lipid Deposition. PMID 41698854
- Anthropometric prediction models of body composition in 3 to 24month old infants: a multicenter international study. PMID 39304751
- Novel genomic variants related to visceral adiposity index (VAI) and body adiposity index (BAI) in Indian sib-pairs. PMID 38971891
- Lessons Learned From Epidemiology of Type 2 Diabetes in South Asians: Kelly West Award Lecture 2024. PMID 39841965
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