Obesity levels have risen dramatically in research animals and others living close to humans, suggesting environmental factors are encouraging everyone to gain weight, according to new findings in the linkurl:Proceedings of the Royal Society B.;http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/11/19/rspb.2010.1890.abstract
"These results show that the obesity epidemic is not as simple as people might think," said linkurl:Jennifer Kuk,;http://www.yorku.ca/health/people/index.php?dept=K&mid=645785 a biologist who studies obesity at York University in Canada and was not involved with the study. It's no secret that obesity has become an epidemic in humans -- among American adults, nearly one in three is obese, defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) greater than 30. Researchers have pointed their fingers at everything from a lack of physical activity to the highly processed foods that so many of us eat.But what if something in the environment was at least partly to blame, as well? To investigate, linkurl:David Allison,;http://www.soph.uab.edu/ssg/people/davidallison a statistical geneticist...
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Klimentidis Y, et al. "Canaries in the coal mine: a cross-species analysis of the plurality of obesity epidemics." Proc R Soc B. linkurl:doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1890;http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/11/19/rspb.2010.1890.abstract
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