I have long thought that there is more to the obesity epidemic than merely a change in diet, although I do believe that the large increase in the consumption of carbs in general and fructose specifically are exacerbating forces. I’m always on the lookout for something that happened around the late 1970s/early 1980s that might be a major driving force behind the explosion of obesity that we’ve experienced since then.

The epidemiology of the sudden increase in fat deposition in so many people looks like an infectious disease, but I have a problem in buying into that idea whole hog. If it were an infectious disease, I don’t see how the switch to a low-carb diet would make it go away. I suspect that it is probably some sort of environmental contaminant that underlies the situation. The difficulty is in discovering what the factors are and how they work to make us all struggle to keep our weights in check. I doubt that there is one specific catalyst for the entire obesity problem; I would think that a combination of ingredients are probably at fault. But what are they?

I’ve posted on a few previously. In addition to those, a paper recently published online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives implicates phthalates as another possible agent.

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Cosmic pizza grease returns! But maybe this time to positive effect. The question is, are you willing to produce a little (maybe a lot) of cosmic pizza grease of your own to rid yourself of polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and other organochlorine pollutants?

In my daily romp through the medical literature I came upon a paper in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry that answered a question I’ve been pondering on for a while? How can we get rid of the almost ungetridable pesticides and industrial pollutants that we all have stored in our tissues?

Organochlorine pesticides (DDT, lindane, etc), organochlorine and organobromine industrial pollutants, solvents, placticizers, and a host of other such substances are in the stored fat of all of us. Their use over the previous decades has so filled our environment with these chemicals that we can’t escape them. The are in the air, they fall in the rain, they are in the groundwater. Consequently, they are in our food. Whenever we eat, we get a load of these persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that make their way into our fat cells and cells in other tissues. And they build up because we can’t get rid of them.

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