Monday, 12 August 2013

[www.keralites.net] The Animals are Also Getting Fat

 

…For the 1948–2006 time period, male rats trapped in urban Baltimore experienced a 5.7 per cent increase in body weight per decade from 1948 to 2006 and a nearly 20 per cent increase in the odds of obesity. Similarly, female rats trapped in urban Baltimore experienced a 7.22 per cent per decade increase in body weight, along with a 26 per cent increase in the odds of obesity.
that too has a ready, although not necessarily correct, explanation:
fat mouse… just as human real wealth and foodconsumption have increased in the United States, rats which presumably largely feed on our refuse, may also be essentially richer.
To counter both of these objections the authors do something very clever, they gather data on the weight of control mice used in many different experiments over decades.
Among mice in control groups in the National Toxicology Programme (NTP), there was a 11.8 per cent increase in body weight per decade from 1982 to 2003 in females coupled with a nearly twofold increase in the odds of obesity. In males there was a 10.5 per cent increase per decade.
Control mice are typically allowed to feed at will from a controlled diet that has not varied much over the decades, making obvious explanations less plausible. Could mice have gained weight due to better care? Possibly although that is speculative.
More generally, there are specific explanations for the weight gain in each of the animal populations, just as there are for humans. Each explanation looks plausible taken on its own but is it plausible that each population is gaining weight for independent reasons? Could there instead be a unifying explanation for the weight gain in all populations? No one knows what that explanation is: toxins? viruses? epigenetic factors? I am not ready to jump on any of these bandwagons and in some cases the author's samples are small so I am not yet fully convinced of the underlying facts, nevertheless this is intriguing and important research.
Hat tip: David Berreby writing in Aeon about The Obesity Era.
-- Nandakumar

www.keralites.net

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