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Clean air prevents obesity in children
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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17% of US children are obese, well, in poor areas this figure reaches 25%. The main causes of excess weight are inadequate nutrition and low physical activity, although, as it turned out, air pollution plays a big role in this "epidemic", among other things.
A study conducted by scientists at the Columbia Institute (United States) showed that women aged 5 and older became obese almost twice as often as women from New York who were exposed to large levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) during gestation , rather than the offspring of mothers who breathed clean air, and 2 times more often fat by the age of 7. In addition, the Seven-Year Plan, whose mothers "received" air with the highest levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, had a kilogram more fatty deposits than the children of those who were exposed to the lowest level of pollutants.
PAH is an ordinary city pollutant that gets into the air when burning coal, diesel fuel, oil, gas or other organic substances like cigarettes.
The results of the work coincide with the results of experiments that were conducted with rodents and tissue samples. Thus, experiments in mice demonstrated that under the influence of PAH rodents gain excess weight due to adipose tissue. And experiments with cell cultures have shown that treatment with their contaminants prevents lipolysis - the splitting of fats into fatty acids under the influence of lipase
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