Demi
Fri, Jun-11-04, 02:42
I have just read this fascinating article, and thought I'd share it here:
London Times - 11 June, 2004
A leading US expert has questioned whether there really is an epidemic
FORGET global warming. It isn’t melted polar ice that threatens to engulf the country: Britain, a nation of couch potatoes supersizing themselves to death, is sinking under the weight of a tide of obesity.
That, at least, is the government take on statistics that appear to show that a quarter of adults and 6 per cent of two to 20-year-olds are obese, and the driving fear behind a “stark warning” last month from Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, that, unless we all get off our increasingly fat behinds and exercise at least five times a week, “a third of all adults will be obese by 2010 — equal to US levels”.
But what if those statistics are wrong or, at least, have been wrongly interpreted? What if all the time, money and effort being ploughed in by the Government to combat obesity is hopelessly misdirected? Jeffrey Friedman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor at New York’s Rockefeller University, believes it might be. This week Friedman, a leading researcher into obesity, exploded a small bomb under the conventional wisdom in America. Suppose, he said, there was no epidemic? Actually, he did more than suppose. First, he looked around him. You can, too. Take a look at your friends, fellow commuters, or work colleagues. Is one in four of them really obese? Then he took a close look at the statistics for the changes in Americans’ body weight since 1991. His conclusion? There is no nationwide epidemic: “There is this image that everybody’s going to be fat,” he said, “but that’s not what the data say. The problem comes when you reduce all the statistics to a single number.”
Analysis of figures from the National Centre for Health Statistics revealed a substantial increase in weight for the already massively obese — as much as 30lb (13.6kg) since 1991. Yet a little farther down the scale, he found that “mid-range” Americans had gained no more than 7lb in 14 years, while at the lower end there had been no change at all.
Because the body-weight curve has shifted slightly to the right — with more Americans crossing the arbitrary line dividing normal from obese — the headline is that 31 per cent now fall into the obese category, compared with 23 per cent in 1991: a headline-grabbing, government health-spending-generating increase of 30 per cent.
In short, says Friedman, the fat are getting fatter, the lean are staying lean and, as is always the way with these things, there is good news and there is bad news. The good is that the lean will probably stay that way, give or take 10lb or so. And the bad? That the fat really can’t do much about it. It is, like everything else, in their genes. After all, as he recently told Science magazine: “One might ponder why, in our current environment where almost everyone has essentially free access to calories, anyone is thin.”
Friedman told The Times: “Where everyone can eat as much as they like, how can weight vary from person to person by hundreds of pounds? I don’t think anyone can dispute the fact that there is a huge genetic contribution to obesity. It’s a very similar phenomenon to height. Over time, height is increasing — the average Civil War soldier was 5ft 4in (1.6m) tall — and today no one would dispute the fact that tall people have different genetic variants from short people.”
Simply trying to enforce exercise and dietary regimens on the population is misguided, he believes, if we don’t also try to understand the science: “There is an analogy with cancer here: it’s like saying that we don’t need to understand why cells go haywire as long as we know that smoking is bad for us.”
He doesn’t suggest that encouraging the general population to exercise more and to eat more healthily is a bad thing, but while “it is very rational to invest in prevention, it is only research at this point. It is not clear at the moment what remedies would best prevent the development of obesity. Is it a good idea to restrict pre-obese children’s intake, or to increase their exercise? Perhaps, but we can’t take for granted that this will prevent obesity. Let’ s wait for the scientific evidence before we blindly assume that a particular remedy will or won’t work.
“Unfortunately, people want answers now, and the use of the numbers attaches an urgency to the problem that might be somewhat overstated.”
For the past ten years Friedman and colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have been on the trail of that science, building on the “thrifty gene” hypothesis first proposed in the Sixties. The hunt has taken them to the Pacific island of Kosrae, where half of the adults are obese and another 30 per cent overweight.
When Westerners stumbled upon them in the 1800s, the islanders were living as primitive, lean hunter-gatherers. It wasn’t until just after the Second World War, and the introduction of a plentiful Western diet, that obesity began to take hold.
Friedman is working on the theory that a “hunter-gatherer” gene that guards against starvation becomes a treacherous liability when the bearer of that gene finds himself in an environment where access to calories is unlimited: in an ironic reversal of inherited fortune, the obese in Western society could be those whose ancestors had it tough, while the lean are the descendants of those who had easy pickings.
So what can be done with this knowledge, other than returning everyone to the Stone Age? Five years ago Friedman discovered the gene for leptin, a weight-regulating hormone, which a 200lb, nine-year-old English girl was found to lack. After a few injections of leptin, her calorie intake at a single meal fell by 84 per cent, from 1,100 calories to 180; her body weight is now within the normal range for her age.
The bad news here, says Friedman, is that “it appears to work in some people, a minority, and not others. We are trying to understand why most people do not respond.”
Meanwhile, he says, give the obese a break. “If you happen to be lean, don’t judge the obese by an unrealistic set of standards, and to the obese I would say don’t feel a failure if you don’t happen to be as lean as the next person. Obesity is not about gluttony.”
He offers some staggering statistics to reinforce his genetic argument, and to make a case for the more humane treatment of obese people by the rest of us. Over a decade the average Westerner will consume ten million calories with, generally, only a small change in weight. This depends on the miracle of intake matching output within 0.17 per cent over a decade.
