Obesity has become one of the main threats to public health, especially in developed countries. Various factors favor its appearance – including genetic factors, which explain one in five cases – but there are also environmental triggers.
Among the latter, diet and sedentary lifestyle play a very relevant role. However, there is more and more data that supports the idea that pollution can influence the appearance of obesity, by affecting the development of the individual, especially in the early stages of their life.
Obesogens are those compounds that can induce excessive fat accumulation in the body. Derived from the chemical industry, they are in the air, water, cleaning products, cosmetics or even in food and its plastic wrappers or containers.
The list of these substances continues to increase as the harmful effects of different by-products and industrial waste are studied in depth. These are the main ones:
All these pollutants generate extra kilos, altering the functioning of the body at different levels, as we will see below.
On the one hand, they can induce an increase in the number and size of adipocytes, that is, the cells responsible for storing fat. This means a greater capacity to accumulate said fat in conditions of energy excess, such as when we eat high-calorie foods. And on the other hand, they are capable of altering the body’s ability to regulate its blood glucose (sugar) levels, reducing the response capacity of certain tissues to insulin.
In addition, they can affect the systems that regulate appetite and the feeling of satiety, favoring greater food consumption. They also alter the hormonal system and promote the appearance of inflammatory processes. All of this ultimately produces an imbalance in the metabolic health of the individual that can lead to the development not only of obesity, but of other pathologies such as type 2 diabetes or heart disease.
Apart from these metabolic, endocrine and inflammatory disturbances, which affect throughout adult life, there is increasingly clear evidence that obesogens also have the potential to alter the way in which our genes are expressed during the early stages. of life, even during pregnancy. These epigenetic changes can predispose to obesity from very early stages of development (childhood obesity) and produce modifications that are passed from parents to children.
With the increase in industrialization at a global level, the growing presence of obesogens in the environment can favor the spread of obesity – and the metabolic pathologies related to it – beyond developed countries, where these diseases already cause a very high impact. on the health of its citizens.
Adding what we know about this risk factor to the influence of pollution on the development of cancer, respiratory diseases and allergic pathologies, as well as scientific data on global warming, should serve as an incentive to pursue a healthier way of life. and environmentally friendly.
Let us keep in mind the serious impact of pollution on the health of the planet, our own and that of future generations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation website and its authors are Antonio J. Ruiz Alcaraz, Bruno Ramos Molina, María Ángeles Núñez Sánchez, María Antonia Martínez Sánchez, Maria Suárez Cortés and Virginia Esperanza Fernández-Ruiz. You can read it here.
