Biologist claims certain chemicals increase chance of obesity

Obesity is at epidemic proportions in this country. But what if some people are overweight, not only because of the brownies they eat, but because of the plastic containers they store them in? The conventional theory goes that people become obese because they take in more calories than they burn off. But molecular biologist Bruce Blumberg says it’s more complicated than that. "If it were a simple problem, a matter of balancing our caloric checkbook, no one would be fat," says Blumberg. "We are not a country full of lazy people who just eat everything in sight." In his lab at UC Irvine, some of his mice are obese. Blumberg made them that way, but not by overfeeding them. "My mice become fatter on a normal diet," Blumberg explains. "That’s only because they were exposed to this chemical in the womb." The chemical he’s talking about is called Tributyltin. It’s used to preserve wood and is found in some vinyl products. There are more than a dozen kinds of drugs and chemicals that make lab animals — or people — fat. Blumberg calls them obesogens...