28 Nov 2025
Academic, broadcaster and author Giles Yeo delivered the illustrious Wooldridge Memorial Lecture in the BVA Congress stream at London Vet Show.
Chris Simpson
Job Title
A renowned obesity expert has suggested that similar strategies for combating the condition in humans can be used to tackle the issue in dogs.
Giles Yeo, professor of molecular neuroendocrinology at the University of Cambridge, delivered the Wooldridge Memorial Lecture “The genetics of obesity: can an old dog teach us new tricks?” at London Vet Show.
The geneticist demonstrated to delegates the role the “leptin-melanocortin pathway” plays in canine and human obesity by impacting appetite and its conservation through evolution.
He explained that heritability plays between a 40% to 70% role in determining bodyweight, with environmental factors accounting for the remainder.
To tackle canine obesity, Prof Yeo said: “I think for dogs is it’s going to be similar to the way you might try to deal with a human being in terms of the strategies underlying.”
He said much depends on an individual animal’s circumstances and the owner’s ability to directly control their calorie intake, which may not be possible with cats that go outdoors.
He continued: “You have to somehow reduce the food intake, and you need to increase the nutritional density without increasing caloric density. So how do you do that? That’s a question for nutritionists.”
Prof Yeo explained bodyweight is “the function of thousands of feeding events that has happened over the past few years” and that if an individual’s genes mean they are “5% less likely to say no… 5% over thousands of meals is hundreds of thousands of calories”.
He said: “So, over the period of time where feeding behaviour begins to influence your body weight, it is not a choice. In casino terms, the house will always win.
“You’ve got to consider your genes like a hand of cards. You can have good hands, you can have bad hands… you can win with a bad hand of cards. It just happens to be more difficult.
“I will never, ever be able to run as fast as Usain Bolt… but it doesn’t mean that if I train, I [won’t] run faster than I do now.”
Prof Yeo concluded: “Until we as society, until frontline clinicians understand that for some people it is always going to be more difficult than others, that people with overweight and obesity are not bad, they’re not morally bereft, they’re fighting their biology.
“Because until we understand that we will not be able to put together a cogent strategy in order to tackle the pandemic – and it is a pandemic – of diet-related illnesses, including obesity, that we see in the world today.”
