More that 60 percent of Americans are considered either obese or overweight. It’s odd for the country to have such a huge percentage when there are fitness areas scattered in most areas, along with the rise of weight-loss and nutritional supplements. Obesity is a major public health issue, as observed by Dr. Rajiv Shah, a leading Minneapolis-based nephrologist and kidney specialist. Researchers are now looking at gene mapping to learn what causes weight gain, as Observer details:
Enter Dr. Andrés Acosta, a soft-spoken Ecuadorian-born research physician and scientist at the world-famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. What began as a research project at Mayo has gradually been spun out into a separate company called Phenomix, which is now taking on venture capital from major physician-led associations and health insurers. If successful in its mission, Phenomix may end up forcing large swaths of the traditional weight-loss industry to go belly up.
“70 percent of all people who try to lose weight either fail to lose any or lose some and gain it back quickly,” comments Acosta. “And that has massive healthcare implications from heart disease to type 2 diabetes to stroke. Instead of looking at how to lose weight, we should first understand why people are gaining weight.”
The why, as it turns out, comes down to combining two somewhat distinct areas of human science: genotyping, the process of determining differences in the genetic make-up of an individual’s DNA, and metabolomics, the scientific study of chemical processes driving our unique metabolic profiles when the genotype interacts with the environment. Together, by looking at our unique genetic and metabolic fingerprints, the Mayo team has created a roadmap for understanding each human’s unique chemical and genetic profile that can not only predict obesity but better address and contain it.
Image via The Observer
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Do you know, for most of the English speaking countries in the world, ha, and the French speaking ones, the word meter means a measuring device, so when we see a sign reading '5 meters' we are looking for something like a, electricity meter, or a taxi meter, 5 of them, obviously.It's even worse when your signs say 6 feet, then we start looking for 6 feet, then realise you mean 3 people, not one of them an amputee, at least not from the waist down.Don't get me started on gallons .... hoist the main sail, all hands on deck, a sailing we will go !
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