An interesting article from The Star (4/5/07) pertaining to a very common question asked:“ ‘I eat the same and do as much exercise as my friend next door, so why am I fatter?’,”
The answer perhaps lie with the recent scientific study which discovered the link between genes and obesity. Researchers led by Prof Hattersley and Prof Mark McCarthy of the University of Oxford examined the genetics of nearly white European:39,000 children and adults from Britain,Finland and Italy.
The study reveals:
· The presence of FTO increased a person’s risk for obesity. In the study, 63% of those sampled had a copy or more of the gene or its variant. People with two copies had a 70% higher risk of being obese than people with none. They were also an average of nearly 3kg heavier than a similar person with no such genes.
· Those with one copy of the gene had a lesser but still elevated risk of obesity.
· They found 47% had one copy of the FTO gene variant, and 16% had two copies. The gene’s effect was seen by the age of seven. “Although this is the first gene that has been found that plays this kind of role,” McCarthy said, “this is not the whole story.” He said that while extra body fat can be attributed to the presence of the gene variant, this gene alone will not explain why some people are, for example, 50kg heavier than other people living in similar conditions in the same place.
· The researchers said they do not know how the gene works and what it actually does to predispose people to obesity, but they hope knowledge of the gene’s role can lead to new ways of treating and preventing obesity.
· The next step, they said, is to examine FTO in more diverse populations including, for example, South Asians and blacks. The researchers also emphasized that genetics alone cannot account fully for a worldwide surge in obesity in recent decades that experts attribute to millions of people eating too much of the wrong foods and getting too little exercise.
More facts about obesity:
The World Health Organisation estimated that 1.6 billion adults worldwide are overweight and at least 400 million adults are obese It projected that, by 2015, there will be about 2.3 billion overweight adults and more than 700 million obese adults. Once seen as a problem exclusive in high-income countries, obesity is now on the rise in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in urban areas.
