Looking at obesity from [View All]

[undergroundpanther]

a different prepective.. than the usual old saws,lifestyle diet,lifestyle, diet.....


Some worry that this view is dangerously monolithic.

Writing on Tuesday in the International Journal of Obesity, a team of US public-health experts caution against focussing **obsessively** on the "Big Two" -- a slower lifestyle and modern food marketing.

"This has created a hegemony whereby the importance of the Big Two is accepted as established and other putative factors are not seriously explored," they say. "The result may be well-intentioned but ill-founded proposals for reducing obesity rates."

They contend the evidence against junk food, supersize-me portions and high-calorie corn syrup is "equivocal and largely circumstantial" and offer some intriguing ideas of their own for other drivers of the obesity tsunami.

Among them:

-- Industrial chemicals called endocrine disruptors that disturb metabolism, encouraging the formation of fat.

-- Giving up smoking: people who give up cigarettes very often gain weight.

-- Air conditioning, which establishes a comfortable temperature zone. In temperatures above this zone, people eat less. The rise in number of air-conditioned homes in the United States virtually mirrors the increase in the US obesity rate.

-- Fat people marry other fat people. These individuals may be genetically vulnerable to obesity, a trait that could handed on to their children.

Another hypothesis is that lack of sleep jolts the metabolic system into demanding doses of instant energy.