Word: fats
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...overweight as children have nearly twice the risk of dying from any cause in their 70s than are adults who were of normal weight as youngsters. Early evidence also suggests that heavier children are even 35% more likely to develop cancer in their later years. "If you are a fat kid, you know you're in trouble," says Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, "and you know you need to do something about it now and not later...
...understand the damage that obesity can do, investigators first have to understand the very dynamics of fat, and that knowledge has been slow in coming. The accepted wisdom had long been that we're all born with a fixed number of fat cells, and gaining or losing weight is simply a matter of filling or emptying them. But things are more complicated than that. As children develop, they continue to add fat cells to their body--at least until a certain age. Scientists don't yet know if kids who eat more food accumulate more cells, but studies...
...from being inert, excess fat, researchers now know, is actually an active participant in the body's biological ballet--particularly if it's visceral fat, which can surround and even suffuse organs like the liver. Relatively shallow subcutaneous fat, which sits just under the skin, imposes a weight burden on the body but remains biologically dormant--more a repository for energy than anything else. Visceral-fat cells can secrete hormones and cytokines that help control inflammation and guide energy use by all the body's other cells. Normally this regulation of cellular fueling is maintained by a well-balanced relay...
Even more alarming to doctors are the changes that excess weight can wreak on the liver. It's this organ, after all, that orchestrates the breakdown and distribution of fats and sugars from the diet. When too much of either comes in, the liver starts to keep some of the excess for itself, converting sugars from soft drinks and the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup into fat that remains within its tissues...
Many overweight children already show abnormal levels of liver enzymes, and fully one-third suffer from fatty liver, a condition in which the organ becomes streaked with fat. "I worry about the outcome of these children 10 to 20 years from now," says Dr. Miriam Vos, a pediatrician and liver expert at Emory University. "In adults, we know that 3% to 5% of those with fatty-liver disease will progress on to cirrhosis or to an advanced stage where you might need a liver transplant." While not all cases reach such a dangerous state, Vos notes that in about...