Pollution can make you fat, study claims
07 09 08 - 09:30 Pollution can make children fat, startling new research shows. A groundbreaking Spanish study indicates that exposure to a range of common chemicals before birth sets up a baby to grow up stout, thus helping to drive the worldwide obesity epidemic.The results of the study, just published – the first to link chemical contamination in the womb with one of the developing world's greatest and fastest-growing health crises – carry huge potential implications for public policy around the globe. They undermine recent strictures from the Conservative leader, David Cameron, that blame solely the obese for their own condition.
A quarter of all British adults and a fifth of children are obese – four times as many as 30 years ago. And so are at least 300 million people worldwide. The main explanation is that they are consuming more calories than they burn. But there is growing evidence that diet and lack of exercise, though critical, cannot alone explain the rapid growth of the epidemic.
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Why do we face myriad threats from chemicals released into the environment? Why isn't enough done to check the safety of such chemicals before allowing commercial interests to go ahead and interfere with the health of all living creatures? You can be sure there would always be many experts who vouched for the safety of these chemicals initially. But you can't trust their assurances - they make mistakes and they miscalculate risk. And so we end up in this mess.
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