Camilla Cavendish rightly draws attention to obesity as a serious individual and public health issue (“Tackling obesity must become a national mission”, Opinion, FT Weekend, January 6). She identifies the “junk food cycle” and interventions directed at this cycle, as key to control of the obesity problem.
However, there may be a more fundamental cause of obesity, the “over nutrition” of an individual in the first two or three years of post-conception life.
In recent decades, the widespread availability of a range of safe, relatively inexpensive, convenient and socially acceptable foodstuffs have dramatically altered patterns of childhood nutrition. This helps to explain why obesity is now widely seen in children of primary school age.
The mechanism of this change is unclear. One possibility is the existence of a “fat controller”. This is an as yet undetermined collection of cells, which, responding to levels and composition of nutrients to which it is exposed in the first two or three years of post-conception life, sets the extent of fat deposition throughout the rest of the person’s life. Thus, the levels of adult fat are predestined by the activities of the “fat controller” in early life.
Confirmation of this hypothesis would involve detailed studies of very early nutrition, a labour-intensive epidemiological task, akin to John Boyd Orr’s study on undernutrition nearly 80 years ago.
The hunt by medical scientists for an elusive “fat controller” is even more challenging. Neither investigative route is commercially attractive and success in these two areas is far from guaranteed.
These considerations may indefinitely delay the answer to the question “What causes obesity?”
J Wilson Carswell
London W12, UK
