Obesity: Are Products in My House Making Me Fat?

Research has been linking common household chemicals, known as obesogens, with obesity. The link was first discovered in the 1970s when low exposure to certain chemicals caused weight gain in laboratory animals. Today, researchers have discovered that there are many chemicals in our environment that promote weight gain in the body.

How? There are many different ways that obesogens affect weight gain including the ability to influence the number or size of fat cells, and disrupting hormones that affect appetite or satiety.

Common Items in Your House Where Obesogens can be Found:
- Air fresheners
- Laundry detergent
- Processed Foods (Monosodium Glutamate (aka MSG))
- Conventionally grown produce (Pesticides)
- Plastics (BPAs)

What can you do to avoid obesogens and other hormone-disrupting chemicals? Probably a lot of the things you are already doing at home such as eating organic when possible, avoiding plastics, limiting your consumption of processed and canned foods, avoiding fragranced products and seeking out products free of BPAs, phthalates and other common chemicals of concern.

Ah, ha!
One of the most fascinating pieces of research I've read about obesogens links these chemicals to increased rates of obesity in our children. During pregnancy, the effects of obesogens can be transferred to the child. Fascinating stuff! There's more about this and other aspects of this topic in this informative article (link below) available on PubMed. It includes links to references if you'd like to dig a little deeper into this topic.

For a great read into this topic, check out this article:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279464/

My Confession:
We made a movement in our house to avoid hormone-disrupting chemicals when I was pregnant with my first child about a half decade ago. Yet, sometimes a fragranced or plastic product sneaks it way back into our house. It's great to clean-up your lifestyle after reading an article or blog with research-backed information...but, don't forget to re-clean regularly. This spring when you do your annual spring-clean-up take a moment to consider how "clean" each household item is and ditch the "dirty" ones.