The Fat Chick Diaries

Amphibians have been taking a major hit for decades. Back in the early 1990s, I was doing graduate research on ranid frogs, so I was paying very close attention to what was being published about amphibians at the time. There was a crisis afoot: frogs were turning up everywhere with bizarre mutations, and populations were dwindling and even mysteriously dying out. There was lots of theories at the time: nematodes and other parasites, UV radiation, chemical pollutants, etc. I will admit that in the past seven or eight years, I have been paying very little attention, as my career trajectory has tended away from teaching biology. But what little I did happen to see did not paint a pretty picture for the froggies.

Frogs are what zoologists call an indicator species. Being amphibians, they have extremely permeable skin. They absorb water and accomplish a fair amount of gas exchange that way, so in that sense the permeability of their skin is adaptive and very handy. However, it also leaves them very vulnerable to pollutants. It’s one of the reasons you have to be very careful what you have on your hands when you handle them. You can’t smoke cigarettes and then handle frogs– the nicotine on your fingers is enough to harm them. If you’re a field biologist out in the wetlands studying frogs, you can’t use bugspray. This can be hugely unpleasant. I speak from experience. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, as with the canary in the mine, if you see something going horribly awry with the frogs, you need to consider the possibility that humans are next. Turns out, what’s going horribly awry with the frogs is now going horribly awry with us, and we have only ourselves to blame. Nicholas Kristoff has a great column about it in the New York Times. I haven’t had a chance to go read the source material, so I’m working just from the Kristoff article right now.

Apparently, there is more and more evidence that the culprits are endocrine disruptors. They get into the water supply through human activities, such as women taking birth control pills who excrete high levels of estrogen in their urine. They flush the toilet, and the sewage treatment plant isnt’ really set up to remove pharmaceuticals from water, so…

The results are not good. Male children are being born with genital deformities at increasingly high rates. Horror stories like that. How all of this relates to this blog is this: Apparently, the evidence that endocrine disruptors cause obesity is mounting. Here’s a quote from the article:

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

That last part is so important, I’m going to paste it again:

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

Now, you and I both know that the overwhelming majority of people in the United States think the rise in obesity is due solely to fat people being a bunch of lazy, gluttonous slobs with no self control. We sit on the couch all day swilling Cherry Coke and eating Snickers bars. It’s easy and fun to blame us, so why look for alternate explanations? Sure, the fatties swear up and down they’re trying like mad to eat healthy and lose weight, but they’re still fat, so they must be lying, right? After all, they’re already full of other character flaws– laziness, gluttonny– so it’s not hard to see they must also be liars, too, right? After all, where does the phrase “big fat liar” come from?

The problem with this, other than the obvious joy people take in engaging in vicious negative stereotyping and blaming behavior, is that this type of laziness means there’s no real push to search for other possible explanations. Nothing else could possibly be making us fat- we’re obvioulsy doing it to ourselves. Pollution causes other reactions in the human body– asthma, cancer– but not this one. No, couldn’t be this one. It’s just sooooo much more fun to blame the fatties, because then we can make fun of them and hate them and feel superior. See how that works?

I don’t believe for one minute that anyone would cry out for action if the ONLY problem that endocrine disruptors in the environment were causing was increased rates of obesity. But there are babies involved. Nothing generates an outcry and a demand for action like deformed babies. So there’s hope.