Even on a 100-year timescale the outlook is bleak
Posted in General on 15. Oct, 2010
“Even on a 100-year timescale, the outlook is bleak.”Around one in five Britons is now obese and that will rise to one in four within 10 years. There is no sign of a slowdown thereafter; all the indications are that this trend will escalate. Young people will continue to be the worst affected, with dire consequences: the first cases of type-2 diabetes (previously considered a disease of old age) have been seen in British teenagers. America, which is around 10 years ahead of us in this problem, is handling its first cases of weight-related coronary disease in children.Andrew Prentice, Professor of International Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, recently described the resultant changes in body shape as one of the most dramatic shifts in evolutionary history and predicted that obese children will, in the future, die before their parents. Dr Jebb, meanwhile, predicts that the classic British pear shape will fall victim to greater fat stores – we will, instead, become a nation of Teletubby apples.Except that, of course, no one is suggesting that we will all end up obese.
The picture is in a way bleaker: of a growing divide between the affluent slim and the overweight poor. And as more of us become overweight, expect body ideals to move even further towards the increasingly unattainable – the very thin. “California, with its two populations of the seriously obese poor and very thin rich, could become the model,” Dr Jebb says.Every pharmaceutical company is pumping serious money into this area, but Dr Jebb pooh-poohs any notion of miracle cures, even in a hundred years’ time. “There will never be a drug that allows you to eat what you like and not get fat,” she says. “They will only ever be able to reinforce people’s voluntary efforts.”The mechanisms of appetite are set genetically, but the equation is so complicated, involving clusters of genes and complex gene-environment interactions, that she believes an advance in this area will be more than 100 years away.
The same is true, she says, for the notion of a fitness “cure”. “There clearly are genes for body shape, fitness and so on, but the benefits of exercise on body and mind are so complex, that I don’t believe that drugs will ever be able to mimic them,” she says.Our great-great-grandchildren, then, will still have to exercise, but if they can restrain from the GM pasties, a fabulous body will be easier to achieve. Research into muscle-wasting disease has already uncovered a single human gene that can build muscle fibres, Insulin Growth Factor 1. By introducing the gene into the legs of rats, muscle mass has been increased by almost 30 per cent.
A bold move on from steroids …ColouringBritain was gripped last month by news of research from the World Health Organisation warning that within 200 years the natural blonde would become extinct, its delicate recessive gene no match for a flood of ravaging brunette. Alas for the dyeing industry, this turned out to be a hoax – we should have known; the science was never sound.Yet the reality is that globalisation is already changing the way we look. “The world will become an increasingly homogenous single population,” says Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London. “You can see it on the streets already and it is essentially an averaging process. In Africa, different peoples still look strikingly different and you can pinpoint where someone comes from but you haven’t been able to say that in Europe for some time, and that process will escalate.”The States, where black-white mixing is three centuries old, is our best model.