0:00
Hello,
my name is Elaine Holmes.
I'm Professor
of Biological Chemistry
at Imperial College, London.
And today,
I'm going to talk about
the metabolic communication
in the development
and control of obesity.
0:13
If we look at the CDC statistics
for obesity in America,
what you can see
is that back in 2010,
already a lot of the southern
half of the United States
were in the situation
where over 30 percent
of the population
had a BMI of 30 or greater,
meaning that they
were clinically obese.
And if you look at this
spread over successive years,
it seems to develop
a little like an infection.
Now, diet obviously plays
a big role and also genetics.
And obesity is linked,
we know, to a lot of diseases,
a lot of comorbidities.
So, for example,
in the lower panel,
if you look at the prediction,
by 2023 in the States
for various diseases,
if we look at type 2 diabetes,
you can see
that we're expecting
54 percent of the population
to have developed
type 2 diabetes by 2023.
So this is a big health problem,
a big socioeconomic problem.
We know that
obesity is also linked
to the developmental
or risk of cancer,
and these are not just cancers
you'd expect to be
linked to obesity
such as liver cancer,
but we're also seeing cancers
like prostate cancer
and leukemia,
there are also rising
in association with obesity.
1:30
So as I said, the obesity maps
closely to various comorbidities
including cardiovascular
disease and stroke,
diabetes and breast cancer.
So here's the map
for obesity in 2010.
If we superimpose the map
of heart disease-related deaths,
this is taken from 2000-2006,
but you can that
it's roughly the same states,
the same distribution
of disease.
Again, if we look at stroke,
what we can see
is that also mirrors
this pattern,
although there's an extra
stroke belt over in the west.
Now, we know that there
are inequalities in obesity,
so non-Hispanic
Blacks are highest
with 47.8 percent of
the population in the US,
having risk of obesity
or developed obesity,
whereas non-Hispanic Asians
are at the lower end
with 11 percent.
Now, somebody
has actually calculated
the annual medical cost
of obesity in the US,
which amounts
190 billion in 2013.
And somebody else
had the time on their hands
to count how many millions
of gallons of fuel per year
it cost to fly overweight
passengers around America,
which was 350 million
gallons of fuel back in 2013,
amounting to $1 billion,
so huge socioeconomic problem.
