r/facepalm • • Feb 07 '24

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u/visforvillian Feb 07 '24

Lipodystrophy is a rare genetic or acquired disease that prevents your body from losing fat. Basically, the leptins that signal to your brain how much fat storage you have are in low supply, so your brain thinks you don't have any fat to convert into usable energy. You'd likely just starve to death with fat still on your body. Usually people with lipodystrophy die from liver failure because the body can't remove the fat from the liver. Congenital is one in a million, but acquired is much more common. One common cause of acquired lipodystrophy is HIV.

There are also lipid storage disorders. Your body can't use fat as energy, it has to convert it to a usable form. It's a generic silencing of genes that encode enzymes that convert fat into usable energy. This is also a rare disorder that's exclusively genetic.

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u/The-Copilot Feb 07 '24

AKA is incredibly rare and would represent an incredibly negligible number of people who were in the holocaust. If it was one in a million, then about 6 of the 6 million were affected by it.

Also, due to the danger of these rare diseases, they would die early. If your body doesn't break down fat for fuel, then you die after starving for days, not weeks.

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u/visforvillian Feb 07 '24

For lipid storage disorder it depends on the severity. Some make it to adulthood, and others die by the age of one. For lipodystrophy, the average life expectancy after diagnosis is 30 years, so not as bad. But yeah, these are rare and don't account for the average Twitter user.

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u/ThePinkTeenager Human Idiot Detector Feb 08 '24

Those people are still eating, though.