Obeisity: What If Being Fat Is Not Your Fault? Obesity Epidemic May Be Fueled by Chemicals in Everyday Products - by Tara Lohan
It's hard to escape the image of Americans as slothful and overweight. But what if being fat weren't totally their fault? The narrative people pound into our heads everyday is that they live in a country where fast food rules, where morning coffee drinks can provide nearly one-quarter of your daily calories before you even get to breakfast, and where you can have pizza topped with Oreos. And there's the issue that less than a quarter of US citizens exercise regularly, and that on average they spend 142 hours a month lounging on their couches, with their eyes glued to a TV. So it's no wonder that the Centers for Disease Control in the US report that more than a staggering 60 percent of adults and 16 percent of children are obese. In the last three decades, obesity has doubled among adults and tripled among children.
Sharon Begley of Newsweek reported: "Evidence has been steadily accumulating that certain hormone-mimicking pollutants, ubiquitous in the food chain, have two previously unsuspected effects. They act on genes in the developing fetus and newborn to turn more precursor cells into fat cells, which stay with you for life. And they may alter metabolic rate, so that the body hoards calories rather than burning them, like a physiological Scrooge. In addition to the plague of Big Macs, we now also have to figure exposure to chemical pollutants as a contributor to the obesity epidemic.
In Japan, scientists were finding that bisphenol A (a chemical compound used to make plastic drinking bottles and baby bottles, among other things) pushed certain cells to become fat cells in experiments performed in the lab and also acellerated the growth of existing fat cells. If their results held true outside the lab in people, it would mean that BPA, and potentially other synthetic chemicals, were in fact also contributing to obesity.
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