Joe Rogan Blasts ‘Bonkers’ Claim From Biden Advisory Committee Doc That Genetics ‘Number One’ Cause of Obesity
Joe Rogan reacted to a claim made on 60 Minutes in January by Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford that genetics is the number one cause of obesity.
Stanford who specializes in obesity medicine, said that diet and exercise have little impact on obesity but genetics was the “number one cause.”
“If you were born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50 to 85% likelihood of having the disease yourself even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management,” Stanford said.
Since that 60 Minutes appearance just a few weeks ago, Stanford has joined President Joe Biden‘s administration as part of the USDA 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which helps to formulate diet standards in America.
On the Tuesday edition of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan spoke with Lex Fridman about the claim.
“She said the number one cause of obesity is genetics. And it doesn’t matter what you do. Like you could be a person who has a perfect diet and exercises and sleeps right and you’re still obese,” Rogan explained.
“And the health experts went fucking nuts. Like, that’s not what the data shows. The data shows that most people who are obese have obese parents and they come from an obese family, but they’re all doing the wrong thing,” he said.
Rogan called the claim “bonkers.”
“There’s not like a person in that family that’s eating grass-fed steak and running marathons and lifting weights and getting up at six in the morning and getting a cold plunge, doing all these different things, but is still fat as fuck. They’re watching their calories in and calories out and they’re burning, you know, a thousand calories a day in exercise and they’re still fat as fuck. That’s not real,” Rogan said.
“There’s this weird thing going on where people want to say it’s not your fault and it isn’t your fault. I mean, if you believe in determinism, if you believe in the impact of the people around you and the environment that you’re in, which is most certainly real, the impact of your parents, the impact of modeling after other people’s bad decision making, that’s all real,” he said.
“That’s a hundred percent real. But to say that all obesity is just genetic is bonkers. That’s a bonkers thing to say. And it discredits all these people that we know that were obese, that without surgery — lost all that weight and looked great,” he concluded.
Watch above via The Joe Rogan Experience.
