Because no other explanation covers all the bases
Just when you thought every possible cause for the soaring number of overweight and obese citizens in the United States and worldwide had been identified and accused — from fast food lifestyles to computer games to kids’ TV commercials to neighborhoods designed for the automobile — up pops a new candidate for The Reason We’re All So Fat.
This one comes from Julie Guthman, a professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who noticed that none of the existing and widely cited causes really explain the empirical universality of the world’s weight gain. For example, obesity has increased by 73 percent since 1980 — in newborns!
It’s hard to pin that number on diet, physical activity, or other lifestyle elements at the age of a few months. Then there are those people who, even on healthy and disciplined diets and with physical activity, are and remain fat.
To quote The Graduate: “One word, Benjamin . . . plastics”
Given these gaps in the chain of causality, Guthman has come up with a fresh possibility, which she enunciated in a recent op-ed column in the San Francisco Chronicle: environmental toxins. Specifically, chemicals that can ramp up or inhibit certain hormones produced by the body. Even more specifically, chemicals that stimulate the body to create an overabundance of fat cells.
The evidence for this is wispy at best, mainly because no one has adequately researched a possible connection, but related studies have found that certain chemicals in commercial plastics are distinctly linked to obesity because of their estrogen-like effects, and that other hormone-disrupting drugs given to pregnant women had “time bomb” side-effects that manifested in their offspring years later.
Guthman may be onto something, but her cause is not helped by a tone of environmental self-righteousness that she brings to it, arguing that our attention should shift from such irrelevancies as diet and exercise behavior patterns and focus on “lax regulation of the chemical industry.” Especially irksome is her conclusion that “getting fresh food into the schools doesn’t take the place of sound environmental regulation and enforcement.”
Perhaps research will prove you right, Professor, but until we know what to regulate and are able to enforce it, education and social pressure to promote healthy lifestyles and childhood nutrition are the best tools we have in the Weight War. Derogating them before your theories have become facts is not helping.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)
What’s to blame for our obesity epidemic, version 286: Environmental toxins