Obesity as a Vicious Circle

Berkeley, CA, Nov. 23, 2011 -America's waistline has been expanding at an accelerating rate, prompting both concern about the nation's health and puzzlement over the cause. Now a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has come up with some intriguing new data and a provocative hypothesis: that obesity itself makes people much more susceptible to risk factors that promote weight gain in the first place. New research published in the journal PLoS One by Paul T. Williams, a staff scientist and biostatistician at Berkeley Lab, depicts a vicious circle - what researchers call a positive feedback loop - in which weight gain itself creates conditions that amplify vulnerability to well-established drivers of obesity. WIlliams contends that this phenomenon may be the root cause of America's runaway weight problem. "We are getting fatter because we are fat," he says. "It's depressing, isn't it?" As Thanksgiving and the holiday season approaches, people tend to be more conscious of their overeating and weight gain.