after all, no one could see his overweight body.

So, in antiquity, obesity was no longer associated with health and beauty. Vice versa. With the development of medicine, excessive fullness has turned into a disease. For example, Hippocrates considered obesity as a disease that significantly shortens a person's life, and makes women infertile. He owns the aphorism: "Sudden death is more characteristic of the obese than of the thin." Ancient Roman doctors continued the work of their Greek predecessors. So, Celsus considered the flabbiness of the skin, which is constitutional in nature, to be the main cause of obesity. And Claudius Galen associated excess weight with excess mucus (phlegm) in the human body. Galen, by the way, said: "Get up from the table slightly hungry, and you will always be healthy."

And already in antiquity they tried to treat obesity. For this, moderation in food and exercise were mainly recommended. However, more radical treatments have also been proposed. Thus, the Talmud describes the surgical removal of subcutaneous fat.

In the Middle Ages, ideas about beauty has changed little. The fact is that the life of society at that time was significantly regulated by the church. Self-restraint, pacification of the flesh, reaching asceticism - this is what the church called for, taking care of the triumph of the spirit over the sinful body. Science in those "dark ages" developed very poorly, and obesity was looked at not so much as a disease, but as a consequence of sin - gluttony. And in the early Middle Ages, people fought, as best they could, with excess weight, resorting to original methods for this.

In 1087, King William the Conqueror of England became so fat that he could no longer ride. To get rid of excess weight, he began to drink alcohol in large quantities. That is, he sat down on a kind of "liquid diet".

Sudden death is more common in the obese than in the thin.

Hippocrates

Get up from the table slightly hungry, and you will always be healthy.

Galen

However, during the late Middle Ages and later - in the Renaissance, obesity in society began to be again considered as a sign of abundance, wealth and even beauty. This is evidenced by many works of literature and art. The paintings of Rembrandt, Rubens and other prominent artists of that time depict people who, from a modern point of view, are overweight and far from the ideal of beauty.

Nevertheless, the doctors of the Middle Ages continued the traditions of their ancient colleagues and, in contrast to society, considered overweight to be a disease. But they were little interested in this problem. And in most cases they simply repeated the words of ancient Greek doctors. The medicine of those years focused on the treatment of infectious diseases and surgery - problems much more relevant for the cruel and gloomy Middle Ages. Doctors, although they talked about various diets, almost never adhered to them themselves. In this regard, Petrarch castigated medical astrology and scoffed at the strict prescriptions of diets with their constraints and restrictions for the patient.

Only in the 18th century did doctors pay serious attention to the problem of obesity. True, in this matter, the opinions of physicians rarely coincided - science went forward, now and then stumbling out of the blue. So, the Scottish doctor William Cullen considered obesity a disease only if it was accompanied by shortness of breath and limitation of physical activity. activity. The Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller argued in 1788 that overweight is more common in people who live in southern countries. In his opinion, in hot countries, the body gives off less heat, which leads to the deposition of fat.

In 1832, a new branch of medicine, natural hygiene, declared itself, the founders of which began to promote vegetarianism. It was this year that the American Sylvester Graham made his first lecture in New York on the healing properties of vegetarian food.

Religion did not lag behind science. In the 1830s, Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham proposed a restrictive diet to eradicate sins such as gluttony and sexual intemperance. Graham never tired of saying that obesity leads to indigestion, and it, in turn, to various diseases.

Graham's restrictive diet had many adherents who claimed that after reducing the diet, they began to feel great. True, according to contemporaries, supporters of nutrition according to Graham looked pale and lethargic. For which, by the way, Graham subsequently received the nickname Doctor Sawdust.

Significant interest in the problem of overweight and related diseases appeared in the late XIX - early XX century.

So, in the 70s of the XIX century, the English physician William Banting wrote the work "Letter on Obesity", in which he warned about the dangers of food containing a lot of sugar and starch. He put forward the idea that potatoes and pasta turn into fat in the body. The idea turned out to be very popular. The British have even begun to refer to weight loss through a sugar- and starch-restricted diet as "bunting." By the way, Banting himself, thanks to his diet, successfully lost almost 20 kilograms.

A little later, in the 1890s, the chemist Wilbur Atwater "decomposed" food into separate components: proteins, fats and carbohydrates - and even measured the caloric value of each of these groups. Then, at the end of the 19th century, doctors began to prescribe substances derived from the thyroid glands of animals for weight loss.

As you can see, humanity by that time had already ceased to associate excess weight with beauty.

And at the beginning of the 20th century, it finally became fashionable to be slim. A huge number of scientific and pseudoscientific theories and methods of getting rid of excess weight have appeared. In a wide stream poured into ordinary people an advertising campaign of "magic pills" that, without much effort, would allow you to lose those extra pounds once and for all. These pills included laxatives, arsenic, strychnine, washing soda, and Epsom salts. How many people actually managed to lose weight by taking these drugs is unknown. But one thing is for sure - there were enough of these pills sold.

In addition to such "miraculous remedies", various preparations were also used, the creation of which became possible due to the development of chemistry. Thus, since 1893, for several decades, a thyroid has been actively used, which affects the activity of the thyroid gland.

After World War I, overweight men who worked in factories producing munitions with the chemical dinitrophenol were observed to lose weight very quickly. Doctors immediately took note of this fact and began to prescribe another "magic" substance for the treatment of obesity. The fact is that dinitrophenol greatly accelerates metabolism, due to which there is a sharp weight loss. At the same time, no one was embarrassed that the same chemical was used in agriculture as an insecticide and herbicide. By 1935, more than ten thousand people managed to take dinitrophenol, but already in 1938 it was no longer used as a means for losing weight. Amphetamine was replaced, which also did not become a panacea - its use caused serious complications.

I must say that until now, scientists have not been able to synthesize a drug that would effectively promote weight loss and meet modern medical requirements.

But the fight against obesity was carried out not only in chemical laboratories and in the offices of charlatans. The problem of excess weight was also paid attention to by serious scientists who left a noticeable mark in world medicine. These include Upton Sinclair, who promoted fasting; Gervard Carrington - the "father" of the raw food diet; Horace Fletcher, who recommended chewing food as long as possible.

At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, the calorie-protein theory of nutrition was considered the most progressive. Even then it was known that fats and carbohydrates can be formed from proteins, but not vice versa. That is why protein foods were considered the most valuable.

This theory was replaced by the idea of separate nutrition, that is, separate intake of protein and carbohydrate foods. Although some of the provisions of this method have not stood the test of time, its basics are successfully used by nutritionists around the world today.

Modern ideas about normal body weight began to form only in the 30s of the XX century. And along with the use of various drugs and diets, surgical methods for the treatment of obesity began to be used. This area is called bariatric surgery (from the Greek baros - fat, heavy).

The first operation on the digestive tract was performed in Sweden in 1953 and consisted of the removal of a significant portion of the small intestine. Later, similar operations were performed on the stomach and small intestine, but they were not widely used. The fact is that such operations were very traumatic and often led to the development of complications.

In aesthetic surgery, liposuction is the most widely used - the removal of subcutaneous fat using vacuum aspiration through small skin incisions. The first such operations were carried out in 1972.

However, doctors and scientists were not only developing new treatments for obesity. With no less energy, they studied the causes and features of the development of this disease.

For example, it was found that adipose tissue is an active hormonal organ that has a significant impact on many metabolic processes in the body and the development of pathological processes in it. Two types of obesity have also been described, androgenic and gynoid. We'll talk more about them later. For now, I will only note that the description of these two types of obesity has led scientists to associate the distribution of adipose tissue in the body