This troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas.Although it is tempting to blame people for some of these animal weight gains:
Such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence: records show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities.Berreby concludes:
The trend suggests some widely shared cause, beyond the control of individuals, which is contributing to obesity across many species.COTTonLINE finds these ideas to be new and exciting. Could the cause be some environmental chemical that we're generating, for instance BPA? How about the unseen, unfelt saturation of the environment with radio waves?
The article trots out many possible causes, including diseases. Most interesting is the general notion that we are being "caused" to become obese by some unknown factor or set of factors in the environment.
Wouldn't it be nice to blame something other than overeating? If we can determine what is causing the weight gain, perhaps we can find realistic ways to reverse it.
