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2010-03-24 09:37:17
Robin Nixon
LiveScience Contributor
LiveScience.com robin Nixon
livescience Contributor
livescience.com Tue Mar 23, 11:15 am ET
If obesity is a disease, like cancer or heart disease, as researchers stress,
it is time to stop blaming lack of willpower for the extra poundage and ask -
non-judgmentally - why are we so fat? From better hygiene to foods that mimic
drugs, the answers may shake up your diet.
8. The Government
In 1998, 29 million people suddenly became overweight without gaining an ounce.
That summer, the U.S. government announced new guidelines lowering the
threshold of what classifies a person as overweight. Previously, if your body
mass index (BMI) was less than 28 for men, or 27 for women, you were considered
"normal." Now only BMIs of 25 or below are considered healthy. (BMI is a ratio
of weight to height, and is considered an indicator of how much body fat a
person has.)
7. Better Hygiene
While our food-stuffed, exercise-starved, modern lifestyles are still the most
popular scapegoats, in the future, we might also blame frequent hand-washing
and cleaner water.
In experiments done on mice, researchers have found that certain intestinal
bacteria can help a body suck more calories out of the same amount of food and
even increase a person's appetite. It is possible these bacteria gained
prominence as we wiped out competing bacteria with antibiotics and better
hygiene practices, said senior researcher Andrew Gewirtz at the Emory
University School of Medicine in Georgia.
The finding does not suggest that obesity is an infectious disease - it is
nearly impossible to change your intestinal helpers after the first few years,
or even days, of life - so don't expect an obesity antibiotic anytime soon.
6. Your Parents
Not everyone has succumbed to environmental changes: Skinny people do still
exist. These people have won "the throw of the genetic dice," said Susan
Carnell, an obesity researcher at the Columbia College of Physicians and
Surgeons in New York.
Genes likely control how easily one feels satiated, researchers are finding.
People who lack the genes for a voracious appetite often don't understand how
hard it is for someone who isn't so genetically lucky, Carnell said.
5. Especially Mom
New research has shown that an unborn child may receive "epigenetic" messages
in the womb about how to regulate his or her weight. Epigenetics is the idea
that even if genes themselves aren't altered, how they function can change.
Researchers at the Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center in Little Rock
transferred the newborns of normal-weight and obese rat mothers, or "dams," to
the care of svelte females. Even with nearly identical genes and upbringing,
only the babies from the wombs of the rotund became plump themselves.
"This occurred despite the fact that the offspring of overweight dams ate the
same amount of high-fat food as the offspring of lean dams," said study
researcher Kartik Shankar in a press statement.
4. Friends
People judge their own weight based on that of others and, well, in the land of
the obese, the overweight feel superior. Research has shown that if your
friends are fat, you are more likely to join the big booty camp yourself - even
if your obese pals live far away. An underlying reason might be a resetting of
what you consider normal, so a scale reading above a certain point could have
sent you into tears one day and barely gotten notice the next. Such findings
suggest that obesity has cultural and psychological causes as well as
physiological ones.
3. Cars, Chairs and Sofas
We don't move our bodies nearly as much as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, a
fact that has likely contributed to our collective weight gain. Exercise is
great for maintaining weight and regulating appetite, Carnell said.
But if you want to lose a bulge, or ten, and "you are not reducing calories,
just exercising, it will take a very long time to lose a single pound," said
Caroline Apovian, an obesity researcher at the Boston University School of
Medicine.
2. The Food Fun House
"If McDonald's didn't exist, we'd all be a lot thinner," Carnell said,
referring to fast foods in general.
Highly palatable foods, such as those available from fast food chains, are
"layered and loaded with fat, sugar and salt," all of which, instead of
satiating us, actually prompt us to continue eating, said Dr. David Kessler,
former FDA commissioner and author of "The End of Overeating" (Rodale Books,
2009). Such foods cause particular excitement in areas of the brain associated
with emotion and reward - much like alcohol, sex and drugs.
With sugar, salt and fat on every street corner, Kessler said, "we are living
in a food carnival." And like an over-stimulated preschooler glazing over with
fatigue and irritability, our bodies are responding to the food fun house by
developing insulin resistance, diabetes and systemic inflammation, which is a
body-wide immune response that has been linked with health issues, including
heart disease and cancer.
1. The National Eating Disorder
While genes and environment are responsible for two-thirds of the differences
in people's BMIs, the remaining third is psychological. Not only can our
jam-packed lifestyles drive us to self-medicate with food, stress and lack of
sleep may take an unfriendly toll on metabolism.
The U.S. food culture, or lack thereof, is also to blame, Kessler said. Unlike
other developed countries, which have been slow to match our obesity rates, we
put limited value on the pleasures and rituals of dining - lunch is eaten at
our desks, breakfast on the commute.
Such disrespect for food likely exacerbates weight problems by leaving us
perpetually unsatisfied. Tellingly, eating fast has been linked to being
overweight while regular family meals are associated with a decreased risk of
obesity.