Can pesticide exposure of unborn children make them obese?

[watervole]

It's only the result of a single study, so one should be cautious of going overboard with the result, but one of the possible reasons for the rise in obesity is the exposure of unborn children to a range of pollutants including pesticides and many others (including, rather worryingly, the plastics used to make bottles for babies' milk).

Comments

[lonemagpie.livejournal.com]

So the transition to junk-food-munching couch potatoes who'd rather sit and play videogames than exercise by running around outside (and parents encouraging this because everybody knows there's a paedophile behind every buh and hedgerow, just waiting to sell your kids to satanic abuse rings on the internet) is just a coincidence then?

I'd call bullshit on that one...

[watervole.livejournal.com]

There's been a period during which rates of obesity have increased even though exercise has remained constant. They do correct for other factors in these studies...

Lack of exercise is one of the reasons, but not the only one. (Lack of sleep also correlates well with obesity, as well as eating too much)

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

"Eat less, exercise more" rarely works for people who are more than slightly overweight. With real obesity, there are usually other factors involved. But our society is so quick to blame fat people for being fat that the research that might cure glandular obesity isn't being done; or where it is, it's been twisted into attempts to suppress appetite, even where appetite isn't the problem.

I've had an endocrinologist tell me point blank that they don't know why a stomach stapling or clamp sometimes works even when the person is consuming the same amount of calories before and after the operation. It might have something to do with hormone secretion, but they simply don't know. Obesity is a problem with possibly dozens of factors involved, not just two.

(And I hope that doesn't sound ranty; I'm trying to be informational, but I'm not always sure I've struck the right tone.)

[jthijsen.livejournal.com]

In my case it's the sorts of food I eat. I've been obese (BMI 36.6), and a change from the fatty stuff to greens worked miracles for me. So did the lowering of the amount of calories, but I'm fairly sure there was more to it than that. Y'see, everyone says that once you start to lose weight, you feel chilly for a while because you lose some of your insulation. I, however, started feeling warm all the time, which to my mind means that I started burning more calories per day. And no, I did not increase the amount of exercise I did. My BMI is now close to 27 and still going down, lately with a little help from appetite suppresssing drugs.

I hope that others who struggle with obesity can also find a way to turn up their internal thermostat, even though it might not be as easy for them as it turned out to be for me. I believe that obesity research should be aimed at just that, turning up that thermostat without ugly side effects (like what we had when speed was used as a weight control drug). Although the couch potato bit and the easy availability of high calory foods will always continue to be a problem. Damn you Ben & Jerry for coming up with Baked Alaska!

[headgardener.livejournal.com]

One of the most plausible suggestions I've seen is that bottle-feeding makes babies liable to obesity: with breast-feeding, the infant has total control over amount of milk it drinks and pace it arrives -- so can stop feeding when it feels full. With bottle-feeding, it is the mother and bottle that controls the amount going into the infant's mouth and stomach, so the baby doesn't exercise and develop a hunger/feed homeostatic response. So it grows up without developing its physiological 'brake', with no in-built 'I feel full, I stop eating' circuit.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

THere's also the different kinds of fats in breast and cow's milk.

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

That theory dates to at least the early '70s; surely if it were true, it would have studies that demonstrated it by now? And even if true, it only would account for obesity caused by overeating, not for the many cases where people continue to gain even when by any reasonable measure they're taking in fewer calories than they should need.