“This extraordinary level of precision,” he says, “exceeds by several orders of magnitude the ability of nutritionists to count calories, and suggests that conscious factors alone are incapable of precisely regulating caloric intake.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,174-1140885,00.html
London Times - 11 June, 2004
A leading US expert has questioned whether there really is an epidemic
FORGET global warming. It isn’t melted polar ice that threatens to engulf the country: Britain, a nation of couch potatoes supersizing themselves to death, is sinking under the weight of a tide of obesity.
That, at least, is the government take on statistics that appear to show that a quarter of adults and 6 per cent of two to 20-year-olds are obese, and the driving fear behind a “stark warning” last month from Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, that, unless we all get off our increasingly fat behinds and exercise at least five times a week, “a third of all adults will be obese by 2010 — equal to US levels”.
But what if those statistics are wrong or, at least, have been wrongly interpreted? What if all the time, money and effort being ploughed in by the Government to combat obesity is hopelessly misdirected? Jeffrey Friedman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor at New York’s Rockefeller University, believes it might be. This week Friedman, a leading researcher into obesity, exploded a small bomb under the conventional wisdom in America. Suppose, he said, there was no epidemic? Actually, he did more than suppose. First, he looked around him. You can, too. Take a look at your friends, fellow commuters, or work colleagues. Is one in four of them really obese? Then he took a close look at the statistics for the changes in Americans’ body weight since 1991. His conclusion? There is no nationwide epidemic: “There is this image that everybody’s going to be fat,” he said, “but that’s not what the data say. The problem comes when you reduce all the statistics to a single number.”
Analysis of figures from the National Centre for Health Statistics revealed a substantial increase in weight for the already massively obese — as much as 30lb (13.6kg) since 1991. Yet a little farther down the scale, he found that “mid-range” Americans had gained no more than 7lb in 14 years, while at the lower end there had been no change at all.
Because the body-weight curve has shifted slightly to the right — with more Americans crossing the arbitrary line dividing normal from obese — the headline is that 31 per cent now fall into the obese category, compared with 23 per cent in 1991: a headline-grabbing, government health-spending-generating increase of 30 per cent.
In short, says Friedman, the fat are getting fatter, the lean are staying lean and, as is always the way with these things, there is good news and there is bad news. The good is that the lean will probably stay that way, give or take 10lb or so. And the bad? That the fat really can’t do much about it. It is, like everything else, in their genes. After all, as he recently told Science magazine: “One might ponder why, in our current environment where almost everyone has essentially free access to calories, anyone is thin.”
Friedman told The Times: “Where everyone can eat as much as they like, how can weight vary from person to person by hundreds of pounds? I don’t think anyone can dispute the fact that there is a huge genetic contribution to obesity. It’s a very similar phenomenon to height. Over time, height is increasing — the average Civil War soldier was 5ft 4in (1.6m) tall — and today no one would dispute the fact that tall people have different genetic variants from short people.”
Simply trying to enforce exercise and dietary regimens on the population is misguided, he believes, if we don’t also try to understand the science: “There is an analogy with cancer here: it’s like saying that we don’t need to understand why cells go haywire as long as we know that smoking is bad for us.”
He doesn’t suggest that encouraging the general population to exercise more and to eat more healthily is a bad thing, but while “it is very rational to invest in prevention, it is only research at this point. It is not clear at the moment what remedies would best prevent the development of obesity. Is it a good idea to restrict pre-obese children’s intake, or to increase their exercise? Perhaps, but we can’t take for granted that this will prevent obesity. Let’ s wait for the scientific evidence before we blindly assume that a particular remedy will or won’t work.
“Unfortunately, people want answers now, and the use of the numbers attaches an urgency to the problem that might be somewhat overstated.”
For the past ten years Friedman and colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have been on the trail of that science, building on the “thrifty gene” hypothesis first proposed in the Sixties. The hunt has taken them to the Pacific island of Kosrae, where half of the adults are obese and another 30 per cent overweight.
When Westerners stumbled upon them in the 1800s, the islanders were living as primitive, lean hunter-gatherers. It wasn’t until just after the Second World War, and the introduction of a plentiful Western diet, that obesity began to take hold.
Friedman is working on the theory that a “hunter-gatherer” gene that guards against starvation becomes a treacherous liability when the bearer of that gene finds himself in an environment where access to calories is unlimited: in an ironic reversal of inherited fortune, the obese in Western society could be those whose ancestors had it tough, while the lean are the descendants of those who had easy pickings.
So what can be done with this knowledge, other than returning everyone to the Stone Age? Five years ago Friedman discovered the gene for leptin, a weight-regulating hormone, which a 200lb, nine-year-old English girl was found to lack. After a few injections of leptin, her calorie intake at a single meal fell by 84 per cent, from 1,100 calories to 180; her body weight is now within the normal range for her age.
The bad news here, says Friedman, is that “it appears to work in some people, a minority, and not others. We are trying to understand why most people do not respond.”
Meanwhile, he says, give the obese a break. “If you happen to be lean, don’t judge the obese by an unrealistic set of standards, and to the obese I would say don’t feel a failure if you don’t happen to be as lean as the next person. Obesity is not about gluttony.”
He offers some staggering statistics to reinforce his genetic argument, and to make a case for the more humane treatment of obese people by the rest of us. Over a decade the average Westerner will consume ten million calories with, generally, only a small change in weight. This depends on the miracle of intake matching output within 0.17 per cent over a decade.
“This extraordinary level of precision,” he says, “exceeds by several orders of magnitude the ability of nutritionists to count calories, and suggests that conscious factors alone are incapable of precisely regulating caloric intake.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,174-1140885,00.html