Obesity: Social Issue or Brain Disease?

Defined as the excessive amount of body fat, obesity has historically been described as a physiological disease. However, recent research has challenged this classical idea by looking into the neurological degenerative nature of this condition.
While the accumulation of body fat occurs through the excessive intake of fatty foods and extreme caloric consumption, the mechanisms of hunger and food satisfaction in the brain have been further studied in recent research.
One such studied focused on the brain signaling pathways found throughout the prefrontal cortex of the brain in the postprandial state. They chose to target this portion of the brain since the prefrontal cortex is the control center for decision making and executive function. The postprandial state means that they conducted imaging tests on individuals after they had had a full meal. This was done to see how different individuals reacted to the consumption of food.
Following the study, researchers were able to determine that obese individuals were less satisfied by standard caloric intake and had showed less inhibitory control in the prefrontal cortex. More or less, it took more food for these people to be satisfied and even then it was more difficult to resist eating more. They attributed these behaviors to a difference in the neuronal activity of the posterior cingulate, which is a portion of the prefrontal cortex, between obese and lean individuals.
While this information may suggest that obesity may be attributed to an innate chemical imbalance or inability to control executive function, individuals that had previously been obese that lost weight and remained at a normal BMI for three years showed similar neuronal activity to lean individuals. This would suggest that neurological disfunction found in the brain may be due to a physiological factors rather than innate conditions.
The question of whether obesity is dependent on social factors such as diet and exercise or on the genetic composition of the brain remains unanswered. However, I think it is safe to say that the neurological function of our brains is dependent on the way we take care of our bodies and the physiological health of our bodies is dependent on the condition of our brains. At the end of the day I guess the real question is, which came first, the chicken or the egg?