Obesity epidemic affecting animals too

According to a newly published article in Scientific American, animals too have become obese in epidemic proportions in recent years, as humans have. So did animals suddenly become lazy, complacent slobs in the past 20 years or so, or is obesity an epidemic with root causes that have little to do with lifestyle and personal choice, and more to do with environmental factors and food modification?

In an article published at the Mainstream Media Review, a strong case is made that our food is being intentionally modified for nefarious purposes, to the detriment of our health.

Here are some excerpts and links to both articles:

If I told you that Americans are being starved to death, you would probably laugh at me. So read and learn, because it is no laughing matter. I am about to show you that Americans are, quite literally, starving to death. Sure, Americans eat, even overeat, but we are still being starved to death, deliberately, at a nutritional level. So please put aside your programmed bias and suppositions of obesity, and let’s begin.


"Obesity is a mask for the horrible truth. That Americans are starving to death in a deliberate campaign of nutricide.” –JITB 01/09

http://msmreview.blogspot.com/2010/06/boiling-frogs-and-counting-sheep.html

Weight gain is usually blamed on poor diet and a lack of exercise. But the marmosets and macaques living at a Madison, Wis., laboratory have followed the same diet and exercise regimens since 1982. Still, they grew heavier with each passing decade, leading David B. Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to believe that environmental factors may be at play. He and his colleagues studied weight changes in 20,000 animals, including primates and rodents used for research, domestic cats and dogs, and urban feral rats. They tracked the animals’ percentage weight gain per decade, as well as their odds of being obese. Both showed a strong upward tendency. Chimpanzees grew 33.6 percent heavier per decade; mice grew 12.46 percent heavier.


Allison speculates that factors such as endocrine-disrupting toxins in the water supply or pathogens affecting mammalian metabolism may be to blame. But some say his data could be explained by diet and ex­ercise changes—caused, perhaps, by an increase in the numbers of lab animals being housed in a single cage. Allison agrees that housing might affect metabolism, but humans, too, live in increasingly crowded conditions. “This is exactly the kind of innovative thinking ... we think our results warrant,” he says. “If density of housing affects weights in animals, maybe density of housing also affects body weight in humans.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-this-collar-make-me-look-fat