Too fat - but is it my fault?

[Wayne_Zitkus]

Researchers are finally learning what many of us have known for years - that what we weigh is not merely a factor of what we eat and how active we are.

Too fat - but is it my fault?

Obesity isn’t just too much food and too little exercise. Roger Dobson reports on new findings by Yale scientists

Eat more healthily, exercise more. It’s one of those mantras that has been drummed into us by health educators ever since talk of an obesity “epidemic” hit the headlines. But a new study from an influential group of scientists asks whether we’ve got it all wrong.

Weight gain may have as much to do with the temperature in our homes, the pollutants to which we are exposed and the medicines we take as the “Big Two” causes: overeating and underexercising. Not only have the researchers, from ten top universities in America, Canada and Italy, including institutions as prestigious as Yale, Cornell and Johns Hopkins, suggested ten other reasons for the epidemic, they have also described the evidence for the so-called Big Two as circumstantial.

Writing in the highly regarded International Journal of Obesity this month, the authors say that undue attention has been devoted to reduced physical activity and food-marketing practices as causes for increases in obesity and that this has led to other mechanisms being neglected. They say: “We do not intend to imply that the Big Two are not contributors to the epidemic. Rather, we offer that the evidence of their role as primary players in producing the epidemic is both equivocal and largely circumstantial.” They have put forward ten other factors that can make people fat.

These experts are not alone. There’s an increasing belief among researchers that the cause of the Western world’s expanding waistlines are far more complex than thought, say, a decade ago. Earlier this year, Body&Soul highlighted an increasing body of research indicating that how much people sleep is closely linked to how heavy they are. The United Institutes of Health in America is taking this evidence seriously and is commissioning new research in the area. It’s time that we all took a more rounded approach to the problem.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8123-2269040,00.html