In all they looked at over 5,000 people of whom 2,000 had diabetes...

What we have realised at Ukmedix News is that more and more research cash is being put into the genetic causes of obesity. If it can be definitely proved that the reason why certain people are overweight is purely down to their genes and not down to the fact that they eat too much and do not exercise the potential for drug companies is enormous.

However what we have also noticed at Ukmedix news is that about every six months a "new" discovery is made and some scientist or drug company claims that they have located the fat gene. The last such "discovery" claimed that only one percent of people had this rare gene and therefore while many people claim that they are overweight "because it is in their genes" this could not really be the case.

At Ukmedix News we have just come across a European research project that claims that individuals who have mutations in both copies of their gene called the FTO have a 70% greater chance of putting on weight than those people who have normal and regular copies of this FTO gene. The scientists say that they do not at present understand why this gene mutation can make you obese but they said that more work is to be done and they hope that this discovery will open up new avenues of research and help the world understand why some people are obese and why others continue to eat all the time and don't put on weight.

The researchers nicknamed the gene that they were studying FTO as it is short for FATSO and compared people who had mutations of this gene to people who did not. In all they looked at over 5,000 people of whom 2,000 had diabetes. The research has been published in the medical journal Science.