OBESITY should be renamed to avoid blaming people for their weight, researchers say.
Fat people should instead be called patients with “chronic appetite dysregulation”, Irish researchers said.
They argued it should be seen as an illness because experts have found hundreds of genes that increase your risk.
Mutations in these genes cause changes in the parts of the brain linked to appetite control.
Dr Margaret Steele, of University College Cork, said doctors should class patients as obese based on how vulnerable they are to overeating, not their weight.
She said: “Our environment throws so much food at us but some people seem to be able to resist the temptation and to stop eating when they’ve had enough to maintain their weight.
“Yet for other people that just doesn’t seem to work — there’s something going on in the brain, something in the level of hormones.
“It’s not a question of willpower, it’s not a question of making decisions.
“It’s at a much, much deeper level that we don’t really have full control over.
“They’re constantly being sent signals to eat and so they might respond by overeating.
“These are the people that need to get some kind of medical help to not do that and these are the people with the disease.”
Scientists have debated whether obesity should be classed as a disease for decades.
The World Health Organisation has called it an illness since 1936 but the NHS says it describes “a person who has excess body fat”.
Dr Steele’s study, presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Dublin, looked at how obesity should be classified from a philosophical point of view.
It said excess fat alone was not enough to be considered a disease — and that body size is not the only factor when considering if someone is obese.
But critics said framing obesity as a disease rather than a consequence of people’s behaviours is unhelpful to patients.
Dr Max Pemberton, a psychiatrist, said it “takes away personal responsibility and places it with doctors”.
He said: “Disease suggests there is an inevitability when it does not have to be that way.
“There are genetic components, just like there are genes that predispose people to be much more likely to become addicted to smoking than other people.
“But we would not classify smoking as a disease – it causes disease but we understand it as a behaviour that we have a choice in.
“Even those who have a genetic predisposition to become fat are not slaves to their DNA.”
