Environmental toxins contribute to obesity and diabetes beyond diet and exercise. Studies on infants and rats show toxins drive weight gain, a factor most people overlook when addressing diabesity.
Over the last few years, scientists have uncovered an unexpected finding: toxins make you fat and cause diabetes. This should be headline news, but it isn't because there are no drugs to treat it. The most recent and perhaps most shocking example of how toxins make us fat is the dramatic increase in obesity in babies. Scientists at Harvard School of Public Health found that rates of obesity in infants under six months old had risen 73% since 1980. Now this epidemic is not related to a lack of exercise or a bad diet. Let's face it, they consume breast milk or formula. And it's not because they don't get enough exercise or eat junk food. Babies live on formula and love. They don't say, Hey mom, take me out for a 1200 calorie McDonald's breakfast or a giant tub of buttered popcorn. You can't point to watching too much television as a risk factor, so what's the cause? It's an overload of environmental toxins in their little bodies. The toxins make the babies fat. Mounting evidence points to a unique and underappreciated trigger for obesity: exposure to small traces of environmental chemicals in the environment. You see, the average newborn has 287 chemicals in the umbilical cord blood. These compounds damage the nervous system, they increase the risk of cancer, and they contribute to obesity. This is not a fringe idea of radical environmentalists. The National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the National Academy of Sciences recently convened to examine this new phenomena of obesogens, toxins that cause obesity. The old idea about weight gain is it's just a matter of calories in and calories out. That idea is falling apart. New evidence proves that weight gain can occur in the absence of excess calorie intake. In a recent study, rats given toxic chemicals gained weight and increased their fat storage. This happened without increased caloric intake or decreased exercise. Six months later, these rats were 20% heavier and had 36% more body fat than rats unexposed to chemicals. The key message here is simply this: Toxins interfere with and slow down metabolism and contribute to weight gain and diabetes. This new research on the connection between environmental toxins, weight gain, and the whole continuum of diabetes opens a whole new area of potential treatment for diabetes and obesity.
